Nice experiment. How many cameras did you actually use? Or did you simply change angles each time, and play the same piece each time?

It appears that you had at least two cameras, and the close-ups could have simply been synched?

Two cameras.

A DVX100B and a JVC cam. I thought about just synching but I had little time to setup since the room was only free for about 30 minutes so I grabbed the extra camera and knocked it out in about 15 minutes. Now I just need to find a professional studio with a piano and time so I can really spruce it up.

Trailer for "Can You Hear Me Now?"
 

Here is a link to the trailer for my 25 minute short film "Can You Hear Me Now?"

This is my first movie so be gentle, but comments are apprieciated.

http://web.mac.com/brian.andrews29/i...235EFECCE.html

First off— It looks like it might be pretty funny. The female seems believable as a character.

As for the "trailer"—
It doesn't really start or stop. It just appears and then vanishes. You might want to check out the movie trailer section on apple.com (www.apple.com/trailers) to see a reference. Usually they tell part of the plot to get the viewer interested in the story. You might even throw in some text to help the viewer (ie: "An addiction" then "leads to an intervention") Usually the "highlight text" is over a black background. You might want to add some music too. Just as long as it doesn't overpower the actor's voices. Final touches: the title, directed by info, a green preview slide at the beginning, final credits at the end showing the website and/or release date or just "coming soon."

:-/ hope that wasn't too harsh?

Good luck, fellow movie-making bud!

James,

Thank you so much for the awesome feedback! You were not harsh at all (trust me I've gotten slammed for this trailer) and all of your points are dead on. Thanks again for taking the time. I really apprieciate it.

Hey, no problem. I actually did laugh when the guy started combing his hair. He reminds me of that guy that works at the Sprint store. If you have been in any Sprint store in the US, you've seen him.

You are dead on. In the script he was "Radio Shack Geek"...he is the "drug" dealer. Shouldn't be hard to figure out the addiction now.

Dude! I was going to say Radio Shack, but the dude I'm thinking of moved from Radio Shack to Sprint.

check out tarnation,youtube and others
 

hey guys i just read and posted in the excellent thread' "rodriguez success yet to be duplicated" and wanted to add something in my own thread.I just wanted people especially amateur filmmakers to not lose heart about lack of filmmakers breaking through,especially digital, uh filmmakers, filmmakers may not be the best word for us but whatever. Look at the success of the film "tarnation", 125 $ budget and awards galore, now the film is even even at blockbuster. go to ifilm and look at success stories ,atomfilms, or google "bowie chick and www.youtube.com and read about this girls bowiechicks story. She made some afterschool videos using a webcam and now the webcam maker has a major deal in the works with her, you wouldnt believe how commonplace making videos for myspace.com and stuff like that is now among young people.its happening guys, the digital decade is here,just hang in there and keep the faith. cheers ,john

I'm looking at her page right now (youtube) and I see no "Tarnation".

A Film Noir Short Story (Action in Argentina)
 

Well, it's been 8 months since I did this. I made it in August for a contest that had nothing to do (necessarily, at least) with filmmaking, and I didn't win anything (arrived late to the contest). Anyways, that and the fact that I was inspired by an English spoken masterpiece (Max Payne, hence the name as a reference to the sequel's sub title) made me write it in English too.
There was no budget whatsoever, but there is a lot of work on pre, post, and the production itself. Will is all you have sometimes (specially down here).

It was the first (live action) short I ever did. I started cinema school (which, although some of you won't believe this, is public and free... and a very good one) last year, and this piece was done before we did our first practical work for the school.

In the middle of the shooting of this short we did other shorts (all of them in the comedy genre) because there were dead lapses because of endless problems I had to shoot this (I'll tell you later if you want). This is the only of all the shorts I've done that has a script (really). All the rest of them (which you'll hopefully be able to watch soon) are improvised, but you won't believe the results considering that (and they do make sense anyway... much more than we'd ever expect). Now all of those are spoken in Spanish (except for one) so until I finish the subtitles I can't post them.

So, with no further ado, here's the short.

http://www.savefile.com/projects.php?pid=595258

Click on the corresponding orange link (you know the name), and then on the next page click on the "Download the file now" link near the bottom of the page. It's a RAR file because it has two subtitles (in English and Spanish) and a ReadMe, so don't worry about it.

This is the project where I'll keep all the shorts, you can keep coming to see if there's anything new there. I'll make a new thread for each short anyways.

Hope you like it, and sorry for the length of the post, I tend to do that.

Please feel free to comment on the good and bad aspects you consider.

My new Doc's Site & Trailer
 

Being a member of dvinfo for some time, I thought I'd post the link to the site of my new very musical doc which just showed at the Mar del Plata International FilmFest and did really well with the public:

www.poetadelguaran.com.ar

and while we're at it, to a page which has many of my old shorts (and needs some reorder soon):

http://www.grancosa.com/todovideo.htm

Caged. A film.
 

Hi everyone.

Mirroring this thread from the DVXUser in hopes to get more comments.

I was about to put "student film" in the title but I thought I'd scare too many people away.

CAGED:
WMV (34mb).
QuickTime (35mb)


Anyway, this is a short film I helped my friend with who is finishing her last year at the school I graduated from last year. Basically, the whole post-production was left to me, including composing the soundtracks in Cubase.

I decided I will colour correct each shot seperately in Shake. A bit of a tedious task, as it turned out, but quite doable. Deinterlacing in AE at night, correcting at day.

Forgive her camera work, they apparently weren't given a tripod (darn.. I'm gonna loose half the crowd on this one). Still, I did the best I could preplanning with them, tweaking the script, and fixing each shot. Most of them were relatively straight forward, except for a few shots which I'll explain later.

Overall, may not be the best film I've worked on, but it was definetely the most post-production intense one. Took around a week to finish everything. Soundtracks were the easiest for some reason. I had all of them done and a few unused ones left for the trailers by the end of one day.

Appreciate all critique, opinions and free tomatoes thrown my way.

A bit of a breakdown for those who may be interested. Hopefully the stills will inspire someone to download the whole film.

First off, as I mentioned, for some shots I had to draw masks and partially defocus the shots. The idea was not only to get rid of the video look, but also to show the isolation of the main character from the outside world she's trapped in. An example of such a defocused shot is the exterior car shot, as well as the interior shot, in the form of a comparison with the original deinterlaced footage. Another interior shot shows the parrot in the window, which was a complete accident, and turned out to the advantage of the film as it provided a form of foreshadowing.

For the colours, I've decided that I will greatly desaturate each shot of the everyday life of the heroine, and bring in the colours with intensive saturation when the flashbacks to the childhood happen, as well as the jungle flora and fauna start appearing. Here is one example of a flashback, and another one of the snakes. For the snake shot a bit of painting had to be done to only bring out the saturation of the orange snake and leave the hands and the table alone.

Speaking of painting and replacing, in one shot a woman walked by on the left of the shot. After some tracking and layering, it was fixed. Another touch-up shot was the closeup of the face. To get rid of the blemishes on the forehead, I did some cloning with QuickPaint which turned out great.

For the titles I wrote a small function in Shake to create small offsets in the X and Y axis in order to emulate the optical titles. A similar function was used for the brightness control to complete the effect.

As to sound, general techniques like gating, automating the volume, de-essing, and equalizing were used. Seemed to have worked.

The trailer is beautiful, but I love the short pieces, the juxtaposition of images that appear to have no relationship to one another, but linked by the music and by the reappearance of the backlit dancing guy. Nice work.