The Shape of Days

So a couple weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to help her make — brace yourselves — an audition tape for a reality-television show. For trademark reasons I can’t get into which show we’re talking about exactly, but let me say that it rhymes with … um … “The Machelor.”

The producers, who’ve been courting this friend of mine for a while now, sent over a list of … well, they were more strongly worded than suggestions. Do’s and don’ts, sort of. Don’t underlight. Don’t shoot too close. Do shoot in a colorful setting. Stuff like that.

We shot the show yesterday, and I’m proud to say that I violated every single one of the little guidelines the producers had sent over.

I don’t think my friend was really expecting what I gave her, either. I’d listened as she and some others had bounced ideas around. You know, all the typical stuff. Make it funny. People love funny, right? So make it funny.

Let me tell you something right now: Nobody gives a shit about funny.

Funny is one of the hardest things in the world, not just to pull off but even to get people to agree upon. Except for the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, there’s no single product of human endeavor that everyone agrees is funny. And to make it worse, the same person will find the same thing more or less funny — or not funny at all — at different times. Funny is hard, because it’s so high-contrast. There’s nothing in the middle. There’s no such thing as “a little bit funny.” Something’s either funny, or it’s so very not.

Funny is hard. Almost funny is easy, but almost funny is not funny at all. So funny is hard.

And I’m lazy.

So I went a different way.

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I finished the show at about midnight last night. An hour and a half of raw footage cut down to just a hair under five minutes. I sent my friend a text and said it was done; she wrote back and said she and a couple others were just blocks away, and could they come see? Of course I said yes.

They came in smelling like they’d all showered in bourbon; they’d been at a bar in the Circle. I set up the screening and did what I always do, kinda hovered around the edge of the room for about five minutes, watching the faces of the people rather than the screen. I had every frame memorized anyway, so I didn’t need to see it again. I wanted to see them.

The show’s very quiet, very small. Tight shots, high-contrast light. Slow-motion cutaways that I shot as coverage while we were getting my friend mic’d and make-up’d.

Through the first minute or so, there was a lot of laughter. “Ooooh, so dramatic,” one person said sarcastically. He thought I’d made a parody, and that he was in on the joke.

The wisecracks had stopped by the time the film got to the part about the day my friend’s uncle died. She talks about seeing her cousins at the funeral, and knowing that they didn’t have a father any more, while she was standing there next to hers. I held that shot for a long time. If you look close, you can see my friend’s mouth get tight and one tiny, wet highlight appear in the corner of her left eye. Then it fades to a slow-mo cutaway of an anonymous man — me, as it turns out — moving the hair out of her eyes.

The show wound down, ending with a mood-shattering smash-cut to black after a weightless and ethereal cut cadence based on lots of long dissolves and dips to black. The music faded out, and the end title card came up and then vanished.

And nobody said anything.

And that’s when I knew I’d done something good.

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I don’t want to sound all full of myself here. I’m not great at this stuff. I’m pretty good. Better than average, if your sample includes everybody everywhere. Among people who do this professionally, I’m very much an amateur.

But a few times in my life, I’ve created something that hits just the right note with me. Maybe everybody else thinks it’s dumb, or doesn’t get it. But it gives me chills.

And that’s how this show was for me.

That little moment, over maybe thirty seconds, when the laughter died down and everybody got quiet? And then the show ended and nobody said anything, just stared for a second at a black screen and breathed?

Yeah. That’s why I do this.

Anyway, yesterday was a good day.

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She’s probably going to kill me for doing this, but … here’s a still taken from the show.

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Oh, the technical stuff? Fine. Nerds.

I shot her with a 650W Arri key light that was rigged high to camera right to put the eyelight in her eye just east-northeast of her pupil. I used an Arri 300W backlight to throw insane contrast on her right cheek. I used no fill light, because fill lights are for pussies.

I used an f/2 with a five-stop ND filter, with an in-camera gain of +3db to blow the highlights on her cheek and a dialed-in color temperature of 5,000 K.

For the slow-mo cutaways, I overcranked to 60 frames per second, which I then played back at 24 in post. I used a ¹⁄₁₂₀ shutter, and I think I had the gain at +6db, but I can’t remember exactly because I didn’t bother to slate that stuff.

I had to send a crewmember — i.e., one of my friend’s roommates who thought it’d be fun to watch the shoot and ended up getting drafted — to CVS to buy a case and some contact-lens solution. Why? Because if at all possible, have your talents take their contacts out. Contact lenses muddy-up the irises and dull the color of the eyes, which are by far the most important things in the shot. And if you’re shooting even medium-tight with a resolution of 1K or higher, you can see the damn things, sitting there like a thin little circle on the sclera. So if you can manage it, shoot your talent without their contacts in.

Especially when you’re shooting women.

Just sayin’.

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