Editing Reel Now Online!
As the headline of this post suggests, my editing sample reel is now online. Check it out in the Editor section. Enjoy!
The Sixty Dollar Light Kit
So here's a little something I've been kicking around lately. In South Carolina, the team and I went to a Home Depot one night and came across an interesting and seemingly unexplored option in the realm of cheap lighting. I'm talking about CFLs- Compact Fluorescent Lights. They're cheap, portable, durable, and even environmentally conscious! Not only that, but they also sell CFLs in a variety of different color temperatures, and even an array of colored bulbs. I've managed to fit my entire CFL kit into this snazzy old sample case:
and on the inside...
Although these lights are more than able to handle larger bulbs, I decided to go with the 60 watt CFLs just to save a little money. Each pack of four CFLs cost just $7.00, and I got a pack of daylight bulbs, a pack of soft white bulbs, which emit standard tungsten light, and a pack of bright white bulbs, which have a sort of amber temperature. The four yellow things at the bottom are actually work lights, which cost $10.00 each, and are capable of magical results.
Each of these work lights are capable of housing much larger bulbs than the ones I purchased, but even these results prove to offer cheap and effective solutions. The front cage simply pops open and a new bulb can be switched out. Also, and this isn't pictured above, there is another outlet on the back of each of these, meaning they can string together endlessly, or until you run into an unlikely power issue. The hooks on the top of the lights also offer interesting possibilities for fastening these lights around a location without stands or elaborate setups.
In this picture, you can see that I've set up something very basic with just two of the lights, using one daylight bulb and one soft white bulb. They are hooked onto the handlebars of my bike and my chair, respectively.
and here is me standing in this light.
Another interesting opportunity here is the fact that you can leave these lights on all day and they won't get hot, so you can use almost anything to obstruct or diffuse light. In the next picture, I used a sheet of newsprint that I found lying around to diffuse the daylight bulb, and I hooked the second light up onto the curtain rods:
Badass. Seriously. That's all for now! More to come soon!
A Late Night
It's almost three in the morning and I'm at the edit system. I'm back in Boston now and I think I slept enough during the drive home from Pennsylvania to get me through digitizing all the footage in one night. I know it probably could have just waited until tomorrow and I probably could have gone home and gone to bed, but when it really comes down to it, I didn't want to.
Digitizing tapes is really one of the most relaxing parts of editing and it's especially relaxing after a three-day Winter shoot and an eight-hour drive. All I really have to do is change settings and change tapes every half hour or so, and in the meantime, I get the first look at the result of all of our hard work. It's a nice way to decompress and remember all of the events of the shoot. For some reason, I feel like whenever I'm on the actual film shoot, days just seem to stretch themselves out so far, and by even the second day, it's difficult to believe that the previous day happened so recently. Now I'm not sure if that makes the least bit of sense, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who experiences this, but right now I'm looking at the footage of the host on his motorcycle, and I know that this was shot just three days ago, but it feels like it's been at least a week.
So I really haven't written all that much so far, because I'm looking for ways to keep myself awake through this whole process. I imagine that I'll start to get tired by around four, so I've gotten myself ready for a long night. I'm already on AIM, and having a lovely chat with a friend in Chicago who decided to drink heavily and play Smash Brothers as opposed to joining his roommates at a strip club. I'll probably check facebook a dozen times between now and sunrise. I may try and catch up on a week's worth of FML if I get desperate, but most importantly, I have a whole wall of my boss' DVD collection within arm's reach.
So this might not be the most humorous or insightful entry so far, but I don't really care, because I'm going to go watch Blood Diamond.
Then Sin City.
Then Collateral.
Then A History of Violence.