"Secret Canyon"

In addition to the last post,

I am still cutting and working on sound in this film.

this was a deadline cut for my school but I still feel like I have alot of work ahead of me to get it to my liking.
 
that was quite possibly one of the best things i have ever seen in my time here at dvxuser! That was great! wonderful story, now i have so many questions. lol

CC?
DOF?
LOCATION?
LIGHTING?
and dont forget, what special effects you used. (the strobe effects during the opening scene was pretty cool, was that a shutter effect you did on your cam, or did you do it in post?)

Good stuff man!
 
t-h-e-w-h-o said:
that was quite possibly one of the best things i have ever seen in my time here at dvxuser! That was great! wonderful story, now i have so many questions. lol

CC?
DOF?
LOCATION?
LIGHTING?
and dont forget, what special effects you used. (the strobe effects during the opening scene was pretty cool, was that a shutter effect you did on your cam, or did you do it in post?)

Good stuff man!
Click to expand...

first off thank you very much for your compliments. now to answer your questions.

I had 2 distinct styles in CC, I had the Gradiency which I used in the hospital with a warmer top half of the frame and cooler lower half. I played with gamma correction a bit to bring some film grain. and spent countless hours tweaking for every individual shot.

with the exterior I couldnt even tell you what I did, once I can get into a comp with FCP 5.1 i could tell you my setting in MB but I basically sat down for a few days and just played with a whole bunch of different settings.

DOF-In camera, no adapters. I had a very limited budget and a small crew so messing with something as tedious as a 35 adapter wasnt on my agenda. instead I decided to create depth the old fashioned way by putting objects in the foreground and using strong diagonals and horizontals in my framing.

Location- All shot in Verde Valley Arizona, I built the surgery room and went cave searching for the shut of him running out of the tunnel. We shot all of the forest sequences up in Strawberry Arizona. The storage room was actually in a police station but it had the look I was going for. The Undercover cop car was real too (thanks to my badass producer)

and finally
Lighting- Lots of lighting, I used alot of natural light for the exteriors however I did manage to use mirrors alot for kickers in the forest. For the interiors I had 3 Arri light kits and I pretty much used every light for every shot except inside of the storage area. where I only back lit the patient to bring out a siloette and just pinlit certain areas of the frame.

sfx- all shutter effects were in Camera, I shot for the edit. all 1/12 and 1/6 along with 1/250 for forest and 1/60 for basic hospital interiors. All blowout effects were done in camera as well such as the tunnel getting brighter at the end as well as the light coming on over the patient. I just rolled the iris.
 
yeah, im still sitting here in shock. lol. That was pretty nutty man. When you say you built the hospitol, where was this done and how did you get all that stuff? (props)
 
jib.jpg

yawn.jpg


this was the medical set, we used paint drop sheets for the walls and c stands holding them up, then when we shot the povs we moved the walls in 3 feet and put a ceiling on to make it seem like it was a more confined space in the actors head.

about the props and eqiuptment, we shot this in a nursing training room so we already had the IVs and such, I bought the surgical tools off ebay along with the masks and chem suits and a local hospital donated alot of great stuff as well.


I attend the Zaki Gordon Institute for Independant Film making in Sedona Arizona...
www.Zaki.yc.edu
 
like the others say, that was great! it reminded me of a mix between Pi, 28 days later and the island..
 
WOW!! Some of the best footage I've seen witrh the DVX. All the cuts look good but the overall audio could use some work. To me the patients audio in the truck didn't seem very believable. Love all the transtions between the shots. It's inspiring to see someone making shorts of this quality with very limited tools and budget.

Once again very nice.
 
great work! you do a spectactular job on the cc, it had a great film feel to the short. also great camera work, with the DOF, with no adapter. i really enjoyed the first peron angle, with the slow shutter. keep up the great work!
 
very nice. there was one shot that had a really nice grainy quality to it. it was the shot from 7:37 to 7:41 with the truck driving away. it stood out just because it was so grainy, and a little different from the rest of the film. i really liked that. did you do something different there?

again, very nice.
 
off the top of my head I don't remember doing anything special, it might have been how it was shot and we just liked it that way when we CC'd but untill I can open up the FCP project file again I wont know for sure...

thank you all for the complents and critique so far, keep that constructive criticism coming...
 
Very well done. I like the creative use of shutter and "old school" DOF. The acting was good, pacing was good, editing was good.

Great work, I can see why this won.

The sound was a bit dry, but luckily, it didn't detract very much to the overall story. Some additional sound design, and a little music/background would take this from a great work into a fantastic one.

One thing I noticed, when in the truck, after he has shown the gun and they get going, at 7:33 the whole hue shifts to blue, and almost removes that cut from the flow. The cuts before and after had the same color scheme, but this one seemed out of place. I dunno if that was intentional, if it was a problem with footage, or if it was added later and had been shot under different conditions. That's not even really a problem, nothing really wrong, just something that caught my attention.

Also, when the wheelchair passes in front of the patient at the end, there were some edges on the foreground element, and the lighting was a little different.

But, those were the only things visually that struck me, and are such small ones (especially when compared to all the other great work done with and in camera), it didn't have any negative impact on the experience of it. Especially when the shot with the wheelchair is so important and establishes what it does.

Very well thought out, and very crafty with the surroundings to establish mood.

Good work.


no, GREAT work.
 
I liked this movie very much. I would love to see a feature length from you some day. The only thing that bugged me just a little bit was the slow shutter. I just thought it was used a bit too much. I would have only used it for shots seen through his eyes and nothing else. Just a thought. This was definitely one of the best looking things I've seen shot with the DVX. Are you working anything else presently?
 
Awesome, I actually watched the whole thing, very entertaining. I also like how you added Kool Keith at the end, he's one of my favorite rappers. I really loved the forest scenes, they looked like a million bucks. Keep up the great work.
 
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