Last week I made a short film called Echoes of the Shore which I shot in just three hours and took an afternoon to edit.
This is part of a series of micro shorts I plan to make every 2-3 weeks, allowing me to quickly test new ideas, equipment and Post-production tools I based it on real narrative footage.
I’ve been in feature film mode for the past few years, with my third feature, Gone Boy, getting ready for release, and my fourth feature, The Teacher’s Pet, almost locked into the picture.
As much as I enjoy developing features, I often miss the immediacy and spontaneity of shooting something quickly, experimenting along the way, and seeing the finished product almost instantly.
With this in mind, this collection of micro shorts was designed to be as simple as possible. My rules for them are:
- They had to complete the shoot in less than a day
- Only 2-3 actors can be selected at most
- Conversation should be kept to a minimum
- There can’t be any crew (except me)
- Editing must be completed within one day
These rules take the pressure off each film and allow me to work faster and more intuitively.
The goal is not to make the perfect 10-minute short and submit it to Sundance (at least for this series). But have a repeatable system for testing ideas quickly—just like a painter who doodles or sketches before working on a larger canvas.
With that in mind, here’s a small detail, and the full short clip below…
No-budget concept development
As with most of my films, I always start by narrowing down my ideas based on my resources and the specific goals of the project.
In this case, I needed to shoot something that could utilize two specific actors I’d worked with before, could be done in an afternoon, and would provide eye-catching visuals.
I’m also leaning towards the psychological thriller genre and decided to use that as a framework for this concept.
In the spirit of keeping things simple – I decided to use a location that I’m very familiar with. A beach in Malibu, California, called Point Dume. I’ve shot there dozens of times before, and while I was initially hesitant to use the same location again, I ultimately decided to challenge myself and find a way to make it feel fresh.
When you have very limited time, leaving room for error is never ideal. Not knowing where to park or how to find the bathroom can waste an entire day, especially when you only have a few hours. So using locations I’m familiar with was a great way to break the ice with this new series of short films.
Within the parameters I had set for myself, I wrote a script in about 30 minutes, centered around a young couple hiking on a hillside that goes horribly wrong.
If you want to see the script version, you can Click here.
Choose A7S III/S-Log3
In recent years I have mainly photographed Hey Alex For larger projects, my Fuji X-T4 For small run and gun use.
I’ve never been a big fan of Sony cameras, especially the prosumer grade ones, because the color science leaves a lot to be desired. The overall look is more video than film, at least directly.
That said, one of the main reasons for making this short film was to further develop my cast Sony S-Log3 LUT. So I embraced shooting with a camera that wouldn’t normally be my preference and challenged myself to get the most out of it on set and in post.
I should also mention that the choice of camera also affected the script. One of the reasons I wanted to show two different time periods in the same location was to show the different color palettes applied to the footage. The finished film is a mix of more natural/saturated daytime footage and a bleached-bypass look.
Filming a movie without a crew
A whole feature film has now been shot no crewI was ready to shoot this little short film on my own.
Part of this means keeping camera settings to a minimum. No cages or accessories are used at all. It’s just that the A7S III is equipped with a Sigma 24mm – 70mm zoom lens, and a 10% moment filter is added to soften the highlights.
This was also the first time I shot in broad daylight without using an ND filter.
This was largely due to my need to capture the most neutral colors without any of the colorization issues typically associated with ND filters. To do this I have to stop down the aperture significantly (usually shooting at F16) and sometimes increase the shutter speed to 1/250 or even 1/500.
The increased shutter speed certainly creates a slightly staccato effect, and there’s less motion blur than I would normally choose. But to make it less noticeable, I avoided any quick pans or close-ups of the actors while moving.
Finally, I don’t think a fast shutter is all that noticeable. This is a worthwhile trade-off to ensure I can use the footage to properly test my LUTs (that’s the point!).
On the day we arrived we spent about 30 minutes discussing our shots and walking around the beach/cliff area. I always like to do this because instead of using a traditional shot list I just improvise based on my shooting plan.
We shot all the flashback scenes first because they were supposed to be played in order—even though they were cut off in the edit. From there we had a quick outfit change and took today’s photos to end the day.
There is very little dialogue in the film, so I chose to use an on-camera Rode shotgun microphone. Normally I would give each actor a collar, but considering how few lines there are, this seems unnecessary. Handling the microphone while filming Guerrilla slows us down.
Thankfully, the little mic on the Rode actually picked up some really nice audio that I was able to use in post. Let’s introduce it in detail below.
Edit in one day
Just like production, post-production has to be very fast.
I completed the entire project in FCP X in about 2 hours. About half was done on my laptop while my wife and I were having a work lunch, and the rest on my Mac Studio when I got back.
The editing itself was very simple because we shot so fast and didn’t have a ton of coverage. It was really just about finding the best shots and looking for some creative opportunities to use flashbacks in a slightly different way than the original script.
Most of the heavy lifting is done in post-production, which takes another 2 to 3 hours to complete.
This includes color grading (which I’ll get to next) as well as sound design and mixing.
Although we captured some pretty good sound using the onboard microphone, there are still a few minor issues that need to be ironed out. The biggest problem was that one conversation wasn’t recorded at all because I accidentally turned off the microphone.
If you watch the movie, you’ll see that this is the slow-motion moment where the heroine says to her boyfriend, “Back off.”
Initially, I planned to do some ADR with the actors to capture those missing lines. But then decided to try it as a creative exercise without dialogue. I’m glad I did because that little beat stood out in the short and felt more stylized as a result.
As for the dialogue I recorded, it had to be cleaned up quite a bit using the built-in audio tools in FCP X. 15% – 20% to clean up the background.
All of this was combined with a large collection of sound effects, sound design elements and licensed music that I downloaded from various websites and sources.
color grading process
Once the sound was complete, the final step was to color the negative. As always, I start right Operation sequence And make sure every shot matches on a technical level.
I then applied a series of Cinecolor LUTs to the footage, including some from our Sony S-Log3 Seriesfurther refined through manual adjustment.
A general note about Sony lenses – to make them look more cinematic, try keeping the midtones down, and then turning up the shadows significantly to restore any lost detail. This helps eliminate native contrast issues that affect the look of Sony movies.
Here is a simple example of some shots using a native Sony S-Log3 LUT (top) compared to the Cinecolor look (bottom) –
From a creative standpoint, I tried a few different looks for the current scene. From naturalistic to monochromatic. After some trial and error, I found that the bleach bypass/desaturate aesthetic works best.
After all the main color work was done, I added a color adjustment layer to the entire film.
On this layer I applied one of 3 LUTs I created it to emulate the Technicolor analog film process. Since the film was already graded, I had to dial down the final LUT to around 20% – but it did add a really nice finishing touch.
Before exporting, I added some 65mm film grain that I had previously hand-made using real Kodak film scans.
All in all, I’m happy with the results – especially something that went from scratch to done in about 48 hours.
Watch the movie “Echoes from the Shore”
You can watch the finished video below. If you like it, feel free to like and leave a comment on my YouTube channel!
Must pay back Subscribe to my YouTube channel hereas I will be posting more of this in the coming weeks.
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