I’ve made it no secret both in these blogs and these videos that I like and have worked on, light hearted film projects.
Back in January, Writer/Director Alex Secker approached me to work on his short film ‘Blind Date’ to DOP. This was a real step out of my comfort zone for me because I’ve only worked on corporate shoots and rom-com short films. By doing something that really challenged me, I wanted to see if I could step up to the mark.
Blind Date is the story of a couple on a date where things aren’t what they appear to see until its too late. It lulls you into a false sense of security that this is a nice romantic film before shattering that illusion quickly as the horror elements come through.
Cameras and Lenses
We shot on my Canon C100 and stayed on just one lens, my Tamron 24-70 f2.8 VC. My reason for this is that this lens gave me the most flexibility in the location. My 70-200m would’ve felt too claustrophobic and the idea was to have a warm, inviting romantic setting. That meant that I stayed at 50mm pretty much throughout the shoot which is a lovely focal length. In some ways I wish I had the Canon 50mm 1.2 but then its the only prime lens I would want and they’re not practical for the rest of my work, which is corporate video production.
I opted for 2 muddy over the shoulder shots and Alex was very clear that he didn’t want a wide shot to establish where we were. What we see and hear quite clearly leads us to the judgement that we are in a restaurant so there was no need to over egg the pudding.
We remained on sticks for the entire shoot apart the final two shots where we purposefully went handheld. More on this later.
Lighting the Location
I had two challenges to deal with. The first was to create the illusion that this was not a horror film and then sharply switch from a romance into a horror movie.
With the opening taking place as a dinner scene. Lighting the actors so it would appear as a cosy romance, I set my white balance to 3200K and lit them with my VNIX 1500S with a CTO gel and a 1 stop of diffusion. I simply switched the lights around for each of the actors. I added a white reflector on the opposite side just to give a little bit of fill.
As the restaurant was dark, I wanted to separate the background and set up my Aputure H528 one of my H198’s as a background light and a hair light. I left them at 5600K to give a colour separation. The idea being that warm was romantic and the blue was dangerous.
Above – Matthew Mordak & Daniella Faircloth
I stole this idea entirely from Jeff Cronenworth who was the cinematographer on Gone Girl and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Essentially we all steal from each other.
The horror element was something I have wanted to try for a long time. More a sinister look rather than something that outright screamed horror. We turned off all of the house lights, upped the white balance to 4200K.
Our first aspect was to establish that Daniella’s character was all alone in the dark. The first dark realisation she is actually alone.
The next was to establish where we were as we never done that until this point. We knew it was a restaurant, but we’ve never seen it. And now, its very dark. She was lit from one of my H198.
We left the area in front of Daniella lit with the from the front to give motivation. Its also to signify that she would be leaving the safety and going where her she shouldn’t – as with all good horrors, they move away from safety and into the horror.
We then tracked her walking down until she was in a close up. The original plan was to move her on a dolly shot, but I talked Alex out of it to make it a static shot as we had been static all the way up until this point and it was in the next scene, where we come off sticks, where I wanted it to show that distinct visual change change.
To avoid any spoilers I won’t show you how we lit the final scene. Suffice to say we used the practical lights in the location and one H198 as a fill light.
I really enjoyed working on this short little shlock comedy-horror and I’m thrilled that Alex has asked me back again to work on his next big project.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the next blog.
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