Wednesday, August 22, 2007

More Theatre Work - Rub My Lamp, Baby.

My neighbor, Joe Webb, who is an amateur photographer and pyrotechnician, helped out immensely with the setup. He pulled a canvas backdrop out of his house and draped it between a willow tree and a red sandstone boulder in his front yard at sunset. We brought over a dual 500-watt halogen construction lamp on a tripod to help illuminate the shot of the lamp. Then the fun began!

We did this on the 4th of July. We set up and started snapping shots within about five minutes. I had smoke bombs that were supposed to be for the kids. I think Joe and I qualify well enough for that title...anyway, they were $0.30 off-the-shelf stinkers that served us well. Christy Webb wrote this theatrical adaptation of the tale and had a metal lamp on hand for prop use. We used modeling clay to seal the lamp lid on so the smoke would pour out of the lamp end. I burned my hand with the fuse once or twice - it's like a little flame-thrower, and I had to move quickly to get it in place and get the burn oriented toward the front of the lamp. Then the lid went on and I sprinted back to the camera. Joe manned his own camera and has some phenomenal shots which I intended to use, but didn't get around to putting them on my machine. It turned out that I had some decent shots of my own, anyway.

I also wanted to have a chance to use my tablet and graft a couple of shots together, so I set up a shoot with the actor playing Aladdin's genie. The rag on his head is a tablecloth that was laying around my garage. I put the dual halogens up again for lighting similarity and popped several good ones off. We were telling bad jokes and tried to get the genie to at least LOOK like he was laughing naturally. I found that the tablecloth matched the blueish smoke almost perfectly, and used that to tone the whole face.
In the end, it turned out allright, and the play was pretty good!

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