SHORT: "Vines" - Promotional Fantasy Short Film

S

SoerenS

Member
Hello,

I'd like to share our short film "Vines" (Dur. about 2 minutes) with you. Initially, the idea was to shoot a low/no-budget 30 second commercial for a 3D-printed jewelry collection which developed into a two minute promotional short film. We shot for one day on a GH5 (422 10bit V-Log), using a Beholder EC1 Gimbal. Postproduction took almost half a year since all the VFX were done by one person with a lot of trial and error. Software used was FCP X for editing, DaVinci Resolve for Color Grading, Cinema4D for CGI and After Effects for compositing.

I also wrote a blog post about preproduction and filming, should you be interested: https://www.soerenschulz.com/making-of-vines-part-1/
And a short post about postproduction (editing, color grading and sound): https://www.soerenschulz.com/making-of-vines-part-2/
Third post with a very detailed description of how we did the VFX in Cinema4D and After Effects:
https://www.soerenschulz.com/making-of-vines-part-3/




VFX Breakdown:

Here's a Color Grading Breakdown we did for "Vines":
 

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It was definitely technically adequate, but it's hard to critique this short unless one really knows what the aim here is. If it is meant to be a commercial, that's one thing. If it's meant to be a work of fiction, then another. I understand that it started out as a promotional piece for jewelry, but then became just a short film(?). Anyway, that's the issue here - what is this? FWIW, as a promotional piece, there were not enough close ups for me - it makes it seem like there was not enough thought and conceptual planning behind this... you were not thinking enough about what you want to accomplish. As a result, it looked to me like guys who went out on a daytrip to shoot a girl walking - NO ARTISTIC PLANNING. If there was more planning, you would have a lot more close ups so you can really play with the emotional effects during editing (closeups of the actress, eyes, face, hands [more], also more shots like over the shoulder when she stretches her hand to touch the vine on the tree trunk etc.). You have nothing to play with in editing - no coverage. Of course, that might have demanded more than one day of shooting - or maybe a heck of a lot more preproduction planning to pull it off in one day (perhaps not possible).

This in general is the issue - think before you do. Because it seems the idea was "walks around, vines appear, notices vine on tree trunk - OK, EVERYBODY, LET'S SHOOT!!!" - is this enough? But again, hard to judge without knowing the exact aims.
 
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Thank you for taking your time to watch our film and for sharing your thoughts. It is still meant to be a promotional piece, just not a 30 sec commercial (inspired by other "promotional shorts" that are out there for e.g. jewelry or perfume brands).
We did quite a bit of planning, but we also knew that we wouldn't have more than five hours to shoot it. Not to use a lot of close-ups/detail shots was a conscious decision. Shooting all these would have been obvious but that wasn't the look and feel we were after. It's supposed to feel more like a film than a clip.
 
Great! That explains everything - if you meant it as a "movie" type clip, then you are right, you don't need all those close ups. At that point the only danger is that one can fall between two stools - one stool "promotion", another stool "fiction short", without being able to comfortably sit on either, neither fish nor fowl. Good luck!
 
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