A Special Treat - From the "Dream Team" . . .

Larry Rutledge

Larry Rutledge

Fest Master
First let me say congratulations to all the winners, you guys did a great job and deserve the win. Also, let me say great job to every one that entered, win or lose you still went out there and made a film. :thumbsup:


Now, we have a special treat to wrap up this great All Hallows Festival . . . another entry from the crew that brought us "A Little Mouth To Feed".

This entry, Unawakening, was shot on the Panasonic HPX 500 and crewed by Macgregor, Jack Daniel Stanley, John Hudson, Barry Green, and David Jimerson.

To download the film you can either go to the All Hallows download page, or click the direct link here:

 
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Heheh thanks Larry.
And thanks for the intersest Blaine.
:beer:

So this is finished. But still a work in progress. Make sense?
Most of the production team has not even seen this "rough cut".

It's hot of the edit bay, so hot Mac and I haven't even discussed the grading at all.

So hopefully you will enjoy and we'll share changes we make in it, if any, at somepoint down the line.

....

A note on the post fest release ... When it became clear that I couldn't finish our second film until very late in the fest we didn't want to add a total of 16 minutes of viewing time (both films together) when it's a challenge to see all the films before voting closes anyway. So here it is POST fest. We made it for and complied by the Hallows Fest Rules, except for length and upload date :)
....

More than anything we wanted to share John Hudson's acting cameo debut with you :laugh: He's a scene stealer :grin:

...

We shot this in two days basically and picked up the traffic scene in a couple of hours on another day. There were a lot of company moves but we wanted to challenge ourselves to work at a fast pace as practice for future projects. Our other piece we took our time with. This one was guerilla style to in the extreme ... I mean stealing a scene in the middle of traffic ... fun :D


Thanks again Barry and David for putting it together.

And thanks Larry R for staying up so late to take care of this when you have to get up so early!

And thanks to Barry_S who happily agreed to accommodate our two purple unicorns in the first place.
 
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I like what I've seen so far, Jack. I'll be looking forward to the final cut. Both of your short films were outstanding and while what you've done in the past is very good, I think these are on a completely different level.
 
I'll be posting my review manana

But I think this is hands down Jack's best work since Odd Squad and this surpasses that completely.

Totally emerged in this film and performances from Shaun, Michelle and Julie that are just made. All of the elements of Film come together in this one; story, cinemaphotography, acting, score, sound design, edit ....

Loved it. Very stoked on this Jack.
 
um... awesome? easily the best piece of footage ever to have aired on dvxuser.com.
my girlfiend watched and said "oh no he did'nt". this is getting ridiculous, jack is barred from dvxuser.com. spread your wings butterfly and fly away. All joking aside, i love this film. No negatives, must rewatch and study.
 
lol

these last two shorts are an attempt to spread wings

we put our all into these to "sell" the team at a later date, and to do a couple of other fun business-y things with the shorts down the road too.

But we love the community here and I love making films for these fests almost more than anything else. Seriously if DVXfest was a job, I'd want for nothing in life (already have love, pets, netflix and a couple of pairs of jeans) :)

So it was a great way for us to facilitate doing something to the nth degree that we all love and wish we could do more of with some tangible plans for both films down the line.

Man ... whew ... speaking of Unawakening ... I'm gonna sleep for a long time now :)
 
WOW! Great work guys! :shocked:

2 days? Bull.

How much time did you spend in Pre-prod? tell us more about the body! And the one beeing buried too! I presume that was a fake eye?


Excellent work as always. :thumbsup:


- Mikko ... doesn't ever want to cross John in traffic.
 
hahah we shot:
DAY ONE:
 - all the the docs office
- all the digging and burying.
- the phone booth scene.

We were gonna get the traffic scene that day but we got out of the docs office too late and lost the light

DAY TWO:
- then we shot everything in the house in one day. 65 shots, about 17? setups, about 6 pages. the cast was there about 12 hours, we were there about 15 hours.

Then we picked up the traffic shot in about 90 minutes on another day.

I don't want to say too much about the body ...

But the eye ... that was compositing ... we had the actor look straight up and open his eye, then he closed them tight and we threw dirt on his face.

In post I put the open eye over the closed eye and feathered the dirt as it came down over it.

...

Not much time in pre-prod. We spent all our pre-prod time on LMTF. The idea with this one was to do run and gun and have that serve the style. I barely had the shot lists done before each day of shooting since we were in pre-pro for LMTF and that one was heavily art directed.


Mac is a good DP at all technical levels, but this kind of work, this sort of intimate hand held style is his particular genius. So I wanted to come up with a thriller that we could shoot like 18 Seconds.

....

One thing that helped time a lot was that we ditched the 35mm adpator on day one (after we got out of the docs office). I think you'd be crazy to shoot with an adapter with the HPX except under very specific cirmcustances maybe ... reason being is that it already has SDOF comparible to a 16mm camera.

Will it get so shallow that it looks surreal like 35mm or adaptors, in most instances probably not, but we all know that's kind of a newb thing anyway - shooting all the way open all the time. Real movies just don't do that. So it definitely has enough SDOF to make it look a little more filmmic, but the actors can still shift without going out of focus.

The only thing I didn't like about the HPX was the glass on it, and I don't know what lens it is but ... I've been shooting with $50 and $200 35mm still camera lenses for 2 yeas now and I have never noticed them breathing. This thing breathed so much that the whole frame was different sometimes. I had conceived several shots with rack focus like *SPOILER* racking from her in focus dead hand in the foreground to her living reflection on the TV. But the breathing was so bad it was ridiculous and I had to cut around it.
 
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mikkowilson said:
... tell us more about the body! ...
Click to expand...
Ah Crap. I forgot to list Mark Johnson as Technical Adviser in the credits.

Barry and David check the credits for any other omissions / errors and I will fix them when I add Mark and then kindly ask Larry to swap them out.

But Mark helped us with some research and details on the corpse.
 
Whoa! I got up early this morning and was rewarded to find this little present! Jack, you constantly are an inspiration to all of us in the trenches.

I've mentioned in previous posts how much I admire your attention to detail and it is very obvious in every frame you shoot just how much planning and preproduction is involved. You have the best work ethic of anyone I know, sir.

What little assistance I was able to give Jack here involved my experience with corpse-rotting that comes from my forensic background. Early on Jack began asking questions about decomposition and the dynamic factors attendant to certain environmental conditions. I found it remarkable, because Jack's interest was NOT simply to come up with an image that looked good for the film ... he was truly concerned about matters such as details affecting skin appearance and how desiccation would affect the jaw muscles etc. etc. Each time I would consider his queries and provide further information there were followup questions and uploaded images and test frames showing how he had altered his prosthetic. It was really remarkable and particularly impressive to me, because he was seeking "authentic" rather than simply "aesthetic."

I recall more than a year ago when we were working on Rekindled that I first realized this guy was OBSESSED because he started sending me lengthy composed articles describing brutal murders that he had me use to mock up newspaper pages and clippings to use for set dressing. Even though only the headlines would ever be readable on screen, Jack insisted that not only would the articles themselves be coherent, but that the remainder of the newspapers be mocked up from actual period papers so that all OTHER articles and advertisements would match the period of our killer's crimes. At first I was kind of amused and thought Jack was maybe a little bit of a fanatic nut job, but as we continued to work I came to realize how important this process really is and how seeking authenticity gives so much weight to the production on the part of everybody involved.

If you can get the special edition of SEVEN there is a wonderful behind the scenes segment about the making of the killer's mad diaries in that film that reminds me very much of Jack's approach. As much as I wish it weren't true, apparently hard work is necessary to create really good films :)

Great stuff here, Jack, and I don't mean to overlook the rest of your brilliant team. This is really what it is all about. I can't say enough to show appreciation for all of you guys and what you've given us this time around.
 
I'd love to watch this but I'm at school and they have downloads and volume disabled...

and I don't think this site is allowed. I can't wait to get home.
 
Props to Mcgregor to the Tremendous cinematographer. The edit was great. The story was nice too. How on earth did you do the shot of the girl doing her hair in front of the mirror, with the lead in the background?

10/10!
 
Annabel Lee! - Jack, back when you were lobbying for "Poe-Fest", this was the piece I was planning/hoping to adapt. Looks like you beat me to it! If only that house was on the ocean . . .

Great work all around, guys.
 
very cool! jack, you do realize that now you must do "the cask of amontillado" because that would rock. :)

also, how much would it cost for one of us to rent the dream team for a movie?
 
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