Last week Cinema 5D posted an interview with myself and DP Matteo Bertoli, about our process shooting my latest feature film – WHITE CROW. This interview covered a lot of new ground and touched on some really interesting aspects of our production – including our crew setup, shooting schedule, camera/lens choices, lighting techniques, and achieving a high end aesthetic on a budget.

Here’s a quick excerpt from the interview:

PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS

One of the first things to consider when deciding on a camera and on-set workflow for a particular project is all the practicalities of the production. What is the shooting schedule like? How many locations are there? How many setups in a day? Size of crew, lighting plan. This all comes down to time and resource management.

Tell us a little bit about the White Crow production. What was the schedule like? Crew size? Locations?

Noam:

White Crow was designed to be shot with minimal cast, crew, and locations, and the screenplay was very much written with practicality in mind. Half the film takes place in one location (the protagonist’s home) and the other half takes place in the antagonist’s house, which made scheduling really easy. We shot everything in only 9 days with a crew of 9 – 10, depending on the day. Normally, when you shoot close to 10 pages per day, you have to work so fast that shots get sacrificed or overall quality goes down, but we really managed to avoid those issues – mainly because we weren’t shooting a lot of coverage, and had actors who were unbelievably prepared. So while we didn’t go for quantity (in terms of shots or coverage), we did achieve quality by taking our time and not rushing through key creative decisions.

Matteo:

The schedule was in theory very, very tight – we shot 81 pages in 9 days with one camera and a very small crew. The crew was composed of: director, 1st AD, DP, producer, 1st AC, gaffer, makeup artist, production designer and wardrobe. In the camera department we were pretty much 3 people! We shot in 2 locations (two houses) and a couple of shots outside. I think the reason why we were able to pull off a feature film in only 9 days is because Noam had a very clear idea of how to shoot the film. Very little, if close to zero coverage, zoom lenses, a lot of one shot, long takes. It’s definitely a very artistic movie and it was shot in a very unique and different way, I love it!

You can read the rest of the article here!

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