Hello guys,
Today I'd like to share with you my fun little hobby between 2006 and 2012. My friends and I were making movies! Amateur short films to be more precise. Most of them were terrible. But... the good thing is I learned a lot from that experience and that's exactly why I want to talk about it here.
Currently I've been focusing on drawing my own original comic called Shades Of Men and I have been posting it here on Steemit. There are a lot of similarities between movies and comics and I see why I went from one to the other.
What I aim to do with this blog is share the stories we created, how we organized the tasks, what is the technical knowledge we acquired, and the mistakes we made. Hopefully if you're into short films yourself or if you like story telling, this might interest you.
We called ourselves Max Prod...
We were just a group of friends, passoniate about movie, eager to share one of their own. Late at night after parties, we would shoot small sequences in the street with no specific story line. It'd often be a confrontation, a simple dialogue. Until the first project came to life.
One of our talented friends, came up with a cool mafia story which was called Drosera. It followed Max a young ambitious but loyal member of the mafia. (Played by myself... ;-D)
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As he learns that his brother wants to take control of the gang by killing the Don, he does everything he can to prevent that from happening.
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This results in cool gun fights, an assassin on rampage with a katana, a mansion taken over and various twists and turns...
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Here's the french trailer if you want to get the feel of it...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6g1wy
The film ended up being about 40 minutes long and took less than a year to complete.
What we learned...
Sound is as important as image. This is often forgotten, but what you say needs to clear enough to be understood. This means shooting with the camera close enough to the actors or in a closed environment. Forget those long shots and outside scene for now...
Manage day light. They say there is a golden hour. When the sun is glowing orange in the late afternoon. Capturing footage at this moment is magic. But then starts the race against time. One thing is sure, footage at night does NOT look good. One thing to consider is shooting night scene during the day and applying a blue filter afterwards.
Avoid pulling out that black plastic gun in public areas. Without the orange tip and the proper autorisations it could be wrongly interpreted. In a small city from France, this didn't cause much harm hopefully!
Finally, longer films are harder to complete... Almost a year to finish it! That's quite a big project to start with! Gathering the right people, finding the gear, preparing the same costumes... That might be the most obvious advice but when you actually in the middle of it trying to see the end... It takes a whole different meaning. In the end, start small. Build from it.
It's feels better to finish a 5 minute sequence than failing to complete a 1 hour film.
With this first experience, we really learned the basics... From getting the video graphic card for the PC, rendering, to editing. Then by the end, designing a cover and actually burning the DVDs. I'll definitely get into more details going forward.
The challenge was the quality of the footage (audio and poor lighting) that made editing pretty hard.
But you know what? It's when we fall that we learn how to pick up ourselves.
The second project got better! More on that soon...
Let me know what you thought of this new topic.
Feel free to ask any question you'd like in the comment section below.
Can't wait to share more with you,
See you on the other side,
Jrej