A long and interesting telecine session on Thursday. Second to last one.
The bonfire scene, shot by the light of the bonfire ONLY, came out good. For a chaotic shoot and scene, there were definitely parts when it was quite charming, even without sound. That's Acting at work, folks. Lots of other good stuff as well.
I also ran a little experiment with the faulty Bolex (mine) and discovered that it does indeed work "okay". Ray, the telecine guy, said that he's never seen a project shot on Bolex that hasn't had at least one bad roll, so it must be inherent to the process. Anyway, in that Bolex test, I got a few very usable (for MB) shots.
Also in that test, I tried out this idea I have for using the Bolex as a still camera.
It totally works great. Fast lenses, interesting film stock, and 4000 -- that's right, 4000 -- frames per roll.
Interesting....
All in all, telecine was a success and we definitely have a movie here. Except for the stuff we're picking up this weekend.
I started final pickups today (Saturday). The sun didn't come out until around 1pm, which killed the morning I was hoping for. The bike shop guys nicely said I could come back whenever, so I did. Got some good ambient bike shop stuff around, then reshot some poster scenes (the date on the poster was for September. Why did I not see this?) lugging around the Aaton for the latter shots because I need to conserve Bolex loads for the movie-bikes stuff tomorrow.
Then I got a very nice but highly labor-intensive shot for the opening credits. The labor-intensive component pretty much gobbled up my afternoon, so after doing some household errands (and eating dinner) I met up with David Thomas having not gotten much of today's shots.
Anna pointed out that Monday it's supposed to be very sunny and my day job will be slow this week, and Iain is available on that day.
I called Iain and he's in, so the new plan is to pick up today's un-picked up pickups on Monday. That will be good.
Anyway -- around 730 tonight, David and I went down to the beach, a very beautiful and mellow Saturday night.
He juggled flaming batons (is that the word?) and it looked really cool. Good footage.
I also got some more pickup footage of the beach at dusk.
After that, we only had about 30 feet left on the roll (shooting Aaton short-ends) so we went to Fisherman's terminal and shot the boats at night. Its hard to tell if those shots will be usable, the angles weren't anything I had planned or could see an easy cut-in for, but a lot of the time random stuff like that comes in handy.
And it was good hanging out with David - he's a friend from outside the production and it's always nice to be able to decompress after dealing with hectic PR-type stuff.
Tomorrow is the final, final day with the actors: Sarah, Will, and Ahren.
Kat is coming along to drive the camera truck and help out.
A variety of shots, ending with back in the Grand Illusion to get the INT. screening room scene that was not usable the previous time.
Looking forward to the whole thing.
