"VOICES" - Feature Film - HD/Letus35 - Comedy

jls4

jls4

Veteran
Here are some scenes from the feature "Voices". We don't have a trailer as of yet. I'm hoping to have one in the next 10 days or so. I know most people get the trailers first, then get the scenes. But I tend to do things sometimes the hard way. :)

Specs: Shot over approx 25 Days which lasted from Late Nov 2007 to March 2008. Shot HD and with the Letus35 adapter. $4K worth of lighting equipment, pretty good audio equipment. Cast Approx 15 people.

Crew:
Director/Producer/Lighting: Me
DP: Jay Williams
Asst Producer: Vonetta H. Jackson
Audio: Ramy Kebbe
Writen By: Nedra Simone and Me
Based on Stage Play by Nedra Simone.

The actual feature is almost complete. It'll be finished once we tweak a few scenes, the last of the color correction is complete, and we add the foley/sfx and the score.

[Removed links as they are no longer valid] - See "Coming Correct" Thread

jls4
 
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mentatDUKE said:
This is looking good, jls. What HD camera did you use? HVX? I'll watch it with sound once I get home. :)
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Thanks. We used the Sony V1U. It has a great picture. It's CMOS like the EX1 only drawback is the chips are 1/4 instead of the 1/2. So we had to pump in lots of light.
 
Ok. Watched em. They were pretty enjoyable. What was the shooting schedule like and how'd you find all the actors? Were they reprising their roles from the play or did you have to cast from scratch. Good luck with this!
 
mentatDUKE said:
Ok. Watched em. They were pretty enjoyable. What was the shooting schedule like and how'd you find all the actors? Were they reprising their roles from the play or did you have to cast from scratch. Good luck with this!
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Our shooting schedule was all over the place. We shot about 25 to 30 days over 4 months. So some weeks we'd shoot Monday-Wed, then Friday and Saturday.
About 40% of the actors came from the play. Funny thing about that was the actors had been performing the play for a year for "hopes of money". I come along and say let's turn it into a movie - now everybody wants to get paid!
One girl, we only needed her for one weekend, 16 hours or less. And she made a HUGE deal about not getting money and that was too much time to not get paid (they wanted pay upfront - not points). Yet they had performed the play at least 5 times, plus rehearsals. So I know she spent over 40 hours and never got paid. So we lost about 30% of them just in that. I wasn't mad though, I was happy with all but one replacement. The others came through people that I knew or the original playwrite knew. Then we started asking the actors who they know. And slowly but steadily filled the movie out.
Thanks

cinewan said:
that was funny.
the images on the last clip look good
http://www.vimeo.com/1610109
great job!
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thanks for watching!
 
Thanks for the info, jls. The budget seems pretty decent. 25k? How much of that is allocated to the actors? That seems like a lot of money to me. I'm surprised there were some hurt feelings.

In fact, would you be able to discuss how you allocated money to the various areas of production. Is it not possible to shoot a film like this for 10k?

Thanks again for sharing.
 
mentatDUKE said:
Thanks for the info, jls. The budget seems pretty decent. 25k? How much of that is allocated to the actors? That seems like a lot of money to me. I'm surprised there were some hurt feelings.

In fact, would you be able to discuss how you allocated money to the various areas of production. Is it not possible to shoot a film like this for 10k?

Thanks again for sharing.
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$25K sounds like I lot doesn't it, but it's not.
$4K - Camera, $5K - Lighting, $4K - Audio That's already $13K and we haven't eaten yet and don't have tapes for the camera, grip equipment or Software (Cineform Prospect HD $1K) yet. I didn't pay the actors up front. All of their money comes from the backend. Most of them didn't like that idea, they felt that if they got paid on the backend, they may not get paid at all.

It's a legitamite concern. And my contract was NOT favorable to them. Everything we did was on a sliding scale. A low end Distribution Deal would not give the actors any money. It would Take A hefty Distribution Deal for them to make anything worth talking about. I did it this way to protect my investors. As long as I sell the movie for decent amount the investors will MAKE money, not just get their money back. This way I can ensure I can get the money again for another project, and grow.

I was honest with my actors and crew as I am with anyone connected with me. I have a "path" that I'm following. That path is worth more than a few hundred dollars. When Tyler Perry got rich, he "remembered" those who were there for him when no one else was. For me, if I just paid somebody to show up - I'd have no loyalty to them at all. It's like having someone cut your grass or something. but they gave to me when I had nothing. and as I grow I'll remember them. But I told them what I was trying to do, how I'm making 3 movies, not just one, how I think my plan will make me a major player in Atlanta and soon Hollywood. I gave them a professional set and professional equipment and they took a chance. I hope the chance pays off for everyone.

So NO ONE got paid on our set. Not the 15 or so actors, not the 4 members of the crew, or the post production people that are working on Songs, Music Score, Editing, Sound Edit, etc.

BTW I went and checked out you guys shorts. I see you'll are doing a pretty good job down in Houston. The shorts are good, you'll are definately on the right track.
 
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Thanks for the info jls. And for checking us out. Your threads are so compelling because we have VERY similar strategies, except you figured out once thing I didn't: you can get paid (or at least recoup) while making student films.

This is a very exciting revelation to me, so I'm adjusting my plan. I'll do one more mega-short, then start prepping my first feature for 2009. Before, I planned on grinding a bit more with short/student films, then I would attempt to convince investors to give us a lot of money to make a feature.

Now I realize, that this isn't really necessary. The key is low overhead, high quality productions. I was of the mind that your 1st feature HAS to be a mega-hit or else you're doomed. I wanted to follow the template of Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Napoleon Dynamite, etc, where the directors achieved immediate success right out of the gate.

Now that the market is so flooded w/ indie films, I've decided that my previous ideal wasnt very realistic.

Thanks for dropping so much knowledge.

BTW, what made you choose Cineform's Prespect HD as a codec? Why is it more beneficial than ProPresHQ and others?
 
mentatDUKE said:
BTW, what made you choose Cineform's Prespect HD as a codec? Why is it more beneficial than ProPresHQ and others?
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I heard lots of good things about Prospect HD and I wanted to make sure I had room to grow. Like with the 24 Diary thread, I went a little over so I wouldn't have to "re buy" later if I stayed in the PC. Unfortunately my Editor loves the Mac, so I know next time around I'll be buying a G5. Maybe i'll see if I can sell my lisence for Prospect. Anyway, prospect is a good program and allows 4:2:2 10Bit 1920x1080p and that's why I went with it. Even though the camera produces 8Bit, when you do editing and effects you may go over the 8Bit area, so having more bits is good - in my opinion.

Also to note, I did Greenscreen with it and had little to no problems. The only problem I had the whole time was a greenscreen shoot we had outdoors and the sun was so bright it kept pushing up the green levels. But when it works, it's so cool. In fact, I was amazed at how easy Keylight (comes in After Effects) could grab the key. I have a greenscreen shot with an actress next to a window with the screen on the other side and after the matte, her reflection is still on the window.

Greenscreen can help you a lot in certain effects and types of shots. I plan to write about this in the 24 Diary. Maybe Chapter 9 or so, cause I figured out a way to shoot almost where ever you want using Green Screen and some patience.

As for your feature in 2009, I say go for it! Remember to line yourself up and try to go for an easy to sell movie.
 
Looking good. I think you've done well, especially for having access to only one camera. Would you mind expanding on your experience with the Letus35? What mount and lenses you used and how easy/difficult it was to obtain critical focus. Also, what kind of audio setup did you go with?
 
That genuinly made me laugh, not an easy thing trust me. I think the images look great, the lighting and colour make this look very appealing. I too would like to know what lenses you used for this. I like how the comedy is'nt forceful and kind of presents itself in a way where even if you dont laugh it is still entertaining enough to enjoy and continue watching. My favourite of the 3 clips would be the first one, i just like the woman's attitude it's very funny, almost to the point of what ever she says is worthy of a chuckle. For my next favourite I'd say the second clip, due to each charater being very different and so each personality brings a new dimmension to the comedy. Very well done and hope to see more soon. The third clip was good too but the other 2 felt more natural to me which is what i like in my comedies. Excellent
 
i love black people on camera, they look so good. some of us white folk need a tune up lol i was laughing too and like alexander said, its not easy for me eigher. funny stuff
 
It's looking good, J. The screen directions in the card game scene bothered me a little. The shallow focus is a bit overdone. The shots look beautiful though. You have good looking actors too. The movie is obviously a comedy and I think it will be very entertaining. The play must have been a success? You should be able to sell a lot of DVDs. I think the budget is realistic for a movie like this. You'll be able to recover your money and make a profit too. I wonder what your chances are with cable?

Good luck.
 
Thanks everybody for watching and placing comments. If anybody else has anything to add good or bad, I'd love to hear as much feedback as I can to, either fix problems that we can fix, or at least prepare me for our next project.

Tony Robinson said:
Looking good. I think you've done well, especially for having access to only one camera. Would you mind expanding on your experience with the Letus35? What mount and lenses you used and how easy/difficult it was to obtain critical focus. Also, what kind of audio setup did you go with?
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The Letus35 worked great. We only had two problems the whole time: the first as many have said about the earlier versions is that they are so quiet you can forget they are on. I had to reshoot 2 scenes because of this. So I told everybody on set, that everytime you think about it - make sure the camera is vibrating. so everyone would walk around and touch the camera periodically. By the end of it, I had rechargable batts, so once we set up the Letus was turned on and it was not turned off until we either changed locations, went to break, or wrapped for the day. After 4 to 6 hours of use, we just changed the batts to make sure that we kept vibrating.

We're on a nikon mount. The base camera was used for Wide shots. Nikon f1.4 50mm was used for mediums, and Nikon f1.8 105mm was used for closes.

The hardest part was the critical focus. I talk a little about a trick we implemented in the 24 Diary. Basically Actors had to hit their mark, and not move much from it. At the end of the outdoor scene with the girl and the "weird drink" the actress is just one of those good ones that just "does it" you have to keep up with her, so it was hard to keep her on her mark because she plays to the other actors and their reactions. At the end of the scene, she just walked off! We had no follow focus of anything. I had got used to working with the bare lenses, but it was difficult to follow her as she walked away because she just did it - I didn't tell her to. But almost 70% of the walk away was in focus so I decided to go with it. Heck I saw Iron Man and a couple of times the AC lost focus and don't get me started on Hit Man.

The focus was always a problem, our budget was so limited we only had the LCD on the camera - no other monitors. so we're trying to meter light AND get focus from a LCD that is probably 400x280 pixels which is shooting 1920x1080. So we'd go in and out on the lenses and hope for the best. Over 90% of the shots have good focus, the other 10% we tried to edit around it best we could or fix it with After Effects.

As for the audio setup. It was really importaint to me to have good audio after my last movie. In my last movie about 20% of the movie, you have to strain to hear. And everyone who watched the movie was constantly increaing or decreasing the volume on their TVs. So I knew that Audio was my number 1 priority to fix. We used a Sennheiser 416 shotgun mic with Monster Cables (the best I could find) and fed them into a 24Bit 96Khz Digital Recorder with Limiter to make sure the audio wouldn't clip out. The audio system was awesome to say the least. I don't know if we got even 40% of the true capacity of it, but I'm hoping to get a Hypercardiod for the next movie and work with the audio guy to improve on the audio even more. I'm very happy with the audio, but I'd like to see a 15% improvement over the base recording and another 40% or so in audio mixing by the time we get to the next project.

Daniel Alexander said:
That genuinly made me laugh, not an easy thing trust me. I think the images look great, the lighting and colour make this look very appealing. I too would like to know what lenses you used for this. I like how the comedy is'nt forceful and kind of presents itself in a way where even if you dont laugh it is still entertaining enough to enjoy and continue watching. My favourite of the 3 clips would be the first one, i just like the woman's attitude it's very funny, almost to the point of what ever she says is worthy of a chuckle. For my next favourite I'd say the second clip, due to each charater being very different and so each personality brings a new dimmension to the comedy. Very well done and hope to see more soon. The third clip was good too but the other 2 felt more natural to me which is what i like in my comedies. Excellent
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Thanks a bunch. We used A Nikon f1.4 50mm and a Nikon f1.8 105mm. For wides we either took the camera as far back as we could go (or at least what we wanted for a wide shot) OR I simply took the Letus35 off and turned down the sharpeness of the camera so it wouldn't be too distracting. We experiemented with different levels of sharpness from 7 to 0. Different scenes have varying amounts. Like R.Rodriguez says my goal was to experiment with every scene, so I could figure out what I wanted and didn't want. To me, when you're learning this is the best way. Sure you may screw up a scene or two - but at least you can say "I'll never do that again" and when you do find something that works, it's like "Cool, glad I tried that!" So some of the 70 or so scenes may seem slightly disjointed on a few shots (we color corrected, re sharpened, etc most of them back where you can't tell much at all), but they were great learning experiences and I don't think they will distract much at all from the final product.

portlandbozz said:
i love black people on camera, they look so good. some of us white folk need a tune up lol i was laughing too and like alexander said, its not easy for me eigher. funny stuff
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Glad to head that you guys liked the comedy. We were trying to keep it light and funny.

filmman said:
It's looking good, J. The screen directions in the card game scene bothered me a little. The shallow focus is a bit overdone. The shots look beautiful though. You have good looking actors too. The movie is obviously a comedy and I think it will be very entertaining. The play must have been a success? You should be able to sell a lot of DVDs. I think the budget is realistic for a movie like this. You'll be able to recover your money and make a profit too. I wonder what your chances are with cable?
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Unfortunately we had to keep the iris open, around f1.4/1.8 for most of the movie. We just didn't have enough light to push into f5.6 which would have expanded the DOF. Good observation - thanks for that. The play wasn't a success actually. It's a long political story and not one that I want on public display for the internet. But if you're curious pm me and I'll let you know. I'm hoping to sell directly to a distributor. I'm not into the whole self-distribution thing. How do you get on cable?
 
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