RitM: Testing "The Rig"

One of the shots that can make your movie look sophisticated and expensive is a moving car shot. This is usually done by running another car alongside the subject car and filming from there, or by actually attaching the camera to the subject car and hoping that the light and focus points don't change too much.

Since Joel plans to shoot Rain in the Mountains entirely handheld, he needed a third way. Read more...

Yesterday evening we ran a test of "the rig," a platform that can be attached to either side of the 'prop truck' as it is towed along a road. I played Eric, babbling out whatever inner monologue I could manage while Christine hid in the truck bed behind me, testing different sound mixes of wireless lav and a shockmounted Sennheiser shotgun. Sean, the guy who built the rig, drove the lead truck. Kit manned the fill-light, which ran off a generator that sat in the bed of Sean's truck. Joel sat on a bucket (that fell off in the middle of the test) on the rig, experimenting, with an old Hitachi VHS camera, with different framings and angles.

When we later watched the test, managing through luck to sync up the DAT, we found that when we went about 20 mph it looked good, especially when trees passed in the background (Kurosawa used this relative motion effect in many of his films: Cf. Seven Samurai and Rashomon). The wireless lav, purchased new for the film, proved to pick up the least car/generator/cab-echo noise.

We pronounced the test a success and gorged ourselves upon mint-chip ice cream while mocking reality show Hell's Kitchen. It was a good night.