Let's play poker ... Yet another first DVX film

VizPictures

VizPictures

Active member
Here is my first project shot on a DVX. It is 8mn long. Everything except the original score from Penderecki was done with the DVX.
We had three Lowell DP lights that were very bright and tough to control.
We shot on a DVX 25P in squeeze mode.

It's my project from an evening directing workshop I took this spring. I posted a few screen grabs several weeks ago but hadn't been able to post the whole thing until now.
The deal was to use the dialogues from some existing scene of our choice, discard the rest and adapt the scene our own way.
I kinda have an idea of what works and what doesn't but I'll let you watch.
We learned a lot shooting this thing ... more than during the class itself ;-)

http://www.vizpictures.com/ahappywedding/ahappywedding.php
 
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I really enjoyed this. I held my attention throughout and had a very 'cinemamatic' flaire to it. I am not familiar with the source material (Penderecki by Morell? Is that a short or.....?)

Nevertheless; the edit was tight and your comps and framing were orginal and well done. You didnt appear to be shy with moving the camera around. The talent was nice; not great but not at all bad with some polishing.

25p? Why? (Curious)

It looks almost XL2ish. IN fact, when it first started I could have swore it was an XL2. Did you mess with any Scene Files other than it being deon 25p? (Thisis not at all a dis on the project. I just notice a bump in the cadence that's all!)

Our Hansk shot this!

Anyway; bravo. Well done! I enjoyed it! It had a nice phychological edge to it and the score was nice as it jumped around on the strings.
 
Nice. I loved that guys acting, the girl's was alright(better towards the end). I liked the composition and camera movement but I did not like some of the editing. The music wasn't that great either. Good setting for this short. Overall, I enjoyed it all the way through. Funny, I am currently rewritting(salvaging) a short film that will have nothing but ADR(though it is not from an existing scene) and have that same unsynced look to it.
 
good stuff. This was really lit up. I only watched it through once and wasnt watching for any mistakes but I did notice on a close up of the guy that when he was walking around his whole face and neck and under his chin was lit up. No shadows at all, kind of looked odd. the rest was great. I dont undertand the ending.. if she dished it out like that doesnt she know that he will get her back unless she kills him? Isnt that how movies are? :)
Brian
 
VizPictures has his location as California. Either that is not his location, or he meant to put 24p or he brought in a foreign camera for some reason.
 
Nice job! That was really well done. The only thing I could see changing about that, would be some of the lighting(an even darker tone of the house would've been great) and the acting. The man was decent, but somebody should've loosened the girl up a bit. overall, awesome!
 
and I forgot to mention a few certain shots and the score. Gave me a similar feeling to the feeling I get when I watch American Psycho. I really liked that.
 
John_Hudson said:
Our Hansk shot this!
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Good catch John. :thumbsup: Yes, I was DP on this.

hectorxd said:
Either that is not his location, or he meant to put 24p or he brought in a foreign camera for some reason.
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Heh heh you are all such a suspicious group! :cheesy:

Yes, the camera used was a DVX PAL 25p version. The director is from overseas in the land of PAL but now here in CA.


Thanks for all the comments. Lighting was the hardest part of the entire shoot. Especially with the number of shots and setups we had. I have a lot of respect for those that master it.
 
Yes I'm in California with a non Californian name that many have nicknamed Viz since it was soooo fun to pronounce ;-) particularly at the grocery store "Thanks Mr Vizzzzz....." :shocked:

The 25P reason?
There are many reasons actually that may be valid or not, and until true HD we're all stuck with a choice PAL vs NTSC and their problems.

I think I started to think about it the day I saw Full Frontal shot in PAL by Soderberg on the XL1, before any 24P was on the market.
Second I never liked the NTSC format, it's bad acronym reputation, and having to fool around with pulldowns. I never tried it though and what I see posted here looks amazing. I just red many posts and listened to people's experiences and it pushed me toward PAL. I already knew this format a bit but that didn't interfere in my decision since the audience would be NTSC anyway (or, in my caziest dreams, film, which in this case people say a 4% slow down is not noticeable).
Cleaner does an amazing good job at converting to NTSC when I want to send out a DVD, so I don't have much trouble with that.
A year ago, I didn't know squat about almost anything. I had just a small pany single ccd camcoder and with a friend over a week-end, for fun we shot The Hook, a short film that we thought would end up in a drawer. Instead it ended up in a local festival and is now posted on my web site :-) I was so pleasently surprised by the fun of the process that I wanted to try to learn that craft, and do more and better.
On a big screen, The Hook looked nasty so I thought, better sounded first like 3CCD, bigger chip and then higher resolution. PAL is 720x576 instead of 720x480, ending up in 40% more square pixels in 1024x576 instead of 853x480 (for 16/9).
I thought PAL would be better for almost anything.
I play a bit with 3ds Max and maybe soon with Combustion so I wanted the highest resolution for textures, cropping, ...
Cropping the footage to 1:2.35 ends up in 435 lines. One can always dream but in case of a blow up it seems the quality would be higher.
For keying, but then again I didn't know anything about the 4:2:0 in PAL vs 4:1:1 in NTSC and the problems involved, I thought a higher resolution would solve many problems.

This was all last year when I bought the DVX here at Safer Seas (now closed). Also the guy at Safer Seas told me that many local guys were shooting on PAL because of the reasons exposed here so it pushed me a bit more in that direction. Since then, I've done no keying, no 1:2.35, no Max stuff (except recently the egg episode 10), we've just shot one film and the HVX is coming up very soon. I may have spent extra bucks for not having used the full potential of this higher resolution but I don't regret it, I think I'd do it again. On my plasma HD I see the full potential of it :) and the PAL version comes with a 5400mAh battery.
Hopefully I'll see the results one day on the big screen.
 
Nice job guys! The camera work on this was extremely professional. That alone amped up the production value. Did you guys use a dolly or a crane/jib or both? Do tell.

HansK. Please dish out stories on the camera work and cinematography. Your thought process, planning, inspiration, equipment, problems, etc. I'm dying to pick your brain! (and the Zombie fest isnt even here yet...)
 
John_Hudson said:
I really enjoyed this. I held my attention throughout and had a very 'cinemamatic' flaire to it. I am not familiar with the source material (Penderecki by Morell? Is that a short or.....?)
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Hi John, thanks for the feedback.
Penderecki is the composer of the score. Some tough music to listen on a CD but that goes very well on film. His music was used on several films like Fearless, The Exorcist or The Shining to name a few.

John_Hudson said:
Nevertheless; the edit was tight and your comps and framing were orginal and well done. You didnt appear to be shy with moving the camera around. The talent was nice; not great but not at all bad with some polishing.
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I love smooth camera movements and wanted to try to have it in constant move. I built a home made dolly for that and bought a cheap jig on ebay (a bit too cheap I think). I tried to build a steadicam but never managed to finish it. Buidling a gimbal cheaply without any correct tool is almost impossible.

John_Hudson said:
25p? Why? (Curious)
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For some reasons explained in another answer. Might not be valid for others but those were my reasons.

John_Hudson said:
It looks almost XL2ish. IN fact, when it first started I could have swore it was an XL2. Did you mess with any Scene Files other than it being deon 25p? (Thisis not at all a dis on the project. I just notice a bump in the cadence that's all!)
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I think I've seen only a screen grab of the XL2. You mean the look is too video? Thanks for detailing.
I started from the scene 5 and changed it according to what Hans advised me to do as I didn't know yet what all those settings were doing. I knew a few though, but not all. The exact settings were:

Frame rate: 25p
Detail Level: -4
V Detail Level: 0
Detail coring: 0
Chroma Level: -3
Chroma Phase: 0
Color Temp: 0
Master ped: -5
Matrix: Normal
A. Iris Level: -1
Gamma: Cine-Like_D
Matrix: cine-like
Knee: auto
V. Detail Freq: Thin
Skin tone: off
Shuter speed 1/50

I'm surprised by the "bump in the cadence". What do you mean exactly? You could see it was not 24P?

John_Hudson said:
Our Hansk shot this!
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:) I don't know if he's "yours", but yes that's him. I've known him for a while. Last spring he saw a directing book in my hands. We started to talk video and discovered we both had a DVX and the same passion. I was really happy to work with him, a very nice and pleasant guy to work with, very patient, very pro.
 
Robert86 said:
Nice. I loved that guys acting, the girl's was alright(better towards the end). I liked the composition and camera movement but I did not like some of the editing. The music wasn't that great either. Good setting for this short. Overall, I enjoyed it all the way through. Funny, I am currently rewritting(salvaging) a short film that will have nothing but ADR(though it is not from an existing scene) and have that same unsynced look to it.
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Thanks for the feedback on the acting. That's very helpful. Any other comment on that part from others is highly welcome.
Robert, what part of the editing didn't you like? Can you be more specific?
Can you also detail the unsynched look you're talking about?
Thanks
 
I'm surprised by the "bump in the cadence". What do you mean exactly? You could see it was not 24P?
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Something definately felt off; just not 'Not 24p'.

I never heard any of these 'issues with 24p' and haven't seen too many 'Locals' using a PAL format. No matter; content is King anyway.

Again; good job. I like a physchological thriller.

I don't know if he's "yours"
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Oh yeah; he's our's alright.
 
mentatDUKE said:
HansK. Please dish out stories on the camera work and cinematography. Your thought process, planning, inspiration, equipment, problems, etc. I'm dying to pick your brain!
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Thanks for the interest.

We decided it was important to create a storyboard for the short before doing any shooting. Instead of creating hand drawn frames/images we chose to use a digital camera and capture shots. We would use an actor or one of the crew and block a scene. Once we had a storyboard we were able to better visualize shots and actually found a few problems. For example, we would have broken the Line of Action in a couple of shots. Catching those problems early saved us a huge amount of time later on. The storyboard also helped us determine a shooting order and group like shots and setups together. Again, saving us time later on.

The director "VizPictures" provided the equipment (which he lists in a previous comment). I brought mine for backup but didn't need to use it. The jib was nice and afforded us some interesting shots. But, because it was an inexpensive model, it also gave us problems because of wobble and shake. That's something to think about when buying one. Since we also had a dolly I looked into using it along with the jib. For example, the shot when the women enters the house, walks down the hall, then around and into the kitchen uses both the dolly and the jib. In shooting that scene I had the actress make several practice runs to get the timing down and then we did the live runs.

We also used an external 16:9 LCD monitor so that we could see the entire widescreen image. The monitor was important and necessary for some of the dolly/jib shots. But the color on the monitor was way off so we did not use that for color reference.

Problems? The number one problem was lighting. Both of us are just learning lighting. It was the most time consuming of all the setups. There were a few shots where I could not get the lighting right. Time forced us to go with what we had and that sucked. But that's reality. We also didn't use enough light in some scenes. The DVX really wants light. If the shot calls for a darker scene, do that with ND filters and/or in post. Do some lighting tests to become familiar with what the DVX likes.

I guess this info just scrapes the surface but I hope it helps.
 
Very Nice
Your camera movement really worked . . .
Looks great . . . very nice . . . .
"Sword in the Stone"
Foley is excellent . . . .
We should look into raising money this way . . .

I love it!

He's Hot!

Nice Job . . .
 
To follow Hans' description of the process, here's the storyboard that we did. The full thing is posted here:
http://www.vizpictures.com/ahappywedding/storyboard/

As Hans said in his post, it was very useful to catch many mistakes early on. We could then forget about thinking while shooting and just follow the shot list. It saved a lot of time. Two mistakes were caught a few hours before shooting, too late to fix the storyboard itself, but early enough to write it down and improvise a fix during the shoot.

storyboard.jpg
 
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