The Least Damnedest Thing - feature trailer

D

Deere

Member
Hi all, just uploaded the trailer for my latest feature to YouTube. It was shot with a HV20 and Redrock Micro M2.

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The Least Damnedest Thing (2010) - Trailer

Any comments/criticism would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!
 
i am no authority here...but congrats on the movie! nice to get something finished, ya know?

nice picture from the hv20...such an amazing little camera. but i have ONE question. WHY black and white?
 
Hey, thanks for the kind words :D

The main reason for black and white was to allow us to shoot faster. We only had a couple of weeks with the main actor and it meant we didn't have to stress as much with color balancing the lights. It really helped us move quickly. This being our third finished no-budget feature, we knew that the main audience would be festival goers and people willing to watch low-budget indie movies, so hoped the black and white wouldn't be too big an issue considering the trade off of getting it done within the time we had the main actor. The plan for our next project we've started working on is to be a lot more commercial- for starters it's in color ;) and it's PG, and it's a genre film...so yeah, less 'indie' than this one. I'm still really happy with how this one's turned out though, and yeah, was really happy with the results I was able to get with the HV20.

Cheers again for checking it out and commenting!
 
I like the look. Other than letting you shoot fast because of colour balancing the lights, black and white can let you get away with more overexposure too. What methods did you use for controlling the exposure? Also, was your audio recorded using an on-camera or boom mic?

At first I was unsure what the plot was. But it sort of seems like it's about a guy applying for a job, is that it?
 
Yeah, that's pretty much it :D The guy in the trailer has to go to a wedding in the afternoon but is trying to get his resume in before then. It's also got a buddy comedy b-story where the main character and his housemate make a bet that he won't get his resume in by the end of the day and she won't be able to get a guy she's trying to make like her by the end of the day- which kind of adds a comedic tension throughout the movie, but I left it out of the trailer in an attempt to give it more focus.

Controlling exposure wise- I used the HV20 manual exposure hack to shoot flat and minimise on camera gain, and then forgot about it and set the exposure using the manual aperture rings on my zeiss primes. Outside if there was too much light, I'd scrim the shots where possible to diffuse the sun and bright clouds in the background and even out the light on the actors in the foreground (an nd filter would've been nice but didn't have one on the shoot), for wider shots I generally would under expose the actors to preserve detail in the sky, knowing I could bring the darker areas back up in post. Inside I used a bunch of lights to control everything as much as possible and get as even an exposure I could (unless I particularly wanted a lot of contrast in the shots, in which case I lit for that) in the minimal time I had to light each setup.

Audio wise- we recorded on set sound via the on-camera mic, but purely as a reference. We ADR'd 100% of the 84 minute film... and I'd say it's about 95% un-noticeable (maybe everyone will disagree?). But again the decision was made in pre-production to do adr because we had such a limited time to do the shoot, but could spend any number of months looping in dialogue as the actors could find the time, which ended up working out really well for us, and I think (this being super low budget with non-actors) that it also gave the actors a chance to try and improve their performances (though I do believe that while with ADR you can add a lot, you also do lose a little of the raw magic(?) of the performance given on the day). And yeah, doing it that way MASSIVELY sped up the time we could move through setups (because we wouldn't have to worry about traffic sounds or random sounds ruining shots on the day).

Cheers for taking the time to comment AuditoryVisuals, hope this answers your questions :dankk2:
 
It looks great! As far as Features shot on the HV20 I would say it is the best looking most polished piece I've seen.

Great Job.
 
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