Black To Black

Welcome back, Acting Fans and fellow bloggers, yep, it's Friday and it's blog time again and this week we have actually done something practical relating to H&H. Yep, I know, a shocker compared to our recent posts! ;-) We met up for a second time this week to go out and do a test of one of the moving shots I have conceived of for Episode 6. It's a shot sequence that will start at black move across the gangs then back to black. For our start and end in black we used a fairly heavy grade black card that Chris already had (Low-to-No budget, remember) which he would hold while I filmed with our camera. It took a bit of practice, and will probably need a bit more too, but it worked. We tried a number of different ways and what seemed to work best was if the card was held in a curve so that it also 'hooded' the camera, stopping light reflecting from the surface of the card itself and creating a darker black in front of the camera. We will hopefully be using this technique to show intercut shots all of the acting 'gangs' in what will appear to be a continuous shot.

If we can get this shot right, it will lend a very movie look like. We also talked further about the shooting schedule and the difficulties of it, especially due to the summer nights getting darker so late it might just take a bit longer than we thought. Taking this weekend in particular we were hoping to get a short 'gang' sequence done but the lateness of the hour has put off the majority of the folks we were hoping to get together for it and, unfortunately, we can't do it without them. This has led us back to thinking about widening our reach for additional cast so we may be looking wider than our immediate circle of friends and family to get the extra bodies we need - time to get begging to those drama course students! We still do have some other things to sort out for the episode to keep busy on, but don't panic, Actings Fans, progress is looking like it might slow again but we will get there with this episode!

Well that's all for now,

TTFN

Vernon Harcourt