A Scene from a New Short Film (Slow Motion)

ponder8n,

Fantastic work! Loved the way you injected humor into an already technically excellent piece. Your son did a great job of conveying his emotions naturally and allowing us to be in his shoes.

Two questions. First, what was your music name and source? And second, could you send a different link to that Compressor article you had mentioned? I came up with a blank page, for some reason.

Please keep us informed on your shooting and editing progress. We're tuned in!

Thanks again!
 
this piece was excellent. loved the look and the slow mo. the content was funny as well. for some reason i think crushing little kids dreams can be funny. hahaha. jk.

but yeah, how did you achieve the little rack iris type of effect, where it blows out for a split second. was that an effect from FCP? or after fx or something?

thanks man. keep up the great work.

daniel
 
adam powell said:
I did what barry told me, but my slowmo still jitters, is it premiere pro being cack?
Click to expand...

i'm in the same boat man, I think it's when we have to render it is when we have problems. It always looks way better on my Vegas Timeline.
 
ponder8n,

Thanks for the links -- good information on both fronts. You know, the more I look at your creation, the more interesting it gets and I begin to wonder what kind of hand held camera moves you did and the kinds of effects you used in post. Care to elaborate on the camera and post work?

Thanks!
 
alumna: For the handheld camera moves, I just experimented with some different movements. One shot I used was were I held the camera really low as I was running up to him and landed on his feet. Then, I slowly moved up to reveal the basketball and then his face. Really, though, most of the handheld stuff was just run and gun shooting. We only had a short time to shoot this. (The high school girl's bastketball team was practicing on the other end.)

As for post, all of the color correction was done in Magic Bullet. I think I used to LookSuite Bronze setting with some adjustments in the contrast, to lighten it up a bit. I also wanted really heavy vignetting, so I maxed out the Vignette setting. Finally, I used Effects Essential Camera Flash plug in for the quick flash wash out look. And, as you can tell, I used a variety of speed from 50% slow motion to 1000% fast motion.
 
ponder8n,

Sure appreciate your describing the camera and post work. They clearly demonstrate your superior skills in both areas -- with a great blend of technical and creative flair.

Thanks also for the clear explanation regarding Magic Bullet. Your color correction with this software was really nicely done. Would you recommend some resources/authors whose work you admire (DVDs, online tutorials or books) who go deeper into Magic Bullet and color correction in FCP? Or better still, since you are an expert in MB and CC, would you be interested in sharing your "Secrets of Color Correction with Magic Bullet" knowledge?

Thanks again for sharing your wisdom!
 
alumna: As for recommendations or tutorials, I don't really know of any. What I like to do is find a look from a show I think is done well, then try to duplicate it. I don't really have much creative stuff myself. I just like to take a look I like and find a way to mimic it. For my son's entire short film, we have all of these diffferent scenes of his imagination, and each one has it's own look. We have a doctor scene that is soft and saturated. We have a spy scene that is like bleach bypass and fast shutter speeds. Then, next week, we're shooting a film noire scene which'll be contrasty in black and white.

I don't use the full Magic Bullet program. I use the cheaper Editor's version. Since I'm typically already shooting 24p, I don't need the fps down conversion. The Editor's suite has some presents that I usually pull from. Then, I typically only adjust the opening and closing three settings: saturation, contrast and gamma. That's how I tweak the look that I want. Sometimes I use Joe's Filters (www.joesfilters.com) for some diffusion and levels adjust. In fact, with Joe's Filters and FCP's color correction, you can do almost anything MB Look Suite can do.

coffee: No, I did not use the filter from Buena.
 
ponder8n,

You are a gentleman and a fine teacher.

I see what you mean about emulating certain looks from shows you like. Although that too requires strong color correction skills. Thanks also for the very helpful tips regarding the Magic Bullet presets and their relative adjustments.

One more question, if I may ... how did you achieve the sound effect in the scene where you block your son's first throw to the basket and the music stops? It didn't seem like part of the music track. Rather, it was more of an audio effect (pause followed by a screeching sound?) you introduced. I could still hear the ball bouncing faintly in the background. A very real, subtle and tangible effect, indeed.

Looking forward to much more of your excellent work in short films!
 
alumna: I did my audio post work in SoundTrack Pro which comes with the new Final Cut Studio. It's got some great audio tweaking tools. I have used it extensively throughout the other recorded audio pieces of the short to remove background noise and normalize the dialogue. It also has a relatively nice library of sound effects, which is where I got the record scratch for the abrupt interruption. The ball bouncing sound is a cleaned up version of the actual ball bouncing. As I said in a previous post, the other side of the gym was full of high school running around and yelling. But, I really wanted this kind of quiet "pull me out of my dream" stillness, and so I cleaned up the ball bouncing. If you listen closely, you can hear some discontinuous sounds of the ball bouncing. I didn't spend too much time tweaking. Just enough to get the point across.

Check back with me in about three weeks, and we should have the entire piece done. You can email me directly since I don't check messages on this board much. My address is below.

Cheers,
Russ
russ(at)toppup[dot]com
 
Did you change any of your settings in F1 ? I have my default F1 settings and would like to try it, but you said you shot 60i and changed it to 30p, did you shoot 60i then change it to 30p in post?
Thanks
 
Mortimer: The only settings I changed in the F1 settings was the Cinegamma settings. I wanted more of a film-like color. I did not change the 60i to 30p. I needed to capture 60i information because it captures two half frames of information per single 30p frame. I then took those half frames and recontructed them into full frames using Compressor. The result is 60p. I then slowed it down by half and now I have 30p of slow motion.
 
Ponder8n:

Thanks for the confirmation - shot some stuff that really benefits slow mo so I am going to do the process now and see what happens.
Wish me luck -
Mortimer
 
Dude, that was awesome! I was waiting for your son to start dunking all over the place. lol
 
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