"Lime, mint" full short film

G

Giles Sherwood

Member
Haha, so a while back I posted stills from my recent short film and they went over really well (/sarcasm), so I've decided to post the full thing!

http://www.rit.edu/~gps5461/film/lime.html

It was shot in 720p/24n with a Nikon M2 setup. Again, a sharp, clean, grain-free image wasn't the look I was going for, as the look of the film was sort of inspired by polaroids and amateur photography that sort of characterizes the MySpace generation.

Some people think I shot this on 16mm, some people think it looks like 3rd generation VHS... I'm curious to hear all opinions :D

Cheers,
Giles
 
My favorite cinematography scenes are the bathroom scenes and when the guy's girlfriend is ripping up the paper. By the way, what was she ripping up? I didn't catch that.

I like the grain and the depth of field. It was kind of an escape. The overexposure was interesting too (which I also loved).

Some shots had some blurred vignetting. It kinda distracted me. Was it because of the M2?

The storyline was somewhat non-linear. Was there a purpose to this?

The story seemed simple. I'm thinking there is a vague message to this film, or am I just shooting for the stars here?

Overall, I enjoyed this little excerpt of yours very much.

thanks.
 
i didn't follow the story as it wasn't that clear to me, but the scenes where there was proper lighting looked best to me- most notably some of the exterior scenes with natural sunlight, when the guy was throwing the tennis ball against the brick wall outside, etc. i didn't mind the blown out sunlight.

the grainy shots didn't look all that good to me, it just looked like you didn't have enough light and turned up the gain. i did that on a coupla scenes on my last short and the first thing a non-film person asked me was "why does it look so grainy??"

i noticed vignetting in some shots also.

i didnt see your screenshots or the last thread so feel free to ignore my comments if it was one of those threads where there was a lot of arguing and debate over stylistic choices you made.
 
Beautifull girl, and some lovely shots.
I felt the grain was too 'gain-like' on the underlit interiors, and some of your blacks were clipped, hence the 'one-dark-eyed' look of the girl sitting at the table in the scene with the bluey-blacks.

Loved the bathroom scene, tearing paper, outside chalk shot (including the ball rolling back-in frame) and blown whites.

What was the song playing when they danced at the end? I tried the names in iTunes you listed in the credits, but no luck.

Some very tender scenes there, well done.
 
Hey everyone, thanks for the input.

Unfortunately, yeah, there was some vignetting (the M2 motor peeps in during the shot of them in bed :\) and some blurring. The wide angle lens I used was really soft to begin with, and I'm sure the unit got knocked out of alignment on a few shots. If I ever get the chance to use an M2 again, I'm definitely hard-mounting it, and I'm definitely going to make sure I have better lenses to use. The 50mm looked beautiful, but the 28mm was terrible.

The storyline was non-linear as sort of a way of presenting a problem first, then providing the exposition instead of the other way around. Opening in media res right after a punch had been thrown seemed really exciting to me, and when I thought of the writing on the mirror and sidewalk as transitions I decided skipping around would be more exciting than referring to past events. Unfortunately, the timeline got slightly more jostled during editing because of flow issues, and a couple people have complained it's hard to follow. Most people seem to get it though, so all I can do is try harder next time haha.

As for a message, I try not to do messages, but hopefully the film showed some insight into its characters and was truthful to the themes?

And yeah, she was tearing up letters from her boyfriend.

The song at the end was done by my friend Evan Younger. People keep asking me about it, so I should tell him to put it up on the web so folks can get to it :D

As for style, if you don't like a particularly grainy look, you don't like it, and that's cool. The one scene I went too far with is the scene where they're talking in bed... it's also the worst-written scene in the film, I think :\ I agree that sometimes the "grain" looks like "gain" and I didn't really fight against that because it's simply what happens when you underexpose video (which I often did by like 4 stops on purpose), but I will say that the overall grain structure of the film works a lot better at 720p of course :P

I'm not sure what you mean by "one dark eye," though, Electricpig... they've got raccoon eyes by design, but you're saying she's only got one dark eye?

Thanks to everyone for their comments, I really appreciate the compliments and the criticisms.
 
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