"The Robin" A 500 cuts Picture

PDX_DVX said:
Portland definitely has some great film makers, and also some GREAT animators. It's tough to make it look like a gritty, dirty, unhappy city though because it's so pretty.
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Yes, an utterly gorgeous city. So picturesque and friendly, and yet moody because of the weather the majority of the year. Lots of different looks too. Great place to be an indie.

I was born and raised in the suburbs, (Lake Oswego) but I gravitated to living near dowtown. (yeah, NW, close to Cinema 21) Really enjoyed living there.

I moved to SoCal in the '90's and then eventually ended up in Utah due to my wife. :) And btw, in case you hadn't noticed from my avatar, I'm a bit of a Blazer fan too. (Rip City is back--#1 pick!! Oden!!!!)
 
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Co? Sounds like "K-Oh"? Never heard of ya. I'm Shawn Nelson. I've been an indie filmmaker in the PDX area for about 4 years now. Before too long I'm going to try to get together a PDX DVXUser gathering, you should come.
 
PDX_DVX said:
Hey, thanks for the good words. Tim Smale, our resident gun/blood guy helped us out a lot. He had just gotten some new weaponry, and we got to use it on this shoot. He also does really great compressed air squibs. Check him out at:
http://www.pdxbloodfx.com/
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Oh sweet, I need to meet him! I own 5 of those guns as well! I've long wanted to see a good c02 squib. I designed one myself a couple of years ago but never had the project where I needed to implement it.
 
Elton said:
I was born and raised in the suburbs, (Lake Oswego) but I gravitated to living near dowtown. (yeah, NW, close to Cinema 21) Really enjoyed living there.
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Funny. I lived on NW 23rd and Northrup from '95-'99. Used to walk to Cinema 21 every Tuesday (cheap night). Now I live in SE and my buddy owns the Clinton Street Theater. So I hang out there on occasion. It's a good place to be.

Sorry to hear about BOP. Do you have other films I can check out?

Co.
 
Cool, I hear SE has become the new NW. :) Hopefully it hasn't been gentrified quite that much yet, but I guess I'll have to see this summer. Gonna visit some fam back there soon.

Wow, just checked out the Clinton St. theater website and they have a Portland Underground Film Festival. Excellent! Are you participating?

btw, don't have many films to showcase at the moment. I have some stuff from *cough cough* film school, but that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Back when we used light sabres (film!) instead of this pseudo-organic cine-like digital whatever stuff.

Again, good luck in the fest!
 
I don't have anything in the PUFF this year, but have shown films at the CST in the past. Seth (the owner) is a great guy and is really cool about renting out the theater for small/one day event screenings.

And I know what you mean... I have stacks of 16mm films I made way back when. Those were the days! Drop me an e-mail when you find yourself in town. And bring some of those old film school masterpieces. We'll throw them up on the screen and have a 16mm minifest!!
 
shawneous said:
Co? Sounds like "K-Oh"? Never heard of ya. I'm Shawn Nelson. I've been an indie filmmaker in the PDX area for about 4 years now. Before too long I'm going to try to get together a PDX DVXUser gathering, you should come.
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Thanks for the invite. Yeah, I've been under the RADAR because I've been swamped with work stuff. Nobody has heard of me. Do you know Todd Freeman, Doug Baum, Jason Sabala, James Westby, or David Walker? Those are some of my filmmaking cohorts in town. Sabala used to own "Sabala's" on Hawthorne, but it just closed. Walker was the film critic for the Willy Week until just recently. Westby just finished his sixth feature.

Anyway, I haven't had a minute to turn around since 2002. So now that my head is back above the weeds, I'm going to be in production more often.

What have you been making? Shorts? Features? Is the work posted anywhere I could check it out?
 
235 Studios said:
LOL, I thought that might be you. Thanks again for the great food while on set. I enjoyed hanging out.
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It was good having you. Egg salad and M&M's on me anytime!!
 
Love the BTS, and looking forward to seeing another film DP'd by Patrick! Man, I don't know ANY of the PDX folks apparently, though I've kind of known that for a while. It's really only because of DVXuser that I've started to get to know more ...

If it wasn't for DVXuser, I never would have made a short in the first place (or at least not anytime soon). Then I connected with Ryan Walters (235 Studios), from there via Ryan was Patrick (PDX_DVX), through Ryan was also Shawn Nelson (shawneous), and the list goes on ...

Oh, and Craigs List ... gotta love that one. :)
 
There is a lot going on the grab in the first post. Definately making me want to know the story. Also digging your geurilla pickup shot and green screen tactics. Looking forward to seeing it in the A.M. :beer:
 
OK - this was awesome.

Held me beginning to end. Fantastic.

In no particular order:
  • The VO. Loved the voice, man. Ab-so-lutel-ly perfect. Nicely recorded. Great tone. Great accent.
  • Editing. Really, really great, in my opinion. Nice effects. Not over-used. Served the story. Nice.
  • B&W intercuts. Loved them.
  • The writing. This is one of those pieces that inspires. Tight. To the point. The writer has chops, man. Very, very nice job.
  • The music was right on. Nicely done.
  • Cinematography. There's a lot going on here - but it all serves the story. Nothing is there to simply be there. I'd like to hear more about the equipment you used and your dolly shots. Really beautiful job. Not one of those things you can pull off in an afternoon.
And frankly, I have no negatives on this one.

This one grabs and holds.

Really, really nice job.

Bravo.
 
great visual style, this is also one of my 6 favs. story didn't really play out that well. i do like the fact that he'd only go out in fair weather haha
 
Dahopafilms said:
OK - this was awesome.

Held me beginning to end. Fantastic.

In no particular order:
  • The VO. Loved the voice, man. Ab-so-lutel-ly perfect. Nicely recorded. Great tone. Great accent.
  • Editing. Really, really great, in my opinion. Nice effects. Not over-used. Served the story. Nice.
  • B&W intercuts. Loved them.
  • The writing. This is one of those pieces that inspires. Tight. To the point. The writer has chops, man. Very, very nice job.
  • The music was right on. Nicely done.
  • Cinematography. There's a lot going on here - but it all serves the story. Nothing is there to simply be there. I'd like to hear more about the equipment you used and your dolly shots. Really beautiful job. Not one of those things you can pull off in an afternoon.
And frankly, I have no negatives on this one.

This one grabs and holds.

Really, really nice job.

Bravo.
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Thanks a lot for the good words! Co O'neill is our writer, and he also edited and did the sound design for our film. He's definitely very talented in all of those aspects, and he has worked in the industry for longer than I have even known how to use a camera. As for our gear, we had a suprisingly small setup/crew. We pretty much just had a DVX100A, equipped with a chrosziel matte box and follow focus, and on the exteriors we used a .9ND and a circular polarizer in the matte box, which were both schneider brand filters. Interior we pretty much stuck with the naked lens, and kept it stopped down around 2.8-5.6. Our lighting setup was pretty mild, we used a lot of the existing light in the garage, and brought in a 650 fresnel with a 1/4 blue gel, to sort of match the warmish light that was coming in through the colored glass. Outside the window we had a smaller 300 fresnel coming through, with some wood slats to break up the light. Also, we had a magnifying lamp that was turned on to provide a little light for the desk, and to finish it off we had a small 25 watt practical hanging overhead, dimmed to about 75% to add some sickly warmth to the scene. We used the daylight white balance preset in the camera, and I would have to look up our specific scene file settings. We shot pretty flat, and added contrast in post. As for our dolly, we used a skate wheel dolly which ran on PVC track for all of the dolly shots. Sometimes I would ride while operating the camera, other times not. It's a very quick and efficient way to pull off nice looking dolly shots, and I highly recommend it! Lastly, we used a century optics 1.6 teleconverter for a lot of the far off long shots, such as the cemetary and the playground. Thanks for watching everyone!
 
I liked this one. Thde best use of Voice OVer. I loved the editing and cinematography too.
 
PDX_DVX said:
Our lighting setup was pretty mild, we used a lot of the existing light in the garage, and brought in a 650 fresnel with a 1/4 blue gel, to sort of match the warmish light that was coming in through the colored glass. Outside the window we had a smaller 300 fresnel coming through, with some wood slats to break up the light.
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Patrick also used a smoke machine in the garage, but the cc process removed the diffusion the smoke gave. It made the light rays more visible, though. Overall, Pat is amazingly decisive for someone his age (or any age) and more importantly, he has zero attitude... which is woefully rare in an industry full of arrogant know-it-alls. And I'm not just saying that because he said I was talented!

Thanks for all the comments! It was a lot of fun to make. We're actually talking about making it a trilogy, just for kicks.
 
JOE BLO said:
I liked this one. Thde best use of Voice OVer. I loved the editing and cinematography too.
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Thanks a lot! Nick Childs, the actor (both onscreen and VO), has a great voice. Apparently, his dad is a V.O. professional in Boston... guess it runs in the family.

Nick is a producer at the animation company Laika (Corpse Bride, Coraline), but he's a talented filmmaker in his own right. If you search YouTube for Muledick, you can check out one of his early short films.
 
I liked this one as well. How did you do the smoke effect when he blew up the first garage? I liked the look of it.

The only gripe I had was that his "target" didn't seem all that threatening. I mean, he made Robin when he took a picture of him and let him walk away, back turned no less. Maybe it would have been cool to have a shot lead on to the street and have him disappear behind a bus or something?

Just a nit-pick though, this short was top notch!

Loved it.

Mike
 
Kyser said:
I liked this one as well. How did you do the smoke effect when he blew up the first garage? I liked the look of it.

The only gripe I had was that his "target" didn't seem all that threatening. I mean, he made Robin when he took a picture of him and let him walk away, back turned no less. Maybe it would have been cool to have a shot lead on to the street and have him disappear behind a bus or something?

Just a nit-pick though, this short was top notch!

Loved it.

Mike
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Hey thanks. Glad you liked it. The smoke was a composite done in Combustion by Loren Judah, a 20 year-old prodigy who works for Bent Image Labs (a commercial animation house here in Portland). I think he had some smoke elements already rendered in his library so all he had to do was track them into the shot I sent him. I told him not to spend more than a couple hours on it because he's a super busy guy and I didn't want him to hate us after all was said and done. He's a genius.

As far as the target not being a threat, that was kinda the point... though it may be too subtle. The idea is that the guy we're following is the bad guy, but we don't realize that until the end. "Jackson" has no vendetta against The Robin, but the Robin can't work while Jackson is out there. So he has to take steps. In short, Jackson keeps it business and The Robin takes it personally.

Or something.

Co.
 
I guess it was just that you previously acknowledged that if you came across Jackson, you ended up dead.

It seemed that when Robin came across him, Robin fumbled with his bag (after being "made") and simply walked away.

Maybe I missed something. Wouldn't be the first time. :)

Overall though... I really liked this one. Voting is going to be tough!

Mike
 
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