Making a film? Great! Your friends are starring in it? Be careful...

Hey, watched your short. While I agree that the sound was the project's major downfall, I loved the cinematography. I'd love to know more about your setups. How many/what types of lights were you using? And how did you fake the rain? Looked excellent.
 
The shots were composed well, but I thought the lighting could have used more work. It seemed a little flat to me.

Also, it took you 8 hours to shoot that?? Not to be pompous, but what exactly took you so long to shoot something so short? Originally, it was going to be 10 minutes?? Bring in that other footage so I don't have my doubts. I work incredibly fast to get a product done, and I'm in awe when you tell me that that took 8 hours to shoot. I think I could have shot that in 2 hours at most.

The sound was a little wacky, but overall it wasn't that bad. I've done with some horrible actors, and these actors weren't that bad, they just didn't show any emotion.
 
haha it took my crew and I 3 hours to get 3 seconds-worth of footage we could use. We were able to get great footage though.
 
I was co-DP on the film. I kinda figured that the cinematography would be the strongest part of the film. The other DP and I were pretty much it as far as production experience was concerned. It was a learning experience for all of us in many ways.

Framing was the most important thing for me. I figured if we could only jump out of the 4:3 mindset and provide some halfway interesting visuals we would be ahead of the game already. Specially since there was little dialog. A few times I threw objects in the scene that were not there before just to make it a little more interesting. Like the saw on the inside long shot. It was put like 5 feet of the ground for that.

The Lighting was actually just a few spots and a banks of work lights....you can get it all @ home depot. My lighting experience before this was mostly budget minded corporate video 3-point kind of stuff. Thanks for the compliments on it. We all thought it turned out pretty well. Doing a night shoot with "rain" may not be the wisest idea for a crew's first project together tho.

Believe it or not the rain was just a hose. We never actually moved the hose or followed the actor that i remember either. The other trick in some spots where we could not backlight the rain well was to film backlit rain against a black sky and then do a gentle overlay in vegas.

The sound was definitely an achilles heel for the production. Much of the site audio was unusable because of an annoying hum from the beachtek box we rented. The audio recorded in post was using the original as an audio guide track for the flashback. The problem was that there were only two lines from the original dialog, and the actor was anxious to get it over with. Also, it just needed more time to get it all right together.

As far as the time taken. We had like 16 different shots to break down and set-up for. Really it was only the other DP and I doing most of that since we were taking care of the camera and lighting. Granted, it did go way faster the 2nd night when we already had all of our lighting schemes established. Still, I am suspect that anybody could have done the shoot in 2 hrs. in our situation.
 
Well, here is my humle openion.

Technically, I think this looked really great, the rain got me really immersed i must say. I have a short wave radio at my room, which I usually play with at night to intercept some foregin language radio channels, that radio really freaks me out some times. Now sound of the radio in the movie was great, gave me goosebumps. Another thing that really gave me goosebumps was when that scary girl laying there, just suddenly "woke up", I though she had turned into a crazy zombie or something. Now this is probably going to give me a nightmare or two.

Story-wise, I did not really like it. The end didn't really give me any concrete answers, and did not please me at all. I don't have anything more to say about that.

But overall, a great movie. :)
 
MiniMan said:
Well, here is my humle openion.

Technically, I think this looked really great, the rain got me really immersed i must say. I have a short wave radio at my room, which I usually play with at night to intercept some foregin language radio channels, that radio really freaks me out some times. Now sound of the radio in the movie was great, gave me goosebumps. Another thing that really gave me goosebumps was when that scary girl laying there, just suddenly "woke up", I though she had turned into a crazy zombie or something. Now this is probably going to give me a nightmare or two.

Story-wise, I did not really like it. The end didn't really give me any concrete answers, and did not please me at all. I don't have anything more to say about that.

But overall, a great movie. :)
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Honestly, I think you really hit it on the head. The end doesn't give any concrete answers. This is just a small piece to a much larger puzzle. Our goal was to generate interest and buzz. (Or at least, that was my goal, since there's a feature length script that goes along with it.)
 
Visuals were great. I have seen a million independent shorts and you guys definately have a good sense of lighting. Well done. The story was limited but I felt that there was something exciting there if you had more time to weave the story. Yes the audio was not good but for not having any experience I would say it wasn't half bad. Jay Rose's book on audio is a great primer for novice audio.

http://www.dplay.com/book/pgs2e/index.html

After a good screenplay, getting good actors is critical to taking your audience on a ride. I think this is another common mistake first timers make, casting people from a limited pool of friends or novice actors. If you cast a wide net and put as much time into casting as you do to the screenplay, you can discover some really talented actors. It really pays off in the final product and makes the production experience much more enjoyable.

Good luck and keep at it (no doubt there is real talent there).
 
The lighting looked fantastic. The dutch angles were also really nice. I will not comment on the sound, since I have crappy speakers on my computer. I would be interested in how you achieved that rain, because it looked awesome! That could have been on a big budget feature, and nobody would have ever second guessed that. I was caught up more in looking at the visuals so honestly I did not really pay much attention to the acting or to the story. Great looking visuals here guys!
 
You're listenin to 666.6, the Devil, bringing you today's top 40 hits.

The rain turned out great. And I like the edit at the end where the speed ramps when he bags the cops head.
 
Just saw it. I thought it was good. It kept me interested and wanted to see more. The footsteps sounded very nice, it being a horror type of movie sound effects are very important.

Problems:

1. Sound of footsteps does go out of sync with his walking (sound is faster) around the 29 sec. mark.
2. The Dutch angles were a nice choice but were a little too dutch (too angled), the first one more so than the second one (I like the low angle dutch on the first one though).

Other than that I thought it was all in all a nice little project. Keep up the good work.
 
Max Lewis said:
Just saw it. I thought it was good. It kept me interested and wanted to see more. The footsteps sounded very nice, it being a horror type of movie sound effects are very important.

Problems:

1. Sound of footsteps does go out of sync with his walking (sound is faster) around the 29 sec. mark.
2. The Dutch angles were a nice choice but were a little too dutch (too angled), the first one more so than the second one (I like the low angle dutch on the first one though).

Other than that I thought it was all in all a nice little project. Keep up the good work.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the kind words.

I actually just took down the film after realizing that it's not the right version. This version shouldn't have the gun cocking sound. The footsteps are off. A few things like that.

We're going to do a little bit more work on it. I'm going to get some behind the scenes footage together. Then I'll post the final film and bts on the web.

We're all excited to work on another project.
 
Thats a bummer that all your prep didn't really pay off. but on the plus side! you learned alot.

Actually one of my films made it on the screen wars comedy episode (i never got to see it). And for us it was something we just did for fun then the director of our filmschool asked if we had something to submit (I met the producer of screen wars 2 weeks before).


Basically we took about 10 mins for a concept. About 40min of shooting. Then 1hr of editing. it made it in, didnt win an award. I was suprised though that it just made it in!

good luck in the future :thumbsup:
 
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