The Rickety Lady: Notes from the D.P.
DP Notes: I met Patrick Mason at a Rough Cuts meeting last year, which is akin to a filmmaker open mic night that takes place in Philly once a month. I highly recommend all filmmakers in the area to attend as much as possible to grow their network, make friends, and exchange feedback on projects. Anyway, he showed off a really cool commercial, and we started chatting pretty regularly. After almost a year, he sent me a 3-page script that he wanted to shoot, so we put our heads together and tried to figure out how to shoot this thing for as cheap as possible while keeping the original vision perfectly intact. We were initially falling short on locations until I decided to take a few stills in my living room and sent them over to Patrick. “Perfect!” he said. So we shot at my townhouse in West Philly. Patrick left the script open enough so that some of the specific details could be molded to fit the geography of my living room and kitchen where we would end up shooting.
Regarding the visual style of this short, Patrick and I talked about having a very low key/practical driven approach to the lighting. Patrick didn’t want it to look ‘lit’ like a lot of horror films where the lighting can sometimes look a bit theatrical. It needed to be rooted in reality for maximum spookiness.
Since we shot this in my (furnished) house, we had to completely clear out most of my furniture into my backyard since our main character wasn’t totally moved-in yet. Next, worked on the limited art design, talent blocking, and placing the big red lamp that I had in a position that lit our main character most effectively. All of our other lamps were then set to this light source. My gaffer, James Powers, was nice enough to stop by for a couple of hours before we started shooting to help set up his Titan Tubes in the windows. We set the color to a creepy bluish/green, turned them all the way up, and left them. We had them plugged in using their AC adapters, otherwise their batteries would have died before we even got the first shot off. Inside, we set up one of my Kino Flo Freestyle 31’s and a Litepanels Astra on c-stands at very low settings to further amplify and mold the light that our lamp was already providing. We also left the pulsating xmas lights on that my girlfriend already had hanging in our living room to add some more visual interest when looking through the doorway to the kitchen.
We used my personal set of Lomo Super Speed lenses, the 35mm, 50mm, and 75mm on my Ursa Mini Pro G2. I normally favor the wider lenses, but these longer lenses, when combined with the 2.39:1 aspect ratio, really hellped with the claustrophobic feeling we were going for. I love the way these lenses look wide open, the contrast decreases, there’s a halation to all of the highlights, they render skin in a really silky smooth way, and of course, the depth of field gets incredibly shallow so that I can draw the audience’s eyes towards our subjects (and away from my now bare looking living room). We were working at really low light levels in a really moody scene, so I was being careful not to clip any blacks by keeping my eye on the false color tool in the camera (keep the purples away). I rated the camera at ISO 400 instead of the ‘normal’ 800, which forced me to expose for the shadows and keep a really detailed/low noise raw file. I also made sure we had some atmosphere in the air to further bring the shadows up along with adding some texture to the frames. The Tiffen Black Promist in the mattebox further enhanced the halation in the highlights that the lenses were already providing.
Once all of the lights were turned on and the camera was set, we were pretty much done making any changes. The rest of our energy was spent shooting and letting Patrick massage the performances that he needed from his brother, Sam, our main talent. Our total crew, once shooting, was just Patrick directing, Max Morgan running sound, and me on camera. We shot from about 8PM to 5AM that night/morning. I remember having a hard time knowing what time it was because the Titan Tubes were set to a color that was very similar to twilight, so it felt like the sun was just breaking over the horizon the entire time. In the end, it was a really fun and laid back shoot that we were able to accomplish for almost no money using the resources that we had in front of us.
Credits:
Talent: Sam Mason
Director: Patrick Mason
Director of Photography/Producer: Joe Grasso
Gaffer: James Powers
Field Sound Mixer: Max Morgan
Sound Design: Zak DevRies
Color Grade: Jason Druss CSI
Ryan Moore: Score
Micah Mason: Production Assistant
Aidan Carter Guynes: Production Assistant
Stanislav Puzdriak: VFX
Jacob Schwartz: VFX
Anthony Pilon: VFX
Camera:
Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini Pro G2
Atomos Shogun Inferno 7” monitor/recorder
Blackmagic Design Viewfinder
Teradek Bolt 300
Bright Tangerine Misfit Atom Mattebox
Tiffen Black Promist ⅛ 4X5.65”
Arri MFF-2 follow focus
Core SWX Shark Fin
Core SWX V-mount batteries
Smallrig Shoulder Pad/Top handle/cheese plate
Matthews Infinity Arm
Sachtler FSB10 w/ Flowtech legs
Smallhd 702 bright Director’s Monitor
Blackmagic Design Pocket 4k with Metabones .71x speedbooster Sigma 28mm macro lens for macro insert shots
Kessler Cineslider
Camera Settings:
24p/ISO 400/180 degree shutter/T1.6
Whitebalance: 3300k
Codec: BRAW Q0
Primarily Shoulder Mounted
Lenses:
Lomo Super Speed spherical prime set (with custom 95mm fronts by Optitek):
18mm T1.6
28mm T1.5
35mm T1.6
50mm T1.5
75mm T1.7
Lighting:
Astera Titan Tubes outside of every window set to a green/blue. Full Up.
Kino Flo Freestyle 31 (Boomed over lamp to amplify practical. Set to about 3200k with 90 degree honeycomb grid to limit spill)
Litepanels Astra (boomed over book case with a third party softbox w/grid, set to 3200k as backlight)
Big Red lamp as practical and main light source (60-watt edison bulb)
Atmosphere Aerosol Haze