Day 166

166/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

After a lot of planning, a lot of obstacles, and a few stressful situations, we pulled everything together and started shooting yet another project today.  

This time it's a 90 second commercial for Random House (yea, THAT Random House). One of their authors has a new book coming out, and since she lives in Pismo which is relatively close to us, we were asked if we were interested in putting something together. The book is about a young girl who is a track star and it sounded interesting, so of course we said yes. The best part is, we even had a budget. When you are used to making a short film for the cost of a couple of pizzas (to feed your friends who helped you out, of course), it's kind of surreal to actually be able to rent equipment, especially equipment that you know is going to work. I've done 30 minute short films on a much smaller budget, so this time around we splurged on some toys. We rented a 5D to shoot on, which was really nice. We also got a merlin steadicam because we knew we wanted some tracking shots of people running, and while it was a pain to figure out it how to balance it, it worked out really well. 


Today we shot the B-roll footage that we're going to use over the author's interview. It was raining off and on for a bit, which kind of sucked, but otherwise it was a relatively stress-free shoot. We even wrapped on time, which NEVER happens on student films. The real work starts tomorrow when we go to interview the author of the book, which should be interesting.