"MY NAME IS HAROLD ALLEN" - A Film By Ben Sliker and Justin Kuhn

yeehaanow said:
Cool way to use an available space. I thought it was a set. The dolly moves match up really well and adds a lot to the story. Same thing with the dolly move into that wipe transition. Wipes always seem cheesy to me, except when they're done in such a way that makes them invisible. I didn't even notice it the first time. :thumbup:

I have another question- Why did you choose to greenscreen the girl? Practicality? To match the guys montages?
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:) I rarely do a wipe that i can't hide. Of course, we all can't be George Lucas.

thanks, yeah, that whole dolly sequence i came up with on the fly the day before shoot. The original plan was to shoot that scene in a library and to have Harold be staring through a rack of books to them making out on the other side. Justin had some trouble securing a library location in Greensboro, so we decided to shoot it in the photography studio where he works. I looked up at that hallway and yelled to Justin ... "Dude! Dolly over the door ... let's do this."

As for the greenscreen, yes, we wanted to match Harold's thoughts about himself to his thoughts about Julia. She is a calming presence for him, and so his memories of her are a little less disjointed but he still can't remember specifics, aka the "Kansas (Iowa) (Wisconsin)" line. That and practicality of driving an actress who was only there for 4 hours out in the middle of a farm field. Also adding the timelapse sky shot was cool as well to match the dialogue behind it. We wanted to give the impression with the line "God, I always loved making breakfast for her", that he made breakfast for her after she slept over (hence the sexy ensemble and sunrise timelapse).
 
I guess I'm late for the party. Oh well.

I liked everything. A couple minor visual things but I'm sure they've been covered.
A number of shots had that artistic look to it which I really like.
And the ending I was not expecting. What a great line to end with.

And, not sure if it's just the mood I'm in but I was engrossed through out the whole thing (maybe cause I'm actually sober at this particular moment :)) .Also, I think the music really added to the flow of things so that helped slide everything along quite smoothly.

Yeah, it just felt easy to watch. Nice short, glad I finally got to it.
 
Raptor365 said:
I guess I'm late for the party. Oh well.
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hell no man! party's just started! grab a beer!

Raptor365 said:
I liked everything. A couple minor visual things but I'm sure they've been covered.
A number of shots had that artistic look to it which I really like.
And the ending I was not expecting. What a great line to end with.

And, not sure if it's just the mood I'm in but I was engrossed through out the whole thing (maybe cause I'm actually sober at this particular moment :)) .Also, I think the music really added to the flow of things so that helped slide everything along quite smoothly.

Yeah, it just felt easy to watch. Nice short, glad I finally got to it.
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I'm glad we grabbed you and held your attention. Now, challenge. Get totally hammered and watch it, please post thoughts afterwards. I want all perspectives! :) Thanks for taking the time to watch and review Raptor, we appreciate it!
 
Lighting Diagram.

Lighting Diagram.

I wanted to talk a bit about this shot cause how Jessie set it up was really cool. We shot this in the same room that the "making out" was going on:

DSC_0201.jpg


There are a number of lighting gags that are at work here. First off, the small "vial" that Tom is holding is the case that an Apple iSight camera comes in. In that vial, I dropped some knowledge on the crew that highlighter juice glows under black light. So I squeezed out 5 highlighters worth into the vial and added a little water.

Here's what the lighting diagram looked like, I'll explain everyone's role and light modifications below.

lightingdiagram.jpg


Ben - I was sitting on the "make out" bed calling the shots and holding the bar style black light as close as i could to the vial without being in the shot.
Justin - On camera
Jessie - Jessie was on the floor shaking the bin of water/broken mirror shards to make it look like water was shining up on his face.

I believe the back light was just an open face ARRI light. The ARRI in front was tilted down at the glass to reflect back up on his face and had a couple blue-ish green gels on the front that Jessie had in her Jelly Roll. We also hung a black sheet in the back so that it was easier to eliminate the background by crushing the blacks a little in post.
 
An incredible effort, but I'm sorry to say I was a bit distracted by how well groomed the last man on earth was... Top notch production in every way, sorry to have gotten hung up on this small detail...
 
texture, sorry that that got in the way of you enjoying the film, that's a bummer. Again, might be one of those things that doesn't translate to screen well, but Tom was gross, un-showered, greasy, disgusting clothes, there was nothing that said "groomed" about him to me. We also didn't want to stoop to hyperbole on his look either, meaning make it look so ridiculously awful and disgusting that people would have to wonder how it got that bad for him. It's a double edged sword really. We also didn't want to give the impression that he just stopped caring about himself as a human, he's patched up some of his clothing, tried to keep as clean as possible (somewhat unsuccessfully). Sure, we could have had a scene where he finds an old razor and shaves or cuts his hair with some rusty scissors, but it really wouldn't have been an efficient use of our 6 minutes, cause that's really not what the film is about. Anywho ... that's what I was thinking, it's definitely a detail that we hoped the viewer would file under their suspension of disbelief.

Regardless, thanks for watching and taking the time to comment, we're ecstatic that you thought everything else was top notch. Cheers. :beer:
 
Awe Ben, sorry I can just be silly, its a Virgo problem I think. Best of Luck in the final voting!!!
 
hey thanks man, i think it's important to let people know what the thought process was behind things sometimes!

Virgo here too. :)
 
As we near the end, I'm reminded of an anecdote from my cousin Dan.

Dan, in his college years, used to volunteer for the special olympics. A few members of his fraternity were matched up with a special needs olympian named Danny. I forget what Danny competed in, but Dan said he was a very big man, and sometimes unaware of his strength. Danny would win events and then almost crush fraternity men, tackling them in his excitement. Before a particular event tho, Danny wanted Dan to take him up to the announcer's booth to see what it was like. So, Dan obliged, and off they went. As soon as Dan opened the door to the booth, Danny rushed the announcer, stole his microphone, hit the PA button and yelled:

"GOOD LUCK ... EVERYBODY!"

And then proceeded to walk calmly back out of the booth.
 
I took your earlier challenge but not that night, albeit I did get hammered.

Anyways, I'll do it now (hint) so here we go (tongue in cheek):

Intro:

The only guy in the entire fest that I've seen so far, had to put
"Made For DVXuser TwilightFest" type into the leader.

As I'm watching...

-Oooh, some green screen stuff, say no more, say no more.
-Nice ceiling cam shot.
-Smooth though, like I said before. Real easy to watch and I can't tell you why.
-Another crane shot, nice.
-A lot of thought going into every shot, artistically.
-Nice voice overs, seems to fit without distracting, unoticeable really, great.
-GREAT ending. Vo and directing on that last scene made the short. I love great endings.

There ya go. Results of my beer challenge, but I did miss the blow out this time, weird.

Looking forward to more from you my friend. Justin Kuhn wrote it huh? Wow.
You guys should do another one. I enjoyed that both sober and drunk. There ya go then, lol. Great job guys.
 
Raptor365 said:
The only guy in the entire fest that I've seen so far, had to put
"Made For DVXuser TwilightFest" type into the leader.
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he he, it's about time i got **** for that, might as well be from the guy who made it.

Raptor365 said:
-Another crane shot, nice.
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this must be the booze talkin'. No cranes here. :)

Raptor365 said:
Looking forward to more from you my friend. Justin Kuhn wrote it huh? Wow.
You guys should do another one. I enjoyed that both sober and drunk. There ya go then, lol. Great job guys.
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Justin came to me with this neat concept that he wanted to direct. Essentially, it was a 2 pager with 4-5 paragraphs of dialogue. Each paragraph stayed the same except for the details (for ex. Hector Andrews changed to Harold Allen). I thought it needed to be a little more focused and so i went to work on some re-writes, and some new dialogue. Justin thought I had a really good grasp of the character from Day 1 so he asked me to direct and he would be on cam and produce. So started the process of making Harold Allen.
 
It worked, your in the top ten. Not an easy task. A good team is everything really. If you find someone who clicks, stay with them as long as you can and look for more talent, lighting, sound, ect, IMO. :beer:
 
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