Cold Night on Canal Street

Canal Street is a quick 3 minute short film I put together with actor Sean Hudock.

We initially had the idea of just walking around Chinatown and getting some pretty shots, more like a screen test than something with a narrative and a thought out visual language. But as Sean and I talked about the idea more, we got more interested in seeing what the most we could do was with the least amount of pre-production, equipment, and crew. Part of that had to do with situation in general, we didn't really have much time to plan anything. So we fleshed out a loose "plot" that basically consisted of a setup (walking around Canal street), a shift in mood and scenery (the restaurant), the only planned shot (close-up of the text message), and then a rough idea for a resolution (the CU of Sean on the phone at the end.) Otherwise, the short is more or less and example of impromptu film making and thinking about the edit as we looked for shots on the fly.

We constructed the ideas as we went, finding interesting spots as the night went on, and we overshot, getting more footage than I thought would be needed in the edit. Basically, we had a rough idea of the story we were trying to create, but I knew I was going to lock down the plot in editing, so we shot different interpretations of our loose storyline and hypothetical routes the narrative could take. I also took a lot of shots of things that I thought could be useful later in building up a system of symbols that could add depth and structure to the story--raw material for shaping context.

Camera Settings:

This was shot starting at around 8PM on a cold January night. It was roughly about 4 hours of shooting, including a sit down dinner that we integrated into the storyline. All the lighting is ambient, meaning it was just myself, Sean, and a 5D MKII on a tripod with no additional lighting equipment. Other than one shot, the entire piece was shot on a Canon 50mm F1.2 L-series prime. The CU of the text message was on a Canon 100mm F2.8 Macro. My intention was to keep the ISO low to control the noise and minimize grain. All the outdoor shots were ISO 320, and some of the indoor shots went up to ISO 1250. I wanted to keep my options open when it came to how dark the blacks were going to be, so I had the style setting at Standard, but with sharpness and contrast all the way down. I dropped saturation down a bit as well, but not too much because I didn't want to have to spend a lot of time later fixing flesh tones and trying to figure out the "correct" color of things.