We did some rather daring shots this time around, and all handheld. That's saying something, too, as we were using an honest to God 16mm film camera with Kodak black & white film stock:
(The Bolex H16 Reflex, made in Switzerland for that
authentic foreign feel!)
None of these simple video cameras for us, no sir! The movie was set in the basement of a library, and apparently one which was constructed by people no more than 18" wide, as that was about the space available between shelves. The daring comes from how we set up our various dolly shots.
The first involved taking a rolling chair with the back removed into one of the aisles, having me sit on it with the handles facing the ends of the aisles, and then our director pulling me backwards as fast as possible while an actor ran towards us. The first try ended in the camera eyepiece smacking into my eye when we abruptly stopped, and consecutive tries resulted in much smacking into books and edges.
For the second one, I had to duck and run alongside our actor as he did the same along an aisle. Thankfully it was an end aisle so I had plenty of space behind me. At least, I thought I did until at the end of the first try I stood up - straight into a low hanging metal light fixture.
Today we did the final one, and the most fun, which consisted of me lying down on a blanket in an aisle, being pulled backwards as the actor crawled towards us. This was actually our workaround when the prospect of using a mechanic's rollboard fell through, and I was quite pleased with the result. That and it was pretty fun getting pulled back and forth along the floor.
Earlier today I was invited to attend an upper-level film class where Mike Hill, one of Ron Howard's longtime editors, was coming to talk about his work as a professional editor. It was a fairly interesting talk, although really what are you going to ask him that's actually going to increase your working knowledge? However, towards the end he wanted to show us a sequence in Cinderella Man that he felt contained an interesting editing effect. So he popped in a DVD, went to the scene, and played it through until it was just past what he wanted to show us. So he paused, rewound, and then paused again, and said that he wanted to try and go through it frame by frame. Mistakenly (and a mistake that I could understand), he hit the next chapter button. Confused, he hit the last chapter button. He tried again, hitting the next chapter button again. This repeated a few more times. One of our film professors attempted to help him while he started talking about what it was he wanted to show us - in order to drag out the impact of one of the punches, several brief cuts at different angles of the same punch were shown in quick succession, divided by the flash of cameras from the audience. The film professor did the exact same mistake, over and over and over. Several times he had it paused at the right position ready to try again, and I wanted to yell out, "OK, now don't hit the button with two arrows and a line ever again!" but I didn't want to sound mean about it. So he kept doing it, and I kept getting more annoyed. Finally, he managed to display it at about half-speed, which was at least enough to show us what Hill was trying to tell us about. I'm still boggled, and I'll leave you with this thought - how is it that a film professor and a top Hollywood editor of many years cannot figure out how to operate a DVD player?
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