Week 10: Short Film!!!

Welcome, welcome. This week was fairly uneventful at my internship. I was filling out face ID charts for the network. This is basically just going through every episode and seeing who was in that episode. Then I would write down their name and reason for being in the TV show into a google doc. I would also put a photo of them next to their name. This can help the network (in this case A&E), identify who’s who.

Outside of my internship, I did a lot of planning for my short film. I gathered a crew and cast and planned to shoot the film during Memorial Day weekend. It would be three fairly full days of filming going from 11:30pm to about 6pm. I planned out my shot list (all the shots needed to make up the film). Turned out, I planned the film to include 103 shots. Each “shot” is defined as switching camera angles, lens type/zoom, or scene. With 103 shots, my producer and I planned to shoot 29 shots on day #1, 35 shots on day #2, and 39 shots on day #3. I’ve decided to pivot slightly from my original idea of creating two identical short films, just with a different color grade. I thought that it would be hard to directly compare the two, so I decided I would have two different color grades within the short film as we switch between different worlds (trying not to give too much away and spoil it). I plan to heavily incorporate cool vs. warm color tones, the color tones that have the most impact on emotion in a color grade. Half of the scenes in the film take place during nighttime, so I’m going to try and challenge myself to make the footage look like nighttime, and film it during the day. The power of color grading babyyy, I can turn day into night. This is beneficial because night scenes are notoriously hard to light, and lighting is key to the final look and feel of the final image. Shooting the film during the day will allow me to better light the scene how I want to and will allow for proper exposure in camera, so I don’t have to worry about a low quality image. Then I can color grade the footage in post-production to make it look like nighttime using cooler color tones.