Lighting Test & Script Finalized

Jared, Ganesh and I went to the Astin Manson Friday night to do lighting tests and layout for the commercial. We lit all the rooms that were in our script except for the outside scene/entrance due to bad weather (it was raining/lightening). The 3 challenges we have on lighting is the tracking scene of Mr. Knight entering the mansion to the dining area, the hallway for commercial, and the mirror room.

As for the long tracking shot, the dilemma we are having is not having enough lights to light the entrance, foyer and dining area as well as without having to go over on power. Right now the dining area is taking 1500 watts (2 V lights and 1 Rifa light). Normally a house has a limit of 2000 watts, and Jared is currently trying to get the maximum wattage on the mansion (the owner was unsure, so we are waiting on confirmation from an electrician). Another suggestion is to use China lights, which contain 500 watt bulbs in paper like lamps that we can hang off the stairs for the foyer, they act similar to an environment light and gives a nice soft lighting to the entire environment. Depending on the answer from the electrician on the wattage, we may have to cut the scene into separate shots instead of just 1 tracking shot.

The lighting of the hallway for the commercial  was mostly a success. We were able to light it to the commercial, except one of the rifa lights weren't working, so the last shot was a little dim. I'll talk to Glen tomorrow about the Rifa light and hopefully get it repaired, otherwise we will just use another v light with a diffuser on it to substitute for the 2nd Rifa. The challenge from this scene was for Ganesh to get the timing right on the camera floating through the hallway. After many attempts, if he counted to 8 seconds on each 'stop' in the hallway, the commercial came exactly out to 30 seconds.

The last lighting challenge was the Mirror Room. Through one carefully placed V light in the corner, I was able to light the entire room efficiently. Ganesh just has to be careful on his camera angles to not get the light in his shot, which was possible after doing test shots in there. We will also have a spare Rifa lighting through the door they came through to give some soft fill to the actors.

We also met as a full group on Saturday to finalize the gags in the script. I gave in suggestions of having multiple cards to shuffle through when Mr. Knight approaches the mansion, another scene where Tim hold another animal while laughing manically, feeding yoghurt to the animal as he laughs as well in the clue reel, and using children dressed as chickens in cockfighting. We had a script run through Wednesday during class to get timing down, which turned out each short was around 2 minutes.