Dario Nieva
Well-known member
Yep, this is an entry for the "When Cloverfield Hit" short-film contest that's still going on right now.
Here is an account of what I had to deal with to make this film:
First I had loads of time constraints. I had just heard of the contest on the 18th or so which pretty much cut out any idea's I could have had for special effects (While I acknowledge this film not to be my best work, I do have the experience and knowledge to output something better).
I also decided to not use any real actors (Which helped me out in the end considering the rules state NOT to use real actors or at least any affiliated with SAG).
The films criteria was to be no more than 100mb and no more than 5min long. You had to display what YOU would be doing during the day when the Cloverfield disaster took place, this also made me decide not to come up with any story what-so-ever outside of what a regular night out would be for me.
I did write down a basic outline and I tried to follow that the best I could.
So the stage was set. Story was a night out with friends, the actors in the film are my friends and to keep it authentic, instead of filming with my Panasonic AG-DVX-100B, I instead opted to film with my Archos Helmet cam.
This was sort of a one-shot deal as I only had Saturday night to film what I needed, and while most of the people I know are affiliated with film in some way or another I wanted things to be as authentic as possible, so (With the exception of the ending) nothing was scripted or planned, whenever I felt everyone was comfortable with whatever situation we were in or even forgot the camera was there was when I pressed the quick button on the cord and started recording a scene.
I had a lot of fun doing this and theres actually a lot of good footage that I could have used to make this a better picture, however when you go for being as authentic as possible you can sometimes break the rules.
Some of the pittfalls:
The rules state that there can be absolutely no music at all besides the music supplied on the main website. A big problem with this is while the night's plan was to go to a bar, the reason we went to this bar was to see a friends band. So any scenes I got in the bar, couldn't be used.
Also the rules state that there can be absolutely no recognizable brands or logos shown (Unless it was from Cloverfield). This was something I should have thought about from the get-go because I normally think about it in my own productions. But normally when going the guerlla route, you tend to not pay attention to things like that.
So something hilarious happened. As you can see in the video my friend is wearing a Dominos Pizza jacket (No he doesn't work there, or ever worked there). So I had to cut around his arm that had the Dominos Pizza logo on it. Also filming the thing entirely in NYC it's very hard to avoid logos and signs and such which made me had to cut around that as well (To the point of dropping entire scenes, one of my favorites in a Starbucks).
Slap on that I had to avoid profanitys (Although I beleive theres one in the end that they let slip by, I cut around a lot of the other ones- People generally curse in conversation) and it added to some weird jumpiness at parts.
Editing things down to 5mins from around 40min of total footage as story and not a trailer is kinda hard too, but thanks to the DVXuser contest, I have some experience with this.
Help me to win monies so that I can start up a t-shirt business.
Make a quick account at www.whencloverfieldhit.com and vote for my video here:
http://www.whencloverfieldhit.com/linkback/245/ref/d9583c9f9f40a08318800c8aba50004b/p_distance/1
The rules say that you can vote on it once a day every day starting today until May 13th. So help a brotha out and vote
Or, just tell me what you thought about it here, as I get some of the best advice i've ever gotten from this forum.
Here is an account of what I had to deal with to make this film:
First I had loads of time constraints. I had just heard of the contest on the 18th or so which pretty much cut out any idea's I could have had for special effects (While I acknowledge this film not to be my best work, I do have the experience and knowledge to output something better).
I also decided to not use any real actors (Which helped me out in the end considering the rules state NOT to use real actors or at least any affiliated with SAG).
The films criteria was to be no more than 100mb and no more than 5min long. You had to display what YOU would be doing during the day when the Cloverfield disaster took place, this also made me decide not to come up with any story what-so-ever outside of what a regular night out would be for me.
I did write down a basic outline and I tried to follow that the best I could.
So the stage was set. Story was a night out with friends, the actors in the film are my friends and to keep it authentic, instead of filming with my Panasonic AG-DVX-100B, I instead opted to film with my Archos Helmet cam.
This was sort of a one-shot deal as I only had Saturday night to film what I needed, and while most of the people I know are affiliated with film in some way or another I wanted things to be as authentic as possible, so (With the exception of the ending) nothing was scripted or planned, whenever I felt everyone was comfortable with whatever situation we were in or even forgot the camera was there was when I pressed the quick button on the cord and started recording a scene.
I had a lot of fun doing this and theres actually a lot of good footage that I could have used to make this a better picture, however when you go for being as authentic as possible you can sometimes break the rules.
Some of the pittfalls:
The rules state that there can be absolutely no music at all besides the music supplied on the main website. A big problem with this is while the night's plan was to go to a bar, the reason we went to this bar was to see a friends band. So any scenes I got in the bar, couldn't be used.
Also the rules state that there can be absolutely no recognizable brands or logos shown (Unless it was from Cloverfield). This was something I should have thought about from the get-go because I normally think about it in my own productions. But normally when going the guerlla route, you tend to not pay attention to things like that.
So something hilarious happened. As you can see in the video my friend is wearing a Dominos Pizza jacket (No he doesn't work there, or ever worked there). So I had to cut around his arm that had the Dominos Pizza logo on it. Also filming the thing entirely in NYC it's very hard to avoid logos and signs and such which made me had to cut around that as well (To the point of dropping entire scenes, one of my favorites in a Starbucks).
Slap on that I had to avoid profanitys (Although I beleive theres one in the end that they let slip by, I cut around a lot of the other ones- People generally curse in conversation) and it added to some weird jumpiness at parts.
Editing things down to 5mins from around 40min of total footage as story and not a trailer is kinda hard too, but thanks to the DVXuser contest, I have some experience with this.
Help me to win monies so that I can start up a t-shirt business.
Make a quick account at www.whencloverfieldhit.com and vote for my video here:
http://www.whencloverfieldhit.com/linkback/245/ref/d9583c9f9f40a08318800c8aba50004b/p_distance/1
The rules say that you can vote on it once a day every day starting today until May 13th. So help a brotha out and vote
Or, just tell me what you thought about it here, as I get some of the best advice i've ever gotten from this forum.
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