Jim Ritscher
Well-known member
Fun shoot.
Suggestion: the actor RECEIVING a punch needs to sell it.
Suggestion: the actor RECEIVING a punch needs to sell it.
League of Legends fan film, shot on a7S
- Thread starter Samuel H
- Start date
Samuel H
Major Contributor
I know, I know... The key word here is "actor", which is what they are not. In fact some of them don't even like wearing the costumes, what they really like is making them!
But still, other people shoot great stuff with non-actors so I can't hide too much behind that excuse. It's one of the reasons I sold the a7S and went for the RX100 IV: having a simpler camera in which I can set half the stuff to auto and it still looks great frees some time so I can put more effors into directing instead. Or at least that's the theory. We'll see.
And of course: thanks
Yes, gorgeous ladies indeed.
"facial expressions didnt always quite match the mood" may point to the moment where the lady in blue is on the floor and she smiles, and if that's the case it's not her fault but mine: she's smiling because it's an ambush, but the edit didn't make it clear enough and people leave confused. I should have gone for a closeup so it's absolutely clear it's not a mistake.
And thanks for the kind comments. I did put a lot of effort into the color side of the thing, in post, and I'm very happy with the final result (the only negative comments I got were from people who expected to see the usual washed out colors of most films and didn't want to take into account that it's supposed to be a video game).
I thought it was refreshing to see nice vibrant colors that were saturated but not overly so. They still looked pretty crisp for being so strong. I assume you shot 4k and downsized to 1080 giving you 444 color which would be nice and sharp. I find it nearly impossible at times to get a nice saturated look with 1080p footage because the colors just get so fuzzy.
Samuel H
Major Contributor
Well, thanks a lot
You'll be surprised: it's internal 1080p 8-bit 420 from the a7S.
I did some stuff different from what other people usually do, though:
- I graded with the vectorscope always in mind; I loaded reference images and took note of just how saturated individual colors were, and tried not to go above that.
- I shot with a lot of saturation in-camera (I set it to +14). Actually, just as much saturation as it wants to have if you're not going to apply a ton of contrast in post (I found that +15 value by matching the image of my spidercheckr to the reference color values; anything less than +15 means I end up with a desaturated image). These are my settings, and this is how they look straight out of the camera. Even though it is slog2 footage, it could be used almost just like that (it would just need a tweak in the black level). This does have a negative side effect: highlight clipping becomes a lot nastier, specially if it's the sky that is blue on one side and goes to white on the other: the transition will have a horrible halo of oversaturated nasty blues. Not a problem in this piece because the sky was white anyway.
It does show some artifacts, because of my limited color grading abilities: I pushed the grass in one direction and the red hair in a completely different one, so when it has motion blur it usually creates a nasty colored halo. Nobody complained so far, though. I guess the bad acting masked all these little things XD
You'll be surprised: it's internal 1080p 8-bit 420 from the a7S.
I did some stuff different from what other people usually do, though:
- I graded with the vectorscope always in mind; I loaded reference images and took note of just how saturated individual colors were, and tried not to go above that.
- I shot with a lot of saturation in-camera (I set it to +14). Actually, just as much saturation as it wants to have if you're not going to apply a ton of contrast in post (I found that +15 value by matching the image of my spidercheckr to the reference color values; anything less than +15 means I end up with a desaturated image). These are my settings, and this is how they look straight out of the camera. Even though it is slog2 footage, it could be used almost just like that (it would just need a tweak in the black level). This does have a negative side effect: highlight clipping becomes a lot nastier, specially if it's the sky that is blue on one side and goes to white on the other: the transition will have a horrible halo of oversaturated nasty blues. Not a problem in this piece because the sky was white anyway.
It does show some artifacts, because of my limited color grading abilities: I pushed the grass in one direction and the red hair in a completely different one, so when it has motion blur it usually creates a nasty colored halo. Nobody complained so far, though. I guess the bad acting masked all these little things XD