F3: "The Good Wild Man" Short Film

Grug

Veteran
Hey guys,

Been wanting to share this with you for a while now, and here she finally is, "The Good Wild Man". A good old-fashioned post-apocalyptic tale, shot on the F3.


(For iPad users: https://vimeo.com/108537363 )

It's 15 minutes long, so you may want to grab a cup of tea before settling in to watch it.

As always, would love to hear your feedback, both the good and the bad.

Cheers,

Mark
 
Great job Mark! Loved the smooth production shots and color grade. The opening jib shot was one of my favorite of the piece. How long was production? What was the best thing you learned through the process of shooting this short? So talented man. Cheers.
 
Cheers Paul.

Glad you liked that opening Jib shot - because it required hauling 80kgs of camera gear by-hand 90 minutes up a steep mountain before dawn!

Shoot was three fairly epic days with multiple unit moves each day, and a single day's pickups for a single shot.

Biggest lesson learnt? Having huge bushfires destroy your locations two days before shooting is hard... and always bring more power than you need! We had a single 3000w portable generator to do those night scenes, and that was hard. Really hard. But probably the most useful thing I learnt was just how much you can squeeze into a day with judicious time-of-day scheduling and location scouting to make the most out of the sun's position through the day.
 
There's nice stuff there but, and you did ask for the negatives too, the extra pale lead character with the modern haircut is just too obvious. Tan lines on the arms, lack of dirt, etc... he looks like my drinking buddy came to your set and just took his shirt off and put on a costume. This takes me out of it 100%. Plus short films should be under 10 minutes. Tons of festivals wont allow shorts that long.
 
The cinematography on this film was outstanding. Some of the best I've ever seen with the F3. In fact I am really curious how you managed to get the skin tones so realistic. DaVinci Resolve I guess? Was a dedicated colorist involved? I gotta know more! Would have been great to see a "behind the scenes" clip as well ( or even just stills ). Also some tech info for us geeks... what lenses, camera settings, whether it was 4:2:2 10 bit , etc.
On the negative side of things, I couldn't understand why the men behaved like cavemen who couldn't even speak. Post Apocalyptic makes me think they either survived WW III , or were raised by survivors. In either of these scenarios they would have learned to communicate properly long ago... I was also put off by the ending. That was just savage and pointless. Would have made things more interesting if they found a female instead, or a child, or something like that. Or maybe just rename this "The bad wild man" heheh. Other than that, great. I watched it twice.
 
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The cinematography on this film was outstanding. Some of the best I've ever seen with the F3. In fact I am really curious how you managed to get the skin tones so realistic. DaVinci Resolve I guess? Was a dedicated colorist involved? I gotta know more! Would have been great to see a "behind the scenes" clip as well ( or even just stills ). Also some tech info for us geeks... what lenses, camera settings, whether it was 4:2:2 10 bit , etc.
On the negative side of things, I couldn't understand why the men behaved like cavemen who couldn't even speak. Post Apocalyptic makes me think they either survived WW III , or were raised by survivors. In either of these scenarios they would have learned to communicate properly long ago... I was also put off by the ending. That was just savage and pointless. Would have made things more interesting if they found a female instead, or a child, or something like that. Or maybe just rename this "The bad wild man" heheh. Other than that, great. I watched it twice.

Thanks for the kind words man, I graded the film myself in Resolve, using a couple of Juan Melara's Kodak emulation LUTs (and some secondary corrections where needed) to bring the colours inline with where I wanted them.

Lens package was Zeiss CP.2s (with the super telephoto stuff shot on a Blackmagic Pocket camera paired with a Nikon 70-200mm). We recorded the SLOG picture profile to 10-bit ProResHQ on a Sound Devices PIX240.

It was pretty intense shoot, we lost most of our major locations to huge bushfires three days before we were supposed to start shooting, and had smoke on the horizon and grass fires just a couple of kilometers away at multiple locations - it was pretty touch and go the whole way through.

Here i am lining up a shot with my AC out in the Australian bush...

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Setting up the jib in rough terrain:

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Lighting the hut interior:

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Some performers can be real divas, this one got grumpy if she didn't have hugs near constantly:

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More jibs in the wilderness:

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Blocking the final scene:

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Six hours of driving for a single 1 second insert shot... gotta love pickup days!

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Yet more jibs inthe wilderness:

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