Short film: pre-production

Ayşegül, my wife, wrote a short script based on a Barbara Eskine story, and we'll be shooting it on HDV, using the Sony Z1E. Ayşegül's got the go ahead from Ms Erskine's publisher. So first up we'd like to thank Ms Erskine and those at the Blake Friedman agency for giving us their help, time and support for our project.

I thought I'd throw up some bullet points on production as we go through it. First pre-production. The usual stuff has been planned. Our route will be:

Shoot in HDV, using Cineframe 25 for a film look. I know CF25 reduces resolution, but we'd de-interlace anyway, and when de-interlaced, 50i tends to leave artefacts behind. We've already shot some scenes one the street in 50i and the de-interlacing plug in's I had certainly didn't look as good as CF25. Any tilts certainly got munged up.

Black Stretch also looked good, but decided against Cinematone as it tended crush the blacks rather too much. We did tests with the Shireen, our actress, and in the location. The story is a simple drama, not anything too stylised or dramatic, so a plainer, lighter look is sufficient.

We'll light the interiors, even though we're shooting in the day and the room is quite light. However there's some stuff at front doors that I'm nervous about as Cinematographer, and the location has lots of mirrors. Also the 16:9 frame may cause us some trouble, with regard to where we will be able to hide lights, boom operators, etc.

Ayşegül has scheduled the film to be shot largely in one day. We actually already have about 20 minutes of footage that we shot in Christmas day as tests, but should be good for a title sequence. The storyboard and shotlist and a partial floor plan have been completed.