Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Awesome, I just spent two hours way earlier tonight (from 10pm to 12am) shooting the first scene of my short fight film. Before I go any further, let me stress exactly what I mean when I say “film”. This is not a home movie. This is not shot by me and my buddies with a Handycam. A good friend of mine does some serious video production and has at his disposal a Sony XDCAM (I don’t know the exact model) for filming in High-Definition Video. Can we say ~$20k camera?

Hells yea!

I wanted to get more than once scene shot tonight, but I completely underestimated the time involved with shooting a scene. I’ve experienced how long it can take to set up and rehearse and run through live fight scenes, I guess I somehow thought doing it for film was different. That’s the first mistake I’ve made in this process. Obviously won’t be the last.

So this scene is the very beginning of the movie and is set at a local 7-Eleven. Mainly involves me walking out, getting a text on my phone, hustling over to my bike and peeling out of the parking lot. Sounds simple right? Actually it wasn’t too bad. The location was fairly decent. There was no parking in the front of the store, which meant we never had to content with cars being in the shot. The store was lit on the outside almost as well as the inside, so we didn’t need any extra lights to balance the scene and make me more visible. The exit was a broad apron onto the street that allowed me to zoom my bike off at a decent speed. The street in that direction extended far enough that I was able to run up my RPMs fairly high before getting out of frame. Being that it was just me and my friend, it took a while to get some shots established, and there were times we had to wait a few minutes for people to pass through, as this wasn’t any sort of official set.

All in all it turned out pretty good. Got in plenty of takes I can take to the editing room and play around with. I parked my rear tire on a painted line in front of the store so that when I took off I was able to peel out rather easily and effectively. The next two shots involve a high-speed camera pass, wheelies, and a skid to a halt. My friend won’t be back in town until the end of next week though, so we can’t do any more shoots until then. Stay tuned!