SHORT: What You See. - A very short film

Intuitive Films

Intuitive Films

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The idea of this little short, was to focus more on the cinematography aspect, and make the footage look as close to film as possible. It's definitely not perfect, but I had a good time filming it.

Enjoy! Critique is much appreciated. :)

https://vimeo.com/129732182
 
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It looks pretty good.

I am not the most technical eye when it comes to cinematography.

It actually reminds me of my first feature that we shot on Cine-Alta (it was the thing at the time).

I had one location that was in an office (in a home) and it looks like your short.

We felt like we got close to looking like film then.

-M
 
It was hard to concentrate just on the light when there was so much wrong and distracting. Wrong: terrible depth of field with critical areas out of focus - we're supposed to see stuff that's actually out of focus; disqualifying - that is not film and not how film is shot, this is depth of field from amateur DSLR footage - if this were film, we'd say "fire the focus puller". Distracting: shaky cam work - also screams DSLR, not film-like in the least. Do over without these issues and then one can talk about cinematography and "film-like", because as it stands now, the last thing I think of is "filmic".
 
Why try and copy film,i watch tv now on my superb Samsung TV and most of the material digitaly filmed looks so good,most of the film material looks poor and unnatural compared to modern digital.
 
I overall liked the short film, but had a couple issues with it. Like OldCorpse said, the focus is usually on the wrong thing, and in reality, deeper focus is more film-like than an out-of-focus shot. The reason most deep focus shots on low budget films suck is due to bad lighting, set design, and little foreground/middleground/background separation. The lighting was also too harsh in the close-ups. Bounce the light off of some foamcore or through some diffusion (or a softbox) to add some shaping to the face.
 
It wasn't bad. The issue here is that your DOF is a little shallow. Looks like you may have been shooting 2.0 or 2.8 or less. There are times when those apertures are nice. Here I think it only added in a few shots, not in all of them. I personally don't like to shoot less than in the 3s, but that's just me. I've been on shoots where the DP enjoyed 2.0. But I'd rather have a little more clarity. But in a personal piece like this, it wasn't bad.

I also think the whole "film look" thing is gone the way of the dinosaur. You can make footage look like pretty much what you want it to. So I'd encourage you to focus on just finding the best way to tell your story.
 
jls4 said:
It wasn't bad. The issue here is that your DOF is a little shallow. Looks like you may have been shooting 2.0 or 2.8 or less. There are times when those apertures are nice. Here I think it only added in a few shots, not in all of them. I personally don't like to shoot less than in the 3s, but that's just me. I've been on shoots where the DP enjoyed 2.0. But I'd rather have a little more clarity. But in a personal piece like this, it wasn't bad.

I also think the whole "film look" thing is gone the way of the dinosaur. You can make footage look like pretty much what you want it to. So I'd encourage you to focus on just finding the best way to tell your story.
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Thanks jls4! Yes, your correct. For some shots I stopped to 1.8 and the rest was filmed at 2.4 I believe. This was just a practice film, so in the future I will definitely be keeping all of these critiques and comments in mind when it comes time to film again. :)
 
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