SHORT: Ghost Town Showdown - A Western Short Film

[wannabeapilot]

Hey DVXers!

After countless hours spent in pre production, 2 long filming days, and weeks in the edit bay.

We finally completed "Ghost Town Showdown"



The idea for this short was originally conceived more than a year ago, and went through numerous script revisions, and delays.

The primary difficulty as I'm sure everyone knows, is that when all the cast, and crew are working for free scheduling can be a nightmare.

To compound that issue, the location was only available during the week, and not on the weekends, so everyone had to take 2 days off of work to get the filming completed.

Costumes, and props were not really a difficult aspect of making this, but it does take time to find items with the right look.

We ended up shooting in December, and in Texas the hours of usable light are fairly short in the winter.

We had till roughly 4pm each day before the light was unusable.

High winds did play a little bit of havoc with our diffusion cloth mounted on two c-stands, but we had enough sandbags to make sure it didn't fly loose.

Feel free to ask me questions about anything related to the video, and please don't hesitate to comment with your thoughts

 

[rustyrehl]

I like that guy's mustache and I like the twist. What was this shot on? What did you record the sound with? And I wanted there to be more blood.

 

[wannabeapilot]

I like that guy's mustache and I like the twist. What was this shot on? What did you record the sound with? And I wanted there to be more blood.

Thanks for watching rustyrehl!

We shot on the Sony PMW F5 in 4k - Slog2.

We recorded sound with a rode NTG3 inside the rode blimp directly into the camera.

Haha we wanted more too, but decided to keep it mostly family friendly.

 

[rustyrehl]

Rad. Thanks for posting those BTS pics. Those are great! That slider looks amazing what kind is it? Also where can I get a scrim like the one you have? Any tips on places to get cheap grip gear?

 

[wannabeapilot]

Rad. Thanks for posting those BTS pics. Those are great! That slider looks amazing what kind is it? Also where can I get a scrim like the one you have? Any tips on places to get cheap grip gear?

Sure thing!

It is the dana dolly
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...olly_ddurk1_portable_dolly_system_rental.html

It's been great, we load it down with about 50lbs of equipment, and its buttery smooth.

For the scrim we spent about $30 to build it from pvc pipe, and a bedsheet.
Here's a pretty good tutorial on how to make one cheap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DaSjG74-WU

 

[KenzoFKC]

Nice work! LOVE the location. Would have enjoyed seeing much more of it! I've often kicked around the idea of shooting a Western, but there aren't any locales in my region (PNW) that have quite that look you've found here. I don't find anything to fault with any of technical aspects of the short, everything looked great. I do believe you could realistically trim 3-5 minutes from this and result with a better film because of it. Understanding that it can be very difficult to "kill your darlings" and trim things that you're particularly attached to, there is a lot of dialogue in the one location that bogs this short film down. But that's just like, my opinion, man! Overall I thought you guys created a pretty excellent piece here!