The Pursuit

We just wrapped an exhausting weekend of shooting for the pursuit. It is now 6:30 on Sunday and I have been working on the pursuit essentially nonstop since 4:00 on Friday. Let's start from the beginning shall we?

I got my brand new Canon 7D on Thursday and we wanted to use it to shoot the pursuit, so Luke and I walked around Friday evening to the various locations and tested it out. We shot a lot of test footage and then reviewed the footage, in the end we decided to shoot the majority of the footage at 30fps with a shutter speed of 200. This gave the look of vaguely choppy that worked really well for this high intensity action. We decided to also shoot some things at 60p so that we could have some potentially awesome looking slow-mo.

Saturday we decided to shoot the majority of the action so that the other actor and I were fresh and ready to perform whatever awesomeness the choreography required. The choreography by the way was done by me as well thus bringing my credits to Producer, Actor and Action Designer. So Saturday was definitely the most exhausting day. We did a lot of parkour so that by the end of the day I'm sure all our moves looked sloppy because we were so tired. But we got some really good stuff in and I'm really happy with it.

Sunday, was the day to get all of that boring story stuff out of the way. We started the day with a bit of action and then in the afternoon knocked out the story. We had to break about 3 times due to light rainfall but we were fortunate enough that we never had any serious issues. It was actually nicely overcast all weekend so I think we got really lucky on the weather. Working with Keetin and Nikki was great they were both wonderful and gave very nice performances.We finally wrapped a bit after 5 which meant that both days we somehow managed to stay almost exactly on schedule, which is quite shocking.

Overall, I am definitely happy with how the shoot went. I think there were a couple of things we could have planned out a bit better, mainly the two times in which there is actual story being conveyed. However, that is as much my fault as anyone's. Everyone was great to work with. I had a lot of fun flipping around with Eric and he really helped to make this film as visually pleasing as I wanted it to be. Chelsey was great at taking charge of the shoots and came up with some really nice shots. Luke was a fantastic DP. He really did a great job of being creative and making some shoots look really gorgeous. Matt was great on audio, he was very professional throughout the shoot and great to work with. John was a great AC he made sure the camera stayed nice and dry during our few delays. Pat and Eric were the best PAs I could have hoped for and Eric even got a nice little cameo in. I really could not have asked for a better cast and crew to help make my vision come to life. I'm really excited to see how the editing goes.