Spiderman Short Film

[Thomas J Tyler]

Passion project, that I DP'd about 7 minutes long. Spiderman Lives: A Miles Morales story.

Let me know what you think of the camera, lighting and action.

 

 

http://www.spidermanlives.com/

 

or YouTube @

 

[Tyler Purcell]

Cool film, I liked the concept a lot and cinematography wise it worked well.

 

Few things I caught whilst I watched.

 

I'm not a fan of low shutter speed CMOS motion blur, I tend to run my cameras up at the higher shutter speeds (lower shutter angles) to combat that. It adds intensity to the material and makes it look a bit more cinematic, especially during action scenes. I also felt there was a lack of closeup's during the fight scene as well.

 

I thought the fan blade scene was overly staged. Part of that was the lack of a multi-layer audio mix. The other part was being confused on where people were in the room because the border's of it weren't defined. I always throw a shaft of light in door frames, windows or anywhere else, to help define the edges of the room. In your case, you may not have been able to, but I would have tried to work something out. The corner with the construction plastic was clever, it filled in ONE corner, but the other side of the room didn't have much. The construction lights helped a little bit, but they seemed way overly staged.

 

Anyway, I still enjoyed the final result. Even though I would have done things a bit differently with the script, directing, editing, sound mix and coloring, I felt the music, stunts and cinematography were the strong points.

[Mark Kenfield]

Very cool, and ambitious little film Thomas. I'd agree with Tyler that the warehouse did seem a little over the top, but if the earlier scenes had been equally stylised I think you'd get away with it.

 

For me the most obvious area for improvement would be the sound design. The fight scenes, whilst they looked good, felt very flat due to the lack of audio effects, limbs swinging through the air, feet scuffing the ground, impacts and matched grunts. All of these things make a huge difference to the impact of an action sequence.

 

Obviously that's not your department though, so good job!

[Thomas J Tyler]

Thanks Mark & Tyler, I appreciate the critiques.

I can respond to the cinematography, other than giving suggestions in color, I had nothing to do with post.

 

Tyler- We shot at 120 degree shutter for the higher speed movements in the first combat sequence. On the second fight, we shot at 180 shutter, We were intentionally using the blur to hide some of the stunt gags, as every stunt was shot practically. We didn't have a ton of latitude to play with shutter , we had to shoot the film with and additional 3 stops of ND on the lens so we could quickly go from 24fps to 180fps by just removing the ND. In hindsight, I should have gone with a faster shutter and cut down on the fog to get the desired effect, we were a little heavy handed with the fog to hide our stuntman (The actor did not do many of the stunts)

As far as the close ups in combat, that was my choice, our stunt folks were very talented and I wanted to do as little to take away from their performances.

The first sequence with the ultra wide gimbal shot was for me, I wanted to keep as wide as possible, avoid cutting, and show the audience we weren't hiding anything.

In the second fight sequence we went tighter and faster to try to push the thought that the character was learning to fight. Much more traditional close ups and quick cuts.

 

Mark- The warehouse was not our first choice, but it worked with our budget (near zero), it was an industrial space that was previously an old " and dime". I really wanted the brick walls and grew to love the wood floors. The high ceilings for lighting and the stunt pulls was a big extra. I agree we could have done a bit more on the audio, but as you said, not my department.

 

Thanks again guys!