Men Shouldn't Sing (Indie Feature Film) - Trailer

R

reuben

New member
Hi,

I'm relatively new to the forums. I'm from Christchurch in New Zealand. For the last year we have been working on a feature length musical comedy. It is a completely independent film. We have finished shooting and editing, and so far the project has cost a little under $10,000 NZ. This includes the volunteer 50 piece orchestra that recorded an hour of music in January of this year.

Last week we finished putting together the trailer, and any comments on it would be much appreciated, we're really open to any thoughts people have.

The entire film has been shot on a DVX100B. I'm not sure what sort of things people would like to know about the film. But feel free to ask any questions, I should be able to answer any questions related to the project.

Trailer embedded in a page
Trailer direct download

If you don't have a player for the files, let me know what format you would like it in, and I will encode it for you.

Thanks

Reuben
 
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Trailer Mixing

Trailer Mixing

Small update; this is the arrange window from Logic, from the trailer. I don't know how useful or interesting this stuff is for people. So please let me know what you want to see/know about.

The second two images are from recording the orchestra at the beginning of the year.
 

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Wow man I liked it alot and I don't even like musicals.Bravo.
Nice colors and all.
I like to know about your lights.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks
 
Thumbs up for getting in and doing a feature.

I thought the sound was great, guess that's pretty important for a musical ;)

I think you sorely needed some set dressing though as I was getting a bit bored of those flat walls just in the preview, maybe just some pot plants would have done the trick.

Best of luck!

Ian
 
Thanks for the comments. One of the ideas was to try and make a musical for people who don't like musicals (and also for people who do). Hopefully the title gives a little of this away.

Lighting and Set Design....

I think these two areas of the production are the two we would have most liked to change. I will give a little background of the location that we were shooting in first. The plot of the movie takes place in one underground complex (that the cast are trapped inside), we had an empty upstairs office building to work with, so we designed our shooting schedule around each room that we needed shots from. We then set up each room and shot it. The green room that you see a lot of in the trailer was the first of these rooms that we did. Our thought process at the time was that we wanted as much room as possible for dancing and also that we wanted it to feel slightly hospital like awkward. By the time we were building the next room, we were trying a lot harder to make it more interesting, and that resulted in our sets getting more and more interesting we think. As we weren't shooting chronologically we think it worked. I have attached an image of the storeroom, which was the third room we did. Only about 5 minutes of the 107 minute long movie takes place there.

Now lighting, for this we decided it would be a good idea to use the fluorescent lights already in the building, and basically just those. Looking back again, we wish we'd spent some money on some more flexible lights. But for almost every scene it's lit by the roof fluoru's as well as a couple that we put on stands. I have included two pictures of these, one is the setup from the bathroom (seen in the trailer) the other from the kitchen on our set (the kitchen isn't in the trailer).

I have about 4000 photos, so hopefully I will be able to provide examples of almost anything anyone is interested in.

Thanks for the comments on sound, most of the people involved in the movie are musicians, actually now that I think about it, about 80% of the people involved in the film are full/part time professional musicians, this includes the crew, so we're a bunch of musicians that are really interested in film.
 

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The look is great, but I feel like the dialog audio doesn't live up to the rest. It sounds like the mic was too far away from the performers, so there's this hollow sound to it. I don't know a whole lot about audio editing, but is there any way to make the audio a little better there?
 
First off, I want to say great job getting a feature in the can. I checked out your website and it looks like you guys do some pretty interesting stuff. I'm no stranger to producing musicals, (you can check out my film www.farheight.com which is almost finished with post) The music sounded very well done, and I think it's awesome that you guys recorded an actual orchestra.

Now, I hate to give comments and criticism on stuff you really can't fix at this point, but the one thing I disliked about the trailer was the lighting. It's really just a personal preference of mine, but I just don't like fluorescent lighting. To me it just gives it a very bland look. However the one saving grace in your project was that the colors all looked very good. The other thing lighting differently could have helped with was the lack of set design. Because the sets were kind of bare, using a 3 point setup, ideally with tungsten lamps, could have helped to really shape the scenes and give them a bit of depth that is kind of lacking right now. I know you probably can't do anything about it now, but that's my 2 cents.

Great job all around, and I'd like to see more when it's available.
 
djsmackmackey said:
The look is great, but I feel like the dialog audio doesn't live up to the rest. It sounds like the mic was too far away from the performers, so there's this hollow sound to it. I don't know a whole lot about audio editing, but is there any way to make the audio a little better there?
Click to expand...


Are there any specific areas that you felt that this was particularly bad? I'm actually really happy with the sound in the trailer, although I have been using all the raw audio for the last few months while putting the film together!
 
fleaguit said:
Now, I hate to give comments and criticism on stuff you really can't fix at this point, but the one thing I disliked about the trailer was the lighting. It's really just a personal preference of mine, but I just don't like fluorescent lighting. To me it just gives it a very bland look. However the one saving grace in your project was that the colors all looked very good. The other thing lighting differently could have helped with was the lack of set design. Because the sets were kind of bare, using a 3 point setup, ideally with tungsten lamps, could have helped to really shape the scenes and give them a bit of depth that is kind of lacking right now. I know you probably can't do anything about it now, but that's my 2 cents.
Click to expand...

Had a look at your trailer and your website, very cool. Am also looking to seeing yours when it comes out. Do you have a date yet? What sort of budget did you have for your film?

I appreciate the comments on the lighting and completely agree with you. Lighting will be something we will work on a lot harder for movies to come, as well as the set.
 
Thanks man. The budget isn't something I can totally disclose due to the arrangement with our investors, however I can tell you we didn't have much. We used every low-budget trick in the book to make the movie look as good as we could, hence why it's taken us so long. That trailer was done back in November 2006, well before the music was completed, and before we had started any of the visual effects work. I'll have the new trailer and character spots up on the web soon. We just locked picture yesterday (hooray!) and right now we're finishing up visual fx, mixing sound for both the songs and the film, and working on color correction. We'll be done hopefully soon, but probably won't premier until October.

Anyway, keep up the good work, and best of luck with the film.
 
It looked really professional, and definitely a very fun movie. I have to say that any criticism i could possibly think of would purely be nitpicking
 
Great look!

Great look!

I really liked the look and sound of your film. How did you guys do the audio for the film? Straight to the DVX? Also, what type of mic's did you guys use? And lastly what were the settings you guys used on the camera?
 
felaguit: That sounds great, looking forward to seeing the new trailer, we're pretty much in the same position with post. Just locked off the edit last week. However, we won't be premiering until December, even though the movie will be finished well before then.

hazelwould: We recorded all the audio straight to the DVX, using an Audio-Technica AT835. That's the only mic we used for the dialogue, for the orchestra we used a wide range of microphones. 30 in total, but we are mainly using the stereo pair in the mix.

The settings we used on the camera were the default Scene 6 settings. However, I have done quite a bit of post on the look. Bringing up skin tones, brightening everything up a little etc.
 
reuben what an undertaking and it looks quality thats for sure. The songs and music were great, who was the composer?

I agree with fleaguit. But even with the the lighting you had you can get a little more creative. Looking at your BTS shots, thing to try in future to give those ceiling fixtures a better look - skirt them, cast more shadow on walls and focus the light more in a straight down ward pattern - rather than photons just flying around.
 
ncje said:
reuben what an undertaking and it looks quality thats for sure. The songs and music were great, who was the composer?

I agree with fleaguit. But even with the the lighting you had you can get a little more creative. Looking at your BTS shots, thing to try in future to give those ceiling fixtures a better look - skirt them, cast more shadow on walls and focus the light more in a straight down ward pattern - rather than photons just flying around.
Click to expand...

The music was written by Michael Bell who also produced and directed the film.

What do you mean by BTS shots? Thanks for the advice. :)

Reuben
 
short update

short update

Short Update:

The film is premiering on the 2nd of December, 2007. Please see our website to get tickets if you happen to be in Christchurch.
 
Wow, I love a good musical and this looks great! Everything about it looked very professional. Nice job!
 
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