Maia Tarrell

Act 1 Roughcut Screening

Last week we hit another milestone in post-production as we screened the first half hour of Play It Safe for some our key team members (including cinematographer Sherwin Akbarzadeh, music supervisor & AP Oscar O'Bryan, and my good pal & longtime-collaborator Maia Tarrell). This was the very first time anyone other than Raechel and I had watched such a large chunk of the film which made the event equal parts exciting and nerve wracking. It was all smooth sailing once we got going though, and Rae & I collected a boatload of really valuable feedback. We're already back hard at work tweaking the edit with the aim for all five of us to reconvene to review the entire film within the next month.

Rehearsal & Gear Test

Just a quick update today. The last few weeks have been very productive and all the pieces are starting to fall into place. This culminated in our first big workshop / rehearsal / gear test on Friday night.

We spent the evening completely going over one scene with sound, lighting, two cameras, and even some costumes. We covered all conceivable angles, from establishing wide shots to extreme close-ups and my next task is to play around with the footage in the edit to work out how we want to cover the scene for the real thing. Jaque and I have already spent a lot of time talking about how we want the film to look and how the film's visual development should support the thematic development. This process of mocking up scenes and then trying things out and edit is really the final stage of defining how we want to execute the film's visuals, both aesthetically and practically.

I was pretty preoccupied operating B camera on Friday night, so unfortunately I didn't get a chance to take any behind-the-scenes pictures. Here are a few stills from the footage though:

Many thanks to Nick, Spencer, Jaque, Maia, and Dan for all your hard work on a Friday night!