SHORT: To Decode Faith
- Thread starter P.S.T.
- Start date
Hello all,
Thank you for watching my short film. This was my final project for my film class at the University of North Texas. I'll try to give as much useful information as possible. I'll break it down in three categories and then in subcategories.
Pre-Production
I did write a master scene script using ADOBE Story. The software was very useful but it does need further development. The only other script writing tool I've used is Celtx. The formatting is a lot more professional than Celtx and you can export all kinds of useful reports. This includes converting your script into a shooting schedule as well as a shooting script, organizing characters and cast, and adding metadata for post-production. If you ever want to revise your master scene script, you can begin a revision and it'll become a production script. It's basically the same but it automatically dates and titles it "Production Revision" for you and you see the changes you write in blue.
I HIGHLY recommend subscribing to ADOBE Creative Cloud as it gives you access to almost every single software they make without coughing $3,000 upfront. You also get updates for free!
You can write shots into your script the traditional way, by changing the content to "shot" but a cool feature is that you can convert your script into a shooting script. The format changes so definitely save a Master Scene copy FIRST, then convert the script as it is not irreversible. It'll give you the ability to write shot notes on the sides of the pages with cool little arrows to specify exactly what part of the script you are describing. This is really good if you have a complicated sequence and will be using many different shots in one paragraph of action.
When I was approaching the shoot, I did print out a shooting schedule but I wasn't satisfied with it. The shooting schedule needs a lot of improvement. It's not as practical to use. You are better off writing it by hand. I did write my shot list by hand following the order of the shooting schedule, which proved to be the most useful piece of paper on set.
Thank you for watching my short film. This was my final project for my film class at the University of North Texas. I'll try to give as much useful information as possible. I'll break it down in three categories and then in subcategories.
Pre-Production
I did write a master scene script using ADOBE Story. The software was very useful but it does need further development. The only other script writing tool I've used is Celtx. The formatting is a lot more professional than Celtx and you can export all kinds of useful reports. This includes converting your script into a shooting schedule as well as a shooting script, organizing characters and cast, and adding metadata for post-production. If you ever want to revise your master scene script, you can begin a revision and it'll become a production script. It's basically the same but it automatically dates and titles it "Production Revision" for you and you see the changes you write in blue.
I HIGHLY recommend subscribing to ADOBE Creative Cloud as it gives you access to almost every single software they make without coughing $3,000 upfront. You also get updates for free!
You can write shots into your script the traditional way, by changing the content to "shot" but a cool feature is that you can convert your script into a shooting script. The format changes so definitely save a Master Scene copy FIRST, then convert the script as it is not irreversible. It'll give you the ability to write shot notes on the sides of the pages with cool little arrows to specify exactly what part of the script you are describing. This is really good if you have a complicated sequence and will be using many different shots in one paragraph of action.
When I was approaching the shoot, I did print out a shooting schedule but I wasn't satisfied with it. The shooting schedule needs a lot of improvement. It's not as practical to use. You are better off writing it by hand. I did write my shot list by hand following the order of the shooting schedule, which proved to be the most useful piece of paper on set.
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Production
Equipment
Sony FS100
Manfrotto 509HD Head and Tripod
Lowel Creator 1 Kit and CTB and CTO Gels,White and CTB Diffusers, Etc
Green Screen( I just bought about 9 yards of nice, good quality green fabric for 20 bucks)
Senheiser Shotgun Mic and Boom Pole (I don't remember the model but I'm sure it's the low end model)
One of the most important parts of the productions process was preparing my actors. I sat down with both main characters, Dr. Marks (Jarred Simmons) and Dr. Leichenstein(Rob Ryan) and reviewed the script. This was really preproduction but I'm already posting it here.
rogar-BigGrin(DBG) This helped rewrite lines that sounded cheesy, gave the actors motivation, directed their feelings, etc. What I learned is that directing doesn't mean you can perform miracles. If you want a certain character, a certain feel for it, a specific performance, then you have to cast that specific actor. I wasn't fully satisfied with rehearsals but I had to work with the actors I already brought aboard. The performance you get during casting is what you will get in production. Don't give in to the romantic notion that your directing genius will bring a stunning performance out of your actor. You won't but you can't expect more with unpaid actors! Rob Ryan(Dr.L) was FANTASTIC right from the get go and I just did my part of directing him. The performance was all him. Everyone did their best, though, and for that, I am still very grateful which is always important. Show your gratitude by showing up on set organized and ready to go. I had my extras motivated with free snacks, a shot list to go through the shots quickly, and a set of hands to help me get the technical things done efficiently, such as lighting, props, and makeup. It was shot in 5 days and all days were on schedule because of great planning. I only had two incidents: a light bursted and sent everyone on a 5 minute break while we repaired and another where our actor was lost(which was my negligence) and we had to wait for him. I avoided having people sitting around doing nothing as much as possible as this causes anxiety and boredom. As for the technical part of the production I have a few things to say.
The camera, Sony FS100, did the job. I only used the stock lense, which is terrible. It's so SLOW. I have come to the conclusion that as long as you have an aproximately similar dynamic range as film and your sensor is 35mm and you can shoot atleast at 1080p 24p then that is all that matters. The LENSES are what give you beautiful images, not the plastic box called a "digital film camera". The lens was very difficult to give you that shallow depth of field as it only opened up to f3.5 and fully wide. As soon as you zoomed in a few millimeters your aperture starts closing greatly, which also proved difficult under low light. I stayed completely away from the gain as it was very noisy even at a relatively low gain. 500ISO is the equivalent to 0dB in this camera. The design is rather akward as there's no practical way to go handheld without having terrible shots. I used a Lowel light kit which got the job done. My first day of shooting, I made the mistake of trying to start from zero with this kit. You will notice that the shots with Dr.Marks in his class were very dark and flat. The next day, with Dr.L, I combined the available fluorescent lights and the light kit with CTB diffusers and proved to be much better. I should have used a light meter, or at least the zebras but in my haste I did not. It shows in the wide shots where his forehead is a bit blown out. I always white balanced. The manfrotto head was not film worthy. It's great for news gathering but it can't compete with the fluid heads Miller makes. At least, not the model I used.
For audio, I had to be attached to the camera. I recommend the double system by far. It got the job done. That's all I have to say about the mic and the preamps in the camera. I had to edit out a lot of room noise in post. The lesson learned is, bad audio can only be polished so much in post. Which is obvious but easily ignored when in a hurry.
As for special effects, I used a green screen in various scenes. Dr.Marks was placed in front of the green screen when he was surrounded by light. The scientist and the philosopher were also on green screens. The artist, I figured that there was really no need for it.
Equipment
Sony FS100
Manfrotto 509HD Head and Tripod
Lowel Creator 1 Kit and CTB and CTO Gels,White and CTB Diffusers, Etc
Green Screen( I just bought about 9 yards of nice, good quality green fabric for 20 bucks)
Senheiser Shotgun Mic and Boom Pole (I don't remember the model but I'm sure it's the low end model)
One of the most important parts of the productions process was preparing my actors. I sat down with both main characters, Dr. Marks (Jarred Simmons) and Dr. Leichenstein(Rob Ryan) and reviewed the script. This was really preproduction but I'm already posting it here.
rogar-BigGrin(DBG) This helped rewrite lines that sounded cheesy, gave the actors motivation, directed their feelings, etc. What I learned is that directing doesn't mean you can perform miracles. If you want a certain character, a certain feel for it, a specific performance, then you have to cast that specific actor. I wasn't fully satisfied with rehearsals but I had to work with the actors I already brought aboard. The performance you get during casting is what you will get in production. Don't give in to the romantic notion that your directing genius will bring a stunning performance out of your actor. You won't but you can't expect more with unpaid actors! Rob Ryan(Dr.L) was FANTASTIC right from the get go and I just did my part of directing him. The performance was all him. Everyone did their best, though, and for that, I am still very grateful which is always important. Show your gratitude by showing up on set organized and ready to go. I had my extras motivated with free snacks, a shot list to go through the shots quickly, and a set of hands to help me get the technical things done efficiently, such as lighting, props, and makeup. It was shot in 5 days and all days were on schedule because of great planning. I only had two incidents: a light bursted and sent everyone on a 5 minute break while we repaired and another where our actor was lost(which was my negligence) and we had to wait for him. I avoided having people sitting around doing nothing as much as possible as this causes anxiety and boredom. As for the technical part of the production I have a few things to say.The camera, Sony FS100, did the job. I only used the stock lense, which is terrible. It's so SLOW. I have come to the conclusion that as long as you have an aproximately similar dynamic range as film and your sensor is 35mm and you can shoot atleast at 1080p 24p then that is all that matters. The LENSES are what give you beautiful images, not the plastic box called a "digital film camera". The lens was very difficult to give you that shallow depth of field as it only opened up to f3.5 and fully wide. As soon as you zoomed in a few millimeters your aperture starts closing greatly, which also proved difficult under low light. I stayed completely away from the gain as it was very noisy even at a relatively low gain. 500ISO is the equivalent to 0dB in this camera. The design is rather akward as there's no practical way to go handheld without having terrible shots. I used a Lowel light kit which got the job done. My first day of shooting, I made the mistake of trying to start from zero with this kit. You will notice that the shots with Dr.Marks in his class were very dark and flat. The next day, with Dr.L, I combined the available fluorescent lights and the light kit with CTB diffusers and proved to be much better. I should have used a light meter, or at least the zebras but in my haste I did not. It shows in the wide shots where his forehead is a bit blown out. I always white balanced. The manfrotto head was not film worthy. It's great for news gathering but it can't compete with the fluid heads Miller makes. At least, not the model I used.
For audio, I had to be attached to the camera. I recommend the double system by far. It got the job done. That's all I have to say about the mic and the preamps in the camera. I had to edit out a lot of room noise in post. The lesson learned is, bad audio can only be polished so much in post. Which is obvious but easily ignored when in a hurry.
As for special effects, I used a green screen in various scenes. Dr.Marks was placed in front of the green screen when he was surrounded by light. The scientist and the philosopher were also on green screens. The artist, I figured that there was really no need for it.
Last edited:
Post-Production
This is the fun part! I worked with the line of Adobe Products:
Premiere
After Effects
Audition
I started edited sequences in order since it's a short film. I kept all the audio organized in Premiere in different tracks. One for Dr.Marks, one for Dr.L, one for all the extras combined(including classroom laughs,etc.), and one for the ambience and sound effects recorded on camera. I only used 2 video tracks to keep it from becoming cluttered. I have a very powerful editing system which I built. You can check it out here.
For the special effects I used AE along with a tutorial on videocopilot.net called Disintegration. I just tweaked it for my personal use. But the gist of it all was that I made some luma mattes with a wipe and some turbulence with an expression that gave it that dusty fade look. I realized I didn't even need a green screen because the effect is blurry so a not-so-perfect mask around the actor was just as good as chroma keying him. I did make sure that in production I took a shot with the actor on and off set, WITHOUT moving the camera. Later on I'd like to master this effect with a moving shot. If anyone has suggestions, please post! So, as you can see in the film, the shot with actor is masked/keyed to where the effect applies only to that layer, and the still shot of the set is the layer underneath.
After I had my sequence finally ready, I exported each audio track as a seperate WAV or PCM uncompressed audio file. I tried exporting an OMF file but had trouble importing in Audition. I, then, just imported each track into a new session in Audition. Make sure that you're consistent with your bit rate and sample rate. In this case, the camera recorded at 16 bit at 48 kHz. To take out that nasty hiss, I used the Noise Reduction Effect which can only be used in waveform mode. It's unbelievable. You just take a segment of silence, called room tone (where no one is speaking but you hear all that room noise), and create a noise print. It'll then take that sample of noise and take it out of any segment of the audio you select. It's like magic! Just tweak with the settings to your taste. I added a new SFX track just to add sound effects and a new Music track for, obviously, the music score. I, then, just imported the final mixdown track into my Premiere project. I found that my audio came out a bit low but it beats having your audio peak. I did mix everything with Audio monitors. That's VERY important. Never mix with headphones, at least. I should have used a multi band limiter to master the audio and bring up the level but I was in a hurry. Next time!
As for color grading, this was the best thing I learned about Adobe's Line of products. You can go into premiere and select all the clips you want to color grade and right click. Then send it to After Effects and BOOM! You have your edited clips automatically in after effects. Tweak it to your liking, save it, and then CLOSE After Effects. It's amazing. Now you have an After Effects sequence that replaced the selected clips. I repeat, close after effects because if you send another selection of clips to AE and it's open, it has this weird bug that it will think you're still working on the previous project. It'll be a pain to save it because you might overwrite the other project, etc. Just CLOSE it! It'll save you trouble. ALSO, DO SAVE a copy of the premiere project. I failed to do so and now I'm stuck with just AE sequences. It's better to save a duplicate Premiere project as PROJECTXCOLORGRADING or something similar. That way you can always adjust the editing decisions you made and then restart the color grading process I mentioned above. On a side note, I did try Speed Grade. It was pretty cool. It has nifty functions but when it comes to exporting it has a limited selection of formats unlike Premiere. I just stayed away from it.
I then just exported my project with the YouTube 1080p 24p preset and uploaded.
I hope you guys found this helpful!
This is the fun part! I worked with the line of Adobe Products:
Premiere
After Effects
Audition
I started edited sequences in order since it's a short film. I kept all the audio organized in Premiere in different tracks. One for Dr.Marks, one for Dr.L, one for all the extras combined(including classroom laughs,etc.), and one for the ambience and sound effects recorded on camera. I only used 2 video tracks to keep it from becoming cluttered. I have a very powerful editing system which I built. You can check it out here.
For the special effects I used AE along with a tutorial on videocopilot.net called Disintegration. I just tweaked it for my personal use. But the gist of it all was that I made some luma mattes with a wipe and some turbulence with an expression that gave it that dusty fade look. I realized I didn't even need a green screen because the effect is blurry so a not-so-perfect mask around the actor was just as good as chroma keying him. I did make sure that in production I took a shot with the actor on and off set, WITHOUT moving the camera. Later on I'd like to master this effect with a moving shot. If anyone has suggestions, please post! So, as you can see in the film, the shot with actor is masked/keyed to where the effect applies only to that layer, and the still shot of the set is the layer underneath.
After I had my sequence finally ready, I exported each audio track as a seperate WAV or PCM uncompressed audio file. I tried exporting an OMF file but had trouble importing in Audition. I, then, just imported each track into a new session in Audition. Make sure that you're consistent with your bit rate and sample rate. In this case, the camera recorded at 16 bit at 48 kHz. To take out that nasty hiss, I used the Noise Reduction Effect which can only be used in waveform mode. It's unbelievable. You just take a segment of silence, called room tone (where no one is speaking but you hear all that room noise), and create a noise print. It'll then take that sample of noise and take it out of any segment of the audio you select. It's like magic! Just tweak with the settings to your taste. I added a new SFX track just to add sound effects and a new Music track for, obviously, the music score. I, then, just imported the final mixdown track into my Premiere project. I found that my audio came out a bit low but it beats having your audio peak. I did mix everything with Audio monitors. That's VERY important. Never mix with headphones, at least. I should have used a multi band limiter to master the audio and bring up the level but I was in a hurry. Next time!
As for color grading, this was the best thing I learned about Adobe's Line of products. You can go into premiere and select all the clips you want to color grade and right click. Then send it to After Effects and BOOM! You have your edited clips automatically in after effects. Tweak it to your liking, save it, and then CLOSE After Effects. It's amazing. Now you have an After Effects sequence that replaced the selected clips. I repeat, close after effects because if you send another selection of clips to AE and it's open, it has this weird bug that it will think you're still working on the previous project. It'll be a pain to save it because you might overwrite the other project, etc. Just CLOSE it! It'll save you trouble. ALSO, DO SAVE a copy of the premiere project. I failed to do so and now I'm stuck with just AE sequences. It's better to save a duplicate Premiere project as PROJECTXCOLORGRADING or something similar. That way you can always adjust the editing decisions you made and then restart the color grading process I mentioned above. On a side note, I did try Speed Grade. It was pretty cool. It has nifty functions but when it comes to exporting it has a limited selection of formats unlike Premiere. I just stayed away from it.
I then just exported my project with the YouTube 1080p 24p preset and uploaded.
I hope you guys found this helpful!
Last edited:
"The lesson learned is, bad audio can only be polished so much in post. Which is obvious but easily ignored when in a hurry."
Good that you know it now... If someone would have told you before...you would have said "yeah yeah....", but it's much better to experience it.
For the noise reduction, it's a little bit to much...but it's also due to the kind of noise reduction plugin. A plugin of 2000 dollar will be different then a free one...
Good that you know it now... If someone would have told you before...you would have said "yeah yeah....", but it's much better to experience it.
For the noise reduction, it's a little bit to much...but it's also due to the kind of noise reduction plugin. A plugin of 2000 dollar will be different then a free one...
j1clark@ucsd.edu
Veteran
There were a number of shots where lighting was a 'problem' for me. For the black man, in many of the shots, the 'shadow' side went to almost 'black'. What is needed is something that keeps a bit of highlight in those areas, that
allows the 'contours' of his face and arms, to be 'clear', and not fade in to the back ground. In some of the shots, the 'side' lighting created shadows on the walls.
For me, long monologs in 'short' films spells death. The intro monolog doesn't really hook me into watching further. Also, it seems that the actor was only shot from one side...
Modern editing suggests that 2-5 seconds for a cut, even shorter for 'action' shots.
For me, if I were to have a teacher, class setup, I'd start off with full frontal shots, then reverse shots of the class, again 'full frontal' not off to the side. My presumption is that you were in control of these presentations, and they were not you capturing a 'real' class. So you could move things around so that the presenter is right in front of the camera, likewise for shooting the class...
Here's an example from "Sister Act II"(1993)
I chose this one because Whoopie is black, and the lighting is good for her. There are also black students, and so one can see how to light them in the 'group' shots as well. Notice that the apparent light comes from 'above', and there is 'soft' fill, perhaps from the side, but it is definitely not hard enough to create shadows. Also notice that for Whoopie's shots, often the camera if it is to the side, will be on the 'shadow' side, with fill, so that her face is easily 'readable'. (It may be for some 'action', or 'noir' or in general for some 'dramatic' reason, that one uses harsh lighting and does put the shadow side in very low values... but I don't think that was the 'reason' here...)
Also note, that in a number of shots, the class and teacher are shot 'straight on', but the 'to the side' shots are not so much to the side, and gives the impression of 'being in the class' rather than some sort of 3rd party observer.