Film Production 01 – Poker Night: A Dark Comedy

Last year I assisted in producing a short movie called Poker Night: A Dark Comedy by Omegastar Productions and my own freelance studio which also does production. During development and production I also did Photography and helped with Lighting. Now, this was a zero budget so we mainly dependent on contacts and resources we could borrow. Our location was rather small so we had a few challenges to deal with to create the setting we wanted. As seen in the images below this is what we had to work with.

We decided not to use the room natural light and installed a hanging light source of our own from the roof in the middle of the room. We did have to try different light bulbs to get the desired range, intensity and color we wanted.

Another challenge was considering that the room needed to be bigger than it looked, and considering camera angles such as the kitchen on the other side. In other words, that kitchen needed to disappear. So a magic trick was required.

What could we do? We knew white bounces the light around and makes everything more visible, as shown in the image above with the light coming from the roof. So we spent sometime and put up black blankets to stop the light from spreading, and make it easier to create the room to become bigger. Also, I was the Boomer and On set sound guy a few times as well in the middle of everything. As the image below shows, there is no kitchen anymore.

We did try LED lights, Soft Boxes and such but due to the size of the room we needed to solve our lighting in this way. As such the image below shows how it ended up looking. The room feels bigger now and yes the last thing we did was add tape around the lamp to make the light softer towards the walls, to stop it from creating harsh light and shadow.

With that out of the way we did some photoshoot for behind the scenes, posters and more.

For this we used two LED lights and one soft box to lit up the cast. The LED lights was mainly to fix some background crease and issues, while the soft box was to soften them up. We also kept the room main light on to get a general even bounce. After the cast left I took photo of the Dealer and the gentle girl with a very different lighting setting and condition, within the same room.

The idea above was to see the highlights of the mask, well enough to know it was the dealer and half of the face of the “victim” as the main facial subject as the eyes goes back and forth. Of course, the emotion of fear is the intended focus here.

Here the idea is to keep 70% of the mask visible in burned out golden light, and one of the eyes slightly visible in the dark. Keeping the contrast between light and dark. The focal point being left side but still giving the viewer ability to look at right side. Making the most obscure part the eyes. These images were then prepared by the director himself, into posters such as the one below. Due to the high contrast it made it easier to stylized the posters.