New romantic comedy feature shot with HVX at 1080 24p

emmettloverdedotcom

emmettloverdedotcom

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We just finished principal photography on a romantic comedy feature called "Till You Get To Baraboo" last weekend in Los Angeles.

We shot for seventeen days in L.A., Long Beach, and Las Vegas with an HVX-200 set at 1080/24PA (except for the "Regina Martin interview" which was in DVCPRO 50 for playback on a TV screen during the film). I'm in the process of removing the pulldown from the footage using a technique described on this board. We used a Dell HD monitor (also recommended on this board -- many thanks), two 4-gig P2 cards, a P2 Store, and a Sony laptop with a PC Card slot for downloading the P2 cards to an external FireWire hard drive when the P2 Store got full (which happened almost daily). We're editing on Final Cut Pro on a G5 with an 800-gig G-RAID drive connected via FireWire 800.

Our eventual plans for the film are an SD DVD version for film festival entry and marketing followed by a 35mm version for (hopefully) the festival(s) and a theatrical release. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Even though this is my first post I have been reading this board for several months and picking up lots of valuable advice -- many thanks to everyone who has shared thoughts and information. This site is one of the main reasons we decided to go with the HVX although a last-second disaster almost made us have to shoot three days with the Sony Z1 (but our luck kicked in).

Here's a page of stills from the film: http://emmettloverde.com/baraboo/baraboo-stills.htm. Click on a still to see its full-size 1080 by 1920 version. Most of the stills have been color-corrected in Photoshop to give us an idea of the sort of work the footage will need during post. Unfortunately the stills are JPEGs compressed to 30% quality, but hopefully they get the point across.

We haven't started editing just yet; we're trying to use the stills to attract more financing for post production. If people are interested in seeing more I could post a few scenes as they are completed down the line.

We had some amazing actors in the film. Here's one of my favorite images of actress Amanda Noret:
Sc-29-001.jpg


My overall impressions of the HVX in a feature production environment: A truly elegant and easy-to-use camera capable of beautiful results. Of course not even 1080 resolution was high enough for me; my background is in still photography and not even 120-size cameras provide satisfactory still image resolution for my taste. The image noise may end up being a problem but the noise resembles film grain in my opinion so I don't think it will shock audiences or anything. The camera's sensitivity was never a problem because we almost always had full control over the lighting. And the camera is small enough and looks enough like a "consumer" camera that we got away with a lot of guerilla-style shooting in Las Vegas.

Enjoy!

-- Emmett Loverde
http://www.emmettloverde.com
 
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Hello EmettloVerde, nice stills, but I'd want to know if also "A Timely Maneuver" is shot with Hvx200. It has a very good photography, a lot better in quality than Baraboo. It seems Varicam to me, but if it was shot with Hvx200 or dvx100 it's an incredible work, you've a god DP. Still hope it's Hvx200!
Thanks to sharing your work! :)
 
I have no where near the technical expertese of most people here or even probably you since you worked in still photography but, strictly as a viewer, I find the stills have a really flat look to them. The composition just doesn't really draw the eye. I'd also suggest doing a little color correction. I realize that you have to use mostly availible light but this is pretty flat too and there's so much wonderful stuff you can do digitally to make it pop a bit more.
 
Well, it certainly looks nice. It screams "Panasonic HVX200 promo DVD" to me though. The lighting was a little strong and colorful, too bright and harsh, "fake" may be the word I'd use. But still, that's a lot better than having too little or too plain lighting.

Don't get me wrong, I like the look and the quality of "Baraboo" overall, but I'm not "OMG uz kcufing PWN oll!!!!!!!!!!!!1" over it.
 
Thank you for your comments.

"A Timely Maneuver" (http://emmettloverde.com/VideoPlayers/Timely-Player.htm) was shot on a DVX-100 by Marc Miller in Los Angeles. I am as impressed with his work as you are, Mr. Del Tufo.

Mr. Beier and Mr. Felis, you seem to contradict each other (one calls the lighting "too flat" and the other "too bright and harsh"). This confuses me.

Regardless, I appreciate your taking the time to look at the images. I chose these particular stills for what they revealed about the story and characters rather than for their composition. As proud as I am of my camera work I know that ultimately the actors and the story will draw any audience we get.

The story features a number of imaginary and fantasy sequences. I tried to enhance these with stylized lighting (I call it "candy-colored") to differentiate them from the "real life" moments. At those times I tried to use the color and style of the light to illustrate the emotions of the characters. Here's where my B.A. in Theater kicks in.
 
emmettloverdedotcom said:
Thank you for your comments.

"A Timely Maneuver" (http://emmettloverde.com/VideoPlayers/Timely-Player.htm) was shot on a DVX-100 by Marc Miller in Los Angeles. I am as impressed with his work as you are, Mr. Del Tufo.

Mr. Beier and Mr. Felis, you seem to contradict each other (one calls the lighting "too flat" and the other "too bright and harsh"). This confuses me.

Regardless, I appreciate your taking the time to look at the images. I chose these particular stills for what they revealed about the story and characters rather than for their composition. As proud as I am of my camera work I know that ultimately the actors and the story will draw any audience we get.
Click to expand...

May I suggest a different approach? You are going to present these to hopefully get financing for top Post-production, right? So I would suggest you get the most visually impressive shots you have and use those as stills. Use the images that pop more to the eye of a potential investor. Film is a visual form, and, as good as the story is, most investors, if you are to impress them, need eye candy (They normally are people that don't even care about the story of the thing, but merelly on the potential revenue they can get from the production).

I see you have good production value, namelly an interior shot on a plane. Do work on getting the most impressive shot from tha location in order to show the investor you had "convincing and professional" looking locations. Also, get the best looking Las Vegas Shot you have. And also, the best possible shot of the cast- It can even be not during acting.

Just my 2 cents, and good luck!
 
My question is actually about the editing. Is FCP behaving with the 1080/24pa? I see a lot of posts about people struggling with that, so I'm interested to hear about your experience.
 
It looks flat, not dim - I think that's the challenge here. These bright images aren't so much suffering from composition issues as they are from too much DOF.

You've got some good looking talent, but the sets just go on and on forever and your actors are just kind of hanging out there in it.

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Does kind of scream.. Hello video.. and hello double shadows and high key lighting with major fill. Kind of looks like spanish TV... now that's good if it's a style and works for the piece. I'm hoping to do something similar for a sketch I'm doing.

good luck
 
Visually I find the image pretty boring. Zero use of Shallow DOF, why?
The lighting set up looks extremely hot.
Would like to see some footage, if the story is solid, I think the "look" can be overlooked.
Good luck.
 
I agree, if your performances are good, and the script is well-written and funny, it will help overcome any video-looking images. Thanks for posting your experiences, and good luck with your project!
 
Okay the lighting could have used some diffusion to wrap around the actors more. But I think color correction can and will make the images much more appealing. Definitely do some work before sending images out to investors. Lower the levels and tweak the color. You can't do much about the DOF issues so don't worry about it.
 
my guess is what people mean by flat here, is that you have a linear gamma curve like video, not film. But that you can tweak in post. You also are over exposed in a lot of areas. Digital, unlike film, is not forgiving at all when you go about 2 stops over key. The info just gets lost.

Flat also because you have white walls in a lot of the BG and all of your composition have a ton of fill. Mostly medium shots, very few get really on axis for a nice dirty single, etc.

I also get the feeling the camera is locked off in a lot of shots. Static compositions. You ran away from chokers too.

This may be good for comedy. I'm not keen on it. I'de look at something like 40 year old virgin and steal their techniques to get a modern day comedy feel.

Just goes to show you it's not just the camera :)

welcome to the forum, where even Kaminski would get ripped apart by us! lol
 
flat refers to no contrast ratio, not hard or depth of field, but lighting specific.
there is no fall off between your forground and background. You can create ratios even with lots of dof.

It seems like you used the same intensity of lights from different angles.
dimmers, scrims, nets, cutters, all these things allow you to shape light. Have individuals walk through pools of light. The audience will be able to follow action if it looks more realistic.

Very ambitious and I commend you on your efforts.
Keep shooting, none of us are perfect and no one on this forum has won an academy award that i know of.

this is just my two cents and nothing is personal.

I hope you get investors for post.

What are your post considerations.
online to hdcam and then to a davinci 2k or 4k is always nice.
 
I appreciate people taking the time to look at the stills and make comments. Based on some suggestions I revised several of the images and removed the weaker ones from the page. I will add more images soon; I'm still in the process of going through all the footage and re-acquainting myself with what we actually shot.

I, too, am fond of shallow depth-of-field images in certain instances. The style of this film is more akin to a 30s or 40s screwball comedy -- lots of two-shots and three-shots and wide compositions in which the actors were free to move and interact. I wanted to showcase their work rather than miss out on good moments because someone stepped off their mark and out of focus.

I also moved the camera a lot on a makeshift dolly which I think mitigates many of the "static composition" concerns. Indeed, I think I only actually touched the zoom button during a shot maybe three times.

Because of the camera motion and the actor motion I decided on very even lighting for most of the film except during certain fantasy sequences. Again, I didn't want to miss out on a great performance moment simply because an actor happened to be outside a pool of light when it happened. (Yes, these are all professional SAG actors, but I didn't want to bog them down.) It did look like a sitcom at times (I've never watched Spanish television) but that didn't bother me.

I'm going to cut the film in Final Cut Pro and then if we can afford it have it color-corrected as needed by a pro on a Davinci or similar system. (The raw images, by the way, did not get overexposed; my playing around with them in Photoshop pushed some stuff into blow-out territory.)

As I mentioned earlier I've been transcoding the 1080 24PA footage to 1080 24P using a technique described here on this board for Cinema Tools. It's a long process (I've also been backing everything up to DVDs for safety) and I haven't yet begun to edit so I don't know whether the transcoded 24P footage will work well or not. My preliminary tests so far have been promising, however.
 
If you go with the Davinci2k, make sure for one it is a 2k setup, and also that they have the defocus plug-in. The Defocus plug-in will be able to mimic shallow depth of field on the shots that aren't moving too much, and make it look a bit more filmic. And it doesn't look like the defocus that you get in your EDL, it looks like it's been done optically, in-camera, it really is a miracle worker. And you can defocus a specific part of the frame and leave the rest sharp. If you have a good colorist he'll be able to make that stuff look much better in terms of lighting too, less harsh and much more movie like.
 
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