Pre Production - Researching Low Budget Cinematographer Andrew Rivara

Another one of the things I decided to look at after some feedback from my teacher, was some statements, tips and having a look at some work from cinematographers that have been working on a low budget since I will be as well. While I was doing some research on the Drinking Games short I refer to on my previous post, I found a lot of work from this guy Andrew "Tank" Rivara, who has been working on some low budget films and in my opinion has actually done quite some good work for the tools he had available. This is a list on IMDb where it shows the work he has done:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2565448/

Among some of the other things that I found about him, were some really useful tips that he posted on filming with no budget and no space. I thought that this statement was actually quite useful, specially due to the fact that we will be working without much budget and also without as much space in some scenes. The statement is based on the work he did on Drinking Games, which I have seen and in my opinion is a very decent piece of work for the budget they had and I also think that after seeing some of the struggles the had during the filming of it, the way the Andrew dealt with some of this as quite amazing. A lot of this problems are mentioned on my posts about tips on being a cinematographer if you are interested in reading about them. This is the statement he put:

"I mainly used the desk lamps that were in the room because we didn't have the time to move around a fresnel unit, not to mention the space and heat issues. We controlled the desk lamps with lighter diffusion grades and black wrap, and all practicals were hooked up to dimmers. We swapped out bulbs regularly. Notably, we used clear glass bulbs for Noopie driven scenes later in the film to get harsher key lights. Sometimes this came out a touch uglier, but these bulbs felt right. We rewired the top fluorescent fixtures and rigged up a China ball that we jammed into the ceiling panelling, which was then controlled by the switch on the wall that actors could control. This was our main ambient light for the beginning of the film. We grip armed in 10'-18' China balls often, including a red polka dot one from Pier 1 that gave us a heavily saturated red fill light. We used small bounce and neg fill items often. Another interesting lighting issue was keeping out the daylight from our window, but still slow for Noopie to throw the phone out this window. All dorm room scenes were shot during the daytime, so this was a problem. Fortunately, the dorm room was located on the first floor, so we chose to build an 8'x8'x8' duvetyne box outside the window so that Rob could interact with it."

http://nofilmschool.com/u/ryangielen

This gives me a very good perspective of the possible things that I could be using for the show during some scenes, specially when struggling with space and to light the room a bit more. I have to consider more than anything everything that is in the room and how can that help me to get a better shot, whether its natural light, lamps, a little light from a toy, etc. If you are interested in watching more of his work, you can have a look at his showreel on Vimeo:

Andrew Tank Rivara DP Reel from Andrew Tank Rivara on Vimeo.