'film' grading, A1 + Letus Extreme

armisiano said:
The colors are nice on the supermarket shots, but the lighting's a bit too staged looking in my opinion. I can imagine shooting in a grocery store using the regular store lighting is probably way too dim though, so I can imagine the difficulty. Know that I give these critiques/opinions with the utmost respect for your work.
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I definitely agree with you. Part of the fun and the challenge of shooting these films is that we are working with a 0$ budget. So all we have lighting wise is what i have in my arsenal. I.e. no flags or silks to shoot light through, so the softest i can get my light is through a 32 x 24 chimera. Also the stands don't go higher than 11 feet, so emulating top lit stuff is almost impossible for us to achieve with my current gear.

The walls in the back ground are actually lit with 1k's as the light levels of the store were slightly too dark in comparison with the exposure we were going for on the actors faces. Definitely a huge challenge lighting in such a large place.

but yeah, still learning the craft as we go along.

skinny! said:
the first scene (the circle)...reminds me of that 70s show pot circle...till the guy offs himself...the color and skin tones are great, lighting etc is top notch, but i don't care for the spray-on sweat thing...too much i guess. i am in no position to be critical, so i say these things lightly. great work sofar though....i love the process of filmmaking and seeing it coming together. thanks for sharing!

Chris
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Definitely reminiscent of the 70's pot circle type thing. The spray on was meant to be overly done as this is an absurd comedy with ridiculous flashbacks. The setup for this is the character with the long hair says something like, "It's more boring than that time I played Russian Roulette." and then we jump to this flashback where he goes into the game not knowing a single thing about it, getting all excited, only to see a guy shoot himself and say, " What the hell was that? This is retarted ass game... I didn't even get a chance to play... ... Aw.. .. He was my lift... GUYS, he was my lift..."

The over doing of the sweat was only done to set a huge contrast between the guys in the scene and one of our leads.

samphibbs said:
Hey Papa what preset are you using looks great, the evolution from the first page to this is amazing.
Congrats
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We have been using the TrueColor preset since the beginning so I've just stuck with that and adjusted curves and saturation in post.

Thanks for the comments boys.
 
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More recent grabs from today's shoot. I am particularly happy with the way these one's turned out. Would love your comments, opinions and criticisms.

andre01.jpg


andre02.jpg


andre04.jpg


andre03.jpg


andre08p.jpg


andre09.jpg


andre12.jpg


andre14.jpg


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I appreciate that some are sharper than others, but at this moment in time budget won't allow for an HD monitor, so focus may be slightly off. Using the Canon XH A1 LCD with peak function. ( Not ideal, but works decently)
 
Gorgeous mate!

The lighting is natural and I really the contrasts. Framing is great too and I'm clearly amazed about the overall feeling of the shots for HDV material shot on miniDV tapes with the canon. I mean, the 4:1:0 (i guess) compression is not felt and the precision of the image is way better than the poor HVX200 720 offers.

This is sick, keep it up.
 
Thanks you guys! I feel like the more we shoot, the happier i am with the images that we are acquiring from this project. I hope the final result will make us happy, and better yet, find some sort of recognition in this business and perhaps distribution.
 
Looks great! :) It has a 16mm magic to it I think. Super16ish feel, and the skintones are nice. The grain structure is also very nice, kudos on that. I love seeing this kind of stuff coming out of the A1.
 
papa, this is probably way late in the game, but i found this thread just now. here is my crack at it in PP 1.5 done in a quick 10min.

Original:

frank_nograde.jpg




Graded:

frank_grade.jpg
 
Here is another fun little frame i took while we were packing up the location and waiting outside. GG wasn't on cause the batteries had been taken out to recharge, but cool none the less.

This was outside without any reflectors or bounce, not too bad.

randomframe.jpg
 
it was a large grocery store, and the owner happens to be one of the main actors parents. Not bad huh? The difficult part of having a larger grocery store like that is lighting the rest of it, which we did not have enough equipment to achieve, unfortunately.
 
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