My schedule for the next umpteen days is going to be rather full (yes, even more full than usual), as we are now in full swing on primary shooting for Prey. Yesterday was both fight choreography/rehearsal and lighting tests for a couple of setups, so there was much the concrete work in the morning and early afternoon, followed by a shower (mmmm, shower!) and a drive to the Bruno abode (which most of the driving was spent with me on the cell phone headset trying to talk Barb through some issues on a project she is working on), followed by several hours of lighty-lightness.
The good news is that the china balls work really well. I have a feeling they will become a mainstay of lighting for this movie (they're really quick and easy to set up, and very forgiving). The other attempt-- my Alice Blue wash for nighttime-- was bloody hilarious. I never got the chance to work the light into the fixture that I wanted to, so I had to go with the bare aluminum reflector and a full gel, but it worked: it made the entire backyard glow purple. It looked like the world's largest blacklight. However, on-camera, it looks fine. There still needs to be spot lighting to give some more interest to the scene and to motivate some other lighting stuff that I need to do when we hit closeups, but that's a known quantity.
The downside is that for one shot I need an overhead butterfly diffuser that can be completely out of frame when the camera is tilted up at about a 30-degree angle and moving. And the overhead part has to cantilever over a stairway on a deck. It means doing some design work that I hadn't planned, but I think I have a solution.
Yeah, that sounds like me.