Back at it Again!

We are really excited today to release the blog about our most recent short, “The First Kiss” written and directed by Josh Dansby; starring Josh Dansby and Garyn Vaughn; and produced by Shut Up, Dansby Productions and Hamil Bros Studios. We released it Friday, May 5, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since due to it’s hilariousness. If you haven’t seen it yet, take your time to watch it now!

Where did this come from?

So you may be asking yourself, “Where did this come from?” We’ve got an answer for you. Josh Dansby is one of our amazing interns and he’s put in a TON of non paid hours for internship purposes, but most noteworthy just to learn the craft of filmmaking. Josh recently graduated from Lubbock Christian University, in fact it was the day after “The First Kiss” released. One of his end of year projects was to produce a video that was at least 4 minutes long. So, he enlisted us to help him be the boots on the ground and we started discussing ideas. I actually wrote a short several months back and was excited to get it shot and produced, due to our time constraints, it just wasn’t going to do any of us justice. About two weeks before his due date, Josh called us up and said “Guys, I have the perfect idea! When can you meet?” We made the time and caught up with Josh in a coffee shop where he pitched us “The First Kiss” and we started figuring out logistics.

How to shoot in 5 hours.

First of all, we did a LOT of pre-production planning including shot and lighting diagrams. On Josh’s end, he was meeting with Garyn to write up the actual script. Funny enough, there’s somewhat of a script skeleton to the short, but for the most part, the short is just Garyn and Josh feeding off each other. How awesome is that? But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Pre-production was key in making this short happen effectively. So, when I say we prepped, rigged, blocked, rolled, and wrapped in 5 hours, I mean it.

Our Call time was 7:00pm so we could get lights pre-rigged and get our cameras lined out. This was our first 3 camera shoot, so we wanted to make sure everything was lined out and settled in the camera department before dark. We owe a huge thanks to Paul Hunton and Brett Womble for helping us out by providing a camera and a lens adapter to us for this shoot as well as a few others. We placed Brett’s Blackmagic Cinema Camera with the Rokinon 24mm cine lens on the hood of Josh’s truck with our Matthews Grip Master Car Mount for our A Cam which was our two shot showing Josh and Garyn. Our B camera was the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera with a metabones speedbooster and the Canon EF 50mm F1.8 on the Driver’s side. Finally, Our C camera was the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera with an Angenieux 17-68mm.

LIGHTS!

With Cameras set we started lighting. Our biggest motivation on the lighting was sodium vapor street lamps that are everywhere. It creates this warm natural looking environment and we knew we wanted to recreate that. Funny enough, our location didn’t have an operating sodium vapor light for probably 100 yards in any given direction. Along with that we wanted to motivate some tungsten colored light (Garyn’s Key) from the house where they’re parked. We managed to do some MASSIVE gel on lights to get the color temperatures we wanted. The other issue with lighting is making sure we didn’t block the street. Although we were shooting late on a Monday night, you have to know that more traffic will take place because of Norman Funkelemeyer’s Law. This law states that any video production or filmmaking to take place where you wouldn’t want any cars will, by a collective of energy, mosquitoes, and expended rubber bands, attract a metric crap ton of cars to show up and decidd to house hunt the neighborhood in which you’re shooting. So, we had to act appropriately and place lights where they wouldn’t hinder the flow of night traffic through the neighborhood.