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Home as the Place You Want to Be

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May 2012.  Film stills taken by me on the set of my film, "When We Were Young".  

In the film, the main character, David, is a years-past-college photography major.  When he was younger, his father, a professional photographer, passed away and left him his film equipment, and the darkroom in the basement of his parents' house.  He takes up his father's field after he passes, and continues to shoot film, his favorite camera being his father's old Pentax (which these photos were taken with).  

In the present of the film, David is about to move across the country by himself, from New York to California, when on his final day in his hometown, he goes down to the beach to shoot some film and develop the pictures in his father's darkroom for the last time.  On this trip, he runs into Rose, an old flame from college, and after catching up for a bit, asks her if she would mind being photographed.  

The series of stills I'm posting right now that include this information are pictures I took on set with a Pentax, the negatives and prints that were produced were props in the film as they were the pictures he took of her, and help segue the cross-cutting between the darkroom scenes where he's reviewing his work and reflecting upon the previous day when he took them.

This particular day, at the beach, was our second actual shooting day. I say actual because the beach was our first "attempted" shooting day.  We were on a very crunched schedule (the film was being produced for the purposes of a senior thesis film for a friend of mine) and had only a little over two or three weeks to shoot and complete an edit of the film.  Our original schedule called for us to shoot the beach on one weekend, and then the other scenes the next weekend.  However, on our first shooting day at the beach, we were completely rained out, and although we attempted to shoot, the conditions were too restrictive and the scenes just didn't look as they meant to.  We were forced to give up and push the beach to the next weekend, with the entire rest of the film.  

We began shooting the next Friday night, where our first location was an amazing rooftop in Brooklyn that looked directly out to the harbor and the Brooklyn Bridge.  Unfortunately, we were IMMEDIATELY ejected from this set, as the landloard and/or caretaker of the building quickly intervened.  I asked my friend (whose project it was) for WEEKS if we had clearance for the location and he kept re-assuring me that it would be okay.  It was absurdly frustrating to say the least.  Miraculously, my friend's friend, who tried to get the location (his father ran the restaurant on the first floor) lived in an apartment complex only a few steets away and got us up there to shoot the scenes necessary during the sunset that was still happening.  In this situation, I only had half the time to shoot all of the scenes in a place I had never seen, so I simply had to request to arm the camera myself and shoot everything on the fly, rather than trying to communicate my ideas of how to shoot it to everyone - as both a photographer/cinematographer/editor/director, it was easy for me to immediately create a series of shots that would edit together and tell the story, but simply too difficult to communicate what to do someone in such a short amount of time, while we were running out of light.  In the end, the new rooftop was alright and worked fine for the film, but lacked the grandioseness of the original location.  Rather than having the bridge right near the rooftop, we were right next to train tracks, with frequently passing trains, which while interrupting us occasionally, also worked in a different way to sell the reality of the location, as well as giving us two on-camera train pass-bys that worked at opportune times.

The following day, we shot all of the beach scenes that this picture is from, and the weather ended up being perfect for the day.
Image size
854x566px 365.41 KB
Make
Canon
Model
CanoScan 9000F
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