DeadChannel

Okay, so hopefully I've been here long enough to do this.

Some of you know that I sometimes make short films in my spare time, but I don't think I've ever posted anything I've ever done on this forum.

Thus far, I've shot five shorts, ranging in length from a minute and a half to ten minutes.

I just finished up shooting a four minute piece titled "Final Breath. The film was produced as part of a two week intensive filmmaking course with a local av company called watershed productions.

Along with writing and directing, I had to op camera and deal with lights. While I like the control that being a DoP (director of photography) gives me, I'd like to work with a larger crew on future projects.

That is to say that the crew on this project was criminally skeletal. For the majority of the shoot (two days, about three hours per day), it was just me, my sound recordist Aydin and my actor, Shane Hainessworth. For part of the second day, I had someone come in to hold sheets of cardboard over Shane to help with the day-for-night effects that I was going to do in post. That's a pretty ghetto way to get that effect, but imo it looks pretty decent in the film.

Working with Shane was great. He's the first properly professional actor who I've had on a film, and I think it really shows. He was able to give a really solid performance in my opinion, but he also helped things go faster by being technical. Blocking out movement with him was easy. That's something that was of particular importance on this project, because the performance had to be so physical. I was able to get all of the angles that I needed, and cutting between them was a breeze.

Aydin is not a professional, but he did a good job. For the most part, the audio we got was clear enough to use in the film. Unfortunately, the wind started picking up on the second day, and because our rode ntg2 boom + Zoom H4N recorder combo (courtesy of Watershed Productions and Nelson Selkirk College) didn't come with a deadcat to cut some of that out, a lot of the audio was unusable. Fortunately, my camera is more resistant to the wind, and I was able to pull scratch audio from closeups for some of the shots. In the end, there was enough there to get a pretty decent sound mix, although I'm probably going to have to invest in a proper audio kit of my own, complete with deadcat.

I shot the film on the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera that I got about a year ago, when they were half off. While there are a lot of issues with the pocket cinema camera (crap battery life, no audio meters etc), the ability to capture raw or pro res, plus the stellar dynamic range tends to give the image what is, for my money, a much more filmic, cinematic look than most dslrs that I've used. Plus, I get to say "is that a blackmagic camera in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me" on set. I'd buy that for a dollar.

Attached to the end of the camera was a 28mm vintage contax/yashica lens that I got at a garage sale. It's a nice lens, the image is typically very clear, it's fast enough to shoot a bit of low light stuff, and the bokeh is very aesthetically pleasing. However, 28mm is a little bit too long, considering that the blackmagic has a super 16 size sensor, cropping the image and meaning that the lens is actually functioning similarly to how a 84mm lens would on a full frame camera. This wasn't a huge problem because we shot outside and I could move the camera wherever I wanted, but it can become tough to shoot indoors. I'm increasingly tempted to drop the cash on olympus's $500 17mm f1.8 mft lens, but I'll probably have to go with the cheaper f2.8 one because I'm basically broke at the moment.

Tomorrow, I'm probably going to come back and talk about post production, but for now you can check out the film, as well as some of the stuff I've done in the past on my youtube:


You can also give it a gander over at the watershed productions film camp page, which also has some stuff from some of the other people who took the course:


At a later date, I'll probably post to talk about the two films that I was the DoP on.

Until next time.