Our first rehearsal day went extremely well yesterday. Talk about a steep learning curve though…
Still, several unknown questions were answered to my satisfaction, proving that I am either a) a natural director, or (more likely) b) a spawny get.
Vickie proved she was more than a capable actress, Nic proved that she has a good cinematographic eye and Chris the gaffer proved that he can light a scene and make it look very professional.
Bloody marvellous!
Even my wife surprised me with hitherto unknown acting abilities, standing in as she did for Dr Crabtree.
There are still areas of improvement we need to work on though; focus seemed to be an issue, especially on wide shots, though we didn’t really get stuck into the full functionailty of DV Rack, so I hope that will cure those problems once we use it properly.
We also need to get into the mindset of shooting, whereby, if you’re in a scene and you have the lights set up, make sure you don’t move on to the next setup before you’ve finished with the current one. Quite a few times we set up, did a couple of takes, moved, then realised later we’d have to go back to a previous setup.
We’re off over to Louise and Chris’s a bit later to see what it looks like on their home cinema setup. Then hopefully more work on improving our results.