Written and Directed by Lloyd Seddeon
Director of Photography by Nutthawut Lim
When Lloyd the director of Hammerhead had approved the “look” I have suggested him I was beyond excited to shoot this short film. Based on the ominous feel of the story I feel it is best to tell the story in low-key style of lighting. This means I get to shoot in the style like one of my favourite director David Fincher and his collection of works that I was inspired by e.g Mind Hunter, House of Cards, Gone Girl, Fight Club etc.
I have put together screen grab on some of my favourite scene to talk about pre-production, thoughts process and of course its cinematography. So let’s jump into it.
Picture below is my first location scout of the bedroom scene which holds many important scenes such as the very first scene and the climax of the story. The first problem I notice right away upon entering the room was the fact that there was not enough light in the room especially when I’m shooting this project with Canon 6D and low light capabilities is not its strongest abilities, I ended up shooting around 160 and 320 ISO throughout the whole shoot, anything higher than that I will likely be presented with not only noticeable noise but fix noise patterns that you can clearly see. In post I decided to embrace the noise and added film grain which 1.) cloak the actual noise and 2.) add a film look.
As you can see in the picture presented by Sunseeker application (Great App), the room is facing West and we were not going to get any luminance from the sun apart from the ambience and reflective lighting from the building across ours. So, next step is to convince Lloyd that we need a powerful light to bounce it off the wall and ceiling (white materials). One light that is powerful enough to be our key light and not burn off the actor’s face is Aputure 300D LED fixture. Ive been following Apurture company for a while now and I think their product is great because of its powerful output and its high CRI/TLCI which is a major problem to most LED in the past.
First shot of the film is the low angle shot of the shoes. Its fairly simple but I have to make sure that the look we were after is prevalent so the look of this first scene can carry out throughout the shoot. One thing I was certain that almost every scene would consist of is shooting on the shadow side, that way you retain the dark ominous feel while creating this separation from the background.
After the bedroom scene we jump to the kitchen, which our protagonist is contemplating while waiting for the kettle to boil for coffee. This scene unlike our pervious room is facing east and we were getting tons of natural luminance from the direct sunlight through the two windows. Shooting against bright sunlight is never a good idea for exposure especially when the interior is dimly lit, parts of the details outside the window will retain details while others like the sky will blow out. So, I decided to defused both windows with frosted film which 1.) soften bright sunlight hitting actor’s face and objects 2.) the window will at least have one blob of overexposing areas 3.) less distraction from outside.
Here are some other interior shots after the kitchen scene:
Exterior shots brings another set of problems and challenges, especially shooting on a blazing sunning day, and that problem is dynamic range. We constantly have to put a diffuser and reflector up to battle the sun to lower the contrast of the shot so my Canon 6D can capture all latitude of the details. We yet again shot the actor on the shadow side by putting him where the sun would act as a back light creating nice background separation.
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