Adventure film shoot with HPX500 clips and info

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One of my films "The Wild Adventures of Thomas England" is shooting with the HPX500.

We just wrapped our first day of shooting, and I wanted to share with you some of the footage along with some notes.

We had very large set pieces some of which you wont see in the clip below, but we found that the HPX500 handles everything we can throw at it so far.

Everything shot in 1080p 24PA, Cine D gamma.

No color correction, Sound sweetening, or score added, this is just raw from the camera then cut up.

I used a few 500w lights to do the light coming from inside the plane window, and I put some warm gel on the far window on the opposite side of the plane because it was just too much white in the scene.

I will be posting much more as the shoot goes on, we have a large battle in the woods we are filming mid July for the movie, I'll be sure to update you.

Any questions/comments welcome :)


 
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Bassman2003 said:
Thanks for sharing. Which lenses are you using or planning to use?
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Believe it or not we are using just a high quality SD canon zoom, the newer cheap HD lenses breath so much as well as other issues.

When we shoot the feature film, most likely we will be shooting with either RED or HPX3000 or the 3700.

This project is to fund the feature
 
It seems that if you keep within the limits of the lens like not going towards the tele end or opening up all the way the SD glass can work fine.
 
Bassman2003 said:
It seems that if you keep within the limits of the lens like not going towards the tele end or opening up all the way the SD glass can work fine.
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This is true, it also helps that the HPX500 doesn't actually have an HD chip, so resolving the details is not effected as much by the lens. The chip is an SD chip that is doing pixel shifting, as long as the SD lens is a good one, the quality is just fine.

I have noticed that really great HD glass such as DigiPrimes will still make a much better picture, but not as big of a difference as you would think. You really see the difference in cameras like the HPX3000 and 2700 and such, because of their native HD chips resolve the resolution MUCH better.

For our film, I wanted to have a look that was closer to the Indiana Jones series which wasn't a super sharp look, they used softening over the lenses.

But Indiana Jones 4 was shot in a way that I hated. It was so obvious that they were using the softening filters, that it bothered me. I didn't want to have that same look, I wanted it to be more like the first 3. So a quality SD zoom did the trick over shooting with DigiPrimes and then putting a filter over it.
 

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Yet another update to the film, this past weekend we shot another large chunk of the movie...

It went very well. This is the last link I will be posting of footage, after this it will be confidential until the film is complete.

Yet again, please feel free to ask any questions or comment as you wish.

This is a VERY VERY VERY rough cut of what we have shot so far. Nothing is even close to being done, but I thought I'd share what it looks like so far.


 
Hey Chris, long time no speak! You are correct, no filters, the only in camera softening thats happening is using a high quality SD lens instead of an HD lens.

Curious, why do you ask?
 
I used to use various filters in the past when shooting film, especially when shooting period pieces to cut down on sharpness or add diffussion. Now I mainly use ND and/or Pola filters because clients prefer to do FX in post and just shoot it clean.
I assume you are following the same path?

chris
 
Footage looks good. The only part that looked odd was the green screen on the left-hand pilot, but I assume that's being fixed.

Is this the length that your promo piece is going to be? I would actually recommend shortening it to more trailer length. With promos I think the snappier the better. Though music throughout the piece will help immeasurably.

Is this the cast you are using for the feature? I personally would recommend casting the leading women with different hair colors, so that they stand out a bit more from each other. The two women in the piece looked kind of similar to each other, and I actually thought that they were the same actress at first.
 
monkeyking said:
I used to use various filters in the past when shooting film, especially when shooting period pieces to cut down on sharpness or add diffussion. Now I mainly use ND and/or Pola filters because clients prefer to do FX in post and just shoot it clean.
I assume you are following the same path?

chris
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Yes we are following that same notion. We shoot clean so post has the most control over what we want. Since its mostly being shot for the editing room its much safer and less expensive for us to do everything in post. Basically we used the same thing, Just ND and pola.

agcohn said:
Footage looks good. The only part that looked odd was the green screen on the left-hand pilot, but I assume that's being fixed.

Is this the length that your promo piece is going to be? I would actually recommend shortening it to more trailer length. With promos I think the snappier the better. Though music throughout the piece will help immeasurably.

Is this the cast you are using for the feature? I personally would recommend casting the leading women with different hair colors, so that they stand out a bit more from each other. The two women in the piece looked kind of similar to each other, and I actually thought that they were the same actress at first.
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This promo will be 11mins long, its for festival use, and then for anyone looking to invest in the feature length. There will be a cut down "trailer" version as well.

Its funny you say that about the girls looking the same... Originally I wanted "Veronica" (girl in red dress) to be a blond for that exact same reason, I didn't want the audience to think they were the same. Turns out all the blonds moved to LA or were shooting in LA so I had no access to them at the time. The "Veronica" character will not be in the feature she was just there as a means to an end: to get that information to the audience in a non intrusive way.

These actors are most likely being replaced with A and B list actors if we are going for our 20million range. This is all yet to be decided.

And yes, all the green screen is a work in progress, its just getting cleaned up and fixed right now, there was a huge rush to shoot that scene because we were running out of our time to use the airplane, and its too expensive to go back again, so I made the executive decision to "fix it in post" as opposed to fixing everything right there. I usually NEVER make that decision but I knew it would be an easy fix for post so I did it.

Homunculus said:
Wow, really professional looking. The main actor and the villain in the forest are extremely good actors.
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Thank you very much, yes everyone seems to have fallen in love with "Dr. Otto". Most liked evil villain haha. He is a wonderful actor who has been on an HBO series, and we were lucky enough that he said yes to my film. He loved the script, I actually wrote it with him in mind, he was my first choice and I was just lucky enough to get him. And the "Thomas England" is played by an actor that I have been working with for little over a year now, I have shot a lot of stuff with him, and knew he'd have the chops to pull off such a character.
 
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