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She Brings The Rain - Retakes
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| Filming at the Darwin waterfront with Sam Korn for She Brings the Rain |
Although there has been no crew to manage for the fortnight it has not been quiet at all on the production front. We have kept hard on the filming schedule and not broken momentum, last weekend I started on the first of the full track takes with Sam Korn. For a couple of hours early on the morning of Saturday 17 September we caught some nice warm lighting at the Darwin waterfront area, retaking the entire song from a few different angles and then some small sequence acting filler to fit in with Maddison's hotel room scene.
During the week I also managed to get permission from the corporate media team at Qantas airways who kindly allowed us to film their aircraft as part of our storyline. This filming will span a few sessions the first of which I completed just last Friday by getting a great approach and landing sequence of one of their aircraft. One more landing was filmed today with the help of renowned territory stormchaser William Nguyen-Phuoc who brought his 600mm lens along to bring us right up close to the action. I am booked in for yet another session this coming Friday to capture a Qantas aircraft pulling up at the Darwin domestic terminal.
Incredibly, all this will fit into what amounts to an 8 second lead in to our main character arriving at the airport. I am glad I have so much fun doing this stuff though, especially when you think of how much effort goes into producing such a short glimpse of footage!
Yesterday we also went along to the airport to film a retake of our main character's arrival. I had not been content with the original take that was essential for the clip, really it was my own doing as I had misjudged my ability to hand hold the glidecam sled, shakes were evident in the rough edits. Needless to say this time I brought the entire glidecam rig and got the take right.
Next week we get together with the crew for what will be the final filming session for the music video, after that it will be back to tidy ups and into edit mode for us. I am almost a little sad that its coming to an end, but we have plenty more planned with the guys in the near future!
Behind the scenes shots - Retakes
She Brings the Rain - Principal Photography Day 4
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| Auki and Sam on set at Lee Point beach. Darwin, Australia Video Still : Jess Lai |
The singing scenes, of course involve lip synching to the actual track that will be used for the video so the easiest thing to do is shoot them all at standard framerate (in this case 25fps) with the music playing on a digital device. Luckily this can all be done on a budget of next to nothing, well, technically nothing if you already have the gear and don't count the minute amount of electricity required to charge a portable MP3 player and speaker system.
The complete simplicity and portability of the system is beautiful. All it takes is someone to hold the speakers and player with a free hand so that the singer can hear it and later we can synchronise the video tracks manually with any marker or even just by eye to the audio. It may not be overly high tech, and I imagine it would quite possibly be laughed at by a pro sound engineer, but for our purposes it is more than adequate and was tried and tested with great results on the demo we shot before principal photography actually started.
The X-10 rig is off to a promising start but it still needs some tweaks to help dampen the camera movement more before our next day of filming, we will be taking any spare time opportunity to adjust and tension the setup till we get it better!
We had Ben Gannon join the crew today to help out with a bit of lighting and gear carrying, he has probably gone away with doubts in his mind about the reliability of some of our equipment. After nearly a full 20 minutes of wrestling with one of our bigger reflectors with the help of our DOP they still had not succeeded in getting the beast back into its cage! Admittedly I have my moments trying to wrangle them back in sometimes also. Today my excuse was I had my hands full with the Glidecam rig, hope they believed me!
A big thanks to our friend Jess Lai who jumped right in to do our BTS camera work for the set, there's some great material in there for the BTS compilation.
Day 3 Behind the scenes shots
Who will survive the Black Jungle?
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| HighRPM's coverage of the 2011 Kamfari is available as an exclusive DVD on each issue of Australian Trailrider magazine from this September 14th. |
Ed Forman and I were approached by Universal Magazines to cover the 40th anniversary of this crazy race back in May this year. Having heard of HighRPM's ability to bang out quality motorsports features for both web and broadcast TV they thought we were probably the best local team for the gig.
We only took a small team down to film this feature and only two cameras to cover the course, interviews and chopper filming, but if there is one thing we are quite used to doing after a couple of years the game; it is adapting effectively and fast with what limited equipment we have to work with.
Whilst my specialty is in getting the fancy shots for features and advertising (what Ed jokingly refers to as the arty-farty work) Ed's motorsports camera skills really showed through in this production. Ed is one of those guys who goes to great lengths to get amongst the thick of the action and I really noticed this when I was cutting the footage in post production; there were numerous shots where Ed' would be right in the middle of a swamp with competitors bogged all around him and whilst he was panning the scenery there would be a commercial television camera crew sitting high and dry trying to zoom in on the action.
I had the somewhat more luxurious job in comparison of doing the dry and flying camera work and then editing and producing the feature.
It is really quite daunting at first when you realise the release is national and will be watched by an audience who specialises in the genre of feature you are producing, but I am confident in the fact that we know what the punters like to watch in almost any genre of motorsports and that is the real, raw action of good competitors doing what they do best!
The 40th Anniversay of Kamfari feature is available as an exclusive bonus DVD attached to the September 2011 edition of Australian Trailrider magazine. At quality newsagents from September 14th 2011.
Action from the DVD - All video stills from HighRPM
She Brings The Rain - Principal Photography Day 3
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| Auki & Maddison Ash filming the Crowne Hotel room scene Photograph - Jess Lai 2011 |
Kerry's Automotive group also stepped right up and helped us out big time by offering the use of one of their beautiful E Class Mercedes Benz showroom cars driven by their sales manager Tim Johnston for Maddison's ride from the airport scene.
Such a classy ride and so smooth too, I didn't take any stabilisation gear for the camera and didn't really need it once I had it braced up against the seats' headrest. In fact it was almost hard to get out of the car to get back to the rest of the day once we had all our travelling footage.
We had just a small crew of four for Day 3 and they pulled it all together nicely as usual. I had Bronwyn Pain with me again for the day and she ran the set with her usual lifesaving efficiency but also took on the BTS Camera duties for the day too as well as equipment logistics and shared gaffer duties. Jess Lai once again filling in the role of DOP with me as well as managing the lens rotations. Sam Korn once again not having to be there but turning up to help us in any way he can which we all really appreciate, extra hands really do make for light work and he is getting a good appreciation for what goes into the making of a clip which will be useful as we have more planned in the near future.
After minor technical difficulties shooting at the airport last time (mostly physical due to the weight of equipment being slightly more than comfortable to work handheld), I fast-tracked the order for the X-10 Glidecam vest as a definite 'need' item to get better stabilisation on our moving shots, it was originally timed to arrive for Day 3 of filming but I quite naively forgot about the customs part of the equation. The guys at profeel shipped me the vest from New York to Australia in their usual record time of only 2 days, only to have it stopped in customs. At this stage all I can find out about the shipment is that it is 'in transit' and could be anywhere from 2 to 10 days before Australian customs process it. I'll try to find out a bit more this week if possible.
** Update on the X-10 vest situation. I decided to do a little research at lunch today see if there was anything I could do to get hold of the vest for filming this weekend and stumbled upon a golden link for a customs broker in Australia, I found Aus-Express Customs via a google search and now wish I'd searched last week. After talking to their friendly broker and giving the particulars of my situation they had a reply back to me in under one hour, confirming they had managed to release my consignment from customs for delivery and it was on its way, they took care of all the paperwork and GST calculation for me and they ensured my item was in the correct Tarriff classification ( the Tarriff Act is incredibly confusing to the average layperson ). Highly recommended if you are in Australia and find yourself in the same predicament as me!
Day 3 Behind the scenes shots
Some shots of the set from behind the scenes. Click to enlarge, use arrow keys to go to next pic.
Auki Henry currently presents for the north Australian motor sports show HighRPM. In his spare time he also works freelance as a producer and photographer.