Brian Valente from Redrock and I recently teamed up to make a short film to demo the Sony EX1 and his M2 35mm adaptor. It was an interesting project in that I worked somewhat backwards, writing a script around the layout of the stage that Brian had secured (he sent me pictures of the two existing sets on the stage and I picked one of them) as well as including certain elements that would show off the capabilities of the EX such as the 60 fps mode.

It was a short but intensive day; about 8 hours of shooting to capture some 23 setups, every one of which made in the final film. Brian did a great job of coordinating everything from the great food to making emergency pickups (viewing monitor was DOA), Mole Richardson provided their teaching stage and crew to us (finally--enough grips and electrics to get the job done right), Luis Sinabldi brought along the Carrion, his great onboard monitor; and I more than had my hands full pulling together the script, casting and shooting and directing duties.

The edit was something else; it didn't take long to assemble picture, but due to some location sound issues as well as a cast member with a heavy cold, I ended up doing a vast amount of painstaking ADR and foley.

Oh and--complete credits will be added shortly, this version is for a Sony presentation at Sundance.

Enough of the back story--here's the film.

http://web.mac.com/chupap/Films/tablemanners.html

Thanks for that. I laughed and laughed. Can you talk about how the Redrock mated with the EX1. What the setup was like.

Any chance you can make a high quality version available for download. I can only watch it in a window in my browser as it is now. Don't have Quicktime pro. Would be nice to be able to see it full screen and full quality.

Great short by the way!!!

Ola, what size file do you think is reasonable for download? Full size and full quality is currently 3.5GB (ProRes422HQ at 1920x1080). I'll be happy to take suggestions on settings and sizes for a downloadable version but obviously it needs to be much smaller file than this (I can't support that kind of traffic).

'll be happy to take suggestions on settings and sizes for a downloadable version.

Quicktime is crippled without High profile h264. A more modern encoder will yield far greater results. The x264 library is the chart-topper right now: it renders amazing 1080p at just 6-12 Mbps.

that was hilarious...very well done

gotta love those 35 mm adapters

Quicktime is crippled without High profile h264. A more modern encoder will yield far greater results. The x264 library is the chart-topper right now: it renders amazing 1080p at just 6-12 Mbps.

Thank you for the info Daniel, I downloaded ffmpegx and did a test with it, but I'm not sure what output format to use. If you are experienced with this and can suggest the proper settings so I can replace the current version I have up with something bigger and more efficient, I would be very grateful. Don't have a lot of time right now to experiment.

Charles, really enjoyed the story, although is was somewhat predictable from the moment when mom doesn't react on her son being naked,

please consider my notes as nitpicking, IMHO
the lighting: it was great till 00:27 uneasiness with just an overhead and no fill light, on moms face again 00:28 shadows on women's face, eyes somehow distracts from setting myself up for a comedy mood
00:35 my favorite shot, great!
00:48 again some "serious mood" shadows on her face
The son shows up, one thing I keep asking why does his skin glows/he glows?
By no means skin glowing is sensual/comedic,(in context of your scene)it's more like people in "Ghost Whispering" showing up...
that's my honest feel to your great piece, forgive for being maybe hard on you, I plan to shoot a comedy this year in Moscow and was thinking to use same setup as you've had, still have my doubts, maybe not for comedy, maybe need more lighting...
Do you mind sharing your lighting and lenses, filters setup, and any other info, will appreciate,
Warm regards, Oleg Kalyan.

Thank you for the info Daniel, I downloaded ffmpegx and did a test with it, but I'm not sure what output format to use. If you are experienced with this and can suggest the proper settings so I can replace the current version I have up with something bigger and more efficient, I would be very grateful. Don't have a lot of time right now to experiment.

I have more experience with Windows than OS X, but this should get you started:

Video tab:
Bitrate: 12228 kbit/s
Video Size: 1920x1080
Autosize: 1:1 (AKA Pixel Aspect Ratio)
Frame Rate: NTSC Film

Audio Tab: defaults are fine. (128kbps AAC)

Options Tab:
Disable "constant bitrate"
Enable Two-pass encoding

FfmpegX doesn't expose a lot of x264's options, but it should still do a lot better than Quicktime. Render a 10-second clip at several different bit rates to find the best option.

Thank you Daniel, will start playing with that after I get back from Sundance.

Oleg, thank you for your thoughts. Traditionally comedy is more flat but I wanted to give a bit more texture to this film. For the closeups I brought in more front fill especially on the two women, where I sometimes added a little eyelight as well. Certainly I could have used a bit more on the Mom's right eye, in retrospect I wish I had dug in a little deeper but we were moving awfully fast. I've worked a lot on studio comedies and this is always a line you straddle, where the obvious choice is to flat-light but the desire is to create more contour. Mostly I didn't want it to look like a sitcom, which would have been very easy to do considering the 3-wall set, style of film etc.

The overhead coop was a setup with 4 jumbo lights, double diffusion underneath (forgot what I decided on--might have been light and full gridcloth, or possibly 216 and 251) and a duvetyne skirt. Fill was two 4x4 Kinos with crates on, plus an inky with diffusion for occasional eyelight. A series of tweenies hung above the set walls picked out highlights on the stairs and mantel etc. A 5K bounced into a 4x8 beadboard above the coop gave some ambience to the back half of the room and upstairs. Two tungsten pars on a doubleheader mounted to the dolly were used for the car drive-by (unfortunately the really pretty part of it where it plays across the back wall as a light pattern didn't make the cut).

I used a diffusion plug-in filter which helped smooth out the highlights on foreheads etc. as well as help the gal's complexions. I see your point about the boy's skin glowing a bit--my concern was not having diffusion on him might stick out. I may revisit his wide shots to see if I can back it off without looking harsh compared to the rest of the material. That's a good note.

As far as it being predictable, that's a bit surprising--I still don't know exactly what it is about myself!! I liked letting the mom "give it away" by not reacting, as the dad picks it up immediately thereafter (and I don't think it is easy to know that he is going after the nose ring), but mostly I think the comedy in this piece comes less from the storyline but from the performance, dialogue and overall absurdity. But of course, it's tough to dissect comedy as it falls apart quickly and what one person finds funny, another may not, of course.

Hey Chaz....

I always love to here your opinions on things here and I'd love to here what you think of the camera.... have you "flown" with it yet? and do you have any plans to get one for yourself?

as for the diffusion "plug in".... is doing it in post SOP now? Do you ever though a black net in front of the lens anymore? Also... did you use any profiles with the EX1?

cheers.... and thanks for being here!

No flying yet but for me all the cameras in that group fly the same as I would have to beef them up with 15 lbs of steel to put them on my rig! For a Pilot or Flyer, I would think it would be fine, nothing jumped out at me particularly abnormally. But I really didn't handle the camera much as I think I said. In fact not at all. Had an operator on this one.

I wasn't planning to use diffusion, it was sort of an afterthought, and I dialed the effect up and down for different shots more than I would have had time to on the shoot. In fact, after Oleg's comments I'm going to revisit the shots with the young man in them and see what they look like with less of the glow.

Oleg, thank you for your thoughts. Traditionally comedy is more flat but I wanted to give a bit more texture to this film. For the closeups I brought in more front fill especially on the two women, where I sometimes added a little eyelight as well. Certainly I could have used a bit more on the Mom's right eye, in retrospect I wish I had dug in a little deeper but we were moving awfully fast. I've worked a lot on studio comedies and this is always a line you straddle, where the obvious choice is to flat-light but the desire is to create more contour. Mostly I didn't want it to look like a sitcom, which would have been very easy to do considering the 3-wall set, style of film etc.

The overhead coop was a setup with 4 jumbo lights, double diffusion underneath (forgot what I decided on--might have been light and full gridcloth, or possibly 216 and 251) and a duvetyne skirt. Fill was two 4x4 Kinos with crates on, plus an inky with diffusion for occasional eyelight. A series of tweenies hung above the set walls picked out highlights on the stairs and mantel etc. A 5K bounced into a 4x8 beadboard above the coop gave some ambience to the back half of the room and upstairs. Two tungsten pars on a doubleheader mounted to the dolly were used for the car drive-by (unfortunately the really pretty part of it where it plays across the back wall as a light pattern didn't make the cut).

I used a diffusion plug-in filter which helped smooth out the highlights on foreheads etc. as well as help the gal's complexions. I see your point about the boy's skin glowing a bit--my concern was not having diffusion on him might stick out. I may revisit his wide shots to see if I can back it off without looking harsh compared to the rest of the material. That's a good note.



Charles,

Thanks for sharing your lighting setup with us.

This is how we all learn as a community and it is great to see.

Any chance you could post how the camera was setup?

Thanks for talking about how you had things set up for the lighting. Any chance of some on the set photos showing these things? Great short, gave me a good laugh, especially the ending :)

Thanks guys, I will hopefully be able to post pictures next week after I get back from Sundance.

Thank you :)

As requested I have put up some behind-the-scenes stills of the film, linked through the main page:

http://web.mac.com/chupap/Films/tablemanners.html

Man, seeing stuff like that always helps you realize how much is going into a production to make it look the way it does. Thank you for sharing :)

Yeah, you sounded so casual when you posted it, like you just called up a few buddies that day with an idea. I knew better when I watched it though!

Excellent job with lighting. (well, and everything else) I hope to be there one day in that category.. where you don't notice the lighting, just that it looks damn good, and everything is well saturated. :)

C

Haha Carl! Well, it was almost like that in some ways. There honestly wasn't a lot of pre-production and planning, we were sort of flying by the seat of our pants given the time-frame. I literally wrote the script from scratch on Sunday, visited the set for the first time on Monday and came up with the shot list and lighting diagram and also met with Brian to break down the script for props etc. (we were REALLY on the hairy edge with the production design--had to move pictures and plants and things around the room depending on which way we were shooting)! So Monday was like a 3 hour day. I had already cast the four parents, although I did have to drive over to Terry (the English chap)'s house and ring his intercom as I couldn't get him on the phone to ask if he'd do it! We hadn't found the young actor to play Mike, so Brian put out an ad on Craigslist.

Tuesday I had a big shoot (for director McG with the RED camera) so the last few details were a bit harrowing to get through. I had my laptop away from set and Brian was forwarding me links to various actors that had submitted. By 3 p.m. he was getting awfully anxious but I just didn't have time to devote to checking out everyone's stuff--finally I pulled the trigger on the actor we ended up with (who was on a layover in Vegas enroute to Chicago--Brian had to offer him his frequent flyer miles to come back to LA for the shoot!) I also had a sudden panic that we didn't have the appropriate "nude" clothing for the Mike character, and via frenzied texting managed to link Brian up with a source (dance supply store). My crew was laughing at me trying to nail down the details for my shoot while somehow still making it all happen for McG...meanwhile, the grip and electric lads were prelighting the set per my diagram.

And on Wednesday, there we were. Some technical issues like the HD-SDI to component adaptor for the monitor was DOA, but Brian hustled and found a backup while we started off with just the onboard monitor. By lunch however we had only completed some 5 of the 23 shots scheduled for the day, and I had a series of deadlines to meet; getting Alex (Mike) out the door to make his return plane to Chicago, followed by another actor who had to work that night, and a hard-out for the stage. My shot list became a frantic juggling act as the usual method of shooting "round the clock" (i.e. all shots from one direction, then from the next closest direction etc until you have shot all sides) had to be tossed to get all of Alex's shots done first, then the next actor etc.

I amped up the intensity and we started to cook. Got Alex out just on time (he arrived at the airport just as they were boarding), got the next actor out, was granted an extra hour of shooting by the generous gent who oversaw the stage, and polished off the shotlist with only one omission, which was an additional "mystery" clip of Alex walking down the stairs as I had intended that sequence to be a little more protracted than it appears in the final film, but I determined I could live without it. We finished up with the plate crash, for which we had 3 plates ready to go but on immediate review at 60 fps (love that solid-state recording) I realized we had it and it was a wrap. 22 setups in 8 hours with most of them in the last four; not bad.

So yeah, it was a bit more than just calling up a few friends, but not all that much more, really! And it cost us next to nothing to make. Next time a little more pre-production (and not working on something else the day before), plus I'd really love not to be shooting and directing with that kind of brutal schedule. And had I taken the opportunity to listen to playback I would have realized what was and wasn't happening with the production sound (boom being mixed with wirelesses that had a lot of clothing noise, making all tracks boomy, scratchy and muffled all at the same time, hence my need to ADR nearly everything).

Great! Especially the cinematography. Wow!

Wow.

Add in explosions and that's an action movie in it's own right. =D

Awesome job on an incredibly inhumane schedule, it sounds like your friends know how to boogie as well, I bet that's handy when you have a sudden inspiration and feel like making your own no-prep 48 hour film fest. :)

On that note, love the other videos on your site!

Carl

thanks--really looking forward to moving beyond "last-minute filmmaking" on the next one!

Charles, what size and type of monitor is attached to the noga arm?

Do you recommend any general settings for the EX1 for this type of studio shoot with controlled light, such as the Cine Gamma Curve, Matrix or other settings, like Detail, etc?

The BTS stills are always great to see, thank you.

That is the Carrion (http://www.lsdsgn.com/) made by Luis Sinabaldi, who was along on the shoot to help out. It's an impressive image for the money.

The EX1 arrived the day before the shoot and Brian from Redrock took care of getting it dialed in for me--I had just asked him to make a fairly neutral cinegamma-type look with as much latitude as possible. At the shoot I had no chance to even sniff at the camera, so I'm afraid I can't tell you what the settings were.

Charles, could you give your opinion on the overall experience, working with the Sony EX1? (picture quality, ergonomics, workflow, etc.)? I'm highly interested in it.

And off topic, or maybe you could post this in the RED board, how your experiences with the RED camera were?

Thank you for your short film, I actually wrote a review here, but I can't seem to find it, so I don't know if the board was acting weird or my computer was, but anyhow: great shots, great lightning, good camera placement, and especially very good acting! Good job!

Thank you Mathieu, I would like to see your review (especially since it sounds favorable)!

Overall I was quite impressed with the EX1. As I indicated I had far less contact with it than I usually would on a shoot but the picture was quite nice. I look forward to trying it out without an adaptor so I can get to know it better. I was impressed with the solution to the age-old problem of mechanical focus vs drive-by-wire autofocus; the resolution is a great asset; the picture quality seemed very in-line with the rest of the Cinealta line, which is astounding considering the price-point. I never hefted it by itself and I've heard the ergonomics are a bit suspect (although the rotating handgrip seems nice) but any camera that doesn't sit on the shoulder is a liability as far as I'm concerned, so a 3rd party solution will take care of all. 1/2" chips are a nice compromise, you can actually start to get a taste of shallow DoF without having to bend over backwards. It's funny that the original camcorders and 2 piece VHS setups from the 80's all had 1/2" tubes, so they had similar shallow focus--I used to wonder why my old tapes exhibited more of this than the DV cameras we've been using for the past ten years until I made this connection.

To me, the HVX has met a worthy successor and I would go for the EX1 over that camera at this point if I were in the market.

As far as the RED project, once it has been posted I will put up some thoughts. I was supposed to shoot a music video with it last night but I've been socked in with bronchitis.

Hi Charles,

thanks for the post. My review was essentially the same as I wrote above, maybe that's not enough to call it a review :-D
Just typed the same stuff again, maybe that I typed some more or less, but that was what it came down to.

Best regards,

Charles, thanks for the Carrion confirmation.

Hi everyone:

I'm pleased to announce that "Table Manners" will be seen at various venues at NAB; in the Sony booth (along with some behind-the-scenes footage) and in Douglas Spotted Eagle's various presentations.