Ted Sim of Indy Mogul recently interviewed Nigel Bluck, DOP on The Peanut Butter Falcon, to discover How to Film an Indie Feature.

Some takeaways (mostly direct quotes) for me:

• Shooting single-camera wastes a lot of people’s time.
• Light for the whole scene, not just one shot. Get yourself into a backlit situation for the master and then you’re going to be fine.
• The best thing you can do is to take light away and start shaping things that way.
• Shoot a Master and a Sub-Master. Then shoot two Over-the-Shoulder Medium shots. Those two setups gets you the minimum coverage you need for a scene.
• Night shooting: go to the street at night and you look at what’s there; look at the colour temperature of the lights that are there and the lights that you put in, make them the same colour temperature so it all belongs in one reality.
• Choose less gear and make smart solutions.

My take: I have never heard of the French Over, so that’s a new angle for me. Love Nigel’s approach to doing more with less. Although some find two-camera shoots scary, I will say the music video I made with two-cameras was so much easier to edit. His lighting philosophy makes it possible.