Imaginary Bullets

[AJ Young]

A short film I shot, Imaginary Bullets, has finally been released publicly! The film had a great festival run.

Check it out here: https://vimeo.com/272665339

I shot it in late 2017 on the Varicam LT with Nikkor lenses and a GE package that fit in my Honda Civic.

Honest critique is welcome!

[Aleksey Aminzhanov]

I'm not really on the level to critique this work! Just wanna say that for me, from a visual stanpoint the result is great!

[AJ Young]

Thank you!

[Stephen Sanchez]

Very nice. It was cute and charming.

I think it would've been nice if the alley wasn't so well exposed. Maybe ISO down a full stop and lift their faces with a 4x4 card. Or even construct an extension to the 4x4 to hold a small dimmable LED fixture or a phone light to bounce into the board, as a mobile powered bounce card thing.

[Mike Maliwanag]

Really nice work AJ! I noticed some noise in certain scenes. Just curious, where you rated at ISO 5000 during those scenes? What did you rate the camera throughout the film?

I think it looks great for having a half ton (at most) grip and electric package. My favorite scenes are at the end with the two kids at the warehouse. The lighting is fantastic! 

[AJ Young]

On 4/9/2020 at 11:23 PM, Stephen Sanchez said:

Very nice. It was cute and charming.

I think it would've been nice if the alley wasn't so well exposed. Maybe ISO down a full stop and lift their faces with a 4x4 card. Or even construct an extension to the 4x4 to hold a small dimmable LED fixture or a phone light to bounce into the board, as a mobile powered bounce card thing.

Good point, thank you!

21 hours ago, Mike Maliwanag said:

Just curious, where you rated at ISO 5000 during those scenes? What did you rate the camera throughout the film?

Thank you, Mike! I rated the whole film at 5000 ISO. I think the nosiest scene was the night warehouse one not because of exposure, but color temp. We couldn't source a strong enough light beyond ETC Source 4, but gelling them blue would cut too much light for the slow motion parts of the scene. However, the LT can go to 2000k color temp, so we set the camera to that. The downside was that we were practically starving all of the other channels of any information and the image became incredibly noisy. Our colorist, Nicole Kizer, denoised these shots in the grade thankfully.

I will say, the incredibly high native ISO made it possible to work with a small GE package. ?