New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

A

ASOM

Member
Hi everybody,

This is not directly about DVX100 but we thought that it would interest the community of DVX users because it could have been done with other cameras too.

So, we’ve just finished our first short movie using a homemade MINI35 kit (based around a Nikon F-2 and a Canon XM-2/GL-2). It’s freely inspired by the movie Fight Club (but it’s not the point of the movie at all). Our budget was about 400$, mostly spent on food and tapes. A lot was done in post, color-correction, stabilizing, degraining,… We hope you’ll like it. If you have any question, please just ask, we’ve a lot of “making-of” pictures if you’re interested. A last thing, it’s in french, excuse the quite crappy subtitles, if you have any correction, please tell us, thank you very much.

Stills: http://www.originalversion.net/temp/marla.jpg

Movie (Quicktime 6): http://www.originalversion.net/temp/marla.mov (right click + save as to download)



Olivier & Sebastien

Another State of Mind,
www.anotherstateofmind.be
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

Our website seems to have some problems, I'm uploading it to another site. I'll post a new URL soon.
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

i managed to download from the direct url.. feedback soon :)
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

ok.. it took about 1.5 hours to download... but was nice after all
your mini35 sure worked great, i liked most of the shots there.. especially the bright sequence with the blond girl (the advert-like..)
acting-wise, the "marla" character didn't work for me, the "fam fatal" type didnt come through..

what's the purpose of this project if i may ask?

at the whole - great aesthetics, well done!
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

oh... another thing.. the music.. didn't like the choices, or the way they were edited in.
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

mini35-style work really helps the whole filmic-look so much. i feel at this point it's almost essential to get the right aesthetic i'm going for.

exceptional work here visually. the subtitles were not very good, but who cares.

good stuff. thanks for posting
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

Thanks a lot already for the many comments, we'll post some pictures of the kit really soon.
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

I loved the way that looked. The footage looked simply amazing to me. I didn't really like the short though. It just really seemed like a music video to me.
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

Asom this looks great!!!!
How did you get around the issue of the inverted/reversed image on set???
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

Looks pretty good man. I agree with most of the critiques listed here, but my favorite shot is the still image of the girl walking towards the camera.

Harlan
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

Hi everybody,

first thank you all for the nice comments and critics, we've really appreciated that, even more because of the lack of answers on french forums (I won't give names but... :-).

So, here's how we done it. Some time ago, we did find a post on the Hackermovies.com forums (great site and forum, unfortunately only in german) about homemade MINI35. Basicaly, they did simply shoot the ground glass of some 6x7 camera. We thought we could do the same by using an old Nikon F-2. So we did; we did remove the viewfinder to shoot directly the focusing screen. By doing so, the image is only inverted horizontaly, it's a lot easier but we had a hard time finding a plain focusing screen (Nikon D f.s.). The one we did find was quite dirty, small black stains at the border,... this is why our picture is not that clean. Later on, we read on DVInfo about the aldu35/angus35 homemade MINI35 but, we have to admit, we're not technician enough to try it :-) We gave up right after reading the long post. On the Canon XM-2, we used a +4 macro adapter and that's all, as you'll see on the picture, the black paper is only there to avoid dust and light to go on to the focusing screen.

We had to optics (had because they died during the shoot, too much focus pulling probably :-) A Nikon AI 35mm-2.0 and a Nikon AI 105mm-2.5. To fill the gaps between these two lenses and to get some nice wide-angle, we did use a Canon 0.7x wideangle adapter on both optics, using adapter rings.

We had some hotspot problems, for sure, probably because of the cheap macro adapter and the wideangle adapter, but we do like it, we did even push it sometimes to get a bit of retro/lomo look.

We did shoot with some el'cheapo lights, two 500watts and one 150watts, plus some 50w and 60w mixing colors,... We did mess up the white balance too to give the interiors a colder look and the exteriors a warmer feel.

We used a cheap AV radio emitter to be able to frame using a 14" TV and a ironing table as a tripod because we had nothing else to place this camera on. Mic was a cheap Sony mic, originally used for Mini-Disc recordings, and our boompole was the stick of a brush :-)

And then, much was done in post (but NO Cinelook Plugins used)

Here are some pictures:
http://www.originalversion.net/temp/makingof01.jpg


Olivier & Sebastien
www.anotherstateofmind.be
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

ASOM,
Your latest still pix link isn't working..want to see this wacky setup...
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

watched the picture... now i'm even more impressed! really, unbelievable... what a mutation you build there.. and your overall guerilla approach is really inspiring. way to go..
are you going to use this rig for another project?
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

Marla was amazing.

i am so impressed with the image quality, your shots were beautifull. I am very intersted to know what your kit is?

thanks!
 
Re: New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

Thank you very much everybody !!

We don't have much money, so guerilla style is the only way to go. We struggle hard to find work, earn some money and finally be able to buy a DVX100. And yeah, we are big fans of Mr Robert Rodriguez too :-)

We did kill our two lenses on this shoot, and the focusing screen is really dirty. Luckily, we found another one and we'll soon buy some new optics. We have some other projects and we'll probably use this rig, maybe with little modifications.

Thanks again,

Olivier & Sebastien
www.anotherstateofmind.be
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top