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Death in C Minor -- A Short Film


Jason Reed

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If you got a couple of minutes to spare, check out our new short horror film: "Death in C Minor"

 

 

This is one of our first attempts at a short film horror film. Shot with the Sony A7s and the Rokinon Cine 35mm and 50mm Lenses. We weren't too satisfied with some of our lighting and camera work (among other things). We want to improve our craft, so let us know what you think -- good, bad, and ugly.

 

Thanks,

Jason R

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Nice work, Jason! Overall, I liked the look you were going for. It definitely fit the genre. The main problem I noticed was flat lighting, partially due to the tones of the walls. The flesh tones seemed to be a little on the green side, so maybe the grading was a little off?...

 

The establishing shot of the house also seemed a bit dim, but I really liked the way you inter-cut the final scene between hand-held & what appeared to be Glidecam. And I watched it with the sound off (as I always do) to see if I was able to follow the story, visually and I was. But yes, what you needed to make more of a visual impact were saturated colors & contrast.

 

But nice job! Keep it up!

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Nice work, Jason! Overall, I liked the look you were going for. It definitely fit the genre. The main problem I noticed was flat lighting, partially due to the tones of the walls. The flesh tones seemed to be a little on the green side, so maybe the grading was a little off?...

 

The establishing shot of the house also seemed a bit dim, but I really liked the way you inter-cut the final scene between hand-held & what appeared to be Glidecam. And I watched it with the sound off (as I always do) to see if I was able to follow the story, visually and I was. But yes, what you needed to make more of a visual impact were saturated colors & contrast.

 

But nice job! Keep it up!

 

Thanks, Bill. You hit the nail on the head regarding the greenish tones. We color corrected our film on a monitor that was calibrated, but had a poor color gamut. After we released the film, I started watching our movie on other computers and I noticed that the tones were off. Since then, I've researched proper color correction techniques (historgrams, vectorscopes, and parades). I wish I would've done that earlier because it would've been obvious that our footage wasn't properly white balanced and that it was skewed too much away from blue, despite what we were seeing on our monitor.
For the establishing shot, we were afraid to bring up the mids and highlights because there was a fair amount of grain. That's why the shot ended up looking so dim, as you mentioned. Since the shoot, I realized we probably should have overexposed on our Sony A7s (+2) and darkened the footage in post (and applied noise reduction as necessary).
Anyway, thanks so much for taking the time to watch our film and comment on it. I really appreicate the constructive feedback. I'm hoping we learned from this experience and improve next time.
Cheers!
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Next time if, you can't get a scope, at least throw an 18% gray card or a color chart at the head of the roll(s) so that you have an index.

 

Funny you should mention it -- just opened up our brand new 18% gray card! Thanks again.

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