Dinner Break!

[as i write this, it is July 21st, but i did take photos each day for the last several days - am just now able to catch up and upload them!]

This shot was taken at 9:33pm, Saturday evening. We really, really needed some food. Well, myself and Joe. Both of us were hitting the wall hard and most of his scenes hadn’t even been shot yet! So we hung out on the floor of Theresa’s apartment, eating pretty good food from a local Thai [or Chinese?] place. Pictured here, from left: Claire Bowerman, actress; Andrea Cobb, production assistant and lighting assistant; Allyson Balla, production assistant; Andy Balla, sound & lighting guy, tech director and assistant editor; Theresa Cox [up on the stairs], co-director/editor/actor; Jack “John” Carruth, actor; Z. Joseph Guice, actor.

Moments after this photo was taken, we began shooting Joe’s scenes involving him on the phone. Interested in seeing the final product of our entry into the Asheville 48 Hour Film Project? Visit YouTube!

Gathering for the 48

[as i write this, it is July 21st, but i did take photos each day for the last several days - am just now able to catch up and upload them!]

An hour before the genre, prop, line of dialogue, and characters are chosen, filmmakers gather at the Asheville Pizza and Brewery on Coxe Ave. south of downtown Asheville, NC. While this place as great food, they have the slowest service east of the Mississippi. But on the evening of the 15th, it wasn’t about the food or the service, but about the beginning of the 48 Hour Film Project! This is where it started and ended, 48 hours later! Once each filmmaker gets their genre and other elements, they go off and write, film, and edit a movie and turn in the 4-7 minute product here, 48 hours later!

Time to Focus

It is the eve of the 48 Hour Film Project here in Asheville, NC. It is time to concentrate and focus and have some fun making a movie over the weekend! From Friday night, until Sunday night, I shall be awake and together with Theresa Cox, leading a great team of talented people to undergo the magic that is making a movie. Or a short film. Friday night we pull our genre, get assigned a prop, line of dialogue and a character that must be in the film. Our writers and brainstormers begin the process until the writers feel they have enough to work with for a good, solid story. The brainstormers go home and sleep for a bit and then early Saturday morning, prep work begins and shooting will start. Saturday evening, shooting will end, and editing will start and go on through out the night. Then, before 7:30pm Sunday night, we turn in a 5-minute short film that will rock! Follow us on Twitter to see how the weekend progresses! Not sure how often we will update the Twitter account, but I’ll try and do it when we get breaks in the action.

Sawyer Motor Co. Building

The Sawyer Motor Co. building, in Asheville, NC. A bit of post-processing was done to this image.

Tools of the Trade

No Photoshop was harmed in the making of this shot [except for the Flickr version having my watermark in the lower right corner]. Just a shot of some of my computer tools that I hadn’t put away yet. I used the onboard flash on my camera [something i rarely use!] and zoomed at the same time, to create this unusual effect. I did it 13 times, and got the effect I wanted in two of the shots. This was my favorite of the 2.

Smells Like Summer

There’s a certain smell, in North Carolina, that lets you know summer is here. Perhaps it is a combination of the humidity and plant/tree growth. Whatever it is, the woods of Pisgah Forest, NC smelled like that today. It brings back many good memories of visiting out here as a kid in the summer.

Underwater Andy

We did some testing today of a new green screen that I bought. As Friday, July 15th, approaches, so does the 48 Hour Film Project, which I’m competing in. This shot is a before and after of Andy Balla, our Sound and Lighting Design and Technical Director, fooling around “under water” in front of the green screen. The effects were done in Final Cut Pro X, which appears to be designed for people competing in a 48 hour film! It is amazingly fast and has so many time saving features, I can’t see doing a 48 hour film without it. The limitations of the program won’t affect our production much because we aren’t needing multi-cam support or tape support.

If you’d like to keep up with how production is going next weekend, be sure to check out our Twitter feed, as I hope to update it while we do our shooting. Time will be tight though!

A New View of Ingles

A late night shopping spree at the Fletcher, NC Ingles grocery store, and, with my camera at my side 30 minutes before midnight, I decided to snap a couple of photos. In a rare [for me] moment of distraction, I did not have the camera set the way I had intended it. The image was 1 stop darker than I was planning on, but I didn’t notice it until I had left Ingles. I was able to fix the problem in Aperture, but I was still not happy with my result. I had intended on overexposing the shot by a stop and 1/2. So the darker look was actually the opposite result I was looking for! While I was able to compensate for the 1 stop underexposed, I was not able to get the bright results I was originally looking for in post.

So…I decided to embrace the darkness. I applied some heavy editing to the corrected original and gave it a feel that reminds me of a shot of Grand Central Station in NY. I’m not sure I like it, as I was really trying to focus on the bright lights and this takes that brightness and removes all signs of it. But it is an interesting look! What does the original photo look like? Well, the one I corrected so it would be less dark is going up on Flickr, and I’ll edit this post in a few minutes with the direct link to it so you can see the “before” and “after” [though the before image i am posting was already edited to correct my boneheaded -1 stop mistake].

EDIT: Here’s the original, corrected for underexposure, version: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vjl/5921431914/in/photostream

The Last Launch

Today’s image is a screenshot of the last launch of a Space Shuttle – the shuttle Atlantis launched this morning at 11:26am EDT on a 13 day mission to stock up the ISS. With a small crew of only 4, there’s a ton of work to be done over the next two weeks. The launch was halted at T-31s for a small technical problem [that is where certain planned technical issues are held at - since 1 second later auto sequence start is called and it is a lot more difficult to turn back]. But the launch resumed a few seconds later and what a launch it was! I wish I was there, capturing this for real, instead of a screenshot.

White Squirrel on Target

A last-minute photo of a hand-painted white squirrel that Theresa built and painted for me several months ago. The target-like ground? That’s the result of a cool iPad app called SoftBox Pro [available at the App Store]. Oh – and that black background? The iPad cover.