This past week has been a whirlwind. I haven’t had a moment to myself until this week, so I thought I would share it with you. I spent most of my time working on the music video. My co-director and I mapped out the plot and she wrote the shooting script. From there, I made a shot list and we secured locations and actors and equipment. After that, we filmed for four days in three hour chunks. We had about one hundred shots on the shot list but we altered the list as inspiration found its way to us. The best is when you realize you can combine two shots into one with a little camera movement. We had a close-up of our heroine’s face and then a wide of her entering a car, but we realized that we could capture both things just by craning the camera up to look out a window. Here are some super cool BTS pics from our super rad shoot:
I felt good about the shoot. I’d been caught in the mindset that whatever came after my thesis would have to be better. I was paralyzed out of a fear of returning to my old, mediocre ways. But shooting this music video pushed me out of that. Although I wouldn’t say this is some great triumph, it is a step forward and that’s what I should be focusing on. Unlike my thesis, all the shots were on a gimbal. I prefer fluid movement with complex staging, but I knew we had too many shots and we could only afford to get one take for most shots. The weather in Ohio has sucked recently. The first day was beautiful and sunny, but then it rained and snowed on and off. That just means there’s a lot of color correction to be done (which is great because there’s nothing more wonderful than a colorblind man doing color correction. I still recall the time people had to inform me that my grass looked orange).
And I finally finished the first draft of the pilot for The Maillard Reaction. Woop woop! (I have just been informed by autocorrect that “Woop woop” isn’t a phrase but to hell with autocorrect!) I worked on it tirelessly (Lies; I was very tired) and wrote about 45 pages in a week. Which, I think, is pretty good. There’s a ton of action so I think the episode would actually run over an hour. We did a reading today in my class and it felt amazing to have people laugh exactly where I wanted them to and get emotional on cue. I think most of my colleagues responded to it well and I think there’s some tweaking I could do, but overall I’m very satisfied. Here’s some proof for ya:
That’s enough chatting for this week. I’m going to go through another draft of the pilot and start editing the music video. And soon I’ll be premiering my thesis at my college. There’s a lot to look forward to.
Goodbye,
Austin
A Bigger Boat 