1st Feature Film shot on T2I

L

luke stewart

Active member
I looked and looked but can't find anyone else claiming this, so here it is: HOLODAD, the first independent feature film to be shot on a Canon T2I.

The blog- www.holodad.com
Facebook Fan page- http://www.facebook.com/pages/HoloDad/108302342522370

I have a visual effects background, but this is my first feature film. Lots of compositing shots involved.
Ray Thomas (DP) and I did some green screen tests over the weekend and it keys beautifully.

I was originally going to shoot with a Scarlet, but Ray already has the camera, and who knows when Scarlet will ship?

Principal photography begins in July.

Cheers,
Luke
 
The T2 can produce great images. Some better than others. If that is what you have to work with get a good fluid head tripod, a few lights, audio package and start shooting.
Your content is as important as your picture and that won't be any different no matter what camera you use.
The T2 has the basic essentials, Frame rate / shutter speed control, manual control, 35mm motion picture size gate. Great films have been shot with a lot less then what you have.
The camera image seems to hold up much better with very soft lighting.
It may be better to shoot a full trailer first and post it to get some feedback. You may not like some of the harsh critical comments, but better hear them early in the production which will give you a chance to improve before finishing the entire film.

In short , go for it.
 
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Actually we shot a feature film last month with 2 T2is and a 7D. It was in the vein of a lot of mumblecore films, so it was mostly available lighting (outside of 2 scenes which I provided lighting), but that style really lent itself to the material. The performances were really great, but it's going to be all about the edit. The target is to have a cut ready for Sundance.

And it means absolutely nothing, but just so you know we're not a bunch of kids shooting in their backyard, we all work solely in film and our crew contains several academy award nominated filmmakers.

That said, I'm really interested to see a full feature with cinematic lighting and camera moves and I encourage you to keep us updated on the production. We found the T2i to be a great camera, although we did long takes and had to stagger the 12 minutes and dealt with occasional overheating issues. It was really more of a documentary go with the flow feel, I'm really interested to see what the camera can do with visual effects!
 
ROCKMORE said:
The T2 can produce great images. Some better than others. If that is what you have to work with get a good fluid head tripod, a few lights, audio package and start shooting.
Your content is as important as your picture and that won't be any different no matter what camera you use.
The T2 has the basic essentials, Frame rate / shutter speed control, manual control, 35mm motion picture size gate. Great films have been shot with a lot less then what you have.
The camera image seems to hold up much better with very soft lighting.
It may be better to shoot a full trailer first and post it to get some feedback. You may not like some of the harsh critical comments, but better hear them early in the production which will give you a chance to improve before finishing the entire film.

In short , go for it.
Click to expand...
Thanks ROCKMORE. I know the "shoot the trailer first" thing is a popular thing to do, but my 1st AD and my DP just want to go ahead and shoot the whole thing. I guess I could throw up some dailies for you guys to look at and critique. Due to budgetary constraints, many of the green screen shots will need to be locked off, and I am anticipating some criticism for that. It would be interesting to see what everyone thinks, I think I'm going to do it! Community dailies critiques! Need to see what my DP thinks of this...
 
drcheese said:
Actually we shot a feature film last month with 2 T2is and a 7D. It was in the vein of a lot of mumblecore films, so it was mostly available lighting (outside of 2 scenes which I provided lighting), but that style really lent itself to the material. The performances were really great, but it's going to be all about the edit. The target is to have a cut ready for Sundance.

And it means absolutely nothing, but just so you know we're not a bunch of kids shooting in their backyard, we all work solely in film and our crew contains several academy award nominated filmmakers.

That said, I'm really interested to see a full feature with cinematic lighting and camera moves and I encourage you to keep us updated on the production. We found the T2i to be a great camera, although we did long takes and had to stagger the 12 minutes and dealt with occasional overheating issues. It was really more of a documentary go with the flow feel, I'm really interested to see what the camera can do with visual effects!
Click to expand...

Best of luck on getting into Sundance! Are you going to submit to the New Frontier portion?
Many of our camera moves will need to be locked off due to the micro budget we are operating with, especially the stuff shot on green screen. The exterior shots will have some crane moves, but I'm thinking mostly handheld and on sticks, a few dolly shots. The VFX planned are ambitious but doable. Lots of matte paintings, camera tracking, and compositing. Right now I am focused on finishing the green screen construction so I can move on to other details. The clock is ticking.
 
luke stewart said:
Best of luck on getting into Sundance! Are you going to submit to the New Frontier portion?
Click to expand...

Thanks! I was actually just the CamOp/Gaffer on the shoot, so I'm not sure the specific plans. The Producer has more connections with Sundance and I know he had sent some footage to hopefully get a producer's grant for funding post-production. Looking at New Frontier I think it would program really well into that.
 
luke stewart said:
Lots of matte paintings, camera tracking, and compositing. Right now I am focused on finishing the green screen construction so I can move on to other details. The clock is ticking.
Click to expand...

Good luck with that. I know you said you had some successful keying tests, but I still don't see people getting really good keys with the DSLR footage. The color space just seems like it's too big an obstacle to overcome for most keying work. Then again, you can definitely compose your shots to compensate.

Same for camera tracking. The rolling shutter should give you some issues with that. Do you have any plans to combat it?

But seriously, good luck with the shoot. Looking forward to seeing some footage.
 
handsome pete said:
Good luck with that. I know you said you had some successful keying tests, but I still don't see people getting really good keys with the DSLR footage. The color space just seems like it's too big an obstacle to overcome for most keying work. Then again, you can definitely compose your shots to compensate.
Click to expand...
I guess I could post something so you guys can see it. Today's keyers are pretty sophisticated and seem to do fine.
handsome pete said:
Same for camera tracking. The rolling shutter should give you some issues with that. Do you have any plans to combat it?
Click to expand...
I think people make this out to be a bigger issue than it really is. If you are doing a whip pan then sure, you are going to get lots of skew. But those shots are a nightmare to track anyway due to the excessive blur.

The geniuses at The Foundry have created their Rolling Shutter plugin. It eliminates skew caused by rolling shutter CMOS cameras. I don't anticipate needing it, but who knows?
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/pkg_overview.aspx?ui=47C4AB50-4636-4326-87D1-FB380B2119EF
 
luke stewart said:
I guess I could post something so you guys can see it. Today's keyers are pretty sophisticated and seem to do fine.

I think people make this out to be a bigger issue than it really is. If you are doing a whip pan then sure, you are going to get lots of skew. But those shots are a nightmare to track anyway due to the excessive blur.

The geniuses at The Foundry have created their Rolling Shutter plugin. It eliminates skew caused by rolling shutter CMOS cameras. I don't anticipate needing it, but who knows?
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/pkg_overview.aspx?ui=47C4AB50-4636-4326-87D1-FB380B2119EF
Click to expand...

I'm not doubting your VFX skills, but just want to stress the importance of carefully planning all of your shots if you plan on doing keying and tracking with DSLR footage.

Today's keyers are definitely more capable than before, but most of the keyed footage I've seen out there has been average at best. And it's usually just talking head type shots. I'm wondering how heavy motion holds up. You'd be surprised at just how much that additional color space helps.

And as for the tracking, rolling shutter affects the shot no matter the degree of movement, even locked off shots. It has a temporal lag that you cannot ignore.
 
Rolling shutter crops up all the time. Footfalls near the tripod, a grain of sand on the dolly track, stuff like that can ruin the shot with vibration. The foundry plugin doesn't work any where near as good as it appears to in the demo, I trialled it for two weeks. Even they recommend Deshaker for global RS correction, and it's free.
 
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I AGREE


Here is a super quick slap comp. Only pulled one key, not multiple like you are supposed to.

7D, iso160, f2.8, Sigma zoom, 1/100 shutter.

I don't like the way youtube washes out the contrast. Does anyone know the optimal file for youtube uploading? mp4 maybe? This was a wmv.

EDIT: I fixed the link. Make sure you watch it in HD.
 
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drcheese, could you give a rough idea of the lighting you used on your recent t2i shoot. Any thoughts on gear/lights you'll be leaving at home on this style of a shoot in the future.
Thanks.
 
lambert said:
drcheese, could you give a rough idea of the lighting you used on your recent t2i shoot. Any thoughts on gear/lights you'll be leaving at home on this style of a shoot in the future.
Thanks.
Click to expand...

Well I suppose the essence of mumblecore lighting is to free up the actors so they can give a natural performance and go where they will. And even though the improv nature of the film meant we had 2-3 cameras going at once, we didn't want to intrude on the actors (many of them were first time actors) with big lighting setups.

So really what we ended up doing was working with the available lighting, and whenever possible we staged them so that the available lighting was creating dramatic shots. In some cases we used reflectors to fill in dark spots, but even then a lot of the time we would try to use more natural elements. Like if they were sitting at a table, we'd put some white papers on it to bounce up the light into their face. The T2i was great for this type of shoot because it looks great in low light and gives you a lot of latitude to play with in post. They're also smaller, so having 3 of them going at once feels less intrusive than 3 bigger cameras.

For the 2 scenes I actually lit, I set up bg lights and hair lights with a Mole 2k Fresnel, 2x 650w Arri Fresnel and a handful of other fresnels (also gelling many since it was a dream sequence). Then since we were free roaming and had 3 cameras going at once, I used a china ball as a soft key, so that we wouldn't see any shadows from the operators. If the director had wanted lighting in the other scenes I probably would have used the china balls a bit more.


I have mixed feelings on mumblecore as a whole, as I really enjoy the lighting aspect of filmmaking, and getting that dramatic, beautiful shot. But all lighting should fit the material, and for this story the style really served it.

Hopefully that's helpful in some way? :)
 
"Hopefully that's helpful in some way? "
Absolutely. Thanks drcheese, I have a t2i and am I'm building a small kit .
 
I posted this on another website in response to Luke Stewart as well, but I wanted to post it here as well-

I've also got a film in production during August/September on the Canon T2i. It's called 'The Darklings' and the website can be found at www.darklingsmovie.com

It's a dark fantasy, and will be shot Day-for-Night, so I'm excited to see how well the footage converts. There will be quite a lot of post production for that reason, as well as the fact that there will be quite a bit of animation added. Because of this, and the tight budget, there isn't even a tentative schedule for release yet, but hopefully by spring/summer of 2011. This probably puts us out of the running for the VERY first to be finished, but I'm sure it counts for ONE OF the first
icon_e_wink.gif


Also, for sound (since the topic's been brought up), nothing's set in stone, but I'm experimenting with using the FiRe app on a number of iPhones in place of a traditional lavelier setup. I think it could be very interesting and am looking forward to seeing (and hearing) the results.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results of your efforts as well as sharing my own! Good luck! I hope you'll post any problems/fixes and tips once you've really started production! I'll be sure to do the same!

The Facebook Page for the movie 'The Darklings' is http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/THE-DA ... 32?ref=sgm

There will be an accompanying free video game as well as a comic book (the first part will be free), so please feel free to click the 'Like' button to follow the movie and find out when that stuff gets posted (and of course news alerts about the actual movie)
 
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