After the laborious process of contract negotiations, it was time to get to pre-production. As a director/DP (when I’m not acting), I had a lot of ideas as to how we could produce this on such a small budget. For starters, I own a small equipment rental company, with quite a bit of equipment.
The main gear we could bring to the table were:
Pansonic AG-HVX200
Redrock M2 Adapter with 7 primes
Redrock Micro X
Glidecam V16
Lights and grip, etc.
I love the HVX200 coupled with the Redrock, so I hoped that we could shoot with that setup in order to make the series feel more like a film-shot tv series than a web series. Luckily, 60 Frames also had several HVX200 cameras, so we would be able to shoot with 2 cameras. That was important to the shoot, since our dialogue is fast and almost always overlaps.
I cannot say enough about the Redrock M2 and MicroX. It really takes the HVX200 to a new level. And Brian Valente at Redrock was very helpful throughout our production, whenever we needed to fix a jammed follow focus that we dropped on cement, or had missing screws, etc. We never had a problem with the adapter as far as use goes, and our producer. still shakes his head whenever she watches Infamous, because she’s never seen that kind of quality with something as simple as the HVX200.
Since trying to direct AND star in a low-budget film (or TV/web series) is a nightmare that almost never works, we attached a director named John Asher, who has tons of experience shooting television and film. We were all happy to have someone of his experience at the helm, and it was also validating in that he loved our script, and was willing to take this on.
For our locations, we wanted to have as wide a variety as possible...but we had very little money. So, many of our locations were donated to us. In fact, I think we only paid for two locations, and they were really great deals. It was one of the many things that had to fall into place in order for us to do this for the budget. Pharaba Witt, our producer, was a master at finding ways to fit everything we needed into our miniscule budget.
From this point on, I resigned myself to my acting/writing duties. There’s nothing worse than an actor telling the DP or director what to do, and though I’ve learned to wear many hats, I’ve also learned when to take them off. The next portion of this article is a Q and A with our DP, Leo Jaramillo. He has been working with Annie Leibowitz in the still photography world as well as DP’ing several low budget projects. His understanding of lighting, and the camera equipment available to us made him a huge asset.
