Original Content London

So the filmshoot is this weekend and we seem to be on track to have everything ready to get in and setup the shoot during the day friday so that we can start shooting either friday night or early saturday.  We have 1200 shots to get through before sunday night so there’s a a lot to do this weekend.

But ahead of that, the arch and track for the camera is now built.  We ordered some cstom lengths of roller chain and sprockets and stepper motors to control the movement of the camera cart and the lights.  The stepper motor moves on a cylindrical series of electromagnets and through the fine adjustment of the percentages of power on the four opposing magnets, you can get the axle to step around in tiny steps, down to I think something like 2400 steps per revolution (so just a fraction of a degree).  We don’t need that kind of minuteness of scale but we are looking for a steady accurate movement of the camera along the arch and so the stepper motor will be able to do that by moving exactly 1/1200th of the circumference of the arch for each shot.  Luckily Bryan is handling all the electronics and programming, because i can only sit here and explain it to you, I can’t actually do it.

I’m also ordering materials for the landscape of our film.  We are making a homemade playdough recipe with flour, salt, oil, water and cream of tartar.  But we need to make about a cubic metre of playdough so may shopping list includes 80kg of flour, 50kg of salt and 20L of oil, and lots of food colouring.  Pretty fantastic.

We’re nearly there though and this weekend should be a blast!

This entry was posted on 5 May 2009 at 9:52 am and is filed under Millions Long . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.