Clifton, over at fusionfox, has agreed to design v2.0 of Take Zer0. When it goes live, expect weekly video reviews of movies, a shorter but more comprehensive series of tutorials, as well as our usual episodes. We also plan to start Clip Show.
Work and school, the fog has finally lifted out of our daily grind. Not entirely, but Sean and I can go back to being amateur filmmakers with overblown ideals. Oh yeah, we’re back to our usual selves, naïvely waiting to have our cherries popped by the studio system. We sat down with Raquel in a Starbucks one night and dished out story ideas. Raquel pitched a semi-autobigraphical character study. Mine is called Night of the Intruder, a low rent mystery via The Twilight Zone. Eh.
You may recognize today’s video. It was posted a few months back; but it was rough and incomplete. So if you feel like taking a spell of deja vu, the short is called Two Years Ago. I wrote it in thirty minutes, storyboarded in an hour, and shot the rest in the same night. The purpose of such haste was to illustrate the ease of short filmmaking; that if you felt like making something, then make it. (It also helps if your actor stands still and never moves anywhere…)
Look forward to regular episodes soon. We already shot a few.
3 Comments to “Web design, Story ideas, and Déjà vu”
Saturday December 15, 2007
Hello.
I am interested in stepping up a level in film making. Until now, my films have been lightly scripted, and the shots have been instantaneous when we found an inspiring location; ie: no lighting setups, no (very few) stage directions, and no external mics.
I really like the look of your film, and was wondering a few things (maybe you should make a tutorial about this?). First the image is very clear. Are you using a Mini-DV type camera? Thats what it seems to be, but it has a very film-like look. I assume that some of that is attributed to lighting. I was wondering what type of lighting setup you had for this film (esp the shots before the power outage).
Thanks, I can’t wait for more updates and tutorials!
Saturday December 22, 2007
Thanks for the interest, Carver!
We are using a Mini-DV camera. My own preference is to have extra crisp picture, and so we set the camera to use the “Thick” (sharpest) setting available. Then we lower the aperture and set the gain to low, while letting in as much light as possible.
The film-like look, as you say, is because we have the camera’s saturation/brightness/contrast levels set fairly low. It can make the picture look pale by default. The reason we record this way is to enable more control in post, and adjust the saturation/contrast later on. We do this to try to avoid that digital look—you know, like over-saturated colors and unnatural bloom.
Hope that helps.
Saturday December 22, 2007
assuming that you camera doesn’t have ability to adjust the sat/bright/contr., is there any other way to make this possible? I can only set the exposure manually.
Also, What is the ‘thick’ is it some sort of digital sharpening setting, or is it a recording quality?
what frame rate do you use? 60i? if not, when do you change it, on the camera or in post?
-Thanks
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