Here I am doing a take of the master shot for a scene using a 400mm lens down a very long and dark hallway.
(It’s best if you watch this fullscreen, and it’s extremely boring if you don’t have annotations turned on.)
T’was another weekend of shooting Scream All You Want, the indie horror/drama webseries-shot-as-a-feature film that I’m the Director Of Photography of. I put my iPhone on the little table my laptop was on and this is the up-my-nose video you get. Shooting my own behind-the-scenes while shooting the movie – a whole new level of meta?
I digress.
The action is: an actor walks about 100′ towards the camera, with a bit of action a third of the way through.
(Click for detailed notes.)
if you watch the top left corner, you see my left hand turning the follow focus wheel; slowly at first, but as she approaches the camera I need to accelerate considerably. The director (Tom) is quietly calling out the marks we’ve taped on the floor – which I’ve also marked on the ring (you see them disappearing as I turn the wheel) so I can watch the position of the wheel instead of the talent or the monitor.
In this take, I blew it. Then to top it off, the Canon EOS Utility on my laptop crashed when I went to reset for the next take.
Also, due to equipment availability (or rather, a lack thereof) we didn’t have a proper monitor, so it’s either the tiny screen on the back of the 5D Mk II, or the USB tethered laptop display running at 4FPS at VGA resolution – a lose-lose proposition.
