Darkline Entertainment Presents 'Broadcast'

Whoa! Super cool BTS! I'm wicked jealous of your RED setup! And do I see a Cool Lights HMI? Why did you use that indoors? Did you want to keep the location's fluorescent lighting? Also, I see a blimp against the wall - what did you have in there that required a full-size blimp? And one more question, why did you have a on-camera mic? Did you use that as well as the boom?
 
Hi Richie, Im glad you've liked some of our older work. I think 'Broadcast' will be a very divisive piece, but we will find out. I had a lot of fun making it and learnt a lot, so it's well worth doing.

Gabriel, you're an inquisitive one ;-)

Ok, well Firstly yup that's a coollight HMI, which was used indoors to bounce and really lift the daylight on the foreground subjects. What you can't see is we were shooting against a window and I did not want to to overexpose the outdoors, so I had to boost the interior quite a bit to stay within latitude. Its not in the pic but we had another 6 bar floury coollight on the subjects too. Using more light meant I could stop down more on the lens so the background wasn't completely out of focus, you can still make out some of the action.

more importantly, this is the first short where ive had a chance to use my coollights so I was going to do it anyway..LOL

Blimp has a 416 sennheiser in it, it didn't require the blimp at all indoors; but it stays in there as a matter of storage

finally the onboard mic on the Red is for reference only. Currently Red One cannot phantom power a mic - well it produces obscene amount of noise, its unusable. So we piped the boom into the DVX and i stuck a cheap mic on the red for reference/synching sound only. The new audio board from Red fixes these issues but we are on a waiting list to get it sent in and exchanged.

A big learning curve for me coming from a dvx. We were waiting for months for our birger mount to arrive (which allows the use of canon SLR lenses). So I hadn't used the Red at all until then. It only arrived first week in October and our first shoot day was the 8th, so we learnt the Red as we went along really.

More pics later :-) thanks for the questions
 
Coming from the DVX, how'd you find the EVF on your Red? I mean, did you use the EVF or the LCD (from force of habit) more often? ... Sorry, a pretty lame question, but until we get to see the films... How about a frame grab from the film? :-)
 
Thanks Herman and Michael. Herman I love your scores, hope to work with you some day if you would permit ;-)

Sean I have to say I think the EVF is great. I use the LCD if I'm not operating camera purely as a quick check monitor, but if I am on camera the EVF is a godsend. Much better for hitting focus in my option and gives you better tonal accuracy than the LCD, especially in lots of daylight. However the LCD was great for jib work or where I needed to follow the action when Gareth was operating camera.
 
updated BTS on front page - now i know why people reserve 3 posts for this, I just realised about the 9 images limit. tut.
 
Oooo. RED. Nice! How was the learning curve?

Just merge those pics into one, then you can post as many as you like.

Then can we see some grabs please!
 
Learning curve was fun! Throw into it that I bought a mac recently because I was told that was the best Red workflow; most of it was new for me. This is my first short edited on FCP rather then Prem.

I much prefer Prem... but FCP is fine.

Infact with Red's R3D importer coming out for adobe I'm questioning the Mac purchase as a whole now.

I originally set out to use the proxies in FCP but I found that to be annoying rather quickly. It doesnt bring in colour looks from redcine (only red alert where you have to import each clip individually while Recine works with a huge library of clips). Also the proxies are not the most reponsive to scrub and play with on the timeline.

So I ended up cc in redcine and export to prores, that way I batch cc'd clips from each filming location by eye, jumping back and forth from each clip to see if they match (again something you cant do in red alert). Once I exported, the files are much eaier to play with in FCP. Also I could bring those clips in AE or combustion for effects work (which you cant do with proxies). So prores saved me on this one.

Not saying that is the best way to do things, certainly grading first before you've even done your fx is not reccomended, but I was up against the clock; on my limited time it seemed to work for me this time around.

Of course though you need to import proxies to get sound from your red clips. its currently the only way. Redcine /redalert do not support audio output. So I had to bring in all the proxes anyway to get the sound from them, then replace all the video with my transcoded prores files and re-link them. Quite easy if you do it all in one hit.

But also we had to sync some other sound with the DVX, because the Red was giving me a hum and phantom power is useless. So some scenes sound was recorded to DVX with a cheap mic on the Red as reference to sync.

One thing that does annoy me is there are 2 menus on the Red for sound. One labelled 'sound' the other 'audio'. They are both in completely different places and one controls the levels while the other controls the enabling. I think it should all be in one place. I wasted time diving into menus and back out again becasue I went into the wrong one during shooting.

But the red overall was fine to work with, it only played up once where it told me it couldnt play back clips as they were 'corrupted'. But when I got the footage back home it all loaded in fine (to a big sigh of relief). There are issues but workable with a reboot.

We were using the birger mount with canon prime lenses, so hitting focus becomes more of a concern; but if you've been working with 35mm adapters its no differernt. Pullng focus is not that hard with practise, depending on the shot. But I would say it's not as dramatic as people say. OK if you're on a big film set you need to nail it. But if not then 3 or so tries and you will have a take that works. As we dont have our FF knobs for the birger we were just focusing with the lens ring and the EVF, which on the L series lenses the focus ring is great.

I have to say Im so glad I did not buy into PL lenses. Our images look great with the SLR lenses and so far they hold up well for use on a motion camera, they should be even better when the knobs arrive. Having primes meant we could open up really wide for low lighting set-up and for really shallow DOF. The Red lens currently only go to 2.8 - and I dont think that would have given us the look we got on this short.

Anyway, Im rambling, but the learning curve was fun. This film was always meant to be something that just made us familiar with the workflow and new camera/lighting.
 
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Wow! Great Story! Pacing... Colors... Lightings... VFX... Another Finalist! Love the contrast between shots with people followed by the monochrome empty shots.
 
Yup, follks, we have a winner.

How did you get the location to look like that? Just a still image? (I noticed that on one of the shots/image :))

Dude, seriously, I thought this was hollywood production.

Fabulous end of the world story, makes me want to make one real bad now.

I loved how you gave the "no one left" shots a dirty, de-saturated look.

My favorite, hands down!

Robbie
 
I am not reading ANYthing in this thread.

I want to go in clean. But color me FRICKIN' EXCITED to see this. Love me some Darkline.
 
Wow. Here's a filmmaker to watch for the long term. The choices are perfect. Using the location you got and a single actor delivered something haunting and memorable. I'm very, very impressed. I said I loved your HorrorFest short, but this shows that you weren't a one-hit-dvxuser-wonder. When do we get to see your feature? I'd be hard pressed to criticize it. Just felt like it was the real thing. A movie. A couple of your extras rubbed me the wrong way and took me out of the film, but that's really being picky here. Incredible work. Five stars!!! Or I guess in this competition that would be 10.
 
Nice work! Nice polish to every scene; perhaps too polished? VFX shots are super as well as
the direction. It would be nice to have just a tiny more back story but that's just my opinion.
Overall this was a bleak piece with overtones of 28days. I love that. Three out of four stars
for me... more comments to come.
 
Brilliant film. It was almost too sharp. Great acting, lighting, etc. etc. Top 8 for sure. RED is just crazy, just plain crazy...in capable hands of course.
 
Nice work. Easily one of the top films this round. I agree with all that's been said before. And I'll add that I appreciated the vagueness of the ending - which reality is true? Gives it that final twist in a film full of them.
 
I enjoyed your film. A nice twist on a familiar idea. The plot required some expert editing to be convincing and I think you pulled it off. Having said that, I found the ending to be a little weak and typical of this genre.

Nice lighting also.

One of my favorites.
 
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