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"DAY:11" Short Film


Robert Sanders

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Hello. I just completed a short film about a soldier fighting during Operation Iraqi Freedom called DAY:11. This is the first time I used the Canon XL2 camera. I was very impressed with the camera system and the picture quality.

 

The true progressive 16x9 aspect ratio and 24P frame rate really provided the kind of cinematic quality this project needed. While I would've preferred a little control over the depth of field, I think the overall image quality is quite exceptional.

 

Here is a link to a mini-site for the film project where you can watch the entire 14-minute film and a behind-the-scenes vignette in either Quicktime 6 (Sorensen 3) or Quicktime 7 (H.264 - preferred).

 

"DAY:11" Movie Downloads

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Good one, Robert! I downloaded the Extra Large. It's spectacular. A gravel pit and some color correction and, hey presto, the MidEast! I've spent time there myself and it really is much more orange than the light in the States. Questions:

 

- Did you hire a weapons guy, or was he a helpful friend?

- The muzzle flash was done in post according to "The Making Of", but what about the bullet hits in the sand? Squibs?

- How did you get the shot with all the army tents?

- Ditto the Apaches?

- What other settings?

Edited by Jack Barker
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Good one, Robert! I downloaded the Extra Large. It's spectacular. A gravel pit and some color correction and, hey presto, the MidEast! I've spent time there myself and it really is much more orange than the light in the States. Questions:

 

- Did you hire a weapons guy, or was he a helpful friend?

- The muzzle flash was done in post according to "The Making Of", but what about the bullet hits in the sand? Squibs?

- How did you get the shot with all the army tents?

- Ditto the Apaches?

- What other settings?

 

Thanks for the kind words. The actor who plays the soldier, James, is an Iraq veteran and he brought home a lot of video and photographs of Iraq. So we used all that reference footage when doing the color correction. The oxydation of the sand is what makes the sand/earth look so much oranger than it does here.

 

The weapons handler is a Sheriff weapons specialist. He'd never done a movie before. So basically he was helping James out.

 

We used squibs, compressed air, paint balls and throwing dirt clods for the bullet hits. Nothing was too low tech for us.

 

The army tents was a matte painting composed from about three different photographs from James' photo journal. Some of the foreground elements were from photos we took of our shooting location.

 

Believe it or not the Apaches were all done 2D. Basically we grab as many reference photos of real Apache's off the Internet and constructed some multi-layered 2D Photoshop docs, animated them in After Effects and composited them against 2D still photos of our locations for the backgrounds. Lots of motion blur and camera shakes.

 

The camera was setup as follows:

 

Black stretch "on"

Knee "low"

manual mode with zebras

cine gamma

2:3:3:2 pulldown

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  • 1 month later...

Im in the middle of it now and its good. I agree with it not looking like Iraq. Its just not the right colors. Maybe should of shot it when the sun was going down.

 

On the scene in the circular tube theres bullet hits and then the next time you see it theres no bullet hits anymore. Ill add to this later but its good acting.

 

Dave

 

PS. The blood doesnt look red enough but you can fix that in post.

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Hi,

 

Well, there's nothing like a good bit of tubthumping. Great location; reliable sun a big plus, and finally someone who knows how to expose video for grading.

 

The digital effects are generally reasonable, of at least syndicated-TV-series standard. The only shots that really worried me were some of the helicopters and the guy getting chain-gunned. There's some great (for some values of great) reference video floating around the net of this actually happening to two people in Iraq through an Apache's FLIR - it's a lot more violent than depicted in Day 11, which I mention only because you could quite reasonably hide your victim behind a big cloud of dust and flying debris and avoid tricky dismemberment effects.

 

Also your guy would have been cut to ribbons by shrapnel at that distance...

 

Phil

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