FEATURE: The Vipassana Order - Feature Film

[D.Mur]

Hello All,

My name is Donte Murry and I'm a 25 year old director currently enrolled in Chapman University's Graduate MFA program. Before attending Chapman I almost optioned a feature then entitled "The Order of the Vipassana" to a small indie production company. I was very attached to the project, and unwilling to give it away to a company that seemed only marginally interested. Once I started at Chapman I begin to think about how I could actually shoot this film myself.

In January put together a team of very talented and dedicated individuals and went about creating a sizzle reel to attract attention and secure funding.

The sizzle reel gave us the "umph" we needed to get the project off the ground. I was able to secure a small amount of funding, get talent, equipment, and resources to shoot this film.

My plan was to shoot the film in 15 days throughout the summer. Many of my film school peers thought it was somewhat of an unreasonable idea. (After reading what other filmmakers are doing on these forums obviously they're wrong)

Here's a promo reel I put together halfway thru the shoot to secure the rest of the funding we needed.

UPDATE - We finished production and we are now headed for post!


http://www.facebook.com/TVOFilm

 

[D.Mur]

Reserved for Production Diary

 

[D.Mur]

So we finished days 9 and 10 this weekend. Also solidified getting the funding we needed to finish by August 21st. Honestly can't believe we are this close, just a few months ago I felt like this was a near impossible and almost irrational goal to shoot this feature. Was really close to calling it off, will detail that in the production diary. Here are just a few stills from we've shot so far.

 

[Marlon Ladd]

Grabs are looking really good!

 

[Lakmir0]

I've been messing around with a little "Super-8 like" technique for converting digitally acquired footage to a retro film look. I hope you dont mind but I took one of your grabs...tell me what you think?

 

[D.Mur]

Grabs are looking really good!

Thanks man! When I first got to film school composition and visual storytelling was a major weakness for me so it's something I'm borderline obsessive about now haha. Glad to read you like the screen grabs.

Also I checked out your trailer, cool project man! Do you have any threads on here about it?

 

[D.Mur]

I've been messing around with a little "Super-8 like" technique for converting digitally acquired footage to a retro film look. I hope you dont mind but I took one of your grabs...tell me what you think?

View attachment 37815

Lakmir0 I'm honored but what exactly are you going for? Are you thinking of incorporating this technique in your film?

 

[Lakmir0]

Well, to be honest, I usually shoot film. But I am coming to the point where I am not sure it makes sense for me now. Largely because the lower end film cameras are too noisy for the sound I'm trying to capture and the higher end cameras are too expensive for what I can afford. I was thinking of getting a t3i kit and doing some eidting to get the look I want. Here is a random t3i grab I pulled off the net along with the edited grab which is the look I am going for (Not trying to highjack your thread but you did ask)

This is raw



This is the t3i grab with the edit

 

[D.Mur]

Well, to be honest, I usually shoot film. But I am coming to the point where I am not sure it makes sense for me now. Largely because the lower end film cameras are too noisy for the sound I'm trying to capture and the higher end cameras are too expensive for what I can afford. I was thinking of getting a t3i kit and doing some eidting to get the look I want. Here is a random t3i grab I pulled off the net along with the edited grab which is the look I am going for (Not trying to highjack your thread but you did ask)

This is raw
View attachment 37844


This is the t3i grab with the edit
View attachment 37845

I'm not quite sure I'd call it the "film" look, but I'm really interested in ways to manipulate digital images with color grading. One really drastic example of that is a beautiful film called Medicine for Melancholy. I'm not exactly sure how they did it (seems like it's overexposed, bleach bypassed, and desaturated) but I like it gets away from the "obvious" 5D look. In someway I hope to do that here. Shoot me a pm with your email and I'll send you some clips where I've experimented with that idea.

 

[Lakmir0]

Well, nothing looks like film quite like film does. But I have done side by side shoots with film and digital acquisition and compared the results to make these editing choices. When you shoot two scenes side by side and take grabs from them to compare, there are some things that become evident about film vs digital.

1) Film is obviously softer than digital 2) Film has grain 3) Film has less color than digital BUT before people talk about Wizard of Oz and all that, remember that we dont have that sort of stock anymore and modern colorrich film is generally color graded that way and is NOT like that raw. I suppose the exception is Fuji film but I shoot Kodak so that is where my point of reference is. 4) Film has a wider lattitude and lower contrast (not range, but actual contrast-ness, if thats a word) 5) Film has more detail in the highlights and doesnt blow out nor does it have crushed blacks.

Therefore, I think the key to having a "film like" digital image is to 1) make sure you dont blow out the highlights. Stop it down if you need to so you dont blow it out cause once its blown, you are a giveaway 2) Add "soft" light instead of hard. So either diffuse the light and bounce it. Hard light doesnt like digital at all whereas film can get away with it. I'll show you 35mm shot with the camera aimed right at a 500w light and you see how graceful film is. 3) Increase brightness of digital footage in post. This will add some highlights but not too many if you shot it right and stopped it down. 4) Saturation should be lowered because film has less saturation naturally than most digital cameras 5) Add a tiny bit of non-color noise to your footage. This gives it a grain structure which is essential to having a film look.

If I do ever go digital in the future, I'm taking it a step further and actually going to frame by frame edit. It takes forever but yields great movement results. In Avid, you can extract frames from the file and then later you can add them back in whatever duration you want. I have experimented with this and when you put the frames back after editing, it gives a true film print feel because you have still frames instead of interlaced video. Granted, the software will interlace it, but it is starting with pure frames of data. Also, this allows you to use the features of your favorite image editor program instead of the (less impressive) features of an NLE. Just some food for thought.

 

[D.Mur]

This weekend we got through days 11 and 12. Stills from this weekend below!

I thought a lot about this quote before and during this weekend - "He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little, he would achieve much must sacrifice much" - James Allen.

I shared this a lot with my cast and crew. It's not easy making a film, it's definitely not easy making a feature. It takes a group of individuals reaching and striving for greatness, and not settling for mediocrity. If greatness is what we strive for then what are we willing to sacrifice for that? I even had to ask myself that a few times in the days leading up to the shoot. It was a good reminder.

 

[D.Mur]

Shooting a low budget feature film is like taking a precious little baby, putting it in a stroller, tucking it in....and then running like hell with that stroller across a highway.

Day 13 tomorrow.

 

[D.Mur]

Wrapped on Day 13 today, a few stills uploaded below.



This weekend we have two BIG sequences.

Saturday - We have a group of scenes where the romantic interest of our lead is initiated into the Vipassana Order. Was originally going to shoot these in a garage...but just today this warehouse opened up...


Sunday - Pageant scene - Man, this is going to be tough. Still haven't locked location, but they've verbally agreed...just need final confirmation (sweating a little). Need three extras to be pageant girls, looking to lock that down tomorrow. Still need a pageant host, but I have several options. This is a visual reference for how we will shoot most of it...

 

[D.Mur]

Finally got the approval for the location we needed for our pageant scene on Sunday. I was terrified at thought of having coordinated all the people we needed for that day and having the small possibility that we wouldn't have a location. Thank God it came through.

 

[D.Mur]

Alright so here are the updates for days 14 and 15. Stills are posted below.

Day 14 - Day 14 was this past Saturday. Visually I felt like some of our most impressive and precise stuff needed to come today, and Day 15. My producer is working nights on the show Big Brother so I've had to take over much of the producing responsibility. Emailing and contacting everyone, making sure we have all the props we need, and picking up crafty right before we shoot. I hate to have to do all that, not because I don't wanna want to do it, but because I'd like to focus on directing. To compensate for it I stayed up until about 4am just drilling in my head over and over again what we were going to do today.

This location is just amazing. It's a 30,000 square foot warehouse filled with machines, stacks of boxes, and other things that look cool in the background.

My DP and I had a field day. What I really liked about the day was that I felt what we shot just didn't look cool - but the visuals matched the story we were trying to tell. I think the stills below give a good sense of that.




There's one steadicam shot we got today that I think is the best thing my DP and I have ever shot. Can't wait to post it up!

Day 15 - I was a little worried about this day. This is a pageant scene (check out our visual references - it's up a few posts) and a very ambitious day. I've had some prior projects where I let the ambition of the day overtake the main responsibility of telling a BELIEVABLE story in every way. I was determined today to try my best to prevent that.


We got off to a bit of a late start because we didn't anticipate how long it would take to get the pageant girls in and out of hair and make-up. This took about three hours. So we spent that time setting up everything and trying to make sure the rest of the day went as smooth as possible. Overall I think we had a pretty good day. I think what we did was believable and we pulled it off - but I'm still not happy with it.

I felt like day 14 was near flawless. Day 15 was above average, but not exactly what I wanted. If I could do it again there are a few things I would fix. Mostly on my end as a director. I'm not happy with the day because I told everyone we wanted perfection these past two days, and that's not what we got today. Also felt we didn't match up with the visual references I had.

Here are a few stills below.

 

[D.Mur]

Here's a few more stills!

 

[D.Mur]

We're WRAPPED. It was a week ago and I still can't believe it. 16 days...

Would not have been possible without the unbelievable team working together on this project. I don't know that I've ever worked with such a dedicated, talented, and consistent group of people. Looking back on it, it's almost silly to think we could pull this off without something or someone falling through on us.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

Now it's time to get started on post production....

 

[D.Mur]

Had to take some time away from post to finish a short. But we're back on it and close to a first cut! Should have a trailer soon.

One thing I've learned is post-production is just about the only thing you can't bargain on or bullshit your way through. It either takes a lot of money, or a lot of time.

 

[Eric Boellner]

Those stills look fantastic, especially the warehouse initiation stills. Looking forward to the trailer.

-JMT