Production Stills

J

jhvid

Well-known member
I feel like a moron, but I failed to get any decent production stills during the shooting of my last short. Now I'm submitting to festivals and some of them ask for production stills. My question is whether or not there is any way to get stills from the finished product.

Thanks.
 
If you are giving them a CD/DVD/Rom press kit, just include them on the disc. If you are giving them actual paper press kit, just print them off. However, because of the low DPI of screen grabs, you will want to work the pics somewhat, plus not print them very big, 3x5 max.

Pump the contrast slightly and maybe do some blur work on the bg of the shots, it will help. Also, close shots will work better than wide stuff.

Cheers,
Chris
 
Cue up your timeline to the image you want to capture, then export a frame (what NLE are you using?) as a TIFF or JPG then print those out. They will not be super high res (only 720x480) but good enough for a small print.
 
i had to do that once. your grab is going to be low rez.

i resized it a lot and went in and touched up the image by hand sharpening edges and puting some detail back in. its a pain, but better then having dodgy looking stills representing your movie.
 
(Rich, your avatar is freaking me out)

(and this is not a hijacking if you put your stuff in parentheses)

:)
 
Thanks for the help everybody. I'm using FCP 3 by the way. Any more help is appreciated, otherwise hijack away.
 
Back to topic... Screen grabs will be low rez. If you have any of your cast and crew that could hang out for an afternoon, get them together (B-B-Q and beer will help) and shoot some simulated production stills with either a 35mm still camera or a high quality digital still camera. Set-up your video camera on a tripod, put some lights and C-stands behind it and start shooting. You will need a shot of the Director (I assume that is you) standing next to the camera and pointing (make sure to have a less than pleased look on your face). Next you will need a shot of you and an actor commissorating over an open script (serious expressions please). Then light hearted shots of you and the cast and crew.

I am making light of your situation a little bit, but I am serious. Quality productions stills, along with head shots and bios of all major talent and crew are minimum delivery items for most distrubutors and festivals. You F*cked up by not getting them during production, spend a few bucks and get some good stills now.
 
Ok hang on. I have shots of that kind of stuff (working with the actors, camera setup, etc.), but I don't have shots of the actual scenes, which is what I thought "production stills" referred to. If not then I'm worrying about nothing.
 
Nuff said, yeah, that is what "Production stills" mean. Screen grabs from scenes are acceptable (in most cases). If you have those shots, put them together in you EPK as high rez files.

BTW, what festivals are you hitting on?
 
So I need the "Director working with actor shots" or the Scene shots or both? Sorry if I'm being dense. As far as festivals, I've entered the Sidewalk Moving Picture Fest in Alabama and the Palm Springs International Short Film Fest. I'm also gonna enter a local one (IndieMemphis), and a couple of Horror genre fests (Festival of Horror and maybe Shockerfest). Might also take a shot at the Austin Film Festival and oh yeah the Asheville Film Festival in NC (my folks live a short ways from there). Maybe some others, we'll see. Have you been to any?
 
By production stills they are going to be asking for pictures of behind the scenes of your movie being made so that they know it is YOURS and not soemone elses movie. So basically you have to recreate the image of the cameralamn shooting the scene and all the lighting and such and take a picture....if not your goingt o be skrewed.
 
Interesting. I never thought of the pics as being proof of the production, I always thought they were just looking for stuff for the programs.
 
You should have 3 types of photos, behind the scenes shots, recent headshots of your leads (and you) and what is called "production stills". Production stills should be high quality stills of your talent during scenes from the movies. If you did not shot those during production, they can be shot latter (depending on your resources and availbility of your folks). Go to a memorabillia shop and look at stills from old movies. These are production stills and almost all of them are staged. If you can not swing that, I believe that most of the festivals will take screen grab stills from your movie and the head shots of you and your talent.

Good luck.
 
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