Creating our Theatre Set
One challenge we had to face was the creation of our "theatre stage" set. This set was meant to represent the inner mindscape of our protagonist, so it was a pretty crucial component to our short film. It had to look nice. But since we were two dudes without any money, that meant we could only rely on using our rented home's living room.
"Green Screen"-ing our Walls
Unfortunately for us, our living room only had one "bare" white wall we could use. And that wall had its own window that peered into the kitchen, a plethora of outlets and light switches, and of course a giant door. Using white fabric, white paper, and tape, we covered our wall as best we could to make it as bare as possible. The result of which can be seen in this video below.
Lighting
Our goal was to have a spotlight shining on our actor in this theatre space we created, during the dance sequence of our film. Unfortunately, our living room's overhead bulb wasn't cutting it. So, we had to resort to using a desk lamp, magnified using the power of a DIY cardboard cone that we placed over the head. However, that was the least of our problems:
As Cristian eloquently explains in the video above, we had a problem. Despite managing to turn our lamp into a makeshift spotlight (using our room's rafters and wires to hang the lamp up), we were unable to position the lamp properly such that it would shine its light directly at the spot we needed it to.
Despite raising the lamp to this maximum height, using the wires, the spotlight would only hit right about the chest level of our actor. Tilting the lamp would cast shadows on our white "green screen" wall, which is also a no go.
And so we resorted to climbing onto the roof (we had a glass roof), to see if we could shine the light through to hit our actor at the right spot.
As you can see in the video above, we tried to see if shining the light through the window would work. Ultimately, it didn't. So, in the end we resorted to building a stand and having someone (our friend and roommate) hold the lamp by hand. It was cumbersome and rough, but the effort and end result was totally worth it.
Nice.