Hey, guys, sorry I'm so late; thought I could throw a thread up before I left this morning, but no such luck. Should have started this last night.

I was almost set to be proud of this one, but a lack of motivation and some very poor last minute decision making sent that plan right out the window. I seriously think this thread could turn into an excellent lesson in what not to do when making a movie, but I'll wait for a few initial comments before getting into the details. Fire away!

very nice job...I liked the lighting ... Did you chroma key because on 2 of my monitors it showed bad edges.... and the end... I was waiting for the scary monster head to stare at me or make me jump like a movie trailer.

Yeah, the lighting made me think a scary monster head thing too. Very cool lighting. Then the big knife came out. Pretty sure some evil thing was going to get the knife, but then the ending. He hears something and turns, and then it is darkness? I can't make out what happened. Perhaps it is the gamma on my monitor, but I was expecting to understand the ending, but it was so dark I felt I was missing something.

Yes, Craig, I did end up pulling several keys, which is why I asked about yours in your thread. Yours were comparatively crisp, where I wasted untold hours screwing around with pre-key color correction, RGB arithmetic, inverted luma keys, and every other trick I had up my sleeve, only to end up with absolute filth.

Originally only the tracking shot of me walking through the jungle would be a key, to let me add a bit more depth to the jungle than my basement set would allow. The second scene would have been in a small cave, maybe a seven or eight foot cube, that was intended to be a practical set we built. Unfortunately, Struct-O-Lite is incredibly difficult to spread on half-inch chicken wire (it just oozes right through), and it took far too long to build the cave entrance, so I made an executive decision late in the game to make the cave a "simple" rock bridge kind of thing with a little pillar/altar at the end where the action would take place. Even that was a pain, despite having grabbed a few sections of galvanized lath from a local mason's supply, and reusing a section of the original cave wall as the new rock floor.

By that time it was way too late to find any, let alone enough, matte black fabric that was thick enough to be opaque, so instead of just photographing a real black void as a background, I needed to use the blue fabric I had to manufacture one in post. You see how well that worked.

Interestingly, the H.264 compression from the camera was the last thing I needed to worry about. I also didn't have enough blue, as it turned out, and ended up settling for a different material with a different hue, but even that, the washed out color from the bright lighting, and the seam between the two pieces of material were miniscule issues compared to the old standards you run into in the visual effects world: uneven lighting and spill from being way too close to the screen. I thought I could deal with them, I was wrong. If I'd gotten off my behind within the first week of the competition I'd have had time to get the black fabric and avoid pulling many keys, if any at all.

Dick, I knew the movie would be dark, but I didn't realize it'd be quite this bad; the shot where he turns around shows a pair of eyes in the darkness, presumably those of some kind of creature, after which we cut back outside to the cave entrance, where it was intended you'd see the lantern light shake, drop and go out as he's attacked by the thing. Sorry it's as bad as it is. I thought I had my monitor adjusted reasonably well but I guess I went too subtle as far as color correction is concerned.

Hi Robert,

I thought I got the ending by what was heard, even though it was pretty hard to see. So my question is what was holding the can of food down? (Is that Spam?) :) That was one big knife, by the way.

The beginning sucked me in completely; I thought it looked fantastic and was tickled to see that your hard work had paid off so well. Your accent, to me, sounded great, too! But then you know that I am a fan of your acting so I appreciated the "stretch."

Hope this doesn't embarrass you but you looked very cool with your stubble and no glasses. I think you should find a solution to wearing glasses, pronto. :)

The food in question was a can of corned beef. We had a can of Spam on hand, too, but those are all pop tops now, they got rid of the key. This one had it, though it's never really visible on screen.

The stuff holding the can is a plumbing item called "oakum". It's part of a process that's far too much effort for most guys to bother with these days, but we still use the stuff, and it makes great looking vines. The story was originally about carnivorous plants, as a matter of fact, but having seen "The Ruins" not too long before the contest started I thought it might be a little derivative. And too hard to pull off, or so I thought. Probably wouldn't have been any harder than the rest of this crap.

I can't say I'm embarrassed by your compliments, I just disagree. What you call stubble I call a neckbeard. Patchy, half-assed attempt at a genuine beard worn by overweight twenty-something shut-in computer nerds because they think it makes them seem older, or more intelligent, when it really just looks dirty. I finally shaved it off yesterday, thank God. Those things are disgusting.

The glasses will never leave my face as long as I have anything to say about it.

Okay; sorry I mentioned it! Thanks for the explanation on the other stuff--makes perfect sense. :)

The opening is great. Really professional and grabs your attention. I also couldn't make out the ending. I figured it was some sort of scary monster from the audio and I could make out those two light dots (that you said were eyes) but it didn't read visually. Also, everything was so dark that it was hard to tell what the food was. It seemed like a very interesting beginning to a much longer movie that i would want to watch. Are you thinking about extending the plot? (Like- this is the scary opening sequence, then the title fades up at the end and the rest of the movie happens and they find his remains, and start tracking the monster etc.)

I agree with what everyone else has said. Good opening. Didn't love the keying and couldn't really make out what happened.

The opening shots were good though. A little more variety in your shots and better lighting will make a big difference as you move ahead.

Cheers,

Mike

Keith, I appreciate you saying it could be interesting as the start to something bigger, but I've had more than enough of this stupid thing. Did a bad job, learned my lessons, time to move on.

Mike, that makes at least two of us (no doubt more) that hated the keys. It was a case of either try to make do with what I've got and have a chance of forcing it to work, or just throw up my hands and walk away. I do enough quitting, so I took the risk. Getting it done was good for me, even if the end product blows chunks. I'd say it's a case of the means justifying the end.

As for shot variety, I think this is the most I've ever had. Not that that's saying much, but the end result of all my editing includes a greater number of camera positions than my previous entries. There was one extra shot, between my cutting the vine and turning to leave, that may have fleshed out the story a bit more, that was a low angle looking up from the darkness below the altar. It was abysmally dark, however, and no amount of color correction could save it. You think the movie's dark now, you don't know the half of it.

And that you couldn't make out what happened, well, I was worried about that initially. In the end, however, I decided to just upload the movie as it is, since upon watching the entire thing Sunday evening, I found it wouldn't make the slightest amount of sense even if you could see everything I wanted you to. Dark, light, it didn't matter with all the details I lopped off in my constantly changing "plan", nothing was going to make sense.

Technically speaking, then, I suppose I did eventually just throw up my hands and walk away.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to stop by!

I still thought you did quite well and I'm glad you stuck with it. That's how we learn.
If you can get one to finish like it opened you will do very well.

Cheers,

Mike

Here's what I think is really wrong with Robert Martens films:

Robert Martens always sells himself short.

Case in Point:

Robert apologizes for his insulting accent. I thought the accent was great! Seriously! It was a great dialect! Very reminiscent of the Indiana Jones/Dr. Livingston adventures. (Harrison was an Indy reference, btw?)

Robert apologizes for his simplistic sets. Cannot be further from the truth! The opening tracking shot was beautiful! I had to watch it a few times to figure out how you did that. The trees in FRONT of you during your tracking shot, followed by the POV shot next to your lantern, both create this beautiful illusion that you are in a large jungle. It's Robert Rodriguez technique 101. No key needed for this shot.

Robert claims his beard is yucky. Hey, you can see in my piece that I'm a computer nerd who struggled with keeping a beard. If people like it, it works. Well, people like it, and combined with your costume, it's a great look for you.

Robert claims he does not have the skill for problem-solving. Rubbish! In fact, I think when Robert stopped wallowing on how awful he is, he created some very creative solutions for this piece. Can't shoot it one way? Try another way. Original solution didn't work? Rush off to the local hardware store and create another one. Robert did this.

Robert practically throws any credibility of this movie away. He's doing this when we, the audience, want to see more. In fact, I think this piece only suffers from being too short, and that's about it. I think I can speak for everyone when I say we'd love to see more about the character, more about the adventure, more of the story!

Robert claims he isn't a ladies man. This I can prove to not be true as I have six signed statements from women whose hearts have been broken by "Playboy Martens" or "Roulette Rob". In fact, the 84-year-old, broken hearted woman, "wants her teeth back!"

Ok, so I took some leeway with that last one, but you can see what I'm getting at. I liked this film, Rob. I just want to see more. You did a great job. It's truth. There.

Harrison, actually, was just a name I felt I could easily pronounce in a convincing English accent (London accent? I'm not sure what region the one I tried to use is actually from). I considered Carmichael, Jenkins, and some others, but Harrison sounded the most natural when I spoke it. Same for the rest of the script. He originally said "brilliant" when he saw the cave, but I didn't think I was really selling the accent with that. I thought about "wonderful", too, but that didn't work for me.

I added "miserable pests" for the same reason, to help establish the nationality of the character and add a bit more of an opening for the movie. Point of trivia, "pests" originally referred to the vines he was supposed to be tracking through the jungle (there was also an OTS of him examining some tracks in the dirt, but once I realized I couldn't hide the fact that the plants I used were in pots, I eliminated all shots below a certain height), but later changed to be more of a mosquito type thing. I swat at something when I say the line, and while it was in fact a plant I was walking past during the shot, it matched up nicely with the dialogue and I suspect most people will think I mean bugs of some kind.

To be clear, when I said the rock bridge was simple I put simple in quotes; I was referring to the fact that when I made the decision I thought it would be the simple plan. One measly rock bridge and a pillar, compared to making an entire chamber. It turned out to be an absolute trainwreck.

I thank you for the sympathetic ear regarding my beard, but while you may struggle with the same thing you don't (correct me if I'm wrong) have the "patchy" gene from Irish ancestry. I kind of like the way I look with it, sometimes, but it just won't grow in evenly enough to make it worthwhile.

I tried to make the movie as short as I could, so if I left you wanting more I guess I succeeded. I know most of the wanting more is from not understanding the story that's meant to be there, but still.

Just to add a teensy bit of extra value to this thread, I've taken the liberty of uploading an effectsless version of The Luncheonette to Youtube: YouTube - The Luncheonette - NO POST (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0xyuh9uWHs) No visual effects, no sound effects, no soundtrack, no color correction, no nothing. Just the video and audio captured by the camera (which I half suspect would have served as a better entry than the finished film). You even get to see me taking advantage of that unexpected moment or two; as editing began, I felt the food item wasn't very well established, and decided to add a shot. The tilt up from the pit was the original opening for the cave scene, but I found a little snippet of me preparing to shoot a close up that I was able to throw in as a way of displaying the can of food before it would have otherwise been seen. It was still hard to make out thanks to the light levels, as I've been told, but that I was able to find this tidbit of footage to use was surprisingly satisfying.

You can check my Flickr photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/itendswithtens/) to see what kind of results the T500 gives you in still mode. Everything starting with DSC00030 was taken with this camera. The radio tower (http://www.flickr.com/photos/itendswithtens/3513840010/) I got yesterday, and the shot of the moon (http://www.flickr.com/photos/itendswithtens/3513031289/) was on the same night I shot the mounted-on-the-lantern footage and recorded my ADR outside.

I've also uploaded a few making of photos here for anyone curious. Enjoy, and thanks again for all the feedback!

Whoa! Sweet pics! Nice props! I like that papermache work! (or whatever that cave is made of)

That, it so happens, is Structo-lite (http://www.usg.com/navigate.do?resource=/USG_Marketing_Content/usg.com/web_files/products/prod_details/USG_Structo-Lite_Plaster.htm). It's a basecoat for plaster applications. Smear it on the lath (that wire mesh you see in the altar photos), drag lines through it to rough it up, let it set, then apply the plaster. I think. I'm not sure, we really only use it for setting bathtubs and shower bases.

When I told my dad I wanted a cave, he immediately came back with that suggestion. He's my de facto producer, and is ninety-eight percent of why my movies exist. I'm not just being a kiss-ass, "oh he loves his parents so much" kind of person when I say that, I'm dead serious that I could not do this without him, or my mother for that matter, who bought the three "majesty palm" plants I used in the tracking shot, and found the five-by-twelve piece of fabric (Pro-Tuf marine vinyl, for your information. PVC coated polyester, according to what I've read) I used as my chroma key backdrop. It's quite blue when you light it right, doesn't shine, stands up to abuse.

I hate to attach my parents' names to a final product I'm so displeased with, but none of what went wrong is their fault, and they should be publicly credited with the work they did.

Those are great photos, Robert. I love your mom and dad and I don't even know them. What glimpses I get to see of them remind me a lot of my parents. Always willing to lend a hand, come up with solutions and have fun doing it.

I love the behind the scenes photos. It looks like a lot of pre-production went into this.

It's a bit dark on the monitor I'm using at the moment, but so was my entry - probably need to calibrate. So I bumped up the brightness in VLC and it works fine.

I liked the feel of this film. The lighting worked well to set the mood.

The soundtrack was terrific. Way too little attention is paid to that or congratulated on that. I thought your sound was amongst the best of all the entrants.That said, assuming the main character was eaten... the sound starting with the machete drop at the end was somewhat lacking.

Overall though the lighting and image capture in the lighting was superb. That was not an easy siuation to capture and you did it well. No..better than well... excellently.

The eyes might have been better as point sources on "it".. and I would have liked more of a closure... ( loud munch)

I liked and learned from this...Thanks

Chris

Jeremy, you have no idea. Two weeks to get my thoughts together and form a script (I went through nine revisions of the damn thing, starting with a futuristic story about a crashed spaceship on an alien planet, changing to the 1920s Amazon after remembering recently reading David Grann's "The Lost City of Z (http://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Deadly-Obsession-Amazon/dp/0385513534/)", then changes in dialogue, names, scenes, sets, and pacing before finally giving up on script and shot list and charging ahead with set construction not even really knowing what I would shoot when it was done), another week and a half to screw around getting all my stuff together. Production was only the end of the last week, editing was Friday night, and visual effects and audio were Saturday and Sunday in two marathon fourteen hour sessions.

Andrew, thank you, I'm pleased with the lighting captured by a purely auto-exposure camera. And who doesn't love VLC for situations exactly like this?

Chris, thank you very much! I wasn't a huge fan of my sound work, except maybe the bed of rain underneath the whole thing, but it's nice to hear positive feedback in this area because I did do quite a bit of work on it. I count eight tracks: ADR (which is only half accurate; the jungle shots used dialogue recorded wild a few nights after I shot the video, but the indoor scene was just a double system setup since the acoustics of a concrete basement make for a good cavern sound), two tracks of hard effects, a mono rain background recorded with my Sennheiser/VX2000, a stereo rain effect recorded with the T500's built in mic (enhanced with a Stereo Separation effect in Liquid cranked all the way to 'wide'), two of what I called "undercurrent" tracks (one the absolute lowest note of a B4 organ from the Native Instruments Kompakt soft synth bundled with Acid Pro 6, the other one of the lowest notes from the same synth's "Nitemare" special effect instrument), and some desperately needed room tone thrown in at the last minute.

The rain effects and room tone were all C-looped to make the proper length sounds, and the indoor rain was the outdoor rain plus a low-pass filter in Audacity at 6khz, then again at 3khz, which was itself then repeated. Reverb was done in Liquid, but thanks to a single frame silence that only existed when all the tracks were exported, I did my final mix in Audacity. Exported each Liquid track as its own WAV, brought them into an Audacity project, adjusted volume levels a little (not too much, I know, with not only a bad sound system but monitoring through headphones), then rendered that as a WAV and recombined that with the fused M2V in Staxrip when I compressed the final MP4 for Youtube upload.

You're absolutely right about the ending sounds; that's mostly thanks to leftover nonsense from earlier revisions of the story, though a lack of experience on my part didn't help (I got plenty on this movie, though). As I mentioned earlier, it was initially going to be vines that were the movie's antagonist. I pictured miles-long meat-eating things that squirmed up out of the cave, into the jungle for their meals. Happen upon this can of food, bring it back to the cave as bait for a larger creature (hence the film's title, said cave serving as a little eatery for this carnivorous flora), then get him when he comes for it. As such, my scream at the end was to be choked off, the lantern dropped and the glass cracked, and the last sound you heard was the machete clanging down into the depths of the pit, fading away as the rain built to a torrential downpour.

When finally completed, however, and after the change of replacing the vines with a single, two-eyed creature (had my dad stand in the dark with two Brinkmann Max Million spotlights (http://www.brinkmann.net/Shop/Detail.aspx?category=Flashlights+%26+Spotlights&subcategory=Q-Beam+Spotlights&sku=800-2655-2&id=250) and turn them on; I actually used a few frames from the end of the clip, when he turned them off, and reversed it so the eyes fade up from the black; doesn't look so monstrous, I guess, but that's what brilliant ideas at the last minute do to your movie), the end of the choked scream and clattering knife--glass crack effect never even recorded, I honestly can't remember why--felt empty (I do however count it as a victory that you were able to correctly identify the sound of the knife falling, I was worried it wouldn't register the way I wanted it to). There's a monster there, you hear it attack, what next? At the--you guessed it--last minute, I added a sort of ripping sound that I thought would make things a bit more interesting. I never really decided whether or not he was eaten, or just killed, or what. A roll of masking tape, peeled in front of the microphone, gave me a nice sound. I added reverb to it, and lowered the volume slightly, but it sounded the way I wanted it to without any further processing. I agree the sound design as a whole suffers at the very end, and is missing something vital, if only I could figure out what, but I am rather pleased with that one particular effect. It sounds more like ripping flesh than I ever thought it would, and I did the least work on it compared to all the other sound in the project. Then again, I'm no sound guy, so what do I know?

Robert,

Like most of the others I feel like you sold yourself short. Not having your expectations, the first time I watched this I marvelled at the feel you achieved as your character makes his way through what looks and feels like dismal tropical vegetation in a miserable rain (how did you do the rain BTW?).

The lighting and the very definite "film noir" visual aspect really set the stage and the first time I watched it the ending immediately made me feel the can of food was bait in a huge trap.

It worked for me and the "no post" version you put up on youtube gave me enough insight to have enjoyed it even more.

I think ya done good.

Thank you, Bruce, I'm thrilled to hear you caught the "bait" angle on only one viewing! I tried to be realistic about the movie and assume the worst, but without enough perspective from my own work I guess it wasn't as hard to interpret as I thought.

When I get back from work tomorrow I'll try and get a picture of the rain rig my dad and I built. A few half-inch brass nipples and fittings formed a T that had two shrubbery sprinkler heads on the ends, "Rain Jet" I think was the brand. Yet more from the odds and ends the old man's got lying around. Each had a hundred and eighty degree spread, and the intensity could be fine tuned by adjustable stems in the actual heads, or by a ball valve we had on the feed end of the setup. That went into an IPS by hose thread adapter, which then got what I suppose you'd call a gender changer on it, to allow it to then connect to the end of a garden hose. It took hours to design and rework to get the heads in the right place and at the right angle. Unbelievable amounts of time, but of all the things in the movie I think the rain is one that worked out the best, so it was definitely worth it.

The garden hose was attached to a bib in the basement that, just my luck, was part of a line that had gone to our house's sprinkler system, long since disconnected; turns out the line never got capped, and when I went to test it I got a nice bit of water on some of the sundry crap stored nearby. A quick last minute solder job solved that problem, and after we attached our rainmaker to the joists with band iron and cable ties to allow adjustments (not even a foot above the camera with the tripod up so high and on the dolly in such a low clearance space) we went to work.

There was a three by five foot copper pan we laid down on the basement floor to try and catch water (lined with rags to quiet the drops, though I ended up not bothering to record dialogue so that wasn't really necessary), but most of it missed. The pan was underneath our foliage table, too--a pair of wooden planks laid across some double high milk crates--and that caught the brunt of the artificial weather. As did my face.

The one worklight I used to light the backdrop was raised up as high as it could be (as part of a cost-is-the-only-object development of the early 70s, however, our basement is only seven feet deep, which made the whole movie that much harder to shoot), as were its cords and the outlet it was plugged into, so nobody got shocked. But hey, it's only 110, right? Real men can handle that without batting an eyelash, so I wasn't worried. The height provided a second advantage in that I was able to clamp a flattened piece of smoke pipe right to a joist, for use as a flag in front of the worklight. My left arm still gets a little light from it during the dolly, but most of my body and all of the plants stay in the dark thanks to that one piece of metal. Real movie lights, with real scrims, flags and filters, would be wonderful, but without money for those I worked with what I had.

The water mostly dried overnight, with a fan blowing on it and some of those plastic moisture absorption baggies hung up around the area, and after another day or two the place was back to normal. I managed to keep the takes short enough, but I did a lot more than I wanted. It's unimaginably hard to act with ice cold water spraying in your face and down your neck, as it was at the end of the dolly shot where I turn to the camera. Six takes of that shot, three of "fantastic" (where we just rearranged the plants, turned off the worklight, and shot from the same position on the dolly as the tracking shot), and another two or three of the over the shoulder where I'm looking at the entrance. The rain coat (which for trivia buffs has the name "Gary" written on the left side in orange marker; yes, I'm aware that an English character would write that name with two Rs, but that's the way the coat came to me) did diddly squat, since with the lantern held in front of me and rain spraying more out than down I got most of it down my arm and neck. I was soaked by the end of it all, which is what I meant when I said I wasn't going through the scene again (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/1134674-post62.html). I screwed up the "fantastic" shot, though, and the clip you see in the finished film is from a reshoot. It's a damn good thing I redid that stuff while I could, because the cave entrance was destroyed immediately after to make room for the altar (same day, I think, but don't quote me on that), which as you can see from the photos I attached earlier was itself molded onto the end of a piece of the first set's walls. Cracked off some Structo-Lite, snipped the chicken wire along one edge, spun it around, laid it on the floor, leveled it with some shims to stop it from rocking, and built the pillar right into it.

The indoor rain didn't cause the problems pulling keys that you'd think it would, thanks to the other more pressing matters I've mentioned elsewhere. The outdoor rain--the bit with the camera strapped on the lantern--used the same rig, and was shot by some rhododendrons on the side of our garage, though admittedly you don't see any plants in the final footage (I should have walked the other way). I just dropped a Ziploc bag over the camera to protect it from the water and fixed up the contrast in combustion.

I'll get a clearer shot tomorrow, as I said, but for now you can just about make out the rain thing in the upper right corner of the attached photo, above the two lights. There was way too much going on for me to get much in the way of good making of material (though I've got plenty of less-than-good material), but this is the closest. The bluescreen is soaking wet, you can tell I grabbed this shot after production was done for the day.

I'm exhausted just reading about it, Robert! You and your dad are quite resourceful, aren't you. Although....you surprised me with the cold water rain. I figured you two figured out a way to warm it up!

Thanks for sharing these details. What you achieved was well worth all the effort.

Bait! *slapping forehead* Of course!!! :)

We'd considered pulling our rain direct from the water heater, since it was right nearby, but that plan never materialized. I don't know if condensation in the lens is a problem only with larger equipment or not, but better safe than sorry.

Here's that closer look at the rain doodad. Initially both sides of the T were the same length, but that put the heads too close together, so we ended up with a male adapter soldered on the end of a piece of scrap copper to widen the spread. The way you see it here is mostly how it was attached to the ceiling; the heads stuck straight up, and sprayed out to what in this photo is the left. Halfway along the piece sticking to the right is the ball valve used for adjustments (the handle is invisible here because it's underneath, directly opposite the camera).

It's a neat little design, and may prove useful on future projects, I'll try to keep it all in one piece.