Dice with death.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently; February sweeps is upon us, and I’ve been under the weather (but, of course, due to February sweeps, unable to take time off to recuperate before whatever I’m coming down with eats me alive) so I’ve been living on crunch time. The good news is that my first spot was handed in last night (well, okay, technically, the wee hours of this morning), containing more footage shot with my own camcorder than anything I’ve done to date (!). It’s a gambling addiction story, but as we just let one of our photogs go (right before sweeps!?), it’s become quite apparent that we’re not going to get any new footage of, oh, say, actual gambling shot for the story. Some file footage was requested from CNN and ABC, but there wasn’t enough of it, and we couldn’t show identifiable faces or placenames (i.e. the abundance of footage with the name of the casino in question on the back of a chair, etc.). My script referenced “the roll of the dice, the thrill of the win,” and then I realized…oh, wait, we’re not going to have footage of dice. So I set up my camcorder in my kitchen, and, up against the shiny black surface of the trash compactor, proceeded to build…The Contraption.

Basically, The Contraption consisted of the following:

• A TV tray
• Two wooden CD shelves
• A slab of plexiglass (to protect the camera lens while I hurl dice at it)
• A small box and the Titanic deluxe edition 3-DVD set (for the camera to stand on)
• The dice from a Monopoly game

Basically, the CD shelves were stood on end on the TV tray to form “walls,” and with the trash compactor serving as a shiny non-specific background, the whole thing was supposed to be a bit of a stylized non-specific craps table kinda thing. (I was really more worried about it winding up looking like a crap table, but I didn’t have much to work with.) I eventually wound up borrowing one of the color lens filters from my old camcorder (that’s one thing I really wish the new model would let me stick on there) and used it as a lighting gel to cast what turned out to be a rather strange orange-reddish light over the whole thing (I also tried lighting it blue – not so great – and unfiltered – even more not so great).
It quickly became apparent that it’s incredibly difficult to roll dice with any accuracy toward that “sweet spot” where they’ll both land in focus right under the lens, especially if I was trying to make it look like I was really giving them a good roll instead of dropping them into place. I think I shot an hour of tape and came up with a total of 6 or 7 usable “takes.” But it turned out rather nicely, I thought. (I did realize I had one major problem when I was in post though – I had to drop some graphics in strategically to cover the honking bright reflection of the sunlight in the living room window behind me. Oops.) We won’t even talk about Othello getting curious enough about what I was doing to come over, knock down one of the wooden shelf “walls” while I was shooting, and trying his own hand (paw?) at the dice.
Hopefully I’ll have this spot, and maybe even an Easter egg or two showing some of the better outtakes, as a video feature in my work blog this weekend.