Doppelganger - a web series shot on Red
- Thread starter sean90291
- Start date
I hate overexposed footage of lazy camera operator ,especially if its 25 thousand$ camera.
It doesnt look filmic ,because sometimes its too dark and sometimes footage is overexposed.It might sound rude but you really could put more work ,youve got expensive gear.
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Anyway picture will tell much more than words, white shirt in your footage and white shirt in bourne 2:
In Bourne its not plain white cause its with blue lines on it buy you should get the point about exposure.
It doesnt look filmic ,because sometimes its too dark and sometimes footage is overexposed.It might sound rude but you really could put more work ,youve got expensive gear.
---
Anyway picture will tell much more than words, white shirt in your footage and white shirt in bourne 2:
In Bourne its not plain white cause its with blue lines on it buy you should get the point about exposure.
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visugeek
Well-known member
Sean,
I see why you went with the Red, in low light other cameras would have been very noisy. You have a pretty good creepiness factor due to the lighting, shooting style, music, and makeup, good job.
It's hard to tell if it's going to be a good story or not at this point. I'm curious to see where you go with it.
I think if each webisode had a beginning, middle, and end with main continuous storyline like the old serial shorts from the 30's and 40's you would be in good shape. I didn't feel this had a beginning really, it was just kind of happening...when did he call his friend? Was he already there? How did the Zombie/Doppleganger just happen to have a tracking device to put on his friend's SUV?
You've got plenty of style, if it has the substance too, you'll have a good series there.
Chris
I see why you went with the Red, in low light other cameras would have been very noisy. You have a pretty good creepiness factor due to the lighting, shooting style, music, and makeup, good job.
It's hard to tell if it's going to be a good story or not at this point. I'm curious to see where you go with it.
I think if each webisode had a beginning, middle, and end with main continuous storyline like the old serial shorts from the 30's and 40's you would be in good shape. I didn't feel this had a beginning really, it was just kind of happening...when did he call his friend? Was he already there? How did the Zombie/Doppleganger just happen to have a tracking device to put on his friend's SUV?
You've got plenty of style, if it has the substance too, you'll have a good series there.
Chris
Good questions visugeek. The accelerated storytelling (which assumes things are happening off screen) may be too much. Hopefully we make a few more and get to spend some "quality time" with the story and actors. I believe in ramping up the pace of online shorts, but I may have gone too far!
As for clipping, hm, there may indeed be a clip here and there in the online version. But that's probably mainly due to the cramped latitude of the conversion process. His collar is a bit hot there, but the original ain't so blown out. Interestingly I hate the comparison shot of Chris Cooper--yes, his shirt is beautifully exposed, but his face is mud. Heheh. That may well be a factor of the online photo too, I realize.
Actually, I could probably go in and fix that hot shirt shot pretty easily. I believe there is information in those hot spots. But it's a lot more work when really the film was done by a skeleton crew and a lot of hours of me working alone. I could work on it for years, probably, but eventually, you gotta move on to other things too. Every shot in a Chris Cooper movie would have a team of experts. I'm just a lone hack!
Thanks for watching anyone!
As for clipping, hm, there may indeed be a clip here and there in the online version. But that's probably mainly due to the cramped latitude of the conversion process. His collar is a bit hot there, but the original ain't so blown out. Interestingly I hate the comparison shot of Chris Cooper--yes, his shirt is beautifully exposed, but his face is mud. Heheh. That may well be a factor of the online photo too, I realize.
Actually, I could probably go in and fix that hot shirt shot pretty easily. I believe there is information in those hot spots. But it's a lot more work when really the film was done by a skeleton crew and a lot of hours of me working alone. I could work on it for years, probably, but eventually, you gotta move on to other things too. Every shot in a Chris Cooper movie would have a team of experts. I'm just a lone hack!
Thanks for watching anyone!
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HerzogisGod
Well-known member
dont change a thing....images look great...love the overexposed look when it's done well, which in your case, it was.
cant imagine what this looks like at full rez...must be beautiful
cant imagine what this looks like at full rez...must be beautiful
HerzogisGod
Well-known member
besides...those look like artistic decisions....
That's certainly my intention. Thank you for watching and commenting, HerzogisGod.
Actually I appreciated your comment bwwd. The shirt collar is something I may revisit in post to bring the hotness down for future versions, so thank you for pointing it out. As I mentioned, there actually IS information in there. It's not as blown out as it appears online. That's a cool thing about Red. You can bring back some of the detail you think you've lost. My post process/ color correction, coupled with compressing it down for an ultra-small video file for the website exacerbated the clipping in that shot you point out. I will pull up a grab to show you that it's actually not clipped in fact. Will post shortly.
Yes but what about other shots ,like the one when woman is in the middle and theres window behind her ,so white and blown out,i would personally aviod those places and never place my character standing in front of the window,those takes are hard to compose later cause face might be too dark or background with window might be overexposed.I would just move her to sit somewhere else to show DOF not white blown out window.
Your most filmic parts are the ones without white colours in the frame.
Here,so you wouldnt say that i took some sh*tty film as example ,single frame from classic and white shirt + even more white tissue ,you know how white are those and they are not overexposed and you can even see folds on tissue + this is outside shot.
Your most filmic parts are the ones without white colours in the frame.
Here,so you wouldnt say that i took some sh*tty film as example ,single frame from classic and white shirt + even more white tissue ,you know how white are those and they are not overexposed and you can even see folds on tissue + this is outside shot.
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Same thing. The shot isn't nearly so blown out as it appears in the online version. In fact, you can see a lot of the detail in the curtain in the HD version. I deliberately went for the background to be a white bloom/glow. It's a choice of taste, which you don't like, I understand.
Red has great advantages. It still doesn't have the latitude of film, however. One day our digital cameras will!
Below is an example of the information left in the collar. I roughly isolated it and it shows there is information there...right down to the make-up smudges. Yuck. I could do more work to completely squelch those highlights in the collar...but like I said, I've moved on. Just showing this as an example of Red's abilities to retrieve highlights.
You seem to like a lower light look, whereas I do like blooms, at least for a more stylized project. But I must say, your fundamental advice that blown out whites can detract from the filmic quality is good advice. Colour treated white fabrics are really useful (the actor's shirt was actually very pale beige in real life).
Note the rest of the image is sort of untreated, and not what I wanted as the final result. My finished shot doesn't have clipping on the actor's nose, for example. But there is obviously some matters of taste coming into play here.
Red has great advantages. It still doesn't have the latitude of film, however. One day our digital cameras will!
Below is an example of the information left in the collar. I roughly isolated it and it shows there is information there...right down to the make-up smudges. Yuck. I could do more work to completely squelch those highlights in the collar...but like I said, I've moved on. Just showing this as an example of Red's abilities to retrieve highlights.
You seem to like a lower light look, whereas I do like blooms, at least for a more stylized project. But I must say, your fundamental advice that blown out whites can detract from the filmic quality is good advice. Colour treated white fabrics are really useful (the actor's shirt was actually very pale beige in real life).
Note the rest of the image is sort of untreated, and not what I wanted as the final result. My finished shot doesn't have clipping on the actor's nose, for example. But there is obviously some matters of taste coming into play here.
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There's nothing wrong with the exposure of the 1st shot. OK maybe some information is lost in the window / collar area butI hate overexposed footage of lazy camera operator ,especially if its 25 thousand$ camera.
It doesnt look filmic ,because sometimes its too dark and sometimes footage is overexposed.It might sound rude but you really could put more work ,youve got expensive gear.
---
Anyway picture will tell much more than words, white shirt in your footage and white shirt in bourne 2:
In Bourne its not plain white cause its with blue lines on it buy you should get the point about exposure.
1) with film or Red there's enough latitude so the contrast rolls off in a less harsh way and looks just fine. Also
2) the shots are graded and lit completely differently for artistic / aesthetic / story telling reasons that have nothing to do with technical issues. You'll find film shots that look like the first grab in something like Devil's Rejects or anything else that's shot on film that's going for a high contrast, bleached, slightly blown out look. Your second grab is a low contrast, muted, somewhat desaturated but not bleached, more natural look.
3) IMHO, you're not looking at his collar if your' watching the movie / i.e, not looking for technical stuff to bag on. Someone who's watching the movie and giving it a chance will be looking at the face of the Dad character, maybe noticing how f'ed up / cool he looks and going back and forth from that to the Son character in the window. Not dipping down in between to check the exposure on the collar. #3, being, again, IMHO.
I also wouldn't be surprised either if the raw footage has a lot more information there than we're seeing due to the color grading.
Again nothing wrong with the exposure, that's a pleasing, properly exposed, interestingly composed shot.
If anything I thought it was a bit over filtered in general, trying too hard for soft looks which made it seem more like video to me because that's what people do with video all the time to make it look like film, or so they think, despite the fact that film has much more detail than video, with the exception of the Red and a few others. But anyway, I would lay off the soft filters. The contrast and color you're pushing is enough.
This one shot is not so bad ,he still has white nose which i would tone down with exposure ,there are a lot more shots in your short which i could copy , paste and compare to show whites ,like shots in the car.Anyway if you dont aiming for the film look and there is artistic choice to keep the whites then its different story,but most films arent like that so i pointed it out.
I know that most film audience dont "care" and dont see those kind of things but there is still a moment when your brain tells you "this is video" , "this is film" and you dont have to be an expert or have knowledge about CC ,it just looks videoish if whites are so visible all over the place.
I know that most film audience dont "care" and dont see those kind of things but there is still a moment when your brain tells you "this is video" , "this is film" and you dont have to be an expert or have knowledge about CC ,it just looks videoish if whites are so visible all over the place.
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Thanks for watching Jack. I wonder if I should add sharpening in my r3d transcoding and/or in color correcting. I'm not sure if "post filters" are always the culprit for me. Some shots don't even have "filters" per se, so I wonder if some of the softness is the camera's uncorrected OLPF effect. I don't do any sharpening, and I do read that most people do add some at some point with their R3Ds. I just finished another Red short and I would like to sharpen it appropriately. What do you do?
Justin Kuhn
Veteran
Good stuff! Liked it more than I thought I would. RED is a lot of camera for a web series.
Thanks Justin! I'm glad you took a moment to watch!
It is a lot of camera for the web, you're right. But don't you find you're always shooting dramas with a 35mm adapter anyway? I'm not as interested in the resolution (especially for web series, as you point out), but I do like the shallow depth of field. I made a bunch of shorts with a Redrock adapter, but it wore me out after a while. Adapters are just very fussy pieces of equipment. Red is just really heavy!
It is a lot of camera for the web, you're right. But don't you find you're always shooting dramas with a 35mm adapter anyway? I'm not as interested in the resolution (especially for web series, as you point out), but I do like the shallow depth of field. I made a bunch of shorts with a Redrock adapter, but it wore me out after a while. Adapters are just very fussy pieces of equipment. Red is just really heavy!