I was picked up in this van pictured to the left here only 24 hours ago and from the looks of it I was not quite sure if I was going to wake in a bathtub full of ice. As it turns out director David Rosfeld is actually the real deal, not on the black market for organ donors. The screenplay “Coal” written by the director is simply good…always refreshing to work on some original content in the (very challenging) short form. Low budget? Of course. Constant changes being made to schedule? You know it. Looks like a million dollars? Yes.

We are shooting with Ziess Superspeeds and the images coming down the pipe are pleasing everyone, I will share some frames as soon as I get authorization.  I plan to make these daily updates from the POV of a Red tech since that is what I am doing here.  One thing I wish I did better before the shoot started was really anticipating how much drive space will be needed for backing up on location.  We are shooting 4 to 8 takes of each shot and after a pretty full day I have used already over 70gigs. A 500GB drive should cover a short film (15min to 20min) no problem but remember you need two of them for making a protection copy. I recently found this footage calculator, very useful (which I am sure will be released in a iphone app format soon) thanks to the creators.

RED experiment of the week will concern the Nikon user, I plan to do some side by side comparisons with the Zeiss Superspeeds vs Ziess ZFs which I recently had modded for cinema use by Peter Sensor of www.rplens.com, those puppies should arrive tomorrow via fedex…pretty excited.

Stay tuned, more to come as I attempt a daily update of the 6 day production…consider this day numero uno.

Cheers.

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