Noticing that the hire company is only open Monday to Thursday, the prudent filmmaker schedules the shoot for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He then books the camera for Friday only, knowing that he won’t be able to return it until Monday. Thus a saving of largesumsofmoney is achieved (ie. £200 instead of £600).

This in turn helps with hiring a more expensive camera, the Arri 16SRIII, which can vary the film speed while shooting. This means motion can be speeded up or slowed down during a shot. This inspires the filmmaker to consider emulating the John Woo-style revelation technique for a couple of key scenes.

What? Yes. It means following action in a fixed shot size then whip-panning with a speed change while simultaneously widening the shot to reveal more to the audience. It will take a bit of rehearsal to coordinate the action and start/stop panning with the start/stop frame-rate slowdown, but should be doable.

Still no sign of the Porsche, though…

****

09:10am: Out-smugged! The filmmaker finds that he is available on the Friday in question to shoot The Car. What’s more, he’s around on the Thursday to pick the camera. Gleefully, he picks up the phone and calls the hire company–and gets an answer machine. The people with the camera have gone on holiday and closed their offices until September 2nd.

Smug comes before the wump.