L4ST - Survival - Canon 5d mark III

M

maarek

Veteran
Hey guys, finally finished our little L4ST short. A bit inspired by "Last of Us" and lately even "DayZ". Three days of fast paced shooting (mostly evenings). All comments appreciated. (Shot in RAW)

EDIT (Now also Vimeo link)



Shot with the Canon 5d mark III using the raw mode. Mostly very low light so light was pushed a lot.

Some photos:


Last_of_us_V20_Orig_music_MIX.Still005 by hmcindie, on Flickr


_DSC2964 by hmcindie, on Flickr


_BK_4587-2 by hmcindie, on Flickr
 
Last edited:
Sorry guys, had to reupload (silly 24fps - 25fps mistake).

And yes, shot with the RAW mode. Took about 2 days to shoot.
 
And here's some backstory to go with it:

We recently embarked on an adventure. To shoot a shortfilm that is loosely inspired by “Last of Us” (and more recently even DayZ)- games. It would be in length somewhere around 5-10 minutes, with some action, horror and stunts but still focusing on the characters and their point-of-view. Survival would be the name of the game.

But we would shoot it on RAW. Specifically the Canon 5d mark III- RAW which Magic Lantern had enabled.

This turned out to be easier and also harder than I first imagined. We had shot some specific tests using the hack earlier, a couple of fights scenes and just nature. Stuff everyone does when they first try it out. So I was somewhat prepared for the postwork. But it actually changed the way I even shoot stuff. For the better.

Using the RAW- mode itself is easy. You just set the settings correct (framerate, resolution) and have a fast enough card. We were using the Transcend 1000x 128GB card which gave us about 25 minutes of 1920x860. I thought that was maybe enough if we just shot everything very meticulously.

But when we started shooting I realized a huge difference. Before RAW I was not even thinking that much, hurrying from shot to shot to get the coverage I needed for the edit. But now I couldn’t do that anymore. Because of having only one card and transferring 128GB stuff took a long time, I had to develop my shooting skills. I had to shoot like shooting with film. Thinking about shots.

No more would I take a shot if we didn’t plan it first. I couldn’t just wave the camera around yelling orders and just take a bunch of random nonsense. I had to slowdown. This actually really improved my shooting. As someone who had never gone through filmschool and just started shooting with cams in the DVX100 era, I had developed this method of “just shoot”. Which meant that I wouldn’t really tinker that much with shots after awhile. RAW- and the difficulties in shooting with it actually improved my skills. Which I really didn’t think would happen.

We ran into a bunch of problems when the card inevitably ran out and had to wait hours for stuff to transfer (I didn’t think we would run out so that computer we were transferring to had only USB2.0). The camera also sometimes did a hardlock or screwed a shot. But those didn’t happen that ofter to be a real problem. They were little nuisances. But the gradability of the shots just jumped out. We shot everything in very low light, with a lot of ISO 3200. RAW- really handled that lighting well. There was noise but it was organic. A bit of sensor pattern in the dark areas but manageable.

Postwork was a bit time consuming because I was going through AE, doing the DNxHD-files for the edit and grading. After “firstlight” in AE, I never want back to the original RAW- files. The DNxHD’s were good enough through the whole post-process.

What I learned is... Sometimes the difficulty and limits of shooting (in my case, shot limits) makes you think and that can prove to be more fruitful than getting it all easy.
 
Very cool.

If you want some critique, I would say the weakest bit are the visual effects. Make those just a little bit better and this thing is A-grade, ready for any network.

I really like the concept of resource constraints (the weight of RAW footage) improving the final result because they make you think more about what you're doing.
 
Samuel H said:
If you want some critique, I would say the weakest bit are the visual effects. Make those just a little bit better and this thing is A-grade, ready for any network.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the critique. Yeah, it definitely suffers a bit from the "one man syndrome". I did have help from Jeffrey Timbrell for the matte paintings but as I did the compositing myself, they suffered a bit. Same thing with the sound effects. Had to do them by myself.
 
Well, don't get me wrong: it's a great acomplishment for one-man post work, and overall the short is much better than anything I could do (at any step, from shooting to finishing). Great clip overall. But if you're looking for the weakest link, I think it's that one.
 
Great work! from technical POV imho:
Clipped highlights, overall look shows it could've been done in regular Mov mode. Do not see Raw advantage here.
 
OlegKalyan said:
Great work! from technical POV imho:
Clipped highlights, overall look shows it could've been done in regular Mov mode. Do not see Raw advantage here.
Click to expand...

A lot of ISO 3200, shadows boosted up a huge amount.

The parking garage scene had a flashlight that was absolutely ridiculous in power, not even 14 stops could've saved us there. When you have complete darkness and a huge flashlight you will clip those highlights, no matter what camera you have. Had to constantly bounce it from walls. But RAW did let us recover quite a lot. Without RAW... man.

Besides, the little clipping worked wonderfully and it gave it a look that is different than a lot of stuff that's shot with more lights.

I'm gonna put this on Vimeo soon so people can see it a bit better without Youtube compressing it all to hell.
 
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