Sunday, February 14, 2010
Today we shot the opener, or proof of concept for Leap 2. The idea was to show that as a director and DP, I could handle the type of film we want to make. To do this, we decided to shoot the opening scene of the film, where a kid, Luke, is chased by two undercover cops and Shane takes them out. The best part is that this all shot in a style similar to “The Bourne Ultimatum”, which is our main influence for this project.
Yesterday (Saturday), Trex (the producer), Alex (Shane in the films), and myself went out to downtown Couer D’Alene to shoot a rough version of the opener and figure out where everything would be shot. Also, it gave me a chance to become better acquainted with the HD cam I borrowed from a friend, the Sony FX1. We had Alex stand in for Luke, and Trex played the two undercover cops. I cut the stuff together last night, and it looked pretty good.
Shooting today, we brought in one of Alex’s friends, Ben, and one of my friends, Joel. We shot the chase part of the scene in about an hour, had lunch, then shot the fight scene at Spokane Falls Community College. I have to say I’m quite pleased with how people did as actors, and so far all the footage is cutting together like it should. Believe it or not, it was actually kinda hard to shoot it like a “Bourne” film. You’d think it be easy to just move the camera a lot and make people sick, but not so! I found that you had to really pay attention to how you used the shaky cam look. Same with the zooms. It’s really just a matter of finding the happy medium between amatuer and pro. Shooting the fight was also a lot of fun, and we even added in some makeup effects as the fight went on.
Getting home, I uploaded the 45 minutes of HDV footage to my computer. Four hours later, I had a complete rough cut, including color correction, and one shot that I had to virtually re-light. Total running time for the opener is almost three minutes.
-El
