[atfirstsight]

We wanted to share a bit of our process, hoping others might do the same. I'd love to see everyone's photos from their sets, earlier thoughts / scripts - anything that led you through the process of creating this short film. Here's ours.

With a false sense of energy, we set out to create a new film under the theme 'discover' for stillmotion / planet5d's latest short film contest.

With the help of our friend, Murray, we spent a few short hours finalizing the concept, writing out the story structure, and starting production. We decided to write original tracks along side of a NIN's tune under the creative common license. With a Nord Stage EX keyboard and Roland TD-9 set, we had the means of writing and working with our own material to match the sound we were looking for. It was a lot of fun! Finally, with everything together, we layered in traffic detail (at different times of day), lower and medium pitched synthesizer pads, bass-drops, and computer hums at different areas throughout the film. This whole film was as much work, creatively, on the audio side as it was on the filming side of the production. We decided to take a linear story and break it and reveal it in a non-linear format. This allows the audience to discover, with the protagonist, the story as it unfolds.

Our protagonist is an inventor, if you will, and typically have knack for seeing the world differently - which also helped simplify what was going on, and allowing us to continue with a non-linear editing format without the story (hopefully) getting too confusing. We shot the film fulling intending to crop it to a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. This decision was driven by the fact that this is a scripted narrative and we had very specific elements for the viewers to focus on.

To come up with new ideas, new approaches, direction, and style is a a challenge to say the least. But we have fun with it. On set, we love to have fun. This entire process was half work and play. One thing that remains common, after we finish a short film, is that we quickly become extremely unsure of ourselves and our work. Every film we've ever posted we've ended up not liking (after it's finished and live). This is why it's both exciting and frightening every time we enter one of these. And thus, the transparent look into the process:


We will have more BTS up on our blog shortly. atfirstsightfilms.com/blog





// POV steadicam shot. Hard to make desecrate under that coat





// cinevate core ontop of the kessler crane philip bloom signature series pocket dolly (not quite as epic as the cineslider!)

[planetMitch]

Well, I don't think I really have any good snapshots to share, but I can tell you what we did.

I decided that I'd try to get the whole family involved in the project. My wife and I both seemed to come up with the geocaching idea about the same time. It is something we've done over the last several years to get out of the house and visit locations we're not familiar with. We don't do it as much as some families, but it is a fun way to discover something new.

In terms of preparation (and I think you can tell in my film) we did none. It all just sort of fell into place and we thought we'd experiment with it as we went.

Friday - I got a shipment from LensProToGo that included a 60D and a 15mm fisheye which I'd never tried before. Saturday, the kids said they wanted to go for a walk to the park because it was sunny and warm (we've had a cold winter). So I said, why not make it into a movie and geocache? Tho we'd been caching in this park, there was a new cache that had been put there since the last time we went - so we did have an adventure to go on.

I decided to try doing a walking timelapse (also something I've never done) and so we just went with it... experimenting along the way. we all took turns taking the photos... the camera was simply dangling from our necks and we pressed the shutter every 10-20 steps.

When we got to the location, we had a bit of trouble finding the cache, so we weren't really filming when my oldest found it - so I asked her to recreate the 'find' and of course, she's not the actress on Disney, so it looks a bit faked.

Anyway, I actually edited it in imovie and it looks it too.

As I said on the other post, we're learning how to make video just like many of you, hope you will learn along with us!

[Eamonn McManus]

Here's the only BTS pics I have from my shoot. This shows how I did the over the head shots when my actor was in the bed the bed shots and my make shift dolly shots. The last one shows my initial storyboard when I was trying to get the idea into my head.... Okay I couldn't figure out how to place them here so I'll just put the links:

Overhead:
http://www.flickr.co...nus/5490386139/


Diy jib by eamonnjmcmanus, on Flickr

DIY Dolly:
http://www.flickr.co...in/photostream/

Storyboard:
http://www.flickr.co...nus/5488411258/

[Ben Sengsouvanh]

So I finally got around to writing up the behind the scenes post for Discovery. For the shoot we used a Canon 7D kitted out with a Jag35 Full Shoulder Rig, a D|Focus follow focus and Sigma 24-70 f2.8. A Nikon D7000 with a 80-200 f2.8, Sigma 24-70 f2.8 and 50 f1.8.

During the interior shot lounge room shot, we lit the scene using a 475W florescent, a 175W florescent and a 110W florescent with a diffuser.

For the kitchen scene we only ended up using the 475W florescent since the space was small and there was daylight coming through the window.

Being on a very low budget for the dolly shots we ended up using a skateboard which allowed us to get the shot, but was quite shaky. The shake from the footage was steadied in After Effects, the final result turn out really well and if we had more time would would have been able to get an even steadier shot for the scene.

For the last shots at the train station, we headed to the train station near Kenny's place. We had to wait 20 minutes to each attempt to get the wide shot since the trains were running every 20 or so minutes. This proved quite time consuming, but we were able to get the shot after a two attempts. The last few shots we got pretty quickly, but getting the shot of the phone proved quite difficult since we were shooting wide open at f2.8 on the Sigma 24-70 it was hard to keep the message on the phone in focus.

The shoot took a day, which wasn't too bad since we started shooting the short at around 11am. After we wrapped up the shoot all the footage was ingested and transcoded to Apple Prores LT ready for the edit. I spent the next day cutting the film together, which wasn't too hard since we basically shot the film in sequence the day before. I decided to leave some of the shots on the cutting room floor as they weren't integral to the narrative of the film. Most of my time was spent cutting things out of the final edit, even now I think I can cut a few frames here and there to make it a better edit. We plan to shoot an extended version of the short some time in the future when we have a bit more time and freedom.

Once the edit was done I took the final cut to Apple's Color to do the final grade of the scene. We wanted to create a very isolated feel to the film so I desaturated the footage and added blue to the highlights to give the footage more of a cold feel and I also brought the highlights down a bit as well. Creating a preset of this look in Color made the grading a lot easier, but minor tweaks to the each cut had to be made so that all the shots matched in look and feel.

On the third and last day of production our friend Wei arranged some titles for the short, we put them into the film and uploaded to Vimeo. If you haven't seen the short film yet you can check it out below, also there's a gallery with more images from the shoot.

You can check out the photos out here Discovery BTS

[planetMitch]

Thanks guys - love to learn from you in how you made your movies. Very helpful!

[atfirstsight]

On our way out to film a wedding on the top of a mountain (about 2,400 metres up in the air) we tried our very best to squeeze in a short film. On the short drive over from Calgary, we planned out the story of the film and decided an interview with ourselves would help narrate the film. We passed by a few rugged areas that looked promising, but the traffic noise wasn't ideal. Then... there was Lake Louise. Of course, there were two problems with this location. 1) we didn't want to appear as tourists in the film, and 2) with this being an iconic Canadian tourist spot, there was plenty of traffic and noise. So, we hiked around the canoe rental lodge and into the marsh where we found a quiet, cold spot less than a foot away from the icey cold, beautifully transparent lake. The backdrop was grandiose.

After our film was finished, we sat back to watch and only then realized just how well this told our story. To live our dreams as filmmakers, and to get to this place as a team that works well together, we've had to climb many hills. We know where we want to go, what we want to do - but (not to sound too cliche) not knowing exactly what that looks like a year from now is so exhilarating.

A couple of BTS photos from the location:

[lydialipingL]

With the help of our friend, Murray, we spent a few short hours finalizing the concept, writing out the story structure, and starting production
wedding dresses 2012

[lydialipingL]

see everyone's photos from their sets, earlier thoughts / scripts - anything that led you through the process of creating this short film. Here's ours.
wedding dresses 2012

[zhuo1005]

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