When I first started out as a filmmaker, I would constantly make small short films as a means of trying out new techniques. I never went to film school, so whenever possible I wrote, directed and edited experimental film projects. Some of them worked well, some not so well…but I always learned something from them, and each of them played a part in my learning process and growth as a filmmaker role.
Unfortunately, I have much less free time these days than when I first started. Between my commercial work and long-term directing projects (including an upcoming feature), it’s getting harder and harder to carve out a week or even a few days to go out there and shoot something spontaneously. While my needs have definitely evolved over the years from a creative development perspective, my desire to shoot these small projects has never really gone away.
Thankfully though, there was a brief period last month where I was able to get back to my roots and make a fun no-budget short film. My first goal going into this project was to try out some new techniques and methods that I might use in future productions.
Over the past few years I’ve been working with larger teams, which has been a lot of fun. That said, with this project I wanted to challenge myself to create a film where I did everything myself. This is by no means the way I normally like to work (part of the reason I love film is because of the collaborative nature of the medium), but in this case I thought it would be an interesting challenge to do everything – from directing/DPing sound and Color – by myself. I’m curious about what will happen when working this way and how the constraints of not having a crew will affect the final product.
I also wanted to try to shoot something in a cinematic style, which in this case meant blocking out every scene so that very little coverage was needed. This is a style I’ve been particularly fascinated by for a while but never really had the chance to put it into practice until now. Taking this documentary inspired approach means that in addition to being my own DP, I will also be running my own audio, I documented this in this blog post last week.
In terms of cameras, I decided to shoot with a URSA Mini 4.6K – again as a means of experimentation. I’ve been shooting in 4.6K for a few months now, but I’ve mainly used it for commercial or corporate projects and wanted to test it out on a narrative shoot. Not to mention I really want to try out the new URSA 4.0 firmware and even made a BTS video about it being released soon.
The last element I wanted to try was utilizing some new film grain that I created from scratch.
As many of you may know, I’m a big fan of adding film grain to my footage, but I’m never 100% satisfied with any film grain I have in the library or accessed through plugins. Recently I decided to shoot some film grain myself using 35mm film (scanned at 6K resolution) and I am currently developing some grain packs that I will release via NoamKroll.com soon. Some of these packages will provide clean film grain, while others will provide dirty film grain. On this film I used a dirty grain that still has some dust, scratches and hair on it, and even some real 35mm flicker. I’m really looking forward to sharing the cereal packs with you soon and hope to release them within the next month.
Here are a few screenshots from the movie (zoomed in to show texture). The first is clean, the second is scanned using my 35mm dirty grain. Please excuse the JPEG compression, which somewhat weakens the effect of the grain structure:
process
When I decided to go ahead with the project, everything moved very quickly. I knew I wanted to test a lot of different things with this project – from new shooting styles, to cameras, to post-production techniques – and I decided to write a simple concept that would satisfy every need.
To keep it simple, I set the entire film in one location and limited it to just two characters, as I knew this would make it easier for me when shooting solo. Within a day or two, I had the location and cast locked in and I was ready to go. It also helped that I was working with two actors I’d worked with before— Timothy Lidpriest and Flavia Watson – In fact they all appear in my short film mechanic,years ago.
The filming took place in Malibu, California, and lasted four hours starting around sunrise. Initially I thought we’d need closer to 5 or 6 hours (since the script was about 5 pages), but since there was so little coverage, things moved pretty quickly. It really made me realize how much footage you can shoot in such a short amount of time when you don’t over-cover the scene. It might take four hours or four days to shoot five pages in one location. It all depends on how subtle you want to achieve…but sometimes less is more, and for my personal taste, using less coverage usually yields more interesting creative results.
My URSA Mini comes primarily with the standard Blackmagic URSA accessories (EVF and shoulder kit) and my Zoom H6 recorder. I also installed a Chrosziel Mattebox with some IRND filters, but didn’t use a follow focus or any other accessories.
I had a full set of vintage Zeiss Superspeeds (MK I) with me, but decided to shoot the entire movie with a single lens (35mm). Knowing that my shooting time was very limited and I didn’t have AC to help me change lenses, it made sense to shoot everything with one lens. I considered shooting everything with 50mm, but ultimately stuck with 35mm because I knew it was more versatile.
These vintage ultra-high speed lenses are absolutely incredible and really add a unique quality to digital footage. Sometimes they shine in a very unusual way, and some of the colors they produce are a little unpredictable, but that’s the whole beauty of photographing on vintage glass.
When it came time to shoot the main dialogue scenes, the fact that I was basically just shooting a master (again, no coverage) was pretty liberating. It doesn’t matter if the actors changed shots or shot markings or even improvised some lines. There was no continuity that had to be adhered to, so it was really great to be able to let the actors work without getting in their way, or having to shorten a shot for strictly technical reasons. We shot at least 10 dialogue scenes, which is a lot more than I usually shoot. But because we were moving so fast, we had to use the extra time to try out a lot of different options for the scene. In the end, the last shot made the cut.
Regarding editing, again I want things to be as simple as possible. I’ve been using DaVinci Resolve 12.5 to edit most of my projects lately, but I wanted to challenge myself to edit and colorize this video in FCP X. Edit in X (or Premiere), then transfer the project to Resolve for color processing. But in this case, my goal was to step out of my comfort zone and colorize film using the very limited toolset in FCP X.
Normally, I’d like to have the full color control that Resolve gives me, but in this case, I chose to treat color like color time-lapse film. I wanted to make some small, overall corrections instead of overly focusing on making everything perfect.
After tinting the footage in FCP X to give it a lower contrast but natural look, I added custom film grain to it. I will definitely do a separate post on this in the future once the grain becomes public, but for now I will say that I covered 80% of the “dirty” 35mm grain.
I also used a Vintage LUT from the Cinematic LUT pack to add an overall color effect to the piece.
The film itself was shot entirely in ProResHQ at 23.98 resolution, 4.6K 2.4:1 aspect ratio. Even with the added color and grain, it performed very well and I don’t regret not shooting in RAW! If I had more CFast cards, or at least had time on set to dump the cards, I might shoot RAW just to be safe. But given my situation, I opted for the extra recording time, and I don’t feel like I took a hit in the image quality department.
That’s it for now. The video is attached below for everyone to enjoy!
Update: The custom film grain I used on this project is now available. If you want to add some real Super 35mm, Super 16mm and Super 8mm grain to your digital footage, check out my packs here!
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