WHITE RED PANIC short film

Hey guys.

My name's Ayz Waraich. I directed a short called WHITE RED PANIC on the HV20, to which Stu kindly posted a teaser for on his blog recently. The FULL film went live yesterday at www.dimeworth.com in various formats. The Vimeo HD link is the fastest way to check it out in decent quality.

So Stu asked if I could share some Before and After images of the film to show what can be done with this cam -- so here I am.

The film was shot mostly with the stock lens, and some shots used the CANON Wide-angle adapter. I did extensive tests before hand with different settings and CC ideas, so I knew exactly how to use the Camera during production. I shot with 1/60th shutter at least, sacrificing the cinemode -- and compensated for that by turning down the contrast in the settings to gain a bit of dynamic range. The "Before" images are really washed out and look flat, but having done the tests I knew what to look for. The wardrobe and locations were carefully considered to get a certain kind of look and colors after CC.

I'm not gonna get into my CC procedure, because it's so wrong and out of the ordinary that it's silly to try and explain. Wanted something a bit impressionistic and vivid... and to destroy some of the detail and definition in the HDV, but keep it sharp looking. Like i said, hard to articulate.

Anyway, here's the B&A. And thanks in advance to anyone who checks out the film.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing and welcome to the forum.

If your only holdup about explaining the CC is that it is "wrong", then I encourage you to share anyway. Depending on the look you need for a specific film or shot, there is no "right" or "wrong", there is only what is needed to achieve the goal.

Anyway, thanks again for sharing.

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fantastic, great movie. love your CC/look.
The before/afters are really interesting too, especially the last set. You were really able to find and bring out some amazing detail/color there.
Q: What's the ratio of location sound to ADR?

Thanks for the post, great stuff!

	Mr. Ichybob wrote:
	fantastic, great movie. love your CC/look. Q: What's the ratio of location sound to ADR?

99.9% location sound as far as dialogue is concerned.

Sfx, ambience, and atmosphere where mostly sound-design in post.

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AYZ WARAICH
N E X U S 6 R E P L I CA N T

WHITE | RED | PANIC

	Quote:
	99.9% location sound as far as dialogue is concerned.

Wow, really nice dialog recording. I thought it was ADR. (the sound overall is very nice too, both music and ambiance)

"I'm not gonna get into my CC procedure, because it's so wrong and out of the ordinary that it's silly to try and explain. "

To me, this is exactly the DV Rebel mantra (at least in comparison to the "Hollywood" method of production). The whole idea behind Stu's book is obtaining Hollywood results without the bloated Hollywood production methods...

I'm sure forum members would respect your wishes not to go into detail about the CC, but since your "look" is one of the most impressive aspects of your short (especially given the camera you acquired the images with), you can understand why we'd be most curious...

Just thought I'd ask. Regardless - excellent work.

Thanks so much for joining and posting your images Ayz!

Like the others, I'd love to hear about your "wrong" practices. Smile

What you did right is make a beautiful film with a very pushed look that maintains skin tones.

I watched it on a 90" projection screen, 1080p projector off a PS3 and it looked spectacular.

-Stu

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Last edited by Stu on Tue Jul 15, 2008 8:28 pm; edited 1 time in total

Awesome job! Your name sounds familiar I think I've seen one of your shorts online in the past... but yeh I've been to a lot of fests recently and this short is definitely better than most all of what I've seen in the past year so I hope your going to send it around ^ ^

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I'm like... professional.

Thanks for the comments guys.

	Stu wrote:
	Thanks so much for joining and posting your images Ayz! Like the others, I'd love to hear about your "wrong" practices. What you did right is make a beautiful film with a very pushed look that maintains skin tones.

It's not so much that it's wrong, but more that it's weird and embarrasing. I can imagine some of the more pro guys thinking it absolutely backwards. It's sort of like baking film stock before using it. It sound stupid, but it definitely has a certain look.

I will say it was all done in vegas, and I used the aav6cc plugin to keep the skin tones. From there on it was very intuitive and experimental. Mostly using multipe brightness/contrast filters and color correctors. There was also some layering of solid color frames over the clips, and then playing with the opacity -- and then adding contrast again. I compared it back forth with traditional ways, and even when the look was almost similar, my way added slightly more aged and filmic look, while keeping sharpness.

That probably makes no sense, but like I said it was very much about experimenting and feeling my way around until I had a process that worked for me and looked right.

Wanted the images to have a raw and impressionistic quality, with not a lot of definition and detail in the blacks. Almost like a slightly faded print, but not.

	Stu wrote:
	I watched it on a 90" projection screen, 1080p projector off a PS3 and it looked spectacular.

A 90" screen! wow, glad to see it held up for you. That's REALLY cool to hear. All I see are flaws now lol.

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AYZ WARAICH
N E X U S 6 R E P L I CA N T

WHITE | RED | PANIC

Hey Ayz, welcome aboard! Hopefully you'll stick around for a bit and contribute to our humble little group.

I must say I was quite impressed with your short. It's well directed, well shot, and well acted. And the DI work is phenomenal. Being an HV20 owner, it also gives me even more respect for the humble little camera. And it reinforces the "it's not the tools, it's the artist" mantra.

One quick question. I notice the film is in 720P format which the HV20 does not support. So my question to you is where in your process did you do the scale down to 720P and why did you choose to go with that format? I have my own reasons for doing things in 720P (saves disk space and is way quicker to work with), but I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

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Filmmaker Redux

	Boz wrote:
	One quick question. I notice the film is in 720P format which the HV20 does not support. So my question to you is where in your process did you do the scale down to 720P and why did you choose to go with that format? I have my own reasons for doing things in 720P (saves disk space and is way quicker to work with), but I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Thanks Boz. And that's a good question.

I Rendered to a 720P version straight from Vegas. Originally I wanted to do a 1080P version as well, but I found there were a lot of hdv compression artifacts and the image didn't hold up so well at that resolution. It looked okay, but the flaws were more noticable. Keep in mind, I really pushed the colors and contrast, so it brought out more of the noise that wasn't so visible in the original image.

720P looked decent though, so I just stuck with that.

I'd be curious to try and record 1920x1080 straight to a harddrive through the HDMI port, but lugging a PC around doesn't seem appealing to me. I had my laptop on set, hooked into the hv20, so I could use the screen for focusing -- but I looked at it MAYBE once. So I unplugged it and put it back. Was just getting in the way for me. Wink

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AYZ WARAICH
N E X U S 6 R E P L I CA N T

WHITE | RED | PANIC

excellent job!

I guess you letterboxed in vegas too? did you plan for this aspect ratio from the start?

and I too am really impressed with the sound. what kit did you use for sound on the shoot? could you explain a bit about how you tackled the sound in post?

Wow! Somebody show this to Stefan Sargent.

	Ayz wrote:
	I'd be curious to try and record 1920x1080 straight to a harddrive through the HDMI port, but lugging a PC around doesn't seem appealing to me. I had my laptop on set, hooked into the hv20, so I could use the screen for focusing -- but I looked at it MAYBE once. So I unplugged it and put it back. Was just getting in the way for me.

We have a blackmagic capture card here at work that we hooked the HV20 up to. The images were super clean, but I noticed some strange motion blurring artifacts that I didn't quite know what to make of. We were mostly curious to see if a better greenscreen key could be pulled by bypassing the HDV compression and going straight out of HDMI (the answer is 'yes'). So while it would work great for greenscreen stage work I agree it would be a giant pain in the arse to lug that PC & monitor around as a capture solution for anything more.

A few more questions if I may....

What was your budget (roughly) for this flick? And what were the main expenses involved?

Also, I read somewhere that you used worklights for your lighting solution. Having used worklights myself I know there's some big caveats when using them. Did you use diffusion to soften the light and did you run into any problems not being able to get the lights up high enough? I've experienced both of these problems in the past, so I was wondering how you dealt with them.

Thanks.

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Filmmaker Redux

Hey guys, even though I asked Ayz to post this on Onlining since it was a CC before/after, I've moved it to Rebel Yell since it's now become a general thread about the making of the short.

Which is awesome and what I hoped would happen. Smile

Ayz, I'd love to hear more about your production audio. Did you pipe into the camera? Or dual system? What mics did you use?

-Stu

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The DV Rebel's Guide