New Short Film - "Trails of Dust"

dang!!!! ummmmmmmmmmmmm? film? what low rez stock was that? sorry for being negative. the story is cool, so is the editing. the picture resolution was so so. maybe its the frame size, compression 8 bit resolution or something i don't know. I must be pretty ignorant or need my eyes checked, that looked more HVX than any type of film stock. AGain I have no clue of what you did to the footage so I could dead wrong. But no part of that footage looked or had any celluloid characteristics. I need glasses/
 
Hey CLD-
We shot on the Arri BL 4 and I used 5205 and 5218 as my stocks of choice. We shot with a set of Zeiss Super Speed T1.4's. Yes I lit the scenes. For the exterior scenes I did very little. I used soem reflectors for a portion of the exteriors. For the interiors we did a number of things. If you would like to know exactly what for each scene let me know, I'd be more then happy to share.
-Corey
 
danny damah said:
dang!!!! ummmmmmmmmmmmm? film? what low rez stock was that? sorry for being negative. the story is cool, so is the editing. the picture resolution was so so. maybe its the frame size, compression 8 bit resolution or something i don't know. I must be pretty ignorant or need my eyes checked, that looked more HVX than any type of film stock. AGain I have no clue of what you did to the footage so I could dead wrong. But no part of that footage looked or had any celluloid characteristics. I need glasses/
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Hey-

Please keep in mind you're watching a low res streaming internet file. The full HD footage obviously looks much better. Robin can ellaborate on what kind of compression settings he used, but I must say it looks pretty good for a live stream. I do not, however, see how you could think it looked like HVX. Did you see how the sky held in the bright desert? The DOF? How about the dark motel scene. These are just a VERY few of the characteristics that film could handle where HVX would fail.
 
Hello -

Thanks for the comments. I was the writer/director on this project.

I really wish I had more time to work with my actors on this film. My lead actor was unavailable for any rehearsals - I had only met him once before at the auditions - not the ideal situation for a director to be in - very stressful. But looking at the positives, that allowed more time to make the drives out to the desert for location scouting.

As Robin noted earlier, the desert scene is meant to be surrealistic. I had written a sequence with a craps table sitting in the middle of the dry lake bed with the lead throwing dice in slow motion- I found out the night before shooting that we couldn't get the craps table so we had to shoot that scene bare bones and it fell a little flat. It didn't come across exactly how i had hoped but thats student filmmaking for ya.

The box thing can be a bit confusing but i planted a few clues. I've considered eluding to the cash in the ending VO but i'm still up in the air about that. Either that or compositing that fragile sticker on the box the first time we see it to form some sort of connection.

I was very happy with the look we got and Corey did a great job capturing it. This is my first 35 short and i was amazed by the picture quality - i wouldn't have been as happy with any sort of video camera. The camera gave us great picture quality and the depth of field we wanted.

We are truly a bunch of crazy assholes to film a movie like this in 3 days!
 
danny damah said:
dang!!!! ummmmmmmmmmmmm? film? what low rez stock was that? sorry for being negative. the story is cool, so is the editing. the picture resolution was so so. maybe its the frame size, compression 8 bit resolution or something i don't know. I must be pretty ignorant or need my eyes checked, that looked more HVX than any type of film stock. AGain I have no clue of what you did to the footage so I could dead wrong. But no part of that footage looked or had any celluloid characteristics. I need glasses/
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I wish you could see the 1080p HDCAM version that I have. Looks a little better than an 88MB H.264 movie :) Maybe if the film gets into any festivals they will be able to show it in all it's high-def glory... I use special compression settings for H.264 that, at 200 key frames per second, keeps the file size considerably low for its quality and length. I'd put a larger version up if someone has the bandwidth but at 250GB/month, I sure don't...
 
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so its a 250D and a 500T (funny I only go by those numbers when I look at stock I havent shot in film for 4-5 years so its hard to distinguish by those numbers anymore)

I was just curious about what film stock and lens because I remember back then I had to shoot outdoor scenes with very minimal lighting so I ended up using an 800T and a 500T. grainy but oh well.. The lens really make a good impression on the film!

Did you rented everything out? how many days was it to shoot?
 
CLD said:
so its a 250D and a 500T (funny I only go by those numbers when I look at stock I havent shot in film for 4-5 years so its hard to distinguish by those numbers anymore)

I was just curious about what film stock and lens because I remember back then I had to shoot outdoor scenes with very minimal lighting so I ended up using an 800T and a 500T. grainy but oh well.. The lens really make a good impression on the film!

Did you rented everything out? how many days was it to shoot?
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Three days of shooting, all camera equipment rented. From what I understand the Vision2 stocks from Kodak are not that grainy, even up to 500 speed. I'm sure Corey could elaborate more on this...
 
Looks great guys! The crazy thing is, maybe its the size of the video, but with the right filter package (grads, ND's) I could see alot of this being shot with the HVX and a 35mm adapter..
 
Justin Marx said:
Looks great guys! The crazy thing is, maybe its the size of the video, but with the right filter package (grads, ND's) I could see alot of this being shot with the HVX and a 35mm adapter..
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Check out these pics and let me know if that's still how you feel...

http://www.robinbuday.com/trailspics/trailspic1.png
http://www.robinbuday.com/trailspics/trailspic2.png
http://www.robinbuday.com/trailspics/trailspic3.png
http://www.robinbuday.com/trailspics/trailspic4.png
http://www.robinbuday.com/trailspics/trailspic5.png
http://www.robinbuday.com/trailspics/trailspic6.png
 
 
Justin Marx said:
Ok, 3,4,5,6 yeah, it's film.. just not as obvious as I would think it would be..
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1 and 2 don't look like film? We find that the best way to get the "film look" is to just shoot on it. Hopefully that won't always be the case... *cough*RED*cough*.
 
1 and 2 are great at showing DOF, but contrast wise, it's nothing that you cant get with a 35mm adapter and an HVX..
robinbuday said:
1 and 2 don't look like film? We find that the best way to get the "film look" is to just shoot on it. Hopefully that won't always be the case... *cough*RED*cough*.
Click to expand...
 
i gotta say the sound needs a lot of mixing/sweetening/adr work. but it seems like you might already know this. ambient sound is almost always too hot, perhaps to cover up lack of foley (footsteps, clothing rustle, materials). also, the location music in the gas station has the right eq, but doesn't sound like it's emanating from speakers in that space. lots of the car sound is off too. engine is too mid-range for a muscle car (though not all the time) and the door of the car when he leaves to go in the gas station is too much of a slam when it should be a simple shut. i could go on and on. maybe post this in the audio section, and you can get some more good audio feedback. that's what needs the most help right now, though you've created some really amazing atmosphere with sound (it's just too hot).

i like the feel of the piece.
really great for a student film.
lots of david lynch influence there, no?

so did all of that budget go to camera rental and film stock/processing/transfer?


good job.
 
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