Set Scoping! - Pestilence

Now that Jaydon and I have done all of the necessary planning for the film, it is now time to become familiarized with the set! I would like to first off thank Jaydon for putting in the effort to get permission for us to film at CCFL.  I would also like to thank Mr. Nick over at CCFL for giving us permission to film here in the first place! This project truly would not have been possible without him securing the space for us.

Initial Set Scoping

Now, we were originally told that we were going to utilize an auditorium primarily used for children's services and the church's private school. It had a beefy audio system, three beefy projectors, some PTZ cameras, and more. It was even large too. This was the first place we looked at, and we looked around to get familiarized with the space.

However, after looking around, we were told that due to possible administrative conflicts with our church, this location would not be suitable for us to conduct our filming. However, another alternative was available, one that would have the least administrative conflicts with our church.

Introducing: The Black Box!

After sunsetting the idea of filming in the gargantuan auditorium, we looked at the Black Box! It is actually a much more versatile and flexible venue that is sensible enough for a project of our scale. It is essentially a practice room in the layout of a small theatre, but it gives us enough room to be able to film all of the indoor shots.

It still had a very good sound system to add diegetic sound to the film, along with a beefy projector to be able to project the movie that is mentioned in Scene 3.

The major highlight of The Black Box is its high versatility. For Scene 1, we require a tech store as the scene. While a side of the room is configured with three-row seating facing a screen, the space in between the seating and projection screen is impressively wide to be able to accommodate the set to be deployed.

Scene 2, however, requires a much smaller room. It is a "lair" that the cyber attacker, Digital Phantom, will end up residing in mainly to execute his attacks (considering the full runtime of the film outside of the opening sequence) to the entirety of society. Available in the Black Box are curtains that can be moved to create "walls". We are thinking about using the curtains to simulate this room. We are going to eventually figure out how to move them. They seem like quite the task to move, but it should turn out easy in reality.

Scene 3 only requires a little configuration. It is already configured as a theatre, so the only potential tasks that would have to be done would be to clear anything that would contrast the illusion that it is not being filmed in an actual theatre. The most configuration that would have to be done would be anything technical-related, which includes connecting the computer to the A/V systems and setting up the video to project, which is really not much work.

With that said, we discussed with Josh, a member of Calvary's A/V team, about how the installed A/V equipment should be handled. The instructions on setting up and using the system were straightforward.

After discussion, we then left home, immediately wrapping up the scoping session, getting us set for filming the following week! We will let you know how it goes!

For now, it's time to chillax...