[metaphiston]

At the weekend I made this for a 24 hour film competition.

It's a bit of a strange film, but I hope you enjoy it! I was the cinematographer, so any comments on the way it was filmed are very welcome, and if you have any questions about how I did anything I'm happy to explain.

One very NSFW word near at the end.

You Tube

You Tube

I shot the film on a Canon 7D with a Pentax-A 50mm f1.2 lens, usually at 1.4 (and at 5.6 for the last shot.) I also used a Pentax-A 100mm f4 macro for the two close ups of the glass.

We used cheap arrays of LEDs for the outside shots and a bit of streetlighting for the reed shots. The indoor shots were LED lit too.

Shooting at f1.4 is a joy for lighting at night with weak LEDs, as it drinks up any light you have, but the razor thin DOF is a pain. It can look nice though and helps with the fantasy elements.

You Tube

You Tube

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Last edited by metaphiston; 02-26-2013 at 03:10 AM. Reason: No idea why the video's appearing mutliple times, have tried editing it but doesn't seem to work

[metaphiston]

Apologies for the multiple video links! Can't see why it's doing that. I only want you to watch it once! ;-)

[VisualDarkness]

So cute and and awesome in its simplicity! It brought a big smile to my face.
I like how it kept the same style through the whole clip.

The only thing I could think of as constructive criticism is that I found the lighting difference between the background and the face a bit weird at times so maybe a slightly warmer temperature for the lighting on the actor would smooth it out a bit.

All in all I want more!

[wolfworx]

:-) What a lovely leading lady too, most enjoyable 2 minutes

[geedee]

Nice! Wasn't it incredibly difficult to maintain manual focus at 1.4 during the whole filming process?

[VisualDarkness]

:-) What a lovely leading lady too, most enjoyable 2 minutes

Yeah, captivating so I was in love for two minutes.

[metaphiston]

Thanks all for your comments!

VIsualDarkness, thanks for the feedback - the lights are very white, which can make mixing them with others a little tricky, and they aren't really powerful enough to put gels on them, so we were kind of stuck! Such are the downsides of low budget cinema. But you're right, it is a little odd.

geedee, yes, it is hard! I've got better with practice, and filming in the dark helped a lot as the screen was so bright. I always look at the little reflective bits in the eye to help focus, trying to keep their size as small as possible. For some shots I also pre-focused or put marks on the ground for the actress to stand on - but still had a lot of badly out of focus bits. Managed to get rid of most of them in the edit though I think.

-) What a lovely leading lady too, most enjoyable 2 minutes

She is great, we're working on another film (which has taken longer than 24 hours to make!) with her where she plays the same character! It's got a Facebook page with some pics and things, https://www.facebook.com/TheTentacleThing

[netrex]

Nice work I chuckled at the end :P