No no.. Help ME Win The Diary Of The Dead Short Film Contest

[DrSiN]

Seriously though.. check out the first installment of Evans City Stories...

http://www.evanscitystories.com/

There is a link to the MySpace entry and I'll be posting the extended version of the episiode clip in both SD and HD sometime this weekend. Let's see how many HPOTDer we can get in the top 10.

Btw.. Axlish -- AWESOME video.. I thumbs up'd it. Good job.

[axlish]

Not bad. I am impressed by the picture A/V quality. What are you filming on?

Also, you are 4 seconds over the 3 minutes, not sure if that'll keep you out of the contest.

[C5NOTLD]

Not bad. I am impressed by the picture A/V quality. What are you filming on?

Also, you are 4 seconds over the 3 minutes, not sure if that'll keep you out of the contest.

If the time doesn't keep him out then the Jay Leno footage on the tv will.
Shame as you did a nice job. Need to always read the rules completely.

[DrSiN]

If it does, it does. I wasn't willing to cut it any further. Besides, this is independent film making so rules should be more like guild lines anyway :)

Axlish, we had 2 cameras on the shoot. The first was a SONY HDR-FX1. It was our primary camera and held up great. We also had a SONY HDR-SR5 which we used for the daylight shots as well as some of the mobile shots. In the end we should have stuck with the FX1 for the mobiles in the house since it handled low light better. There was a 3rd camera capturing behind the scenes footage but I don't know what it was.

It was edited in Vegas Professional on a kickass quad core WinXP pc.

[lifelikecarcass]

Yeah, it's pretty good IMO.

How did you make the choice to have it be 2 girls like that?
You trying to keep it politically correct?

I thought the dialog was kind of weak though.
When girl2 runs away yelling "Bastard" wasn't convincing.
Seems that in reality, the girl upstairs would've heard the other girls blood curdling screams and ran down to see what was going on.
Then the pace would've been seriously amped up and the chase around the house could've been made much more substantial.
Which would've contrasted nicely with the "tongue in cheek" ending.

But it is good, even if it won't be allowed in the contest.


In the end we should have stuck with the FX1 for the mobiles in the house since it handled low light better.
There are tricks you can do in post, such as tone mapping that can dramatically improve the dynamic range of exposure. Which is exactly the problem most cameras have with low level or high contrast light.
Dynamic range is a problem with all cameras that use CCD's, which means all digital cameras even high end pro cameras.
Aside from the Viper of course.
Which is why tone mapping was developed, to deal with that limitation.
This is where film shines, as it isn't subject to that limitation since it uses light sensitive material to represent exposure values, not numeric values which are absolute.
I assume tone mapping isn't a feature available in Vegas but I'm not sure, but I know it can be acheived on Final Cut.
It's difficult though.
Any compositing app such as After Effects or Shake can do it the best though.
And it's much easier.
But for those who are very concerned with image quality, it's worth the money and effort.

[DrSiN]

How did you make the choice to have it be 2 girls like that?
You trying to keep it politically correct?

The two girls evolved from the original script which placed them as friends in a pharmacy. When we were unable to get a good location on short notice, I rewrote it for a house and in doing so, keeping the girls together made since, especially given the target audience. I'm anything but politically correct :)

When girl2 runs away yelling "Bastard" wasn't convincing.

Yea, to be honest, that whole sequence is weak :( When we were unable to get a retail location and I rewrote the script, the whole zombie attack suffered so much to the point I almost canceled the shoot. In the end I'm glad I didn't and I'm content with the outcome. Also keep in mind that Sarah (girl #2) had never acted before. She did an outstanding job.

Seems that in reality, the girl upstairs would've heard the other girls blood curdling screams and ran down to see what was going on.

Sarah may have head the scream and it might have been what woke her. I think the scream over fade in enforced that pretty well. But I wanted to leave it open to interpretation. Some people are simply heavy sleepers and might not hear a scream coming from the back yard outside on the opposite side of the house.

There are tricks you can do in post, such as tone mapping that can dramatically improve the dynamic range of exposure. Which is exactly the problem most cameras have with low level or high contrast light.

Not sure post could help in this case. I did look at improving it but the footage from the SR5 was just too grainy and all my attempts at correcting at post ended up looking much worse. Luckily we didn't use the SR5 for much so I just lived with it.

One thing I did learn from some test footage we shot is with these HD cameras, it's better to shoot well lit and use post to drop the dark and simulate night shots. At least indoors.