While down under in New Zealand, Agent B receives a mission from a strange messenger. But there are more than a couple of others after the same quarry. Can she survive?

Watch Episode 26 now! Go to http://www.ladyxfilms.com and click the "Current Episode" link.

The Lady X Crew

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Episode 26 Details:

Directed by: Aaron Koolen
Produced by: Angela Hovey & Aaron Koolen
Camera Operator: Julia Green
Written by: Matt Oakes & Angela Hovey & Aaron Koolen

Audio Assistant: Alison Titulaer
Still photos: Angela Hovey

Principal Cast: Justine Hunter (Lady X); Bernice Tuffery (Agent B); Greg Smith (Mr Big); Daniel Cowley (Rival Agent); Charles Unwin (Rival Agent #2)

Music: Composed and performed by Nigel Pattinson

Special thanks to: Deidre Bourke, Andrew Stephens, Debbie Andrews, Jeff Sanders, Jill Rudd, Shane Powell

I thoroughly enjoyed this episode. Excellent job ! I especially liked the ending (dog barking/night vision scope).

I'm a little unsure the significance of all the characters but since the movie flowed so smoothly it doesn't matter as much because I had fun watching it.

Anyone going to Episode 26 from the front page by scrolling down the list will be sent to Episode 25... minor link problem :)

Thanks, Andrew. Fixing it now.

Thanks Jim. Yeah there is a lot happening in that 7 minutes especially considering that there is about 3 1/2 of intro & end scene but glad it flowed well enough for you. :)

Aaron

Aaron

I think your episode is one of the best going so far...your story had nice twists and turns, and for the most part, great acting. (the guy who killed agent b has got star quality...too bad he got killed so fast..) To be honest it's the first episode in awhile that made me smile. Congratulations.

Barry

Aaron,

Great job, impressive to see what can be done with an XM(GL)2 in the right hands!! Really enjoyed this episode. Thanks to you and your team for all the hard work.

Thanks for the positive comments Barry and Rob .

Barry, glad you smiled, ( Hopefully in the right parts ;) ). It's always a bit nerve wrecking showing these things, especially to friends. I've had 1 friend not laugh, 1 friend slightly grin and one crack up laughing ;) We're having a showing of it for cast and crew this friday so that will in interesting.....Time to drink a few beers before hand me thinks..

The scene I find the funniest is the part where the paranoid agent finds out he's forgot the box etc. That was shot last minute because that actor was leaving the country in a few days so we couldn't shoot the chase scene we had originally planned because motorcycle guy was on holiday at the time. I was up late that night trying to figure out what to do. Got an idea to have him forget the box, then jump out of car - abuse himself a bit then notice bike guy (Who we'd shoot on a different day) run away and get shot. After shooting I thought, "That's not gonna make much sense" cause then the bike guy would have to find out that paranoid guy didn't have the box, go back to the house area and find it etc. Making the whole thing too long and boring. So instead just had him finish when he was out of the car and made motorcycle guy find the box straight away. It was the best part of the movie for me ;) and I still laugh when I see it.

Rob, yeah although it was a pretty amateurish attempt (We'd never done anything before and had not much idea what we were doing) it came out OK in the end and we did put a lot of work into it. There was about 4 days shooting, and I did hours and hours of Foley. I don't think there is one single sound effect in there that I didn't Foley in the end (Friends and wife helped with a couple). Splashes, footsteps, clothes rustles, leaves, doors, shaving, paper moving etc. The worst was Foleying the sequence where Drowner agent pulls out Agent B and searches her. Had to foley the stones in time to his movements, water etc etc ;) Drove me mad!

Anyway, thanks again for the encouraging comments.
Aaron

Aaron,
Your recent spot moves somewhere in my top 10.

Great job !

I'm a big fan of a very specific vivid "look" a Canon GL or XL series produces in natural light.
Rob (episode 14) and you were the only other short to do this so far IMO.

No offense to any of the films BTW.

So Aaron, how did you like your GL2? I know I was amazed at
some of the footage my XL1S spit out after some careful
manipulating of the settings.

Thanks for the compliment Dan!

Rob, I'm reasonably happy but I didn't get much time to play with different settings in camera before shooting so I did most stuff in post. There were a couple of shots in my episode that I really liked light wise, just cause the light fell luckily and that made me see that with proper, controlled light I would be able to get some really pleasing shots. After going through deinterlacing etc, I think next time I probably will try shooting in frame mode.


Cheers
Aaron

All right, Rob...you can't throw out a teaser like that and leave us hanging. Exactly "what" tweaking did you do to the settings to get such a great look?

Same question applies to you, Aaron.

Hehehe... okay John. Basically it isn't rocket science and all have
been mentioned by me before:

1) shoot in frame mode (interlaced is evillll)

2) use a custom preset and set Setup Level (black level) all the way to the left. NOW ENABLE the custom preset!!!! This is a tricky thing to do and very very very easy to forget

3) my zebra level indicator was at 90

4) slightly underexpose your footage

5) shoot full manual, I shot at a 1/50th shutter (PAL)

5) color correction in post to increase apparent latitude with an S curve

That's basically it.

Rob so you don't saturate more with the colour gain setting?

Rob, with your zebra at 90, so you expose so that all (Well, as many as possible) zebras disappear at that setting? I guess that would cause the underexposure you were talking of.

Cheers
Aaron

No... I left my color gain in the middle as I did with color phase
and sharpness (although fiddling with sharpness might be
interesting as well, haven't tried yet).

Yes the zebra's help in that. But what I mean when I say
underexposing is when I'm looking at the image in the view-
finder I make sure it is a tad darker then I want to go for.
But ofcourse that is relative on how you have your viewfinder
set up.

But even if I were to use a monitor on set I would very slightly
expose it just below what I was looking for. It gives me richer
colors and blacks. At least that is how I feel about it.

Basically I'm saying it because from what I see a lot of people
tend to shoot in the highs instead of the lows and mids. You
can always increase in the higher areas, but you can never
go back if you lost detail in the first place.

Do you aim to have some of the image just coming on the zebras? I'd imagine that would be a good thing also, so that you know you're using as much of the latitude as possible. If you were a stop out (i.e. There was nothing so bright that you could go a whole stop higher before clipping) then you're losing 1/2 the dynamic range which can't be a good thing either.

Aaron

Well, I think that depends on the amount of light available. I'm
trying hard to remember my Lady X shoot, but it has been a
while already. I think I only saw a couple of lines in some shoots.
Mostyle I tend to shoot on the safe side. I'm more concerned
with the overall brightness then getting the maximum highlight.

I understand what you are saying. Trying to get the maximum
exposure range possible, without crushing anything should give
you more to work with.

I just don't think I have mastered that kind of control yet. Especially
since I'm also not using any lighting kit at this moment at all.

So yes, I do think I'm losing a bit if the dynamic range. But I don't
think it is half. Good question though! I'll play with that some more
in the future.

Yeah I'm really interested now to start trying to control things a bit more. Going to look into a lighting setup soon I think. I'm already wanting to get into my next short film already!

Regarding dynamic range, I was just thinking of that post that Jeff did regarding it. Every stop that you go down you halve the light, and therefore, if you haven't got many highlights (i.e. you stopped down too far) then you lose half the dynamic range.

For example. If I set up a scene so that I have some dark parts that are "as dark as you can go", and then I have some light parts that are "as light as you can go" and then I close down the iris one stop, the darks will crush, and highlights will now sit at the top of the second to last stop of the camera right? So I've effectivly lost a stop, which is 128 of the 256 possible light values - or half. Maybe I misunderstood his post. Anyway that's probably in extreme conditions and trying to manage that, as you say, could be a nightmare without controlled lighting.

Catchya
Aaron

I read that as well Aaron and it's definitely important to maintain
as much as possible. But that's hard to do sometimes with our
"limited" tools.