I finally got the Trailer for my film up on my website. The film is a SAG "Ultra-Low Budget" shot in 14 days. The entire film was shot with the Canon XH-A1 equipped with a Brevis 35mm adapter. It was a lot of fun to shoot, not so much fun to edit, but an all around great experience. Now we have the task of trying to find someone to buy it and distribute it, wish us luck!

You can see the trailer HERE: http://www.higherdefinitionmedia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=121:stamped-the-preview&catid=52:blog&Itemid=111

And here are a few production stills:

Hi Anderew,

Wow, an entire feature film with the A1! We've all got to see this, but we can't see any video. I'm using Safari as my browser (Mac 10.4 OS). Let me know what we need to do to see some footage. Good luck with distribution. I sincerely mean that...

Best regards from Austin, TX,
Jack

Just watched the trailer... looks bloody great. Very 'Breakfast Club'.... you could have a winner there.

Good luck with it, what are your plans with it?

Jon

Looks like solid work, very much in the 'Breakfast Club' genre, which is not a bad thing. Good job on the production. Hope you have plenty of luck with the distribution.

Looks good to me too.

looks good, very film like

Thanks! Yeah, Breakfast Club is a good way to sum it up... just 23+ years later, pg-13, testing not detention, and an happy ending... but other than that.... yeah, Breakfast Club.

We hope to sell it. All our actors where SAG and we went through all the proper channels, permits, insurances, legal, etc. So we have that going for us. We'll see.

And here are a few production stills:

Nice use of child labor in the second picture... : ) Ha, looks great man... I love that final shot where the girl says "No Class..." and then the kid screams... Classic... Bet of luck to you...

We hope to sell it. All our actors where SAG and we went through all the proper channels, permits, insurances, legal, etc. So we have that going for us. We'll see.
It looks good!

Which SAG contract did you use? Is it SagIndie? If so, which one? What was the budget?

Thanks!

doug, haha yeah, our boom op gets it all the time, he's 19, but looks like he's 12. He was a good boom op for being so short.

Jack, good question on the contract, I have no idea... I had no part in that end of the production, just all the technical part mostly. As far as budget... I would have to guess somewhere around 70-80,000... so much was donated, so it's tough to say, again I didn't have much part in that.

Hi,

I own a XH-A1 as well

I'm starting work on our feature-- initial shooting in San Francisco Area Aug 24-25.

Could you tell me if you used single camera?

I'm wondering if it would save a lot of time to be shooting say, a medium and close up
at the same time for later editing, or one cam on each actors in a two shot.

Along this vein, I'm interesting in a trade exchange with other A1 owners who would want to do the same thing. I lend you mine for your shoot, you lend me yours for mine, with a deposit while camera is borrowed of course to protect everyone.


Alain Lumina
magicalrealismfilms.com

I have two A1s, but I only used one at a time. One camera is fine for simple dialogue scenes. Really you only need two or more for stunts. My second camera was used exclusively for exterior shots and b-roll... nothing more.

Wow, impressive trailer! It's inspiring. Congrats!

Did your strategy involve much use of the in-camera video image settings? Was the boom mic connected directly to the A1? If so, did this work well? Did you use other mics? ADR much?

You mentioned that editing was not so fun. Would you use the A1 differently if you were to do it again?

Many Thanks,
Steven

Thanks Steven, I used a Sennheiser ME66 for all the interior stuff... and a some exterior, and a Sennheiser G2 Lav for the very wide exterior stuff. Everything went strait into the camera (since I didn't have dedicated sound guy) and it worked out pretty well. Not much ADR if any... I was such a stickler with sound, if we had any problems with sound we just did another take.

Didn't use any presets, camera set to factory... hindsight, I would now... but I did all my grading in Apple Color, so it's ok. The biggest problem I encountered was with the A1s tendency to purple fringing, if you look really closely you will notice it in some shots... especially the VERY quick shot of the kid cheating by peeking at the girls test... look at his left shoulder. That problem is totally solved now with the Cinevate flip module for the Brevis. The camera equipped with the Brevis Flip has NO PROBLEMS whatsoever with Purple Fringing or CA. I wish I had it on this film, oh well.

I know this is off topic, sorry....

Regarding a one camera shoot.. when you are shooting a scene where it involves dialog between 2 or more actors, do you shoot the scene several times at different angels so that you can go back and forth between the actors as they talk during editing?

I hope to be shooting a short film myself one day so I am curious as to the different filming techniques people do when using just one camera.

-John

Andrew Waite, typically if you got one cam and you're shooting dialogue with two actors over the shoulder, you record one take behind each actor, then just cut it up. It's always work best for me. The trailer looks great! You had a pretty good shallow depth of field going on in a few of those shots. Hope you can sell the film. Good luck, dude.

Yeah, I usually shoot a master shot (non-over the shoulder) until everything is perfect all the way through the take or scene. Then I will take note of positions for continuity. Then will move to the first over the shoulder shot...it's at this point that I focus audio just on the one person who we see completely... I have the other actor run through their lines as well just so I can get the reaction of the person we see, but I don't care if they flub their lines, we can't see their lips... we're just going to over lay audio from another take. Then I repeat with the other person. That's pretty much it.

Did you shoot on tape and if so did you get any dropouts? Or did you shoot to hard drives?
Keep us informed every step of the way of your journey to get this film out to the public and money in your pocket.

John,
Both. We shot tape (Sony Premium), and over 20 tapes didn't get a single dropout! We also as a redundancy used a hard drive and captured via Adobe On-Location on a Mac Book Pro using Bootcamp. It's a good thing we did too, because at some point during shooting a grip got mixed up and loaded a tape we had already recorded on when I asked for a blank! Moral of the story, NEVER REWIND A TAPE, ALWAYS use the write protect tabs, and MARK YOUR TAPES!!! It worked out ok because of the hard drive backup.

Looks great! I noticed you didn't buy the flip module until after this project...What did you do to get the image right side up when shooting?

Great looking setup btw...

-JS


Oh yeah...and once you got the adapter on did it change anything else with your image besides getting rid of the fringing?

i had to just flip in post... using he simple rotate filter in FCP. this was a hassle because anytime you added a filter or effect you had to render. so besides eliminating CA/Fringing, it was a big time saver, and it also helped with sharpness. oh, and of course made monitoring a lot easier as well.

John,
Both. We shot tape (Sony Premium), and over 20 tapes didn't get a single dropout! We also as a redundancy used a hard drive and captured via Adobe On-Location on a Mac Book Pro using Bootcamp.

I use the same method and software, but on a PC platform. The only problem is my dual-core laptop's fan sounds like a wheezing old man if it's warm in the room and the mic will sometimes pick it up. I shot a short last summer and it was 100 deg in the room, in post I was wondering what that faint whislte was in every take. So I bought an extra-long firewire and keep the laptop further away now. :-)

Do you have a blog where you talk about the technical aspect (pros, cons, pitfalls, etc.) of shooting a feature with the XH-A1? I'm planning a feature for next year as well, and I'd like to know what to expect.

Good luck with the film.

It looks good!

Which SAG contract did you use? Is it SagIndie? If so, which one? What was the budget?

Thanks!

That's gonna be a problem for us. In Canada, ACTRA doesn't have anything comparable to SAG's contract. The best they do is 50% of scale, and even then it seems to be with extreme reluctance. on a micro-budget feature, that can eat up most of your budget.

Have any "hosers" had experience working with ACTRA (or Quebec's UdA) before? I cold use some informal tips.


J.