"Malfunction" a GH2 narrative short

Ben_B

Ben_B

Veteran

"Two computer hackers hit some snags while attempting to steal a valuable piece of information."

Created as a senior exit project for my bachelor's in Film and Digital Media (with a concentration in production) from the University of California, Santa Cruz. (Class of 2011.)

I would love to hear your questions and comments!

Filmed with Lumix DMC-GH2
1080/24p Cinema mode.

Lenses (in order of frequency of usage in project):
Olympus F. Zuiko 38mm f/1.8
Lumix G Vario 7-14mm f/4.0 Asph.
Lumix G 20mm f/1.7 Asph.
Lumix G Vario 14-140mm f/4.0-5.8 Asph.
Sigma 24mm f/1.8 EX DG Asph. Macro
Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4
 
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Very Nice!
Shows off what the GH2 is capable of. Sharp, detailed images.

Can't wait to get mine.

Well shot, good sound and involving storyline.
 
Lighting, camera work, beautiful... loved almost every frame. Well done. Acting was pretty stiff across the board and the characters were too young for the parts they seemed to be playing. I see it was a school project but I think you should always try to get age appropriate actors if your story requires it, the only guy who looked the appropriate age was the guy at the keyboard (I think that's you?). The other thing I would suggest to improve is the sound design. The dialogue is all nice, clear and snappy, but there seems to be a like of atmosphere... especially during the computer glitching scenes... the sound there could be much more dramatic.

But all in all a very high quality overall product and much cleaner than my final project in college!
 
seanmcleod said:
Lighting, camera work, beautiful... loved almost every frame. Well done. Acting was pretty stiff across the board and the characters were too young for the parts they seemed to be playing. I see it was a school project but I think you should always try to get age appropriate actors if your story requires it, the only guy who looked the appropriate age was the guy at the keyboard (I think that's you?). The other thing I would suggest to improve is the sound design. The dialogue is all nice, clear and snappy, but there seems to be a like of atmosphere... especially during the computer glitching scenes... the sound there could be much more dramatic.

But all in all a very high quality overall product and much cleaner than my final project in college!
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Nope not me :) Interestingly enough he's actually the youngest one of the actors...just goes to show you that it's really hard to tell what's what sometimes with these things.

I like the atmospheric sounds in the forest and in the dark room but I agree it could probably use some more in the other places. It's mixed for speakers with a heavy subwoofer (for the screening which was in a theater) but I think this ended up being at the expense of headphones and small speakers...its hard to hear some of the sounds that really jumped out in a nice way on a larger speaker system.

Glad you liked the film!
 
nicely done, Ben.

apart from the acting and age (like Sean said) it's a very impressive work, for a school project.
for my taste, when choosing this kind of story, you have to be extra careful with credibility, not to put out too much details.

shooting was good.
nice colors, skin tones, and camerawork.
huh, and people say the canons look better... i just don't get it.

btw, all the night shots- what were the settings?and post work?
 
I have a set of KRK speakers so I should be able to hear that as well... maybe some low end got cut in the encoding on vimeo...

And I didn't mean the guy at the computer looked older necessarily, just that a hacker type could typically be played by a younger dude because of the nature of the work. The mastermind and boss as a young girl doesn't seem as authentic.
 
roei z said:
nicely done, Ben.

apart from the acting and age (like Sean said) it's a very impressive work, for a school project.
for my taste, when choosing this kind of story, you have to be extra careful with credibility, not to put out too much details.

shooting was good.
nice colors, skin tones, and camerawork.
huh, and people say the canons look better... i just don't get it.

btw, all the night shots- what were the settings?and post work?
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Thanks! I sort of tried to avoid details (we don't see the screens that much, etc) and the other parts are allegory so yeah.

The night shots were done at either ISO 800 or 1600 (I don't think I ever went near 3200) with the Olympus F. Zuiko 38mm f/1.8 (wide open I believe) for that first closeup shot, and the two of the church building were with the 20mm f/1.7...I am guessing stopped down slightly to f/2.0 or f/2.8 or something. Did the rack focus and tilt on the church shot with just a naked camera and a tripod and no AC...took a few tries, had to get a crazy homeless guy out of the shot too! These were 1/30th of a second shutter with Cinema color mode, contrast -2, sharpness +1, NR -2, sat +/- 0. They were lit (in addition to the streetlights and these large overhead lights above the church steps) with this neat LED work light (its rugged, rechargeable, can light two different things since its hinged, is magnetic to stick it to things, and basically acts as its own stand or handle) with a large orange gel over it. http://www.amazon.com/Cooper-Lighting-Might-D-Light-LED130-Rechargeable/dp/B002T4AEGK

seanmcleod said:
I have a set of KRK speakers so I should be able to hear that as well... maybe some low end got cut in the encoding on vimeo...

And I didn't mean the guy at the computer looked older necessarily, just that a hacker type could typically be played by a younger dude because of the nature of the work. The mastermind and boss as a young girl doesn't seem as authentic.
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Right I gotcha. I was sort of trying for it to be a little off, I like the idea of taking someone who seems very innocent and having them not be that, but I totally understand that it might not have worked.
 
Wow - looks delicious. Great work on the lighting and mise-en-scene. Lovely skin tones. What were your settings in the daylight scenes?

The GH2 is so good at $900 - or at any price for that matter. Now we have no excuses.
 
Very nicely done, Ben. I started watching to see how the GH2 did (very well), but kept watching for the story.

For the Rorschach looking guy-- did you have him wear a chroma green balaclava and then key it out or what?
 
Sam Scoggins said:
Wow - looks delicious. Great work on the lighting and mise-en-scene. Lovely skin tones. What were your settings in the daylight scenes?

The GH2 is so good at $900 - or at any price for that matter. Now we have no excuses.
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Thanks!

Same as night scenes, Cinema with the settings listed above. For lighting the computer room I used two lowell caselights (they're like mini kino-flos, with two florescent tubes each in a mirrored box with two mirrored barndoors. You can probably see them in her glasses but they have the diegetic explanation of being computer screens...can't clearly see that they're lights, just light sources.

The scene in the dark room was NOT lit by just that lightbulb (which is something that people with these cameras might try to do which I don't understand.) It was lit from camera right by a 1K arri light (very high up on a large stand, like, 15 feet in the air) with a 650 for fill. I then pumped up the contrast a bit in post for more of that low-key lighting look. I selected a very low-wattage bulb (38 I think) to hang from the ceiling so that once I exposed properly for the scene with proper film lights you'd get to see more of the inside of the bulb and we'd avoid that infamous halation from that zacuto test. (oh right..they lit that scene with just a lightbulb...hmmm.)

For the city day I brought a reflector but it didn't get that much use because it was pretty cloudy and the light was pretty diffuse. I used the intelligent dynamic range control on the GH2 to bring out a bit more DR in the ultrawide shot with the airplane. For the last day shot of the city (main guy walking toward the camera in a wider shot) the sun was going down (it looked remarkably beautiful down the other way of the street) so I put him facing the way he was so the light would hit him and we'd get nice light on everything from that and not have to worry about exposing for a really bright sky.

For the forest I used reflectors and also just waited around to get the light right for particular shots. The nature of the way I was shooting the scene also meant I could move the actors around a bit and cheat the positioning in order to get the lighting nice on each of them.

BrandonT said:
Very nicely done, Ben. I started watching to see how the GH2 did (very well), but kept watching for the story.

For the Rorschach looking guy-- did you have him wear a chroma green balaclava and then key it out or what?
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Thanks!

He was wearing this green pantyhose type thing and I was going to key it out but so much of his skin showed through that the colors got a little off so what I ended up doing was rotoscoping it (but I used the rotobrush for most and the green really helped, then cleaned things up with masks...had to traditional rotoscoping on something like one shot.) The resolution on the GH2 was so good that the rotobrush was actually able to keep up even on most of the forest shots where it was green on green.

Then I used mocha to motion track him and mapped that to the offset and rotation of the fractal noise generator making those patterns. Originally I was only planning on doing something like having a sort of blurred skin-tone plain look but then I was fooling around and really liked the fractal thing...but that then meant motion tracking everything which I hadn't planned for when I shot (would've put track points on his face) but I think it came out pretty well...mocha is a pretty amazing (and really fast and easy to use for this sort of thing) piece of software.
 
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#filmstat -v
Active Filmstat connections
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp4 37 0 photo.quality.score good.photowork.com ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 lighting.quality.score good.lighting.com ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 sex.for.sex.sake.edu disappointed.com CONNECTION DOWN
tcp4 0 0 pacing.film.score need.shorter.scenes CLOSE_WAIT
tcp4 0 0 over.all.com good.effort.tv ESTABLISHED
#uname -a
Darwin Film-Critic.local 10.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.6.0: Wed Nov 10 18:13:17 PST 2010; root:xnu-1504.9.26~3/RELEASE_I386 i386
 
For those watching this to look for GH2 image quality I tried to compress it as little as possible but it still softened things up a bit. The perceived higher resolution you get from watching it in the normal vimeo window (not full screen) matches the actual resolution of the original on a 1080p screen, at least to my eye. I am very pleased with the sharpness the camera produced and am a bit bummed that some of it was lost in web compression (though not at all surprised.) So anyway, if looking for quality, watch it smaller and just know that you can expect that kind of quality at full res out of the camera.
 
Ben_B said:
For those watching this to look for GH2 image quality I tried to compress it as little as possible but it still softened things up a bit. The perceived higher resolution you get from watching it in the normal vimeo window (not full screen) matches the actual resolution of the original on a 1080p screen, at least to my eye. I am very pleased with the sharpness the camera produced and am a bit bummed that some of it was lost in web compression (though not at all surprised.) So anyway, if looking for quality, watch it smaller and just know that you can expect that kind of quality at full res out of the camera.
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I think at some point you do have to say **** it to certain 'technical" issues, and see if some one has presented a 'watchable' visual story... I would like to upgrade to the GH2, but I just got my full CS5 Production Premium package upgrade... so... GH2 will have to wait... maybe a GH-3... if Panasonic continues the line... but for the moment I think I'm ok with my unGH13'd GH1...
 
j1clark@ucsd.edu said:
I think at some point you do have to say **** it to certain 'technical" issues, and see if some one has presented a 'watchable' visual story... I would like to upgrade to the GH2, but I just got my full CS5 Production Premium package upgrade... so... GH2 will have to wait... maybe a GH-3... if Panasonic continues the line... but for the moment I think I'm ok with my unGH13'd GH1...
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Yeah that's for sure. And we sort of have to realize that technical issues can be a double-edges sword. Web-compression can hide imperfections with the image, etc. If a weakness of technology and computers is that they do EXACTLY what we tell them to do, then maybe some of these technical issues provide a bit of randomness to save us from ourselves.
 
This is nice, Ben. Good lighting work. Fruition of your hard work.

Cool special fx. Did you use AE CS5 as the primary editor?

Interesting lens you got. Olympus F. Zuiko 38.8. That's the most frequently used lens? lpowell loves his Konica Hexanon AR 40.8. Either one seems like a good match to 20.7 pancake.
 
great job!, just watched it after downloading from Vimeo. Very nice.. Loved the overall feel of this piece ; )
 
stonebat said:
This is nice, Ben. Good lighting work. Fruition of your hard work.

Cool special fx. Did you use AE CS5 as the primary editor?

Interesting lens you got. Olympus F. Zuiko 38.8. That's the most frequently used lens? lpowell loves his Konica Hexanon AR 40.8. Either one seems like a good match to 20.7 pancake.
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Yeah used AE CS5 for visual effects. Used the Olympus for almost all of the closeups and the two-shot in the forest. Medium shots were mostly with the 20mm f/1.7, wide shots with the 7-14mm. Used the other lenses listed here and there. The Olympus lens is designed for the Olympus Pen F system (I have a PEN F half-frame 35mm camera and love it.)

kprince said:
How did you do the "malfunction" warp phase text stuff in the beginning?
]great job!, just watched it after downloading from Vimeo. Very nice.. Loved the overall feel of this piece ; )
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Thanks! The text was done with some filters in FCP (that ship with it, specifically used Bad TV for that bit) and the Title 3D title generator (also built into final cut.)

Sam Mallery said:
Watched it last night with my girlfriend. We both liked it.
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Thanks!
 
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