Chess Film: Magnetic Chess Pieces

Problem:

During shooting on day two, the shot that took us the most amount of takes was the one we expected to be the quickest. Before a "dead body" is shown in the film, I envisioned a clip of a pawn rolling off the chess board. My idea was that seeing the pawn rolling off the board would foreshadow the death that was about to be shown. 

First photo export from video

Second photo export from video

As shown in the pictures above, whenever we attempted the shot of the chess piece rolling off the board (seemingly by itself), it sticks to another piece on the board. This is because the board I brought is magnetic, so the pieces stick to the board as well as to other pieces. We weren't really sure how to fix this problem, especially since it took us around 9 takes until we finally came up with a solution. 

Solution: 

When we first began taking the shot, we had our actor use his hand that was outside of the camera range to roll the piece off. This method wasn't working because it was making the pieces fly off the board or get stuck to another, instead of slowly rolling off. As cinematographer, I really wanted to achieve the look of a soft roll off the board to heighten the creepy/horror aspect which leads the audience to wonder what will happen next. Then, our sound designer offered the solution of blowing air onto the piece instead of flicking it off the board. We were a little skeptical at first because we didnt think it would actually move the piece. After a few shots of blowing the piece and getting it stuck, I finally got the perfect-unstuck shot that I was aiming for.