Virulent - A 5th Click Film (My first short!)

K

KOHR

Well-known member
Hey everyone, not exactly sure if this is the exact forum to post this in (as my film is still in production) but its my first short so I figured I'd make a thread here. After several months of preparation and a couple weeks of scrambling, desperate efforts (due to procrastination) we have finally started our own short zombie flick, "Virulent."

Day #1
Today was the first shoot and I was thoroughly impressed with everyone's ability to perform, especially considering that the entire cast and crew is comprised of high school students (myself included). However, due to some scheduling issues we weren't able to finish all of the scenes we wanted to get coverage for today, so we'll have to go back and grab some dialogue and pickups tomorrow.
Production stills...
(All shot on Canon XH-A1 and then a bit of quick color correction)

IMG%5D
VirulentScreencap1.jpg

One of the first frames of the first scene (following the intro montage which leads in with gunshots)


VirulentSC3.jpg

Our first attempt at a choreographed stunt; blood fx to be done later on in post

VirulentSC2.jpg

Impressive rage from our zombie extras!


DAY 2
So we got the ending of the first scene finished off quickly and then started the tenuous work on Scene 2 (the first indoor scene). Essentially it was the first time we've ever done custom lighting for each shot, but for the most part, they look fantastic! The only issue was that the zombies and one of our main actors began to smile half way through a death scene... but I'm sure I can edit around that. Anyway, as I posted later, we had some trouble with the fuzz, and didn't exactly have the right permission to be out there :D . So now we have to shoot the upstairs stuff at another similiar location. Nothing will stop this short from getting made. Heres some screen caps!

Screencap2_6.jpg



ScreenCap2_2.jpg


Screencap2_1.jpg




ScreenCapDay2_5.jpg
 
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Slight issue with the production right now guys-- the police got called on us because of all the bloody children that neighbors were seeing, so we have to find a new place to finish the movie (oi vey!). Luckily, we JUST finished the last shot we absolutely needed to allow us to use a different location without making it seem obvious. I was obviously quite stressed and tired after that (took them 2 hours to line us all up and take all our info... but then we were just told not to shoot around there again and to clean up and leave)... so I don't have any new stills yet, but I will later this afternoon. As for some footage, I'll try to get some up before the end of the week, maybe with a color correction comparison. Thanks for all your interest and support!

Anyway, continued from post #1...

Production Still #10 : Day 2: Scene 1
ScreenCap2_3.jpg
 
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Technical Details:

Day 1:

We started shooting early and thus had to deal with some very dense fog. Luckily by the time the extras were ready it had mostly dissipated and we had enough light. We decided to shoot around noon in order to make the best of the harshness of the light. Because its winter the light wasn't too bad (it was hot though... like 85 f hot), this would have been impossible to do in the midday Florida summer sun.

This was the first time we really have ever done anything with a "handheld" look. I didn't realize how hard it was to make it look good without going overboard, and I feel it went a little overboard sometimes. We used a couple bounce boards and reflectors on some of the shots but they were often times so quick and fast paced that it was too difficult (and frankly quite pointless). The actors and extras did a fantastic job of landing their cues and following the blocking.

Day 2:

The location we were shooting at had been abandoned for years and there was no power. The interior of the house was very dark and there were no windows to bring light into the foyer area. We brought out a generator and several dozen feet of extension cord and ran some power into the house. We wanted to keep the dark, abandoned look of the place without under exposing too much.

This is a very low budget production and a tiny part of that budget was allocated to lights. We were able to get some cheap stands (and by cheap I mean CHEAP) from our school and used those with some CFL lamps for the main lighting. We created the look of sunlight pouring through the door by shining a 1K halogen worklight custom fitted with some CTB filters (I don't remember the exact combo we used but we wanted to keep it slightly yellow). We used smoke to really bring out the beams of light and some clever blocking in order to create some of the lighting effects (will be visible in the final footage).

These are certainly the best stills from the production. We still have a long way to go before we can get consistent quality. The amount of information and support that this forum has offered is without a doubt the most important tool students like us have in order to improve our skills in this craft.


-- Sebastian Baron
Cinematographer
(term very loosely used)
 
Hey, just in case anyone didn't catch it, Qzar ( Sebastian Baron) is the Director of Photography for this short and, may I say, is doing an amazing job of it. Just wanted to compliment you on the great work you've done already on this project, it looks great Sebastian!
 
This looks pretty promising. What are you using to make the zombie noises, or are you just recording the sounds the actors make?
 
HBlack said:
This looks pretty promising. What are you using to make the zombie noises, or are you just recording the sounds the actors make?
Click to expand...

Hey, I've actually seen a lot of your stuff, and I believe we are around the same age; pretty impressive! Anyway we're probably going to use a composite of the sound that the zombie extras actually made (a sort of choking, gasping sound I told them to try to make while running) on set and a sound I'm sort of designing. However, the sound effect is really more of a natural sound that I happen to be talented with. We're going to record that for a while in a silent setting for a while, then overlay that several times in post. If you must know, its essentially a gargling, hollow yelling sound while holding large amounts of mucus and saliva in the back of your throat... works pretty well. :beer:
 
I'm doing pre production for a zombie short at the moment too. I'm probably going to do something similar, but I've got to find a friend with asthma or something first.
 
wow, this definatly looks amazing, i guess every indie filmmaker at some point wants to make a zombie film. me and my friend work at a supermarket and his dads the manager so hes letting us shoot one there. its gonna be pretty sick. but honeslty yours looks incredible. the lighting in alot of shots is fantastic. really looking forward to seeing the end result.
 
EDIT: Beacher- definitely get the permission for the location, for this one I got desperate and ended up using a location without proper permission. I essentially went off what the neighbors said and how the property wasn't listed as existing anymore. We warned everyone around that we would be making a short student film there, but the cops still showed up on the second day, not because of a complaint, but because of someone getting worried about all the "hurt" "bloodied" kids. Oi vey, killed by concern. Anyway, about the lighting-- that can all be attributed to Qzar, who personally set up a custom lighting set up for each shot. It was quite impressive, to say the least.

Hey everyone, today is the third day of shooting, I'm just reserving this post to write about the day and post up some stills later on. Todays pretty important, despite the fact that its only 1 day in the production, its probably going to make up the bulk of the short (everything else is action, this is dialogue/actual drama). I'll make sure to keep everyone up to date.

P.S.- I have a trailer on the way, so I'll try to get that up somehow too.
 
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I'm kind of pumped to check this out, I'm ready to sell my DVC30 for an upgraded camera, and the XH A1 is on the top of the list.

I want to see how good the footage comes out. Good luck guys.
 
Hey everyone, thanks for your continued support! Essentially I'm doing the final cut of the movie right now. Unfortunately the project that took 3 days seems like it will amount to somewhere around 3 minutes! Brutal. However, I feel I should remind all of you that may be excited about it (even though I am myself) that it is my first student short, and that though these specific screens look awesome, blocking issues, line crossing, and insufficient coverage for some action scenes appear to be plaguing this movie during the editing process. I will try to get a trailer, new screen caps, or BTS pics up in a little while. Thanks again!
 
From the stills, it looks great. I'm also definitely waiting to see a trailer to see how your scenes play out.

-Austen.
 
We have a lot of BTS footage and pictures that we are definetly going to put up but the problem is our BTS guy took a lot of footage and sorting through all of it is quite the task. There are some VFX shots that will slow down editing but once we get that finished we'll have more time to focus on getting more stuff up here for everyone to see. Our main goal is to get the principal movie (including ADR and foley) finished by February 1st which is our deadline for the Sarasota Film Festival, that has slightly put BTS at a lesser priority. I know KOHR is working on a trailer, which is actually more of a teaser (hard to make a trailer for a 3 minute movie). Hopefully that will be done soon.

I feel a lot of the scenes came out alright. We were working under tough conditions with a lot of extras (we sometimes had to spend several hours prepping and that put a toll on the cast and crew). Our experience level was really tested at times, especially when we were trying to get good coverage with zombies. In the end however we got the thing finished and Kasey's impressive orchestration of the madness certainly guaranteed a good finished product.
 
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