I wanted to take a break from the software side of things and take some time to detail some filmmaking techniques. As always I am constantly experimenting, and would love to hear thoughts on this. I’ve written other posts on technique, such as Working with Actors, and will continue to add them to the mix going forward. Also, Gary King has added some posts on technique which might really help low budget indies.

I’ve always been conscious of developing the right look for a film. In my film R.P.D.M., I worked hard to show visually the effect of a drug which slows down time in your mind. In EVIE, I came up with different color schemes to represent visually what was happening in the story. All of the main character’s climactic moments in that film are told without words, purely through images and very specific color choices. Even as far back as my horror short BLOODY MARY, the look of each scene was consciously designed along with the DP, Timur Civan. I am bringing the same attitude to THE LOST CHILDREN.

I was in Austin for SXSW, going out for dinner with another filmmaker and a camera guru. The subject of DSLRs came up because the camera guru was speaking about them in a SXSW panel. I told him that I was using the Canon 7D on my feature, and he asked how we got away with that, was it our primary camera. I told him we used it for interviews, and for generating some footage that will later be degraded. The low-light capabilities make it possible to get 1080 HD footage even at night under street lights. And if your goal is to dirty that footage up later, and make it look like “found footage,” then you get quite a bit to work with.

But the point was this. I said I was no longer in the business of trying to make little cameras look like big cameras. Now, I prefer to embrace whichever camera for what it is and exploit it for that. If I want to shoot something broad and cinematic, I will likely go with a big cinematic camera. When I am shooting on handy-cams, it’s because I am seeking something the handy-cam can give me. For instance, I wanted some scenes shot as if on the night vision you get from some older Sony cameras. So that’s what we shot that scene on. I don’t know how we would have gotten this look in post. I mean, I’m sure there’s some way to get part of it with enough time and skill, but I don’t know if you’ll ever get the eyes right in post without serious efx work. And it’s the eyes I wanted in this shot. I wanted the eerie, otherworldly look night vision gives the eyes. And this supports the meaning of this scene.

This goes hand in hand with the post I wrote about why we chose the non-fiction format for this film. It allowed us to choose cameras for certain looks. It released us from the burden of having to keep up with the joneses in terms cinematography. And hopefully, it’s going to help us stand out some.

I started this journey last year with this post called “Cameras and Camera Tests.” So now I want to give some more on the results of this after shooting this way throughout 2010.

What are our goals?

First off, to create convincing “found footage.” Very often, you will see something in a film that’s supposed to be from a video camera, and it’s quite obviously some cheap plugin. There’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself, if it simply indicates to the audience that this section is “video.” It serves the story. But along with the Non-Fiction format, we wanted footage that might actually pass muster on the web. As in, if you came across a bit of footage on the web, you would have to look at it twice before you realized it wasn’t real.

Secondly, our goals were to create some unique and beautiful looks. Many filmmakers these days seems to define beautiful as one thing; does it look like the movie I saw in the theater last week. I think beauty in images can mean a lot of things. On the other hand, I see many independent films shot on camcorders, where it seems like the filmmakers simply gave up thinking about the look they wanted at all.

This image serves two purposes. First, it’s about what I want as a “surveillance video” image. I am still doing a lot of experimentation with this, but this image is coming pretty close. Secondly, I think there’s a lot of beauty in it. It’s “realistic” in the sense that it’s a “video image,” yet it’s a bit impressionistic too. The cross-hatch pattern and the saturated colors combine to make it almost like a painted image. To my eye, it lends a bit of a surreal quality to the shot. Which again, supports the meaning of this particular scene.

What is your opinion of this shot regarding those two purposes?

This image was created by shooting the actual scene on a 7D mounted high in the room as if a surveillance camera. I zoomed in on that image in FCP. Then played back and shot my HDTV monitor with the 7D again. I could have shot this on a lower res monitor to get a little more accurate as “surveillance” footage, but I like this look and think it’s a good compromise between style and “realism.”

Playing with static

There are certain points in THE LOST CHILDREN when cameras mess up, the image goes in and out, and sometimes go to pure static. There are plugins that do this, but to my eye none of them comes close to the real thing – at least on the budget we’re working at.

That’s beautiful.

Look at the random “bolts” shooting through that image. Both of the above were created by first running off the original footage as NTSC to a deck. Then plugging that deck into a very old TV. Fortunately, my ever-resourceful art director has everything, including this old TV hanging around, for me to experiment with. ( Next to the TV, that’s the 3 TB of RAID 1 storage where THE LOST CHILDREN lives.)

This TV is so old, that its only input is a coaxial cable. Look it up, youngin’s. That little black box you see on top of the TV has a coaxial input and RCA inputs, so it’s able to connect both to the camcorder and the old TV. In the end, we replay the footage from the NTSC camcorder, to the old TV, and then re-shoot the old TV screen it with the 7D, while jiggling the loose coaxial cable to get the randomized static we want.

This image is not played back as is. But we cut up the static in FCP and add it to the timeline with our “surveillance image.” So that in the timeline, it looks like this:

We don’t play the footage back as is, because, for the parts of the scene you actually want to see, I think this little TV puts out too low resolution, so I’m worried about how it would look on an HDTV or projected.

I’m not exceptionally concerned about how this film looks on the big screen because I think in the end, the big screen will be a minimal part of our distribution. But it never hurts to do the best you can to make sure your movie will look good wherever. We gave ourselves the added challenge by shooting on many cameras, in many codecs, in many frame rates.

But using these little bits of static along with our regular footage does a pretty good job for us. The static comes and goes quickly enough that it gives us the illusion that the static is actually in the footage we’re seeing. Combine that with some nice static noise and the illusion is complete. If you want to play with this yourself, FCP Studio comes with some static noises. Also, this site has a lot of sound effects. I don’t think they are really professional quality, so I may not rely on them for final output. But for working with your rough, and for learning, it’s a great resource.

That brings me to the final point about the look. One more reason I avoid plugins is that they are only going to make your movie look like other movies. At least at the level most of us are working now. I’m sure in Hollywood, they have all kinds of insane software for creating these effects. And I’m sure that with enough money, you could do it all in post. But at the low budget level we work, we’re usually limited to retail tools. So I feel like if we depend on those tools, it’s only going to work against us. I’ve seen sooooo many indie movies using the effects you get in Video Copilot. I appreciate what Video Copilot does, but I also think it encourages laziness, and I’m often able to spot it within seconds. Low budget filmmakers like it because they think it makes their films looks like Hollywood movies. But I believe that in the end, you just end up looking like everyone else.

And as I’ve said in a number of my posts, we are working hard to stand out, not blend in. So creating our static the way we did, and using the techniques of shooting and re-shooting on our specific screens and our specific gear will give us a look no one else will be able to easily replicate. And hopefully make us stand out.

The camera guru I mentioned at the top often says something on our filmmaker message board, DVXUser: To paraphrase: “Hollywood is already good at a lot of things. Why not make something they can’t do? That’s the way you can stand out.” Whenever I’m making decisions on how to proceed, I use this as a guiding principal.

Stay tuned, I will soon blog about the fun to be had making fake entrails and shooting a massacre!

WHAT’S UP LOVELY is my 3rd feature film — but the first project in which I allowed for time to reshoot the film and do pickups. It helped tremendously.

http://www.grking.com
http://www.WhatsUpLovely.com

I’ve been asked by a few people to cover the post-production workflow. I already talked about the shooting, editing and test screening process. So now I plan to address the score and sound design component and how everything — in theory — comes together in the end.

Here’s a snapshot of the final project in Final Cut Pro: (remember to keep your dialogue, sound f/x, music all on separate tracks)

This review is all just based on my experiences as I’m sure if I had a post-production supervisor and budget to hire a post-house things would be a lot different.

SCORE

Tackling the score with two different composers (Ken Lampl and Jonathan “Electronathan” Sorge) was no easy task. First off, I had to see if they were even open to this idea.

The reason I was interested in having two composers is I enjoy both their work for different reasons and skill sets — and it’d be an easier time commitment for each (if they split the duties) as they would be doing it as a favor for me. I showed them the rough cut to see if it was something they’d be interested in working on…thankfully they liked it and found it to be a great challenge they wanted to take part in. The main factor that I believe hooked them is that “Lovely” is definitely a score-driven film.

Admittedly, I was a little afraid to even bring up the idea — but knowing each guy personally helped make this a realistic option. They are true gentlemen and professional so I knew approaching them about it would at least be entertained. However, it’s a very risky thing to ask any creative person to join forces (almost like asking 2 filmmakers to co-direct together) — as it leads to potential conflicts. After a few phone calls to clearly define the roles/responsibilities and give each their own autonomy over specific scenes we were off to the races.

We all reviewed the film together in late November 2009. Then they took several movie files from me in order to work separately in their studios to create sketches of ideas. I let them work their magic until January 2010 when I checked in and previewed their cues. There was definitely some back and forth of feedback and revised cues — and by the end of February the score was locked and I was truly amazed.

In fact, the score is now so alive and adaptable with each scene in the film….it moves seamlessly from cue to cue (composer to composer). To me there is no sense of schizophrenia with the score – or at the very least their styles gel quite nicely together where it doesn’t take me out of it. In the end, the audience feedback is just that they truly enjoyed “the score” which is a win for everyone.

SOUND DESIGN

Dialogue clean up and sound f/x were completed by a talented music student — Keith Ukrisna — that I had met while he was interning for a post-studio I was using for “New York Lately“. I delivered the film to him and off he went.

We primarily used Google Wave for our entire communication/review process. There were definitely some lengthy waves going on, but for the most part it helped us keep organized over the entire scope of the film.

Keith spent the majority of time working on cleaning up the audio (primarily the dialogue scenes). Note: Remember to record “room tone” so that you can lay it under your scene to help smooth things out. He worked wonders on some of the scenes. Thankfully we had pretty clean sound throughout, but there were definitely a few locations that had some issues (ex: bar refrigerator, traffic, etc)

I asked him to put all his ideas into the sound design — and then we could scale back as needed. I preferred him to explore the soundscape as I thought there would be things he developed that I never would think of — which happened. There were definitely times where I did say I wasn’t too fond of things and they were removed.

It was an easy process/workflow. We divided the entire film into separate sequences for him to work on and referenced every shot with a timecode window.

Once sound was approved for each scene, Keith would deliver the sound design files associated with the scene (referencing the timecode on where the file should be plopped in to the timeline to sync up with picture).

The only drawback in asking a student to work on your project is they have school and other activities that may cause delays if you’re on a strict timeline. But for me, the cost-saving advantages far outweighed any hard deadline — even though I kept him on one to keep things on track. Keith did a phenomenal job and I plan to work with him again.

FINAL MIX

I did the final mixing myself on Final Cut Pro. Not the ideal whatsoever but it worked. I had all the separate files (music, sound design, dialogue) on discrete tracks so I could easily mix the levels to what I needed. And since the film is in stereo 2.0 (and not some complex 5.1 or 7.2 mix) I felt I could handle it.

Again, not my choice to do it (I’d really prefer someone else) — but to save money and not burn any favors — I believed I could spend about a week on it. If I had any trouble I had friends willing to help out which was a great safety net.

AFTERTHOUGHTS

The best part was at a recent sneak preview of the film we had the audience comment on how great the music and sound was — which is an incredible testament to my team. They were truly amazing to work with and I hope I can keep them around (and pay them next time!). Sometimes I have to take a step back to really appreciate the amount of talented people that are willing to work with me for very low (or no) pay. I definitely don’t want this to be a regular thing and — as evidenced with my next project “How Do You Write A Joe Schermann Song” — I’m able to move up and gain a little funding which I’m more than happy to share with the people who’ve been there the whole time believing in what I’m doing.

That’s sometimes the best part — to look around at the people who were there with you from the beginning….and to see everyone moving up together. Helping each other along the way. That’s independent filmmaking.