Vital Butinar

Interesting article. I have a meticulous approach myself because it saves me time on set and a lot of headache so that things don't go wrong. Of course you can never plan for everything and you always need adjust stuff but it's a little easier when you've got an in and an out to guide you how you need to improvise. I've never gone over scheduled and never shot over time and always finished everything we had to shoot in the time we had to finish a project. I usually work in the same order, concept 1st, story board 2nd and shot list/schedule 3rd. These shots are from a music video.

Thank you very much. The oldest footage was shot with a Nikon D7100 and vintage Tamaron lenses. Our first device that we could shoot stuff with. Then there was some footage in there that was some stuff in there that was shot on the Canon 100 and Canon EF lenses. But the newest stuff was shot on the Blackmagic Pocket 4K and Samyang/Rokinon EF cine lenses and a couple Canon EF tele lenses. Like I said most of the shots were done by my girlfriend who is the cinematographer on our projects but the shots were designed by myself. I do however shoot sometimes but it really takes me a lot more planning before I get the shot that I want. Where she just points and the shots look awesome. I really love the BM Pocket 4K. It gives really nice images that can be graded well.

Hi guys! Here's my new reel. I directed and produced all of these project with the help of my trusted team of course. A few of the shots I shot myself but most of them were made by my girlfriend who's a really great DP. There are some dance videos, music video, a couple smaller commercials and promotional videos and a few films. Nothing major but like I always say we started ourselves from nothing and are slowly growing our projects in budget and size. We usually work together to come up with the concepts of the stuff we shoot but I or my girlfriend's sister write the screenplay and then I work with my girlfriend to make the shot list and the shooting schedule. The editing and color grading is usually done by my girlfriend and some by myself. She also dose most of the sound design. But any graphics or compositing is done by me and the art for the projects and the titles are done by myself. Best regards

Wow yeah. Where do you hide a mic when the actor is nude hehe. Well thankfully with our no budget projects I don't see many actors signing up to walk around naked in front of the camera. So that shouldn't be a problem hehe. I was looking at the NTG-3 but I'll see when I'll get ready for buying. Thank you.

Oh I definitely understand. When I was still playing I had a bunch of guitars and among all of them that were all between $300 TO $1200 range there was a marginal difference but I had one $10000+ range that was hand made and even the feel of it was different not to mention the sound. So I definitely get it. Thank you for explaining it. Oh yeah I know we rent both camera gear, sound gear and lighting for projects that we work on but for our own projects that we play around there's usually no money involved anyway so we need to use the equipment that's on hand. So slowly I buy stuff that we can use semi-professionally. But like I said I can't afford everything at one time so one of the next steps will be either finding a lav wireless system that's affordable or a shotgun mic that will be good enough. But it will be a couple of months since this year the BM Pocket 4K and a couple of lenses and some additional stuff broke the bank. So I have to wait a while before the next big spending. On a side note we had a situation on the short film where we were shooting near a AC vent and the person doing the sound was not experienced enough to know that it will be impossible to filter out the humming of the AC in post so we unfortunately had some bad sound but in the end it was my fault as the director for not noticing this. But we learned some stuff along the way and I'm glad we have a chance to learn on equipment that maybe may not be top end professional but is good enough to do the job and we actually get a nice end result. So the equipment is good enough for our projects. But thank you for explaining these stuff to me.

These days I always want an advance on the budget to cover the cost of anything that we need to rent or pay. So if the client stiffs me on the bill at the end I only lose my payment. Unfortunately happens more than I'd like and only on small projects but better that way so that I don't have to pay people from my pocket and it's too expensive to sue someone for smaller sums of money. As far as contracts go you can't get anyone to sign a contract before on smaller jobs. The best I can do is get an estimate out to them and get them to pay an advance on it.

Well it's funny because technically here you wouldn't need any special written permission from a property owner but I've always made it a good practice to just get a document that's signed by the property manager or owner. But shooting on public land usually you can without any sort of special permission unless you're disrupting the normal state of the area or disturbing the peace and even then it's a simple procedure and costs next to nothing to apply for a permit. But this stuff is different in every country. One time my producer got us a bar where we shot a music video and the owner just gave him the keys and said "Just write down what you drink and we'll settle the tab later..." and that was it hehe.

I don't have any clips to compare because I didn't save them and unfortunately wasn't testing stuff out. Just played around a little. But it did surprise me that it was good enough to use.

Yeah it's true I monitored all the sound on my pc monitor speakers so I can't say for sure where the difference was and I did not do a proper test. It was just fooling around with the Sennheiser mic because I only had it for a couple of hours since it was attached to some TV broadcasting equipment that I was working with. So all this was just playing around but it did surprise me because I really expected it to be bad and not as good as it was. In fact I was considering not using the mic and just wanted to use camera audio but then opted to use the recorder in order to free my girlfriend of cables who was the camera operator. Naturally I do think that we were lucky enough to have had a location that had ideal conditions for sound. The whole short we only screwed up majorly with sound on one shot where there was an AC vent right behind the actor and got really crappy sound making it wors I couldn't do ADR later so the bad sound stayed. Other than that we were shooting at an old mansion and the only thing that bothered us was a plane that kept circling around one time when we were shooting an outside scene. Probably you're right that other better shotgun mics would perform better in not so ideal conditions. On this shoot we were able to place the boom operator virtually just out of frame on almost every shot where there was sound. Anyway I was just surprised how well it worked out and I'm probably going to have to spring for a better shotgun mic soon. Thanks for the input.

OK so recently because we were shooting a short film I bought a sound recorder the Tascam DR60 mk2 and since it doesn't have an integrated mic we had to connect something. So we were in a tight spot and I tried to hooked a $15 no name stereo shotgun mic with an integrated battery onto the recorder and to my surprise the sound was grate. And I don't just mean that it was usable but we ended up using this mic for the entire short film and all the dialog sound was really nice and even the ambient sound was really nice and I was even able to do come foley on the same mic. How is this possible that this little mic gave me such a great sound and when I compared it to an xlr Sennheiser mic I borrowed of a buddy yes there was a difference but the level of noise was virtually the same and the only noticeable difference was that the Sennheiser mic had a little better dynamic range and the low tones were a little richer from what I could tell. So my question is how is it that this little shotgun mic gives me such a good sound? Anyone has any ideas on this? Best regards

I just bought a Tascam DR60 mk2 and it's great. I use it to capture audio on our short films for the sound recorder. It wasn't expensive and only cost about 170€. But you do need an external mic.

Well here's a little update. After doing a couple of projects with the new Blackmagic cameras and editing everything in Resolve I can honestly say that I love editing in Resolve more than I did in Premiere and had no regrets about getting rid of the Adobe subscription since all the projects have now been done in Resolve for the last couple of months.

It looks amazing! I've been playing around with mine for about 3 weeks now and I can't believe that footage comes out so amazing compared to anything this small that I've shot on. I'm thinking of even ditching a rental on a project and just renting the lenses. But I'm not sure we've gotten used to it enough and have enough confidence to shoot a bigger project on it. The battery life kind of sucks a little and not even the time but rather that it just dies and that's it no warning nothing. Other than that I'm so happy I got this thing.

Well after getting my Pocket 4K I absolutely love blackmagic raw and love the Davinci color grading. I can honestly say that I haven't ever before been able to color grade an image like I am able now and it's also fast to render a video. But some other things just get under your skin. I can honestly say that Premiere can not hold a candle to Davinci as far as color grading but the user interface us much better in Premiere and so is some of the workflow. Don't even get me started with Fusion which is a mystery all in it's self. And I have nothing against using nodes but this thing is confusing and I'm still trying to learn but I'm at least half a year away from the same skill set I've got in AE. I've been thinking about a round tip workflow with Davinci and Premiere, AE but I still think that it would be even more confusing. I can't wait to try the non beta version of 16. Best regards.

True I agree completely. That is one of the last things I would worry about if any of the others happened. But still in a way it sucks.