In this week’s studio, my crew and I explored different types of shots and lighting. Basically we just carried the camera and the tripod and walked around in NAS, taking turns to film and act.
Our ideas on the film just started to come together, so we talked a lot about how we wanted our film to look like as we were filming random stuff. It was a good time to get to know each other’s visions for the film and each other’s personality, as we will be working together for the next 5 weeks.
In week five’s pitching, I proposed that I wanted the film to be a sci-fi, with a certain extent of futuristic-ness. I noticed that the NAS building is generally very modern and has a slight futuristic sense in the design.
We found a stairwell that looked very futuristic by accident and we agreed on it being one of the locations that’s going to be in our film immediately. We spent a long time in the stair well filming and taking photographs. It’s a perfect location.
The video above is merely a put-together of what we filmed on the day and hopefully it gives out a vague sense of how the film is going to look like. I did not color grade it at all because I wanted to see how futuristic it could get without any post-production.
One of the footages that I filmed was Niki walking down the stairs. The amount of lighting that was casted onto her face was so little that her facial expressions were too dark and blurry to see. So I think when we’re actually using the place for filming, artificial lighting has to be used so the face of the character looks clear and lit. Another shot that I did is the one starts with the table downstairs and the camera slowly moves up and to the right and stops when Niki is in the frame. I did that because I felt like a lot of Hollywood blockbusters were using such camera movement for an establishing shot of a character. But with the camera being hand-held, it’s almost impossible to achieve that steady and smooth movement. A standard production team would probably use a dolly with the long neck with the camera attached to the front (I don’t even know what that equipment is called). Nevertheless, it’s worth a shot.
If we were to film in NAS, lighting is the main concern, because the density of lighting varies too much too often. But still, it is an ideal location for the film because of its futuristic atmosphere.