New romantic comedy feature shot with HVX at 1080 24p

It's Magic

It's Magic

Man all you have to do is apply a magic bullet film look preset to that and your done. Instant(after you render) film look. this will add a whole lot of production value to your project. Actually if you can send me a still image full quality I will magic bullet it and post it to this thread. Did I just make that a verb? nikolmann@yahoo.com
 
Everything in shot appears to be competing for attention. It's a little overwhelming. Selective lighting and dof would help with this. Not sure if post work will help much but I'm happy to be proven wrong. I'm looking forward to some edited footage.
 
I think the high key lighting would look really good if you went black and white like the screwball comedies you refered influenced the script. Right now it looks as if the sun itself is just out of frame in most every shot. The one shot I really liked was the the guy leaning into (with eyes closed) the girl...it's a little softer with nice blooming and looks very filmic and interesting...More of that please! best of luck
 
emmettloverdedotcom said:
Thank you for your comments.

"A Timely Maneuver" (http://emmettloverde.com/VideoPlayers/Timely-Player.htm) was shot on a DVX-100 by Marc Miller in Los Angeles. I am as impressed with his work as you are, Mr. Del Tufo.

Mr. Beier and Mr. Felis, you seem to contradict each other (one calls the lighting "too flat" and the other "too bright and harsh"). This confuses me.

Regardless, I appreciate your taking the time to look at the images. I chose these particular stills for what they revealed about the story and characters rather than for their composition. As proud as I am of my camera work I know that ultimately the actors and the story will draw any audience we get.

The story features a number of imaginary and fantasy sequences. I tried to enhance these with stylized lighting (I call it "candy-colored") to differentiate them from the "real life" moments. At those times I tried to use the color and style of the light to illustrate the emotions of the characters. Here's where my B.A. in Theater kicks in.
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I don't know what Felis meant but I'll try to expand on what I meant.

Please note I don't mean to be overly critical or disrespectiful as you've done something very important I have not: shot a feature film.

When i say flat, I generally mean uninteresting and this comes from a number of things.

First of all, your compositions are generally pretty sterile (though this may well be the director's fault. The shot choices tend to be limited to very simple setups using the typical close-up, medium shot, or over the shoulder shot. Everything feels very bare-bones and conventional, almost looking at styles from a soap opera or cheaply produced sitcom. Nothing really draws your eye accross the frame. This is further compounded by your shallow DOF. Don't get me wrong. I love a deep focus but you have to use it right. You have to make sure to keep the shots interesting. You have to focus our eyes in other ways while still giving us interesting stuff to look at in the background if our gaze wanders. Good use of deep focus (think Kurosawa, Welles, Leone, Ford) can produce results that look like a painting. These on the other hand are simply boring and would likely serve to draw me out of the story. As I said, I don't know if this is the director's call or if it somehow suits your movie.

Then there's the lighting. This is where things really feel flat to me. Most of the time, it seems you simply used your practical lights for illumination. Everything has the stale florecent look to it. There isn't much of a range of light to dark on anyone with most things being comprised of a very small luminance range without either the harsh shadows I tend to like or the deeply defused silk style lighting that would work well for a romantic comedy. Everything is just...flat. The light doesn't seem to be focused very well either. Just as with the focus, the light doesn't really draw your eye from one thing to the other as it should.

I don't know what your time constraints were or whether or not you could offord lights, but your stills just a lot like that of a TV show only higher resolution. One thing that I think looks great, is using sunlight as much as possible. It's free and it's absolutly beautiful. Instead of just turning on the lights in a room, why not open the blinds or even open the windows entirly? I promise you'll get much more interesting lighting than you will from florecents. Use some thin white sheets to diffuse it if you can't afford silks or bounce it off of a white board.

Finally, I found that the use of color could be a bit stroner. It seems like all your colors were kind of evenly muted with none really having any strength over the others. It's hard to even articulate but simply many of the shots just felt...wrong color wise. I personally might try tinting some scenes or just saturating certain colors to give it more of a definate look.
 
Were the cinegammas used?

Were the cinegammas used?

I would like to piggy back on what's already been said. I think the footage looks very videoish. I was wondering if you used any of the cinegamma settings? Barry says that Cinegamma D gives the most filmlike qualities. I also wonder if the lighting was fluorescent? That type of lighting can really give a harsh look. As others have said DOF is definately a dead giveaway. Congratulations on your film. I hope its becomes a hit!
 
I'd agree with what's been said here. Which is why I made something to show how helpful color correction can be when used well:

WASHED SINGULAR
WASHED SPLITSCREEN

DEEPER SINGULAR
DEEPER SPLITSCREEN

DEEPER 2 SINGULAR
DEEPER 2 SPLITSCREEN

The second one is pushing a little high into the reds and yellows, but I was just futzing with it. I think since you actually shot it already, detailed color correction would help a lot with the aforementioned "flat" look.

Just a suggestion. :)

Also, definitely keep us abreast of the process to get 1080 into FCP, as I've been concerned about that. I may just go to Edius for the ease of the editing process, anyway.
 
cc pics

cc pics

Yeah I dd some stuff in magic bullet this is what I got one is just basic the other tint warm heavy
3.jpg

3basic.jpg

3before.jpg

Does magic bullet work in dvcprohd? couldnt get it to work in motion. Just black.
 
Again, thanks to everyone for their thoughts, comments, and experiments with filtering the images.

We're done shooting, so we won't be using the M2. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

We're not concerned about trying to get a "film look"; our attitude is that since the movie will hopefully end up on 35mm stock projected at 24 frames per second (as it was shot), it will have a "film look" because it will be on film.

As much as we love the look of black and white, we need to consider the marketplace and thus will be releasing this film in color. We may do a little experimentation with colorizing certain fantasy sequences, but my gut is telling me that the way we lit using colored gels and such goes far enough.

We will be talking to post houses about how far to go with color correcting/color timing at the digital stage but my gut is also telling me to leave the images as raw as possible so the post house has as much data available to work their (Davinci or other) magic.

I've posted a few more stills on the page if anyone's interested.
 
Just transfering to film won't give it the "film look." not with that lighting and those colors.

Doing black and white however is a great idea. Get a good color corection program with a histogram and desaturate the image entirly. Then go into the histogram and crush your blacks and give yourself maybe a touch of highlight to make things pop. The great thing about the histogram is that you can controls your highs, your lows, and the mid range and thus can get the most out of what luminance you have. Then just add some film grain and maybe a little softening (like the 40s films had) and your movie should perfectly have the look of a 40s style comedy. You can do all this easily in combustion 3.0 which is pretty cheap. I did a test but I can't upload it unfortunatly.
 
I think some good color grading will help you. They are very flat, but your story is key, and people will forgive this if it is a good story.

People forget how much of an art lighting trully is. I have so much to learn!

There are so many slick looking piles of crap out there these days. Remember that' s not all that matters.
 
Here are some quick tests (split screen) as to what is possible with a cheap CC program like Combustion.

Here I simply used the histogram to crush the blacks, up the highlights a bit, and saturate the colors a bit more:

n45704758_30140565_5517.jpg


Here, I did the same thing but added a bit of a blue tint. I think it makes a bit more filmic and also works well since, being in the air and primarily lit by sunlight and clear skys, the lighting would be a little blue:

n45704758_30140566_6075.jpg


Finally, in this last one I went for the 40s comedy look. I desaturated the colors and upped the contrast (as well as crushed the blacks). I also added a thin layer of film grain:

n45704758_30140567_6733.jpg
 
emmettloverdedotcom said:
We will be talking to post houses about how far to go with color correcting/color timing at the digital stage but my gut is also telling me to leave the images as raw as possible so the post house has as much data available to work their (Davinci or other) magic.
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Do NOT do any color correcting on anything if you're later going to grade with the Davinci. The colorist using the Davinci will be devastated if you try it yourself, as it will give him less to work with and degrade the image. So you are absolutely right not to, your gut feeling is correct!

However, it's all good to talk about color correction, but my beef is with everything being in focus. If you're using the Davinci, it has a hardware defocus plug-in which really is amazing - it will be able to turn some of those shots into very cinematic images. The defocus can selectively soften areas of the frame in a way that looks optical, rather than a video effect. You just can't do this as well in After Effects or Nitris, I've seen professionals try and it never beats the Davinci, and almost always looks like a CG effect. The Davinci doesn't, that's why it won an Emmy.

In my experience you can do a lot more with the Davinci than Magic Bullet, and with less degradation of the image. With a good color grader you'll add $$$'s to your production, I can't stress this enough :thumbup:
 
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Just wanted to say, amidst all the technical talk about your images, that I watched 'A Timely Manuever' and if this feature is as well written and well acted as that short was, it should be a blast to watch. Keep up the good work, hopefully more people will be hearing about you soon!

j
 
I think your theatrical background shows in these images. They look very theatrical to me-- they remind of the show Coupling, which I also consider to have a very "theatrical" vibe/look. The workflow you described is also very much the sort of thing that someone with a theater tradition would do (sticking to master shots more and letting the actors play out the scene instead of piecing together meticulously storyboarded pieces of photography). It's just not in particular what most people on this board are going for. :p

Don't sweat the harsher critiques on here too much. And yeah DEFINITELY don't mess with the color correction at all if you're going to give it to a professional colorist (DaVinci, Lustre, whatever...) to work on. But I think that would be a good step, having that professional finishing on it, if you want people to take it seriously.

P.S. And I think most of those examples that people put up of color correction examples made it look worse if anything. There's definitely something to be said for a professional colorist instead of someone with a Magic Bullet preset.
 
hemophilia said:
I think your theatrical background shows in these images. They look very theatrical to me-- they remind of the show Coupling, which I also consider to have a very "theatrical" vibe/look. The workflow you described is also very much the sort of thing that someone with a theater tradition would do (sticking to master shots more and letting the actors play out the scene instead of piecing together meticulously storyboarded pieces of photography). It's just not in particular what most people on this board are going for. :p

Don't sweat the harsher critiques on here too much. And yeah DEFINITELY don't mess with the color correction at all if you're going to give it to a professional colorist (DaVinci, Lustre, whatever...) to work on. But I think that would be a good step, having that professional finishing on it, if you want people to take it seriously.

P.S. And I think most of those examples that people put up of color correction examples made it look worse if anything. There's definitely something to be said for a professional colorist instead of someone with a Magic Bullet preset.
Click to expand...

Are you hatin on my magic bullet preset?
:Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
Naw your right if you are going to have a professional colorist color correct your video then of course they will do a way better job than us. We are using magic bullet editors and they are using magic bullet suite hahahahaaaa got ya!:Drogar-Evil(DBG):
 
I think you're fooling yourself as far as the actors go.

To say you wanted to showcase their performances and not bog them down by making them stay on mark is like saying you did all static shots because you wanted to focus on the DP's compositions and not bog him down with camera moves.

Hitting and staying on mark while giving an all out performance is the actor's job. It's what they're there to do. SAG means nothing, this is absolutely rudimentary.

And look what you got for it-- A two dimensional piece that anyone will tell you was shot on video. I know you have high hopes for post, but what's that old saying? First, do no harm.
 
Relax stephen

When someone submits work it goes to the block ready for butcher. We don't pull punches; that's what your girlfriends and wives are for.

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I think Me Loverde has a nice product here; it's a good start. The writing has flavor, the actors definatley can act and he seems to have a plan. I think the real missing ingredient is a Pro DP or at least the skills neccasary to be a qualified DP.

These grabs are flat.

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All this is subjective as is all of our opinions, so let's not be dismissive of other's .02. I look forward to this as well as Timely Manuever was very well done!

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As far as Mark's ? On my shoot your hitting them !
 
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