SeeingEyeBlog

Yesterday Was a Lie has wrapped its Los Angeles unit, which means we have one final day of principal photography in San Diego. Over the four weeks we’ve gotten some great footage, an I lost at least one belt size. I hope the film does well. Here are some photos from the set:

My best boy grip, Brian Griffith, shot this still while we were setting up a shot for the movie I’m shooting, Yesterday Was a Lie.

Yesterday was the halfway point in the current film I’m shooting, called Yesterday Was a Lie. It’s a black and white feature in the noir style, and last night we shot scenes inside a 40’s taxi cab. It is called “poor man’s process” when you shoot a stationary car and pan lights across it to simulate passing streetlights. It was a lot of fun setting it up, and the shots ended up looking beautiful. Black and white poor man’s process, being a few steps away from reality, seems to create a more beautiful version of reality. It is possibly more artistic than color cinematography, because the lack of color is a step away from reality and into fantasy. It is weird that I would consider a shot inside a car to be one of the best looking shots i’ve ever done, but I think it has something to do with the creation of a stylized world purely of light and shadow, where even the mundane scene of a car interior can be captivating.

As I prepare for my upcoming film, Yesterday Was a Lie, I’ve been watching a lot of noir films. Most recently, I watched T-Men and Out of the Past, two films that are quintessential noir.

T-Men has all the conventions of the genre: the hard-boiled dialogue, the morally ambiguous characters, and the stark urban black and white photography. We see silhouette, figures in fog (one of the characters has a thing for steam baths), and people moving in and out of complete shadow. All during a perpetual night created by the granddaddy of noir, cinematographer John Alton.

Out of the Past is a classic noir tale, told in a first-person flashback for the first half, and the second half switches to real-time. Each character is caught up in an intricate web of lies and deceit. A scene near the end seems to encapsulate the entire genre: the emasculation of the male hero by a dame, through her intelligence and sex appeal.