Four Day Hombre - 1000 Bulbs
Monday, August 2, 2010 at 11:28PM Lighting Cameraman: Ross McWhannell
Operating Cameraman: Fabian Wagner
Post: Ross McWhannell
This shoot was a few years back now, so forgive me if the details are a little sketchy. The production of the video was a wonderfully collaborative effort, a lot of hard work and a whole lot of fun. And I think it shows. I remember sitting with the band and our director Mark Wordsworth in pub in Leeds some time before the shoot commenced. He had made a cardboard cutout version of the set complete with Star Wars figures representing the principals, which he duly acted out to playback of the song. It was very cool, ambitious and everyone was sold.
We had very little money and there was no external funding; everything was paid for by the band. Luckily the band had a lot of contacts, friends and devoted fans happy to help out in any way they could. One such contact came in the form of the band’s shared history with Lancaster University. Lead singer Simon Wainwright was heavily involved in the theatre programme there and they were able to provide us with a large studio space complete with overhead lighting rigs, a lighting console and plenty of power. They also provided the camera (a Panasonic DVX100) and the Glidecam rig as I recall.
We had two and half days to get the elusive one-take, including building the set. Construction and pre-lighting started on the Friday afternoon, we could start choreographing the camera move on the Saturday and we had to pretty much know what we were doing when all of our extras arrived on Sunday, so the race was on.
This was a completely new challenge for me, with numerous firsts in terms of experience. I had never worked on such a large set with so many moving parts, it was a whole new world. I had also never worked with a camera operator before, and on this set it was never even a consideration that I would operate; managing the lighting was more than a full time job. Fabian Wagner operated the Glidecam and I think he and assistant Borja Berrosteguieta did a tremendous job.
Working with such a lighting toy box was a first for me and I was a bit like kid in a candy store. Right off the bat we got lucky. The lighting console was MIDI controllable so we were able to hook up keyboardist Ed Waring’s laptop for playback and use a sequencer to program the lighting cues. This enabled us to do a whole lot more than we would otherwise have been able to. In addition to the stage lights, we also rigged numerous (though thankfully not a thousand) domestic bulbs around the performance area and several strategically placed china-ball lanterns around the set as a whole, again all controllable via the console.
During shooting, myself and Mark would hide in our little control centre with the aforementioned lighting console and a monitor. If you look at the back of the nightclub section you will see a curtain, we were just behind there. The set was Oz and we felt like the wizard. Incidentally, kudos to Borja for bashing that monitor cable to our emerald castle, we had no money for a wireless feed and keeping that cable out of everyone’s way took some skill.
Before we knew it it was Sunday. The set started to fill with extras which of course changed everything, but it started to come together and eventually after several hours and many takes we finally nailed it. What you see is the final take of the day in its entirety. The combined sense of pride and relief when got there was palpable.On to post, and while there was no editing to do so to speak, there was still a fair amount of polishing to be done. Although we were finishing 16x9, the camera’s native frame was 4:3, so what we lost in resolution we made up for in that we were able to smooth out any minor bumps in the move. Grading was also quite novel, evening up a continuous take required smoothly key-framing the look section by section, and it took quite a while as I recall.
While shooting on DV certainly had it’s limitations, it was absolutely the only choice we really had. We used the tiny sensor on the DVX100 to our advantage to give us that massive depth of field. This was not only practical - remote follow focus was well out of our league - but provided us with that ‘everything in focus’ look that is a big part of the aesthetic of the finished piece and I think it really works.
Terrific work from everybody who worked so hard to make this happen, it really was a lot of fun.
Reader Comments (3)
I enjoyed reading this very much. The technical terms are a foreign language to me, but the determination and enthusiasm are clearly communicated and helped me see more of what is going on in the film. I love the phrase 'smoothly key-framing the look section-by-section' (poetry!) and the way it expresses Ross' fastidious attention, skill and the ambition to perfect the film.
Well well well.... How about some AWESOME videos cousin?! Let me geek out on you for a moment and just say FREAKING RADICAL!!!!!! Any way Uncle Bart and Aunt Karen say they want a DVD- We all really liked it! Thanks for making such cool stuff! Keep it coming! -cousin Joanna (the one in asheville)
Reading this took me back to the day Anna and I came down as "extras" dancing in the background to 1000 bulbs, what a day! it was great, well done you! ah so proud!!xx Lillte Sis Nic xx