Backyard Party

Photo by: Alison Midstoke

Three Good Years

I've been working with two of my actors in the current photo project for three years now. All the way from the first auditions I held through an intense and somewhat wacky rehearsal process and shooting process for my first staged project all the way to this current extended project. Here's Neyssan, who plays Phil, and I celebrating his second to last day on set and three good years together. Cheers!

Photo by: Unknown

At Wrap

At wrap everyone descended on the food and goodies made by our amazing set design team they'd been eyeing all weekend:

Surprise!

I asked one of our actresses in one of our three backyard party scenes to crouch down in the front of the composition and pretend to take a snapshot with my iPhone of the birthday girl walking in. She gave me back all of these fantastic and fun images. Everything below is by our actress Lily Wen:

Photos by: Lily Wen

Hanging Two 20'x20' Silks

That same windy weekend we also needed to hang a two 20'x20' silks to diffuse the sunlight on a fairly wide shot of the party, but the wind just turned them into giant sails threatening to blow away or bowl everyone over. Many thanks to our ever industrious producer Josh Shain for applying his theater and ropes know-how and getting everything safely rigged. With the wind we weren't able to raise the silk as high as I was hoping, but it took us so long to get it up and secured that the sun had nearly dropped low enough that it worked just as well at the height we left it at. It still took four people holding it against the fence with their bodies to keep the silk from billowing into shot, but as you can see there were a lot of smiles going around all the same.

Happy Birthday

Protect the Candles

Lighting thirty birthday candles on a cake on what turned out to be an exceptionally windy weekend proved almost to be the death of us. It took shielding the cake with two 6'x6' flags, a black cloth held up on a third side, and the body of one of our crew members on the fourth to get the candles to stay lit just long enough for us to take the picture. It resulted in a lot of laughter, but I think we got the shot.

Around the Campfire

Here's how the rest of our night shoot went:

Lighting a Backyard Party

Lighting this backyard party night scene was fun. One big broad light, another for some extra pop, a campfire, and a really slow shutter speed. Those are strobe lights, but we used them all backwards because balancing the campfire to the artificial lighting meant exposing with the 250 watt tungsten bulb instead of the strobe itself. All that and then the actors just have to hold really still while looking natural.