"Papergirl" A Nikon D7000 Short Film

B

bri

Member
Hi guys,

Grabbed a bunch of friends and shot this for a moviemaking marathon (12 days, 8 minute max) and our creative element was Cocaine, genre was action/comedy. Usually more familiar with the Canon cameras but went out and shot this with the Nikon D7000, Sigma 10-20 f4-5.6, and Nikkor 50/f2

Any feedback would be great :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDLpJ-4oACU
 
Great job and awesome audio. D7000 did a great job also. :-)


bri said:
Hi guys,

Grabbed a bunch of friends and shot this for a moviemaking marathon (12 days, 8 minute max) and our creative element was Cocaine, genre was action/comedy. Usually more familiar with the Canon cameras but went out and shot this with the Nikon D7000, Sigma 10-20 f4-5.6, and Nikkor 50/f2

Any feedback would be great :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDLpJ-4oACU
Click to expand...
 
Thank you for the feedback :)

Let me try to shed some light on our audio setup. In the field we were using the ZOOM H4N with an AT835b shotgun mic for on location sound. However we were fairly pressed for time and we didnt have a dedicated sound engineer or anything so a lot of the audio wasn't very good. However thankfully we did hiss tracks for all the locations and then we went into post and did ADR dubs on the voices on the final edit. We did the voices with the RODE NT2a condenser microphone into a Focusrite Saffire interface. Most of the other sound bits are foley and I pretty much had to sync it up with every single pertinent action in the film.

Note to self: Try to get audio perfect before going into post because ADR and foley is extremely time consuming and incredibly stressful under a time limit. Nevertheless it worked out alright. Also most of the music was created in Propellerheads Reason and the intro and guitar parts were on GarageBand for iPad. We had one day to score the movie by the time the final edit was completed.

Cheers :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDLpJ-4oACU
 
Pretty cool; I do like Nikon's color for video, subtle difference from Canon but nice - just hate shooting video with 'em.

Fun performances, especially her boss - some of the fights or hits could have used some 60p slowmo; the main thing that took me out of the story was how "ADR" the ADR stuff sounded. I'm no expert, but in your shoes I'd have used the same mic used on set, at the same distance/angle. Especially the guy in the garage - very big-radio-announcer proximity sound. This being such a broadly played comedy, that didn't really hurt things like it would have in something more quiet.

I'm curious as to how ADR is done to sound more natural; I know you can record an impulse on-set and then use that in an impulse reverb plugin to get a sense of a "room" vs. dead studio sound, but haven't heard much of that being used in ADR. I'd say avoiding proximity effect, using a similar mic (vs. a large diaphragm studio mic) and a quality reverb plugin that can dial in similar room reflections could go a long way.
 
The color indeed is a tinge different than the Canons and the footage was a pleasure to throw a quick grade on. Once I threw a curve on that darkened the shadows and also saturated the footage, it started to remind me of the trusty ol' HVX200 for some reason. Although I didnt' have enough time to test the color presets, I just choose the most neutral looking preset and turned down all the saturation and sharpness, and contrast.

Actually we had hoped to do some Michael Bay-esque slow motion shots for the film but we had to omit those shots because the Nikon D7000 does not have 720/60p which was disappointing. But now thinking back couldn't I have Twixtor'd the footage? But then again I haven't gotten around to learn that yet and theres nothing worse than trying to learn something on a time limit but I think I've seen that plugin generally used with 60p footage to make it even slower?

Michael, that's a good point about using the identical mic used for on location to record the voices if it were physically placed at the same angle and distance in the room to the actors. I personally would have also liked to work work harder on spatial placement of the final sound so the stereo mix could give the illusion of space and sounds could be moving relative to the picture.

Generally recording everything as flat as possible it will save you problems later on because you can always add more reverb in post, but sometimes you can't help the location and for an indie film on a shoestring budget. Because who has the time and money to go off and sound foam the entire location right? Then again I've heard of egg cartons doing a good job of sound muffling, so I guess it's not too bad if you had a stack of those. In the indie spirit, if there is a will there is a way! I guess if there's a nasty echo either hiss track another location or when you re-dub the voices try to match the ambient reverb with a plugin.
 
I think in many cases of narrative film, you want to capture some of the personality of the room - which is primarily reflections (or lack thereof). If you're in an egregiously echoe-ey space (tile foyer with 20' high ceilings, etc) quilted moving blankets on stands can do a lot of deadening. If you hunt around you can find black ones, or black over silver... which can help you with bounce, or negative fill as well.

Biggest problems with many reverb plugs is they're made to be noticed, usually for music. RedLine Reverb (by 112db) has a lot of control of things like early reflections, and when I bought it it was about a hundred bucks. (and it does sound awesome on a Marshall stack...)

Regarding twixtor (or time warp which you already own with recent versions of AE)... it's pretty remarkable - but the more frames you give it the better. So 60p is a huge help - Nikon users out of luck for now!
 
The ADR seemed to fit the genre. It had a Hong Kong esque feel. Almost all Hong Kong films are ADR.
(It is funny that most film makers on this forum are happy to over process their footage, or add crappy effects, but complain about ADR)

Fun concept. If I had the time, I would flat out steal it. I would like to work on something like this.

Could have gone more cartoony and/or stylized (think Scott Pilgrim, or something), but under the time-constraint/experience-of-crew... great job!
 
bri said:
Hi guys,

Grabbed a bunch of friends and shot this for a moviemaking marathon (12 days, 8 minute max) and our creative element was Cocaine, genre was action/comedy. Usually more familiar with the Canon cameras but went out and shot this with the Nikon D7000, Sigma 10-20 f4-5.6, and Nikkor 50/f2

Any feedback would be great :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDLpJ-4oACU
Click to expand...

I may get a few friends together and pick out genres and elements by writing them down on paper and picking them from a hat. Not sure if that's how it went down with you guys, but it seems like a good idea.
 
James0b57 said:
The ADR seemed to fit the genre. It had a Hong Kong esque feel. Almost all Hong Kong films are ADR.
(It is funny that most film makers on this forum are happy to over process their footage, or add crappy effects, but complain about ADR)

Fun concept. If I had the time, I would flat out steal it. I would like to work on something like this.

Could have gone more cartoony and/or stylized (think Scott Pilgrim, or something), but under the time-constraint/experience-of-crew... great job!
Click to expand...

Actually the inspiration for this film originated from a script I wrote called "Paperboy" which is currently in preproduction. I wouldnt want to spoil anything by revealing too much but I can say the direction is more stylized, faster paced and darker, being truer to the original script. I suppose we could call this first film a prologue or a extended screen test to gauge out if people liked the general concept and an attempt to learn what people liked or didn't and then transfer that experience into developing an even more polished second film. Plus our mystery element was COCAINE... we had to rewrite the script to fit it in seemlessly somehow and that changed a lot of things as well.

But So far it has been a huge learning experience, especially when you get the opportunity to see your film projected in a real movie theatre and you get to be there in person (much to a new filmmaker's trepidation) and see how the audience reacts to the movie and if different parts work or not. Also now I'm watching the YouTube insight to see what parts of the film were the most interesting to an average viewer and watching and the attention arc according to the moments in the film. I suppose these metrics will come into good use as well. The wonders of technology!
 
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Very smart.

May I suggest you keep with ADR. Kill Bill did a good job with it. It would lend a graphic novel feel to the film. Much like live action anime. Just a thought. No need to reply to that suggestion, just consider it. Good luck to you. Too bad you guys are in Canada, otherwise I'd have loved to help out.
 
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