Always Learning
Sadly, I’m still a fair bit behind on my production schedule. Filming has yet to begin, as I’ve been engulfed with storyboarding and shooting tests. On the bright side, things are finally beginning to come together and I should soon get into the full swing of things. I also forgot about evaluation week when designing my production schedule, so there’s a fair chunk of extra time to work, and I will probably stick around for some of spring break to get a bit more filming done.
Lately, I’ve been trying out video tests with the camera in low-light conditions. I was initally very distraught to learn that the camera, while having exceptional control with photos, does not give you many options when shooting video — the most troubling aspect of this is that the camera automatically chooses an ISO for you, and for the dark, shadowy look that most of the video sequences in The Lightcrafter will have, the camera picks ISO 3200, resulting in a huge amount of noise. Fortunately, thanks to crafty Mark II users and the internet, I found out that you can lock down settings (including ones that the camera automatically picks for you), so I can point the camera at an especially bright spot such that it lowers the ISO to the range of 100 – 1000, lock the settings at that point, and then move the camera to where it needs to be and film the scene. Cumbersome and silly, yes, but very, very relieving to hear. Tonight I’m going to put that to the test, and if it goes well, I may even begin filming some video for the movie, at last.
Storyboarding is going well. I’d estimate I’m at least 75% done. So far it’s 45 pages, making a total of 405 hand-drawn, more-detail-than-necessary images. Whew. One unanticipated effect of this is that I’ve gotten a lot better at drawing! So that’s been fun. My goal is to push myself to the absolute limits and finish storyboarding by tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes…
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