3. Lights, Camera… Action!
May 24th, 2021. Cold Start production blog post written by Richard Townsley
Welcome back to COLD START: The Road to Production. In the introduction blog post, I discussed the gear that will be needed, our additional small-scale shoots for our TV screen, and the importance of safety during the pandemic. Now, we have secured a 22-foot moving truck that will house all of our equipment for our shoot in June. We have been working closely with the equipment rental house, Wooden Nickel Lighting Inc., that will be providing additional light stands, mounts, apple boxes, dolly tracks, sandbags. Cold Start will be filmed on the Black Magic Pocket-6k. We will be renting specific camera equipment from independent sellers, these rentals include Atlas Anamorphic cinema lenses, Nucleus-M wireless focus puller, and a Teradek wireless HD video transmitter. This will allow for a socially distant video village, a hub for the Director, Script Supervisor, and 1st Assistant Camera to operate from and communicate without disrupting a take. We are confident that by combining our equipment and our rentals: we will have everything needed to make each shot happen. Now, our next major obstacle to tackle is fitting all the desired shots into our shooting schedule.
Our San Clemente location will be used only for two days. We will be filming 40 shots each day. This is will not be an easy task. Each shooting day will be 12 hours overnight. Many have asked, “why not shoot during the day?” This is because of our location’s windows. The majority of the film takes place at late night, so, we will only lose time if we try to block out the sun from each shot. Cold Start’s Assistant Director has taken our shot list into consideration and carefully determined that we will have 20 minutes between each shot to set up the lights, camera, and to block the actors for each scene. We have to move quickly and efficiently while allowing time for sanitization between scenes.
In other news, our smaller shoots for the TV screen prop have been completed. The game show consists of a 1:32 sized practical wheel with working lights that will be spun by the gameshow host. We filmed the gameshow host over greenscreen and through the use of visual effects, we will place him into the miniature set. To construct the gameshow set, we wanted to take a unique approach to the appearance, we teamed up with a resin artist located locally in the Los Angeles area to design a custom floor that will actively create reflections of the gameshow’s wheel lights to help sell the effect that the minute is actually built to 1:1 scale. Additionally, we filmed a Saving Private Ryan-inspired war scene that will be used for a later shot of TV. Both the full gameshow episode and complete war scene will be available on our website as bonus content once the film is released.
