Sara - A Psychological Thriller

K

kmper02

Member
Hey all!

Here's a short teaser for a psychological thriller we are currently producing. The film is called "Sara" and tells the story of a young photographer who stumbles upon an antique doll. I don't want to give away too many details (don't get too excited, the teaser doesn't give away much either) other than this film is not your typical "haunted doll" story.

We are all student filmmakers living in the Santa Cruz, CA area. Some of us have recently graduated, while a few of us are still finishing up. This is our first attempt at a feature length film and we are putting as much effort as humanly possible into it. We have locations from San Francisco, to San Jose, to Santa Cruz...not to mention a relatively decent sized budget.

Please let us know what you think! Comments on the video and "likes" are greatly appreciated. We are attempting to build a following. Also, a production blog is currently being developed. More info on that soon.

Thanks! And enjoy!

 
Love the motion you have, excellent framing and smooth buttery pans.

Great way to keep the audience interested as you show some of the credits. I can tell from the trailer you approached this very creatively, keep us updated as to when we can see more.

My only criticism was the beads on the doll look very modern day. Other than that, good stuff.
 
Great look. Care to tell us anything about the production? Lens choices, on set lighting, grading techniques, so forth?
 
Shot on Canon 5D with Canon lenses. Mostly stuck to the 16-35mm 2.8 and 50mm 1.4. However the first intro shot was shot on a nikkor 80-200 2.8 for shallow DOF and flatness. All lighting was natural. We had to go back to the location three separate times for consistent lighting. All the titles were done in camera. Edited in FCP and graded with Magic Bullet Looks.
 
Niiiiiiceeeeeeeeeee.

If you need a PA or a gaffer or a boom-op or something you know where to find me :D
 
It looks cool. "Teaser" (though an ambiguous term for sure) is kind of misleading, though. This looks more like the "run up". Basically you used a lot of your "tease" time showing credits which is really odd...

I think those credits will work great in the actual film, I just felt this sort of "teaser trailer" to be a little confounding being that you're showing the credits in the trailer. Ya know?

But yeah, it looks nice. The pan between/behind her legs was extra awesome. It's such an obvious position for a camera pan but I couldn't for the life of me think of when I might have seen it in any sort of non-comic-book-style movie. It felt extremely intimate without being grotesque. Cool beans. Keep it up.
 
We actually shot this before we had a plot or script written. We just knew we wanted to make a film about a girl who stumbles across a creepy doll. Now that we have a solid plot outline in place, this mock intro we shot doesn't really work in the story we constructed. Instead it will probably appear in fragmented pieces in some sort of dream sequence. The titles were more of a test, but we're are definitely going to do something very similar for the final production.

I didn't edit it, but the editor said he used some sort of "bad TV' effect for the scan line/tv glitch out. I think it's a stock FCP plugin.
 
What sort of apertures were you shooting at for those shots outside where the background is blown out? Really nice effect. How much of that was crunched on to get it there in post?
 
For a lot of the stuff, the lenses had to be stopped down quite a bit. I don't have any fader or ND rings for my lenses so trying to achieve narrow DOF on a bright sunny day is very difficult. Put some orders in and I have three ND filter on their ay.

I think Nick, our editor, used a custom preset in MBL plugin for FCP and then tweaked. All I know is when he toggled between the raw footage and the graded footage, the difference was night and day.

Thanks everyone for you're comments and questions!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top