So Sean and I shot another actor reel. Location was the actor’s workshop, in RJ’s office. Setup time: twenty minutes. It ain’t gonna top Nascar, but that’s fast enough. Shots turned out fine. We didn’t prefer the utterly ordinary white wall, but what were we to do?

Because the actors were good at what they did (memorizing four pages of the script I wrote), we wrapped photography in ten minutes shy of an hour. Which was great; because the light pouring through the window was our key light. Any longer and the sun would’ve gone down several shades too low, a no-no regarding continuity.

Two nights ago, the four of us got together and shot my itty bitty skit in a parking lot I. Remember when I blogged that I wanted to shoot a “practice skit,” you know, to get my hands dirty? This was it.

Er, I wrote it the night before we shot. Bad idea. Remember: stories are never written, they are rewritten. Mine had the germ of a story, yet it hadn’t germinated. Despite this, Jaemin and Mike waded through the murkiness and emerged as solid actors. They’re amateurs and likely don’t give a damn about being the next John Cho; but in the thirty takes I pieced together in Premiere, they’re very competent. Not fantastic, mind you. But they’re much better than they think.

The skit itself is…proficient. I’m not gonna say it’s good, because it isn’t; but it is proficient. We lit the interior of the Scion with three battery operated LEDs I got at Target; wrapped them in an orange gel. The exposure was great at 1200 ISO, and the lights matched the background. It seems like it’s coming from a nearby street lamp, and that is precisely the effect we set out to achieve.

In other news, we completed the new layout for Take Zer0 3.0. Sean tells me he just sent out the .psd to our coder to be coded.