FLASHLIGHT-short film-old film look test

MingDingNoodle

MingDingNoodle

Member
I shot this on the DVX100b last summer and finished a few months ago. I tried some film grain/hair/splice effects with the footage. Put a golden look over the film and aged it a little. The only light we had was one flashlight and the headlights from our car. The grain isn't too bad, the old film leader effect helping a little. I along with two other guys shot this in one night on a simple country road in Madge, Wisconsin. I shelved the footage for a while because I was working on other things. Check it out and let me know what you think. Play
 
Hey,

the suspense on this was very nice...the part where the person outside was walking round the car was great, and having not much light made it all the more suspenseful...also loved your ident and your credits were lovely too.

Mike
 
Did you use any specific plug in for the old film look? I usually use Cinelook film damage, but I like the movement in your titles. Looked authentic. How did you do that?
 
UncleBenji1977 said:
Did you use any specific plug in for the old film look? I usually use Cinelook film damage, but I like the movement in your titles. Looked authentic. How did you do that?
Click to expand...

Thanks for all of your feedback!
The old film look was achieved a couple different ways. First I shot some old red leader off a wall using a 16mm projector. I made sure the stuff was dirty and scratched a little. Then I imported the footage,desaturated the leader and changed the opacity in final cut. Then I used it as an overlay on video track 2.
I had to pump up the colors and the blacks on the footage so it would show through the leader, yet the leader still removes a lot of that extra color. It also softens the blacks so they aren't as rich. Makes for a good old/underexposed look. For the titles, I had to key frame them to jiggle and I just did that in final cut, but I went one step further. When you do it in final cut, the title jiggle looks very video-ie. I saved a quicktime of each title just over black and threw them into Cinema Tools and reexported out at 24fps. When I brought them in, I overlayed the leader on top of the titles and messed with the opacity color correction and leader color until the text and background was what I wanted. It was a lot of tests and crap to deal with, but overall I am happy with how it turned out. I also tried to do the title jiggle different for each title so for the most part I didn't do any copying of keyframes. I did occasionally if I wanted a moment in one of the titles to look simialr to another.
I did this old film look for that SXSW Grindhouse competition as well. Check it out.
 
I liked this on so many different levels...
A, STORY (it had a beginning a middle and an end)... It also had a protagonist with confilict...
B, Shot exceptionally well. (Love your choices of angles, lengths etc...
C, Tempo (Fantastic)...
D, Creative,
E, The audio Rocked! Very well done...
F, The look and feel of the overlay floored me... It looks so much like 16mm film...

I'll have you know, now seeing Flashlight, I am definitely purchasing Summer School.
 
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Thanks NC17,

To be honest, I wasn't having that great of a day, but your comments pulled me right out of that. Thanks again!

*mike
 
Another trick too for scrolling titles is to bring them through cinetools. Down with titles that move like fluid crappy video! Make them all 24p!
 
Geez, that was bonefied badass. You really had me on the edge of my taskchair. Great film, please tell me you are going to submit that to atleast a few festivals.
 
How did you create that dirty old film with hairs on the gates, scratches and all that? It looked like a possible grindhouse short.
 
:beer:
Thanks for all the comments! I did see the Hobo with a Shotgun trailer, and yes, it was by far the best one. Felt the most like a grindhouse trailer. Not to mention it has the whole James Garfield storytelling arc. Brutal revenge!

Cheers!
 
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