A little something from the Z1

A

Anthony Bristol

Member
Hi Everyone, Here is a rough cut of Liberatus, an experimental short. Shot at 1080i50 on Z1 and edited in FCP using the AIC codec.

40mb [right click / save as]
http://www.anthonybristol.com/projects/liberatus/video/clips/liberatus_hq.mov

There is still some compositing to be done, i.e. the hand is there for reference and there is some keying that needs to be done, plus some shots added/taken out but you get the idea.

No adapters used, shot in 3 days, edited in a further 3 at a cost of approx £10. If anyone wants to know whats going on, just ask :p

Anthony
 
Excellent work, one of the best I've seen the Z1 looking. I figured out what's going on, matter vs anti-matter, good/evil, through the looking glass metaphor. Loved the lighting and mood, very david lynch, the shave part reminded me of a Scorcese short. I wonder what my alternate soul/spirit is up to. Good work Anthony.
 
Nice stuff. Which of the adapters did you use? What did you do on CC?

The part with the guy shaving is right out of Scorseses' "The Big Shave" ;-)
 
Darn i'm out of bandwidth, I'll sort it out now, give me a few minutes :)

EDIT: Okay all sorted now.

Well spotted guys, it's a Scorcese's "The Big Shave" inspired ending.

Yasser, you are close with your reading of the film, but there is another deeper level in which it explores.

Simple explaination? what does my reflection do all day when I'm not near a mirror? (this basic story is used to tell the following:)

Tricky explaination? It is a metaphor for infancy, a child gaining self awareness and questioning itself and its environment. Jacques Lacan Mirror Phase Theory plays a big part if anyone is interested. Basically, until 6 months of age a child does not recognise itself in the mirror, after that time he sees himself/understands the concept of "self", becoming self aware. This is when self thought and self analysis start to evolve in the childs mind. In the film it's portrated through metaphors, the objects, the comb, newspaper, are new experiences/memories/ feelings/....in the first instance teh comb dissappears, but he questions it, the newspaper he hangs on to and plays with, destorying it as we do when we are children to gain understanding of how something works. And then the razor....etc etc. Thats a simplified reading but it would be interesting to hear if anyone has any other readings of the piece :)
 
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Rafa, here's some info on how we shot the piece and CC'd:

The white space scenes were shot in a small studio at college, it was simply 6 poly boards stood up against two walls and taped together to stop them falling over. To hide the cracks we hung toilet paper (!) between them. The floor was simply a roll of white paper. Then we overexposed in camera until the background and paper dissappeared. There were a few shots where it was present, but they were quite simple to matt out in FCP. Magic Bullet was used to give it that look, Berlin I believe. The whites were already blown out from the camera. The rest of the video we applied Punchy and played with the colours. I'll get up some before and after screengrabs to show the difference in colour.

The tracking shots in the opening sequence were done with a skateboard. We removed a screw from each of the trucks so they could be angled to achieve that look of the P+S Technic Skater, not as versatile (or expensive) but did the job. The still shots in white space can have a post zoom applied. Usually this looks cheesy (IMHO) but as there is no background object the eye falls for it as there is no change (or lack of) in perspective to be noticed.

In the white space we pinned up cutouts in green paper the shape of the mirrors in the toilet scene, they were to be keyed with the real world scene. The inherent problem in this is that they appear to be floating, which when keyed looked very "Sesame Street". So we have removed them for now until we find a solution.

The lighting in the 1st 'toilet' scene was all natural, and worked brilliantly. We did have a giant reflector to bounce a little light onto the actor though. In the 'real world' shaving scene we used a workmans light and the reflector to get an even tone on his skin. Worked well, especially in such a cramped space. I haven't a clue what lights we used in the white space, they were all flourescants designed for lighting greenscreen.

The flickering light; we shot all of those bits (for every change of scene beginning and end, but didnt use them) by turning the lights on and off in the studio. The problem with this is the white walls suddenly became uderexposed and it was possible to see the cracks between the poly boards. So what Ben [editor] did, is take a frame from the floor when a light was 1/2 on and use that repeatedly, whilst matting out the upper half above the actor, then he cut round the actor and made him completely black to complete the look, then just repeat a few times. I hope that makes sense? The buzzing of the audio also helps with the effect.
 
No cinetone, CF25, cinegamma or black stretch used. Pretty much raw camera settings. Just a lot of care with composition and making sure the lighting was suitable.

Half way through the shoot I discovered the black stretch worked well in the white space, we didnt lose so much detail on the actor with the camera overexposed, but as we had started with it off we decide to leave it that way. I'm experimenting with CF25 and cineform, shooting straight 1080i50 leaves you much more options in post, albeit with a few more hoops to jump through to achieve 720p at least.

Ben edits on FCP, we used AIC which was a huge improvement over editing HDV on the mac in our previous project. HDV really does not stand up at all to any CC or effects, breaking up badly. I edited some on PPro and Cineform and when we put the footage together in a timeline I was certain his wasn't HD at all, turned out to be the HDV not liking the CC. Anyone shooting with HDV I would always recommend using an intermediate such as cineform, AIC, DVCProHD for editing and leave HDV for shooting and export to tape only.
 
I was near your end yesterday, Virginia Water. But good info on the shoot. So you used no cinegamma, Also, photojpeg is a good intermediate codec. But cineform rocks, your HDV footage ends up looking better than it was before. Also anyone here heard of hiCon32?
 
Hi Anthony.

Great short, beautifully thought out and shot. My only criticism would be when the hand pushes through the mirror, the hand effect works great but the explosion/smoke cheapens it, kind of lessens the emotional intent of the piece for me. Anyway, fantastic stuff, I look forward to seeing more of your work.

Also by AIC, are you referring to the Apple Intermediate Codec? Was it slower or faster to edit on than native hdv ?

Thanks
 
Hi Peter thanks for the feedback :) the effects on the hand are just there for reference until the final edit, it should be something much more subtle, it definitely does not fit in with the piece.

AIC is indeed Apple Intermediary Codec, I am not such if render times differ too much, it's supposed to be quicker, but the major plus is it doesn't break up, unlike HDV. Only downside is the filesizes are 3 times bigger.

Anthony
 
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