Uphill Battle Shoot Plus Football Player Interviews = Long Day!
The weather wasn’t so bad today but we were inside anyway. Although, I never really stepped outside during the whole shoot so maybe my key grip and gaffer had to deal with some elements that they didn’t tell me about. The shoot went pretty well today. I like my key grip, Evan Brown, because he just LOVES laying down dolly track so I’m never hesitant to come up with dolly moves—unless the schedule doesn’t permit it. My gaffer, Ephraim Smith, is great to work with as well. I tend to want to do things in a way that would be easiest for my tiny crew, but he’s up for (and encourages) any challenge that I can give him.
We wrapped at exactly 8:30pm—which is the time the director wanted to wrap by—and I went immediately to BYU to shoot a couple of interviews with football players. We had two KinoFlos and a Canon 5D MkII with a tripod that didn’t have the right screws for the camera. I was in a mild internal panic but quickly figured that this would be a good opportunity to shoot some sit-down interviews in a way I had never done before: handheld. The lenses we were using were image-stabilizing lenses so I setup the tripod at the appropriate height, put the director’s sweater on top of it as padding for my hands while I semi-handheld the camera for the entire interviews. This allowed me to keep the camera moving and even do a lot of dynamic dutch angles I wouldn’t have normally been able to get had the tripod worked out the way we planned. It was really fun! But my hands got pretty tired.
Anyway, I’m really wasted and need to get to bed. Here are just a couple of frame grabs from today’s Uphill Battle shoot followed by a couple of images from the interviews.