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I guess my new Twitter brand is to admit to some easily avoidable mistakes but rebrand them as tips. So what else have I fucked up on...?
Here’s one that fucked me up a bit on Beyond Skyline... I didn’t have any pre-viz for that movie. 1700 VFX shots. I think almost 800 of them on green screen. So we story boarded everything. And I thought I was prepared and ready to go. Nope!
Story boards are incredibly helpful but can be too divorced from the production reality. I did shot lists too but they were too basic. I’d cover my bases but I didn’t have a solid plan of attack with the lighting and blocking to move through everything in the most efficient order
Beyond had a ton of location work and we were shooting on the equator in the rainy season so we were asking to get behind schedule anyway. But Skylines was mainly on stages and a backlot so I really wanted to prove I could stay on schedule and then some.
So for me, the best process was walking the sets with the team in prep, shooting stills and building the shot list. But then every night after wrap I’d go walk the next day’s set again sometimes by myself. And then draw over head maps with camera positions for each scene.
I know it’s super basic but the overhead map shot list was way more helpful for me than pre-viz or storyboards to be honest. The other big basic revelation was (drumroll please) the dolly! 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😂" title="Gesicht mit Freudentränen" aria-label="Emoji: Gesicht mit Freudentränen"> I know. But coming from shooting run and gun indie stuff, I always saw the dolly as slow
But our DP on Skylines @AduPlantier21 is an incredible dolly operator so I felt I needed to get more comfortable with the speed and process of it. And came to realize. If you pick the right line for your Dolly master - you can get around 6 setups without having to move the track.
So we ended up getting better variety of coverage - with three lens sizes per position - and a lot more close ups and quieter moments with characters. It definitely helped that our stages had sky panels lighting the sets so we could adjust on the fly but using more dolly was key.
Here’s a look at the end set piece in the Armory... shot list and overhead maps.. Very basic but we shot 197 setups on the set in 4 days using this method.
The other huge assist was having Reel Deal Stunts do our 2nd unit and action pre-viz. So that meant our big action scenes always had a solid foundation that I’d build off of with the maps and shot list. It was the first time I worked with an action 2nd unit and it was invaluable.
And the happy ending is that we never fell behind schedule on Skylines. The last day was Alpha Team walking down the alien canyon and I just kept shooting them a few more times than necessary because we had hours left and I didn’t want it to end. Took this pic before calling wrap
Here’s some more chicken scratched overhead maps I just dug up.
And here’s some blocking stills with our great 1st AD Eliot Mathews as Dr. Mal https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😂" title="Gesicht mit Freudentränen" aria-label="Emoji: Gesicht mit Freudentränen">
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There’s still a lot of meat on the bone to discuss here. One of my friends asked about B cameras and how that works with the dolly master. Simplest version is to have B cam on a slider track to get the OTS shots at the same time. But B cam is an interesting discussion to itself.
I used to always want a second camera running no matter what. Part insecurity and part what do we have to lose. But editing afterwards found a bunch of setups useless or redundant. So I focused more on the single camera. Some setups esp in tight sets only have one usable angle.
We had our 2nd unit DP Frederic Martin as our main B cam operator on days we didn’t overlap and that helped a lot because he could find interesting shots and angles on his own as well. But was always honest enough to say eh we don’t have a shot and not force it for no reason.
