Here's the link to the youtube clip of the movie. Basically the short was done as a lighting exercise during one afternoon, and attempts a film noir styled look. It's a pity youtube doesn't have better quality as the movie looks very nice in High Definition. The running length is just under 3 minutes.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=12jdbuXwLcU
Here's a short done by Mike, Steve and myself. I'll post it to Youtube once it's complete.
My two main actors have been secured, as long as I schedule and plan out the whole thing properly. The scripts approaching completion, I just had to touch up a couple of things but it should be in fit enough form to base the movie from. Most of the locations are all sorted as well, thanks to my location scouting for my previous project - takes a bit of trouble out of the whole thing. There are a few things in the movie I will have to try and work out how to do however... due to certain limitations of my locations. The time to shoot is fast approaching so everything must fall together fairly quickly. Should be good.
Just took a few shots of a costume test for the character of Cedar in the next short I'm doing. I'm not too clear about what to call it, but Stranger in the Woods can be the movie's working title for now. Cedar is a grim reaper style character, the costume isn't quite complete yet either, it needs to be pinned up to actually fit the actor properly, and will probably feature a black drawcord around the waist. The script is pretty much finished, might need some final touches but now I can move into planning the thing out.
I've found an interesting site with a very indepth Film Look process. It uses Photoshop, and incorporates many different steps to a lot of other methods I have seen. Instead of editing the base layer of the frame/movie, it builds up layers on top using the original frame as reference, some of these layers include highlights, softening out the digital artifacts, adjusting the color curves, and manipulating the channels.
In my eyes it does the best job of a distinctive film style look, and seems to even increase the quality and clarity of the frame slightly because the original frame is never destructively edited or changed. To apply this effect to movie sequences, however, is quite an involved process since you would have to export to image sequences, batch process the many steps, then reimport the image sequences. Whether you would do normal color correction/grading before or after these steps I have no idea. I would experiment with my current footage, but it has already been processed by the incamera CineLook. Best results come from straight DV or HDV footage. I will try some of these steps with my next short however.
The link is http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jhw/filmy/index.html
There's a mythological figure named Orpheus, who was the 'king of song'. One of the more popular stories featuring Orpheus was the one about how he traveled into the Underworld to attempt to retrieve his dead wife. He made a deal with Hades, agreeing that his wife could return with him, but only if she walked behind him and he didn't glance back until they left the Underworld. Unfortunately he was unable to do so and broke his deal.
The character Morpheus from The Matrix took his name from this Greek figure, and there have been many movies made using similar ideas. The short I'm currently writing takes the concept behind this idea, albeit twisting/changing the characters. I'm incorporating it into one of my older ideas that I liked but was lacking certain aspects which stopped me from wanting to work on it. This should definitely help things along.
Well I'm back at Polytech for the final six month stretch, and will have plenty to do before the year is done. We're starting to go over NLE's again, primarily Avid which is one we have to edit at least one project on. It's meant to be one of the more powerful editing systems, but unfortunately has an interface that resembles Windows 95. Actually, imagine Windows 95 with buttons that turn purple when select or click them. It's not a pretty sight. I even believe that it may look even worse than Adobe Premiere 6.0 and below, and a lot of people know how Win95-esque that program is.
At the moment I'm just doing some writing, trying to iron out some decent ideas for the upcomming short. I'll be able to post some preproduction photos soon, I've got most the the cast lined up also which helps out a whole lot. Things will most likely be a lot busier up until the next of the year, but at least that will keep things interesting.
Well the short is fairly completed, it clocks in at around 5 minutes. I tried putting it up on Youtube a few days ago but not sure if it uploaded fully, I was running out of bandwidth at Polytech. I'll try and put a link up to it soon once I'm sure it's there, however.
In other news I'm coming back from the three weeks holidays fairly soon, so should be able to get stuck into preproduction for my next short which I'll have to wait until August to film, not that August is that far away.. seemed a lot further the last time I thought about it. Until then.
Edit: Try out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLhSInGPNfU to see the Breakdown short movie.
Well I'm right into post production of 'Breakdown' after a very short shooting period of two days. Well it might not seem so short after watching the film, in fact you may be thinking 'This took two days to shoot??', due to the relative lack of anything in the film. Well dollies take awhile to setup etc etc.
Anyway the rough cut is completed and I've been color grading the footage, I managed to get quite a distinctive look to it, roughly emulating film style but without doing any effects to degrade the footage like adding grain or flicker etc. Below are a couple of before and after shots, it's hard to see what it really looks like from the stills, but in moving form it makes it look a lot less like video footage. The color grading consisted of reducing the saturation and chroma slightly, desaturating the highlights, adding a little bit more contrast, and in some shots reducing the levels of the highlights due to overexposure in areas of the frame.
I'll definately be using some similar color grading in my decent short, except not taking as much of the colors out of the video.
