Example project Archives - Budget-stretching tips for filmmaking, animation, motion graphics & visual effects

Before & after color grading comparison of flat scanned 35mm on the Outpost DVD

The British independent low-budget (£200,000 according to wikipedia) feature Outpost directed by Steve Barker achieved something pretty extraordinary– it rose above the endless flood of made-for-straight-to-DVD movies that belong to what I call the “post-Alien subgenre” (a group of soldiers/technicians who don’t like each other are stuck somewhere isolated/dark/claustrophobic, waiting it out for a specified amount of time until rescue/safety, while being killed off one by one by a mysterious & obscured creature/entity)… by being bought up by Sony and given a limited theatrical release in the UK.

Ok cool story, brodawg. Yeah so on the DVD there are deleted scenes that appear to be from an assemblage edit of the flat transfer film scan footage. Which means you can directly compare that to the look of the color graded final feature, if you’re into that kinda thing. It was shot on (Fuji) 35mm, so the flat transfer holds 13-14 stops of dynamic range (good prosumer video cameras and DSLR/DSLRish cameras hold 7-10 usable stops). The color grade’s bleach bypass/ENRish look is kinda par for the course considering the genre, but it’s definitely well crafted. And if you wear an eye patch, have a parrot on your shoulder, and use the word “booty” in a non-hiphop way, you can even rip the deleted scenes and try mimicking the final result… which would be pretty useful for anyone who’s learning to color grade. BUT THAT WOULD BE ILLEGALZ.

Here be the Outpost DVD on Amazon.

Planning for reflections for highly efficient VFX

So this is about using additional “reflection takes” from a shoot to greatly aid in a composite.

Here’s a scenario: you shoot an actor on greenscreen that, in the final composite, will be walking past a wall made of brushed aluminum, or polished granite, or even dark plastic. You should shoot an additional take with a mirrored panel reflecting the actor mimicking the “real” take, but with blocking altered to ensure the actor never overlaps the reflection (since this will give much more leeway for manipulation in post). Then it’s relatively quick and painless to composite the reflection onto the wall or whatever, better melting the elements together visually while also giving an organic look to CGI objects without spending eleventeen thousand hours on shaders and rendering in 3D software.

Here’s some more specific guidelines…

Plan for objects that have less than perfectly crisp reflections. This is because your “reflection take” will likely not perfectly match the real take of the actor’s performance… not to mention that your reflection panel probably wasn’t a high quality mirror to begin with.
Shoot the actor’s performance on greenscreen like normal, with no reflection panel (thus allowing for a simple composite without having to roto out the panel).
Then set up a mirror or shiny board where the reflective object will be in the composite. Reblock the actor doing their performance so that you get an unobscured shot of the reflection. This will likely require some spatial cheating, but whatevs. It’ll help when compositing if the background in the reflection is either greenscreen or black (duh), but this usually isn’t super essential. I’d suggest having the actor watch the “good” take a few times so they can study & mimic their movements and timing.
In composite, finalize the actor’s position and timing into the shot. Then throw in the reflection take and tweak it to match the reflective properties of the particular surface. You’ll likely be using “Add” or “Overlay” composite modes. Btw, you should be working in linear blend mode whenever you’re doing photoreal-ish compositing or using motion blur (if using After Effects via the “Blend Colors Using 1.0 Gamma” checkbox under File > Project Settings).
Geometric mega-accuracy of the reflection’s placement and angle aren’t nearly as important in selling the shot as having the kinetic properties of the reflection match the actor… meaning that the timing of an arm swing or head turn need to be pretty close, so bust out the retiming/speed change plugin/tool if it doesn’t.

Back in ye olde 2007, this technique really saved my skin when a project I was directing/DP/compositing became logistically stressed with revisions when the signoff process grew more complicated than anyone expected. Nobody’s fault, just the nature of the beast. To put it lightly, we found ourselves in a super crunch, both in terms of time and budget. If any students are reading this, note that this kinda stuff happens all the time and probably the primary difference between a professional and amateur is that the pro is able to not bother dwelling on obstacles and just focus on figuring out a way to deal with it as best as possible within the limitations, without ripping their own hair out and going insano. Then, theoretically, you eventually matriculate to projects with big juicy budgets and long healthy schedules that are super fun with lots of creative latitude. I’ll let you know when I ever hear of one of those. The clients who give those out must hang out with Santa Claus and ride unicorns or something.

Anyways, we had to reassess a sequence that contained a CGI refrigerator. It originally was going to animate into existence in a fancy way that can only be done in 3D software, and the shot was to be 3D matchmoved. But due to aforementioned schedule/budget factors, we were hard-pressed just to get the shot done with the fridge static, un-animated. Because of the “reflection take” I was able to use just a still image render of the fridge and make the shot look “good enough”. This saved us several hours, since it nixed having to matchmove as well as eliminate the render time for the fridge. Here’s a lil’ video clip showing a breakdown where you can see how big of a difference the reflection take makes…

Is it optically accurate? Not at all. But it “feels” right to the average viewer. Is it invisible realism? Nope. But it sells the shot with a minimum amount of time and resources.

Using a car interior as an audio booth

If you need to record clean ADR or voiceover, etc, and don’t have access to an audio booth, try recording inside a car (that’s not running, duh)… I guess they’re actually designed to have great acoustics. The only problem is that the actor can’t stand up, which often makes a big difference in delivery, especially if it’s an untrained actor… so maybe just always use really really short actors, I dunno. I can’t remember where I got this tip from… either a book, website or an audio person.

As I’m writing this, I remember a related experience from before I had heard of that. There’s a scene with two actors exchanging dialogue in the back seat of a parked car, which I shot from the front seat with a Sony VX1000.

As we were setting up mics, I was astonished to realize that the audio from the camera’s built-in stereo mic actually sounded better… which is the first and only time that has ever happened. But I guess it makes sense– that sedan had nice acoustics and we were in the middle of a quiet wooded area. Also, they were moving around a lot and keeping a directional mic properly aimed at them within such an enclosed space would’ve been difficult.

You can also get one of these relatively inexpensive thingees… I have one and it works great, especially for the price.

Color-saturated fill light for a better composite

Here’s a useful technique that I came up with for shooting certain kinds of greenscreen stuff…

Make the fill light a saturated color (that’s different from the screen and the subject’s clothes etc, duh).
In post, isolate that particular color and then tweak it to match the hue of whatever the natural bounce light would be in whatever environment you’re compositing them into.
Though keep in mind that it’s always better to just use a colored fill light that matches your particular background plate. This technique is more for cases where you have to use one setup for several varied backgrounds.

For example, you can use a saturated magenta for the fill, and then use the secondary color correction in Color Finesse to tweak just the saturated magenta to appear bluish if they’re supposed to be standing on the belly of a giant, naked sleeping smurf or whatever. Another great thing about this technique is that you not only can control the hue and saturation of the fill color, but also the luminance of the fill, and quite easily at that. Of course, this technique will only be useful for certain shots, depending on the lighting and blocking.

Here’s a straight forward example of this technique from a shoot I was DP on. Because of last minute schedule changes, I had to shoot numerous bits of Snoop Dogg in just one setup, even though they took place in a multitude of settings. We could’ve shot him in neutral color and depended on conventional color correction to help color him into the background, but that usually looks pretty rookie & unsavory in my opinion, since any color adjustments to affect the “bounce/ambient” light will also affect the entire subject’s color, even the areas being illuminated by the key light. So with a magenta fill, we had some tweakable “ambient” light to match the backgrounds in post.

You can see from the original footage on the right that not only was I able to easily change the hue & saturation of the magenta fill, but also the luminance. More examples from the exact same lighting setup below…

Also, note that in these examples (which I composited & color graded myself) the tweaking of the magenta fill was done with just the “Hue and Saturation” effect in After Effects due to what was available on that particular workstation. Theoretically, Color Finesse’s secondary color correction would’ve given even better results.

Animating off the (temporal) grid

Say you’re using After Effects to animate five balls flying into a wall and bouncing off. Normally, you’d have to keyframe the instance of impact on an exact frame, before changing the direction of the ball’s position path to bounce off… which wouldn’t really have any kind of qualitative disadvantage if it was just one ball. But when there’s five of them, and all of them end up having the moment of impact occur exactly on a frame, it might feel “not chaotic & organic enough”. Or just plain unrealistic if it’s a visual effects shot… if you were to shoot video of five baseballs being thrown against a brick wall, only maybe one or two would have the concise moment of impact occur exactly during a video frame. For most of them, there’d be a slur of motion blur denoting that the impact was occurring either slightly before or after an exact frame. If the balls were composited in and all had the moment of impact synch exactly to frames, then it can kinda read subconsciously as synthetic to the viewer.

This principle – that action does not naturally unfold synchronized perfectly to the occurrence of a particular framerate – can easily be applied to animation, if your project has need for such a thing. I totally just scored major snob-dawg points with that last sentence.

For sake of example, say you’re using After Effects. Put your animated layers in a precomp that has triple the framerate as your main comp… ie. if your main comp is 29.97 fps, then make your precomp 89.91 fps.
Animate the layers moving/colliding/bouncing/etc in the tripled (89.91) framerate precomp.
In your main comp, you should see that the moments of change/impact/etc are sometimes occurring at a moment in time that’s between discreet frames.
Moving any keyframes in the precomp by one or two frames allows you to put those moments of impact on or off “the temporal grid” of the main comp.
Be sure to use the phrase “temporal grid” around your coworkers to look pretentious. Err, I mean classy. Classy and sophisticated. You know, like how James Bond is.

Of course, if needed you can up the framerate of the precomp to whatever if you need more chaos/realism in the timing array of impacts.

I first came up with this when working on the project pictured below, needing smaller units of time to distribute the keyframed squares that comprise the flame movement. Since then I’ve used it on VFX-ish compositing shots for the reasons I noted above.

Panasonic’s GH2: If you’re an aspiring filmmaker then you really really really have no excuse anymore

You’ve probably already heard some stuff about the GH2 and how great it is for video. I bought one and days later used it for a client project, and have since ran some tests. This camera is a big deal. Seriously, I can’t believe this thing exists… for the money, it just can’t be beat. For now at least.

Pictured here with the 14-42mm kit lens, and Fotodiox adapter which puts to use old analog SLR lenses I already done ownededed. Neato.

No need for me to go over all the technical specs, that’s what the entire rest of the internet’s for. Here’s the bits that matter most in regards to low-cost filmmaking (I could care less about it as a stills camera)…

It has a swivel screen, which right off the bat will save lots of time and headache in a no-budget shooting situation. Otherwise there’d be some low/high/oddly angled shots you just wouldn’t be able to get without shelling out for an external monitor.
The Micro Four Thirds format has a sensor that’s slightly smaller than the size of 35mm motion picture film, which means it has a depth of field that’s close to such. Spherical-lensed, 1:85 35mm cine film (the most common format up until the mid/late 90s) has an image area of about 21.95mm x 11.87mm, and the GH2’s sensor in video mode is 18.8mm x 10.6mm (though nowadays nearly all Hollywood non-digital acquired films are shot on 24.89mm x 13.45mm Super 35mm). In my opinion, the mega shallow depth of field obtainable with the Vistavision-sized 36mm x 24mm sensor of the Canon 5D Mark II, while a nice option, is unneeded 99% of the time for video. And once you start shooting actual dramatic/narrative setups with focus-pulling, you’ll appreciate having more breathing room, especially if it’s a no-budget situation where you can’t afford to lose takes to focus problems. Bottom line: the depth of field “shallowness” is beyond good enough.
The video footage looks great. It doesn’t have the aliasing/moiré/pixel-skipping issues that Canon’s 5D Mark II and 7D have… thin diagonal lines are smooth and clean in the GH2. The rolling shutter isn’t too much of an issue, and the compression looks pretty good for AVCHD.
Probably the best thing about the GH2 is that you can use almost any old lens on it. This is huge. Once you make the jump into shooting with interchangeable lenses, the cost of glass usually becomes half the money involved. The flange distance (from back of lens to sensor plane) on the GH2 is really short, way shorter than analog SLR or DSLR formats. So if you simply get a cheap $30-40 adapter (basically just a metal ring that puts the lens further away from the sensor plane), then you can choose from literally hundreds of great old cheap lenses from ebay, garage sales, craigslist, whatever. Like go search for old Nikon F-mount manual lenses on ebay and behold. And on top of that, since the smaller sensor uses only the center of the lens, that means you can usually even resort to using ultra cheapo bad lenses, since most lens problems occur around the edges (you’re also scaling down to, and resolving for, only 1920 x 1080 pixels for video, which is very low res compared to still photos, so lower grade lenses generally should still perform perceptually fine). Take all that money you save and put it to work in front of your lens in the form of props, costumes, locations, actors, whatever. Just note that the effective focal length of 35mm still lenses will be doubled on the GH2… ie. an old 50mm Pentax K-mount lens will look like a 100mm in your footage. So you may end up buying a Micro Four Thirds lens if you like short focal lengths. One more note about using old lenses: if you don’t already own some, I’d recommend going with the Nikon F-mount adapter since there’s a lot of great old cheap Nikon lenses. And an added bonus: if you later get a Canon camera, you can use those Nikon lenses on it with another adapter because the Nikon flange distance is shorter than Canon’s.
The body is only $900. THAT’S JUST FARGING RIDICULOUS THAT YOU CAN GET A CAMERA THAT SPITS OUT FOOTAGE LIKE THIS FOR A PRICE LIKE THAT. I started out with super8, then Hi8 video, then 16mm, then DV, HD… all those formats & cameras had some kind of serious flaw in regards to cost versus quality, and what I see in the GH2 is none of that. This is by far the most bang for your buck I’ve ever seen. And I have a feeling we’ve kinda reached the ceiling for a while in that regard. So waiting around for something better & cheaper is probably not gonna yield anything other than wasted time.

$900 GH2 + $30 Pentax adapter + $220 Peleng 8mm lens = Footage that looks like this. Unheard of. You can peep the raw frame as 90% quality jpeg here.
Okay, so here’s the bad things about it…

You gotta deal with the audio issue… either record double system with something like the Zoom H4n for $300, or plug the GH2 into a BeachTek box. Orrrrrr… if you already have a miniDV or whatever camcorder with decent audio, then you can use that to record audio. Having the visual reference in the audio footage also can make synching sound to picture faster.
It’s usually out of stock, so finding one takes more legwork than just clicking five or six times in your browser. I have a feeling video production companies are buying them in three’s. I wonder if anyone has bought it not primarily for video… probably not, that’s what the Canons are for. REALTALK.
Using multiple old lenses makes using filters complicated. If you’re shooting in direct sun and wanna open up your aperture wider than like f8, you’re gonna need an ND filter. So to not spend mucho bucks on multiple screw-mount ND filters for all the varied lens face sizes, you either need to invest in a matte box & rectangluar filters (very expensive), or get one set of ND filters in a big face size and a step-up ring for each of your lens face sizes (not as expensive).

Of course, there are many higher quality, better workflow video camera options out there (duh), but if you’re looking for a camera to try out filmmaking or up your game from HDV/etc with minimal financial risk, then straight up the GH2 is it. Feel lucky you weren’t born twenty years earlier. Or thirty. Or whatever, you know what I mean.

Check out my recommendations for a barebones budget GH2 kit.

Paying off location owners with your day job’s free perks

So this is probably gonna be more anecdotal than pragmatically useful. But maybe someone can use this for their project…

When I was a 21 year old art student, I was asked by a peer in the department, Chad Hutchison, to be DP for his very ambitious film project. He didn’t really have the money to make it happen, but we found all kinds of ways to stretch the budget. His part-time job was as an assistant manager at a big chain movie theater, where he was regularly given a booklet of vouchers to hand out to complaining customers, basically to make them shut them up and go away.

To most people, free movie tickets are as good as cash. So he would kinda ration them until he’d be given a new booklet, and we could have our little pile of “filmmaker Monopoly money” as I would call it. We were able to pay for two days of shooting at a local pub by shelling out a stack of them to the owner. If you’ve ever shot at a private location with the owner/manager present, then you know how huge of a difference it makes if they’re getting compensated– asking them to flip a circuit breaker or turn off a loud ice machine is no big deal for them when they have something in their pocket from you, versus it being a big annoyance when they’re doing it as a free favor. Oh yeah, I remember we also decorated the bar for halloween… it’s a safe bet that had we not been paying, they wouldn’t have allowed that, which would’ve had a definite negative impact on our already meager production value. So if you have any kind of access to job perks stuff like that, keep in mind you might be able to pay people with it… never hurts to ask. After a particularly long, exhausting shoot day our actors appreciated them as well.

Yeah so, I guess if you don’t have any budget and you work at like a pizza place that lets you take home one pie at the end of your shift, maybe work out a deal where you drop it off after work for X number of days. Okay, maybe I’m just fantasizing that someone would be paying me that way. Like right now. Whatevs, I’m hungry.

You can see clips from that film (including some from the paid-for bar scenes) at dopjaan.com/213.html.