3rd place at the Iron Filmmaker '07

M

mrWr0ng

Well-known member
Yesterday at 10am began our Iron Filmmaker Challenge. They gave us the ingredients and we had 24 hours to turn in a short film based on those ingredients.

This year the premise was that the town totem pole had been desecrated and a curse had been placed upon the town. The rest was up to us.

Here are a few stills. I will have the short up when the editor finishes with the extended cut (we had to cut out a ton to make it into the time limit):

EFM_IV.jpg

EFM_I.jpg

EFM_III.jpg

EFM_II.jpg


Immediately after the screening, we were approached by a guy who just finished producing a feature, shot it on the XDCAM and wanted to know how we got video to look like that. He said he almost thought it was film and then talked about the XDCAM for a while and how much more like film it looks, etc.

But we got a really great reception and though last year we placed higher (2nd), that's still two consecutive years in a row we placed, and I still think we can eventually walk off with first.

UPDATE: Here is the festival cut. This is what we turned in for the competition, and I'll replace this with the "Final" cut when Danny finishes: http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Escape_From_Livermore.mov

Also, here's our entry last year, we took 2nd: http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Murder_My_Kitten.mov
 
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Looks good. When do you make that decision to crop the images to an extra wide aspect ratio? Will the final be the same? What size did you shoot in with the hvx? The xdcam guy sounds like a salesmen, when they start talking tech you want to shoot them.
 
Thanks!

He definitely wasn't a Sony salesman, he kept referring to it as the Panasonic XDCAM. I think he was just more into the name thing.

We made the decision to crop the images at about 4:30 this morning. While Danny (the guy in the cowboy hat) was editing, I tossed out the suggestion that maybe we try making it wider. So we letterboxed and then adjusted the offset to get the right height. It hadn't occurred to me until early this morning that we would look at doing wider.
 
Did you tell the bozo he was giving filmmaking a bad name just by opening his mouth? I hope so. Those producers gotta wake up, and stop pretending their little lives away. What's the set up anyways, and how big was the crew? Oh ya, 1080, 720, 24, 30? What's your' part?
 
Thanks you guys. DiscoRobo, if you think those are bad, you should see the totem pole. Since we had nothing to control the sun, we just exposed for our subjects and let everything else blow out. I'd be happy if there was blue sky, but I'd rather have the subject than the background.

Dogcat, we had a 3 man crew and 3 actors. Danny in the cowboy hat was the editor, I was the writer/director and a friend from film school DP'ed with my camera. We got the premise at 10am, brainstormed until noon, shot from 1 - 6 and then edited until about 6am. Camera settings were 720p 24 (with some slow motion for a couple of the shots) using Barry Green's Bronze setting, gain +6 and added tweaks on the spot.

The sad thing was, we brought an Arri kit and a Lowel kit along with an assortment of diffusion and gels, c-stands and such and then wound up with a premise that had everything outside, so we didn't get to use any of it. But that's sort of the challenge with this competition - it can go any way.
 
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I guess i thought it was rare people upped the gain on purpose, were you looking for more grain?
 
Yup. There's a thread in the main HVX forum about gain and a user posted some stills from a music video with the gain upped to give a faux film grain and I really liked that, so we tried it. The brightness of the sun mutes a lot of it but overall it gave us some additional texture that i was really happy with.
 
great footage ... definetly few shots over exposed... i thought sound could have been lil better... too much of loud ambience sound... may be its just me
 
I've blown out a lot of backgrounds, but I've actually grown to like the way it looks.

You're right about the sound, though. I'm gonna invest in a windscreen ASAP, cos I'm not happy about that... we really weren't expecting to have to do the whole thing outside, though
 
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