Day 06 Blog – Fake It while we Make It

Dear Backers’ Club Members,

In Studio

Last week we were out and about in Regina, shooting on the streets and in the parks. This week, we have an actual home with a roof and power outlets and everything! Welcome to the studio portion of shooting Corner Gas: The Movie 🙂

Our home base is a place called Canada Saskatchewan Production Studios. Love the name – very accurate. This is where we have our production office and where I’ve started my day since Day 00. But it’s different now. Before today if you walked the halls you’d most likely see the accountants in their tiny room that looks like a poorly lit college dorm, a few managers and coordinators riding their phones. But if these offices are the “brain” of the show, we just chug some energy drinks. There’s a new hustle and bustle now that most of the crew is in the studio.

The studio space, which is down a hallway straight out of the Death Star, is huge! The cavernous space where we built our sets has a 42 foot ceiling and 15,000 square feet of floor space. That’s enough headroom for two giraffes stacked on top of each other (don’t ask me how they got there, we found them that way!) or to hold enough water for 23 Olympic pools!

We have three sets built in the studio at the same time: Oscar and Emma’s house, a secret location (sorry) and another secret location (another sorry). Today we shot mostly in the Leroy home set.

 

 

So what is it like to stand in the studio? Well, this might be surprising, but it’s actually dark and very quiet. Despite the abundance of people and the pace of the work, it still reminds me of visiting a large cathedral in Europe where people are quietly shuffling here and there, talking in whispers so as not to ruin the mood. Everything seems to be more in “control” – we have better control over the lighting, we can remove unwanted sound, and we don’t have to deal with the elements. The trade off is that you have to fake all of that stuff! I overheard that when they were shooting the Corner Gas television series and The Ruby was actually a set built in the studio; they experimented with using wires to move all the flowerpots and give the impression of wind! But enough of the hearsay, let me show you some of the tricks we used today for filming to capture all of that Oscar and Emma gold!!

Here Comes the Sun

Here’s how we make the sun shine in a dark studio. Check out the picture below, and you’ll see that we shine a big light at a big white thing. What exactly is going on there? The light is probably a “1k,” which is film-speak for a 1000-Watt incandescent bulb. If you look at the bulbs around you house, chances are they are somewhere round the 40-Watt to 60-Watt range. Watt is a measure of the power consumed, so the light we used today is about 20 times more powerful than the light above you. And to be honest, that’s actually one of the small guys. Then, there’s that white square, which we call “diffusion.” This spreads out or ‘softens’ the light so it looks more like the natural sunlight you would see after it bounces its way through the air and through the clouds. It can get far more complicated than that, and often does, but that’s the basics.

 

 

I bumped into Kyle, who runs our generators, and asked him to point out the 1K lights in the truck. He did. I didn’t ask him to pose and look cool – that just came natural.

 

 

I noticed a few other strange things as I walked around in the darkness. When you see the movie and you see Oscar and Emma’s house, I want you to remember that if you see out the window, you were seeing a big fake screen with a painted-on horizon hiding behind some well-placed potted plants. On second thought, I kind of hope you forget about it! After all, the point of all of this is to fool you into thinking we filmed this in a real house.

 

 

 

Listening to David

One quick note: There’s a tiny problem with trying to give you access to everything that’s going on now that we’ve moved in to the studio – the spaces are smaller. On a street it’s easy for us to point our cameras at this and that, and not be in anyone’s way. In a studio, a set is usually three walls with the camera resting where the fourth wall should be. The actors’ “eye-line,” a term for where they are supposed to look, is usually out of that missing fourth wall, so we were definitely farther away from the action. Lucky for us, David Storey (our director) let us put a mic on him! If you haven’t seen the Day 06 Video Blog, you should go there right now. It’s a rare treat and a cool thing for David to let us do that. I’ll pass on the thank you’s!

OK Backers, that’s it for today! See you soon for our second day in the studio.

Davin and the Digital Team