$ shots

A money shot, from the way I understand it, is typically a shot in a film that is either difficult and/or expensive to produce or something that the film's commercial success depends on. From the way Dr. R used it, I take it to mean any shot that is particularly striking or beautiful. I already shot mine, so it would be ridiculous to simply describe them (anyone reading this has probably already seen them). Instead, I'll describe my thought process in making them.

For the first shot (the ping pong table shot) I wanted to do something with a moving camera, because that's something I don't do very often. I got the idea that it would be cool to have a moving shot of the table with ping pong balls falling around it; I liked this idea because it incorporated multiple lines of motion. For the lighting, I basically wanted to achieve the kind of lighting I've described in all of my other blog posts, so I won't go into that too much.

For the second shot (the shadow shot) I wanted to play with shadows. My initial idea was to have a shadow appear on a wall, and then the camera would turn around and see the source of the light (my friend Alex) and he would be surrounded by a halo of light. Due to the fact that we didn't have a tripod that could turn that fast, it evolved into the shadow being on the floor and the light not being so much a halo as an outline (that was due to us not having a fog machine). Nonetheless, I think it worked.