Shooting Notes Film- Shot (25 seconds)
Making film is a slow, laborious process. Watching a film is a smooth, undemanding breeze. The contrast between these two aspects have always fascinated and frightened me. One has to work especially hard in film as it is so close to reality—there is a moving image, sound, real people etc. It is easier to hide what is really going on in a still image and present a transformed view of that than it is in film.
These difficulties usually mean that it is harder to get up and actually make films. You have to think of the idea, write it, plan it, find locations, find people to help, shoot it in its intricate detail with multiple angles and takes for the shortest of sequences, get good sound, move all the data around, edit it, colour grade it, provide music and sound. It’s easier (well, in theory) to just try and write something. But Wesley, an ok friend of mine, tired of my whining and told me to think of the simplest shortest film that I could and just go and shoot it. I did and it is a very useful process. Here’s a rundown of how I made the 25 second film Shot.
Planning
There was none. There wasn’t much light left in the afternoon and my plan to go shoot in an abandoned Marrickville factory started to look too ambitious. So I walked to the wild non-park at the end of my street with no idea what I was going to shoot. I had a walk around and the initial idea was to just shoot myself walking through the long grass and get a number of angles so that I could practice cutting together.
Shooting
I set up the sticks for a wide shot and as usual couldn’t tell focus for shit on that small screen with so much sunlight around. I try to set up the camera for a 10 second delay before starting the shot but that didn’t work. I started walking across the frame and the ground looked soft so I had the idea of just falling down. The ground was not soft, there were giant, sharp edged rocks exactly where I was diving. Acting is hard!
When I came back to have a look at the footage it looked a lot like I was getting shot so I decided to go with that.
I filmed another closer wide shot from the side. And then one from a front 45 degree angle looking down on the walker. The camera was getting a lot of front sun and it really washed out the image for this shot but there wasn’t really much I could do. I realised later that It would have been better to have the walker walking into the sun rather than away from it.
Around this time I started doing some multiple takes for the same shot. All in all I must have thrown myself onto the ground perhaps 12 to 15 times throughout the shoot.
I gradually got closer and closer to the subjects fall. The colour in the image although I was working a super desaturated, unsharp, decontrasted picture style varied a lot from shot to shot and I was unsuccessful in colour grading later. Don’t know what to do about this really.
Put the camera on the ground for the final fall shot pretty close to the walker. Realised that a nice dead face close up would have been nice.0)
I had a decent idea of exposure (esp using the ND filter) but it’s nowhere near being good. A monitor is crucial for shoots on this thing. You really need to be able to tell what you are looking at.
I then did some general walking scenes. I don’t know if it is the lens of the bad focus or bad exposure but the images are nowhere as sharp in the wide angles as I’d like them to be. A monitor again may help.
Audio
I took the Zoom along to record pristine audio but it was very difficult to manage shooting, acting and then worrying about audio as well. Most of the time I forgot to turn the recorder on for the shot. The 6 clips that I did get were really unusable because most of it was silence either from not being near the action (I had to leave it near where I was going to fall) or from it not being really turned on. I have to practice a lot more with the recorder.
In the end I just went with the Audio from the camera which surprisingly wasn’t that bad. Everybody talks about how horrible the sound is, and maybe I’m just really ignorant about good sound but it worked ok.
I got the hilarious gunshot from the first place I could find on the web. Sound is strangely forgiving but that doesn’t mean that you can neglect it.
Editing
I converted the 3.6GB of data to ProRes LT and imported into Final Cut Pro. To show you the level of my expertise, I spent 10 minutes trying to find how to split the single long clip in the timeline (a result of MPEG streamclip) into multiples.
Once I had found the razor tool I was left with the jigsaw puzzle that seems to be what editing actually is. I played around with in out points and went through the clip frame by frame making sure I synched up where the walker was in the process of the fall. I had a pretty good range of angles to choose from and had a good feel for the shot.
I choose the actual shooting to happen in an unexpected place where the walker is actually coming into frame. As it was a sudden, intense action I cut the clips very short for the shot and had longer more contemplative shots around it. I think it is a pretty standard edit and I was definitely happy with it in the end although it is very immature in terms of crafting.
I used the text tool to make the titles which is super unintuitive (you can’t move the text box around with the mouse but have to define it’s coordinates for example) but the titles are one of those nice touches that makes the thing look smooth.
What I couldn’t figure out was how to colour the piece well. The tools aren’t very intuitive in FCP itself and I wasn’t confident to go into Color. This is something I definitely want to put more effort into and maybe download a trial of Magic Bullet looks. But even with that getting consistency of light and so on across clips seems to be a difficuly task. Important though. In the end I was left with a washed out look which isn’t really what I wanted.
I think the piece works without music as there is a blank tension just in the really everyday sounds of traffic and grass being trodden etc.
I had fun doing the edit. There’s a long way to go.
One of the main problems which I don’t know how to avoid is that I can’t use multiple filters like Fade In/Out and Desaturation together on a clip because my notebook isn’t powerful enough to render the two. This sucks and I need to read up on a way around it. May be good justification for getting one of the newer macbooks with a decent graphics card and handing this off to one of my siblings.
Timing of the shot was critical but pretty easy. I kept on playing it back and put it just a little earlier than the visual clue of the shot having been fired. I think it works well. The body is strongly propelled forward by the edit and then it slumps.
The fade in/outs really add to the feel of the clip.
Distribution
Exporting the movie into 1280x720 for uploading to youtube took like 15 minutes. The actual upload of 72MB of data to youtube took half an hour! That sucks. The quality when it’s up there is fairly good and the UI around the whole upload thing isn’t the most intuitive but it’s decent. I then posted it to Facebook.
This clip did take a while (about 5 hours of work) but it was fun doing it. It would be far easier with another person I guess but wasn’t impossible with just one. I need to do a lot more of these. I’ll try doing 2 a week.
Posted 2 years ago
