Long Take Shoot

Working with the Bolex is always an awesome experience....especially during the summer! What is difficult about taking 6X1 during the summer is that each project is assigned one right after the other and most of the production is improvised.  My group and I were talking about ideas the day before the long take shoot.  We came up with a hallucinogenic peach that is bitten by a man who was stood up by his date. Crazy idea, but that was pretty much what we could work with since we were given a short period of time to brainstorm.  During our brainstorming hours we were excited by our shot list.  We knew that with the long take we could accomplish these shots successfully.  Well, we were wrong.  Sure our long take shoot came out alright, but it was difficult to film all the action when the camera had a shallow depth of field.  It was a telephoto lens and what we were looking for was more of a wide angle, especially for the style of the narrative as well.  At the beginning of the shoot blocking seemed simple.  We blocked our main character to pick up a peach, and walk down this trail which was about 30 ft long and be surprised by the random characters in his hallucination.   Well we blocked many times without using the camera to see how it would look.  Once we used the camera and saw through the lens what actually was in frame, we had to re block a couple more times.  What was also difficult was the time restraint that was given to us.  We had to follow the 54 second rule, and using a beginning, middle, and end to  a story is very difficult to fit in 54 seconds, but we did it!  Once we finished our long take shoot, we went into processing the film.  Processing the film didn't come out as we hoped, but we still have good footage.