MISDIRECTION - DVX Low-Budget Feature Film (Trailer Inside)

L

LPguy

Member
Greetings,

I'm one of the silent ones. Only a few posts here and there, but I read these forums inside-and-out, and have been doing so for a few years now. On the advice (and body of work) of the community, I grew motivated to shoot my first feature film this past summer, and did so on the DVX.

Who am I?

- I'm a Rhode Islander doing Graduate work at the University of Connecticut. I primarily study Film Communication, and am actually working on some interesting research involving some of the DVX community. More on that later.

- I've been working with video since I was 17 (I'm now juuuust about 24) but primarily in small-scale projects, montages, some community work and some live-event shooting. I did a short or two a while back, but one was pretty simple and the other - I'll say it - was pretty terrible.

- So I got quiet for a while. The predominant advice here is to keep shooting, and while I do agree, there's something to be said for 'keep reading,' too. With my line of work, I'm used to distilling massive amounts of information from a variety of sources into something that can be explained (and retained) in a minute's time. I tried to do that as much as possible.

- And then I got an idea for a movie... a heist film, actually. So after a month or so of laughing at myself, and refining the idea beyond the "Some kid makes another home video project and calls it a movie" phase, I wrote a script. It took 3 weeks to adapt the treatment to a script, and 2 months to develop that script to something that was, in my estimation, shootable.

- So I went out and cast in the area. I had access to some actors from previous projects, and some wannabe actors from my other endeavors. I also had access to a group of individuals who teach Public Speaking courses in our communication department. This proved helpful - if you're going to work with non-actors, let them know what concepts such as rate, tone, and emphasis mean. It was interesting, as two separate dialogues of direction slowly merged into one with the differing backgrounds in the cast.

- We shot the film in the summer, from June 18th - July 15th, 2007. Things were hectic, and we learned a lot. My Production Manager, Nicola Shayer, and I weathered several storms, but were generally in good fortunes. Insurmountable obstacles suddenly became manageable hours before a shoot; schedules seemed to fall into place with gentle nudges (as opposed to the instinct of a shove-down-the-stairs;) cast and crew were generally agreeable, and everyone remained persistent. We shot 29 hours of footage over 169 hours on set in 18 respective shooting days. We got every shot and managed to lock the camera back in its box for its return ship date on 7/16.

- Post production has occurred (and continues) in the shadows of my master's thesis; I'm not sure if anyone has ever done an indie film and a completely separate thesis at the same time, and I'm even less sure I'd recommend it, but it has been interesting. The film now is in the final-cut stages, and we're working to iron out a few issues and make sure things are as well-put-together as possible.

So... here's my film:

M I S D I R E C T I O N​

You're Jake Harvey, Professor of Criminology. You spend your days teaching about major theft and your nights researching cutting-edge crime across the globe.

An old friend comes back with a lucrative proposition: do you risk it all for a one-time chance to become filthy rich?

Of course you do.

Written & Directed by Stephen Stifano
Produced by Nicola Shayer
Music by Chuck Bangley, Kevin MacLeod, & Jermai​

PRODUCTION INFO:
Runtime: 87 Minutes
Camera: Panasonic DVX 100
Sound: Azden SGM-2X (into onboard XLR)
NLE: Final Cut Pro 3 on Apple Powerbook G4 800mhz
Lighting: 10 different Worklights.
Total Budget: ~ $1500
Locations: Predominantly around Storrs, CT & Foster, RI.

RELEASE INFO:
World Premiere: April, 2008 - Providence, RI (TBA)
Distribution Plan: Northeast Festival Circuit followed by limited DVD release.

CAST
JAKE HARVEY - Jeffrey Kotz
BOBBY RIVERS - Rory McGloin
JESSICA ATWATER - Erin Condry
BUSTER SUSAN - R.J. Gregov
NED ACRIMOFF - Joshua Seymour
MONTY MCCOMBS - Leroy Moton
KEITH DAVIS - Chuck Bangley
CAM LUCAS - Michael Shawver
'BIG MONEY' VALENTINE - Nicholas Koberstein
VINNY OSBOURNE - Mark Cistulli

OFFICIAL TRAILER:
Available directly off of the film's homepage, http://www.misdirectionfilm.com (quicktime, 16 megs)

Also available (in poor resolution) on YouTube.


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More updates will follow when important, and I'm also going to acknowledge some of the good and bad (there's definitely both) in the production and what I've learned for my next film.

At this point I'm curious what you guys think, specifically of the film (from the site) and the trailer. Any questions, comments, and curiosities are more than welcome. Criticism never hurts, too. This was our first time out - the lot of us - and I'm excited to begin work on my next feature this summer. Thanks again to this community for everything it's provided over the years.

-Steve
 
Oh man...the first thing I noticed was AUDIO...holy crap...

There's soft audio, there's rich audio, there's 2 different types of sound in the same scene where one character sounds great and then the other sounds like he's in another room, there's peaking, there's really bad audio, really good audio...I could go on and on and on... Audio is as important if not more important than your picture. If you haven't started on it yet then you have a good base to work off of...but if you have...oh man you have a lot of work to do.

Visually the scenes are lit well, lots of color choices. The DVX performs amazing as always in reaction to the different light settings, so great job on that!

The acting was kinda "eh" for me, it seemed flat, dull, and uninspiring (but what can you expect for an extremely low budget feature?).

It's an interesting concept and I like the idea...just the audio killed it for me in the trailer.
 
Charlie,

Absolutely. The audio in the picture is my greatest frustration - I saved the disclaimers because I believe people shouldn't see work with priming, but there was an incredible variety of audio setups in the film, and some of them were executed horribly. I will make no apologies for the audio quality, as there were times where the textbook "lazy shotgun mic person" was in full effect, and I've been harping on it since we entered post-production.... fortunately, for the most part we were able to transition from scene-to-scene such that the quality doesn't zig-zag in the feature like it does in the trailer, but it eventually reached a point in post where options were to preserve the energy in a performance, or turn to ADR on a prayer.

Towards the end of the shoot I held a bit of an education day, where I worked *back* through the basics of sound recording, and it did improve things some, but more than anything there was too little knowledge on the set with regards to sound. It'll be fixed next time around - some lessons are only truly learned the hard way.

Thank you for the comments on the lighting; we tried to make the scenes more visually interesting, as it's a talkie-film. I've still got a long way to go in that dept; wearing so many hats might also be an issue going forward ;)
 
That was my first impression as well. Every single line sounded different, which was extremely distracting in such a dialogue-heavy trailer.
 
looked good man... again... the audio needs some sweetening but overall the script seemed to be well written and for a low budget film i would definitely pay 5 bucks to go see it :) Keep up the good work!
 
Another thing I would do is to remove the MPAA inspired "This movie has been approved for..." sign in the front. I realized that you've removed the MPAA label but who did the approving? It comes across as imitative of higher budget films. Most indie film doesn't use that label anyway.
 
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