In my last blog post I went over building and filming the boat in Vintersea's "Crack of Light". https://www.hotkarlproductions.com/post/making-vintersea-s-crack-of-light
In this post we'll cover building the hull set - in our story Avienne and her handmaiden get mutinied and thrown into the hull so I wanted to show it and not have them just disappear. I thought it would be fun and help make our video bigger - little did I know it would be some of my favorite shots in the video!
I got started on the floor - I wanted to continue the blue + yellow theme from the outside of the boat + the alternating colors give it depth.
Here's the wall:
I also wanted the floor of the boat to look straight nasty - so we added all sorts of grungy paints to it. We used spray bottles with acrylic paint, sponges, etc. to grime it up.
Now we're starting to put the floor to the wall - Freddy making a cameo in this photo.
So we have our left wall with the slats in a temporary position, and our back wall + floor. We were playing around with where to but the props and junk so the hull didn't look sterile. Freddy was freakin amazing and making it look good but chaotic. He wins the set decking champ award I just made up.
This is what we were building up to - SHAFTS OF LIGHT!! Woohoo!!! But we wanted a steeper angle.
This is where things started getting REAL - we had lights on and were creating shafts of light - I wanted beams of light and we were moving the slats on the wall to adjust our beams of light as desired. If this case it's a GODOX SL 200W that we were using as our key light.
Also, that canvas prop on the ground, it's got a sick easter egg.
Also, poor Freddy here, RIPL
More contrast, some haze/smoke in there.
We tested multiple lights - including an ARRI 1K (tungsten). We ended up using the GODOX SL200W.
Here's things looking better:
We did the testing a few days prior to shooting - we really wanted to make sure we had everything dialed - things would obviously change alittle once we had our actresses in there but that prep time made a HUUUUUGE different.
And then the day of filming we have our amazing actresses in costume!
A BTS Pic - we rocked two BMPCC4Ks. I was using a Xeen 20mm with a Speed Booster - so it was like a 35mm equivalent on a full frame camera. We had a Dracast silk on the right providing alittle bit of fill.
Candice and Avienne were bummed about being mutinied - but it happens and they were alive.
We got multiple takes - story, performance footage, etc. from this set and I LOVE IT ALL. We had a build day, an assembly/light test day, and then a day of filming. Having the time to get everything prepped and basically set kept the day of filming adjustments minimal.
If you haven't yet, watch the video here:
https://youtu.be/1qWrrvPtZ4g