Less knitting, more movie making!

I always think that I'll get so much knitting done on film shoots. I'm thinking that once I've placed the set for the shot, all that's left to do is sit back and watch. No not really, I'm always moving things and hiding tape or glare or spray painting small spots... As well as the fact that once they yell "Action!", everyone needs to be extremely quiet on set. There can't even be a plane passing overhead. So knitting is too noisy.

Here are some photos of the sets that were shot up to now. The pictures were taken by Safe Solvent who's a fabulous photographer/graphic designer/web designer/does everything kinda guy ( http://www.safesolvent.com/ )






The first ones are of the female character's bedroom. It's a sunny saturday morning and the young lovers are waking up late and cudling in bed.



Because the film is called "washed in blue", we decided that there would be the colour blue present through out the film. In this scene, I wanted it to be cozy and on the walls. As things begin to worsen between the characters, the lighting turns blue. At the end there's no more blue. It just dissapears from their lives completely.













As some of you might notice from an older post, we cut out trying to make a silhouette on the window and instead we just blasted white light in.
































The next scene was shot in "The Village" at a restaurant called The Sandwicherie. The director really wanted flashing neon lights and that's what he got! It looked great, except for the fact that I forgot that the dinner had a chrome surface, so all of our lights really reflected on it. But I found that using silver duct tape hid all the flareing that the DOP complained about.

I'm really enjoying working with this great team. The DOP is doing a wonderful job lighting and making decisions about the camera angles and movement. The actors are really getting the characters...anyway, everyone's on the ball. Next weekend's shoot will be fun. I'll keep you posted with more photos.

The Greater the Weight

Here are some pictures from the last film shoot that I art directed. I worked with a wonderful production company called Mouvement Perpetuel (www.mouvementperpetuel.net) that was started by two dancers who now make films about dance. They are really great directors and a blast to work with. It was a really simple idea. It was a very strong contemporary dance piece by Dana Michel.



The directors asked for a simple white roped boxing ring. I had found some great black and white pictures of boxing rings from the 70s, when people still smoked like crazy during the matches. Here are some examples:

The director of photography followed with the aesthetic and got moving lights with strong beams to light the dancer. We got a smoke machine to fill the room and overall it looked pretty good! I was happy with the results since I was really busy working on a set for a play and I had to pay my boyfriend to build it from our tiny appartment. I loved working on this project. Here are some pics of the final result:

A new set!

I'm presently working on art direction for a film. I've actually had the script for this one for almost a year now, but it didn't look like it would happen. Then, two weeks ago, they decided to shoot half of it at the end of november! At first (as usual) I thought that the set would be pretty straight forward; a bedroom, a kitchen... You know, normal places. But when you start doing research your head starts to spin with ideas! So it's getting pretty elaborate. On top of it, it's really hard to find appartments to film in that have a bedroom or kitchen large enough to fit all the lights, the camera, the crew...the actors. Especially ones that you are allowed to paint. I guess if we had a larger budget anything would be possible, but we don't. Anyway, I'll post some photos up soon of some of the design ideas and the actual sets. I think that this one will be exciting to work on. I always think that, until the last few weeks of the shoot , when I wish that I could throw the script at the director's head and stay home and knit all day. But until then, I do really like my job.