Film Look on Low Budget (See snapshots)
 

This is what I achieved in regards to make video have a film look.

Film Look Snapshoots

What are your opinions on these?

Impressive....what settings did you use,etc to get this look?

Way to go Mugur, way to go!
Keep it up dude! Bravo!

Cool lighting, and the close-ups give you a nice shallow depth of field. Hard to do a whole film in close-ups, though.

I appreciate your comments, thanks.

Well, as far as the lighting goes, I have used 1x150w halogen flood light positioned on the ground in order to achieve right shadows. I do like the warm temperature of light it gives. Because is a flood light and the wals of the room are white, it will bounce enough to fill the shadows just right. In the back, those are some of those small size bulb Christmas lights.

As far as post production, I used on this exercise only free tools such as:

- VirtualDub
- WAX free video editor

As I am used with VirtualDub I did the cuts there, after that I went into Wax and applied some custom made color grading filters.

So I would say the light is very important (nothing new about that) in how you plan to achieve a film look on video.

As far as DOF goes, it plays a good part but is not essential, as I will prove it with a new exercise which doesn't involve such close-ups therefore no shallow DOF but of the same cinematic look.

Forgot to mention, it DOES matter to preview your video on an external monitor (TV) as things are pretty different but very helpful in adjusting the look.

Can you post actual footage?

You may download it here

great footage

Separation
 

Ok, as I promised, here is one alternative to DOF, artistically speaking.

http://www.digitallymotion.com/sep.html

Depending on the scene, we could create several layers using different colors. This is not something new but it can be good in many cases especially on video. Of course it would look even better with a manual white balance but we discuss the principle here :)

Interesting approach. There are definitely ways to create depth in a scene, without having shallow depth of field. Especially arranging layers of space, and pools of lights.