Eliot and I made a quick new short film the other night… Well sort of, it’s not very much and I’d say isn’t really up to the standards of what we are capable of now. It’s more of a test of a couple things I wanted to try out.
I wanted to try out a effect or more of a seamless transition between two characters with the camera panning between them. Well it didn’t work as I expected but the good thing is I now know how to do correctly for whenever we want to try it again. Basically what went wrong this time is there was a slightly different look between the two shots I wanted to seamlessly transition between, but the bigger problem is the camera picked up a pretty good amount of noise in the video, making it hard to transition between the two shots.
Next time I got to make sure the shots are identical which can be accomplished with sticking with one camera set up and not the two I did this time. I also got to make sure my camera settings are correct next time to avoid the noise; which I believe I missed in this test because I messed with the brightness and contrast settings on my Atomos Shogun.
If there is noise I could just use a post-production noise remover which I did try out this time and fixed part of the problem. The issue with this fix is it adds many hours to the videos render time, which I couldn’t afford this time since I had other projects in line that needed to be rendered out quickly.
The video was also a test for some LUT’s I wanted to try out through the Shogun. I’ve never utilized LUT’s in the past and through a School project I’m currently working on I got to experience how they can be useful in giving a film a better look or more importantly capturing better S-Log2 footage through my A7s.
There’s all kinds of LUT’s that can be downloaded for free off the internet; colorist or just people in general are always creating some, which most usually give out for free. There’s film emulation, stylized filters, and color space LUT’s out there to use, with all of them being useful for achieving that look a filmmaker wants.
I’ve been looking into the color space ones such as Rec. 709. This color space is known as the current HDTV standard for broadcasting television and many films also utilize this space. This standard is going to be replaced by Rec. 2020 in the upcoming years with UHD televisions coming into the market; but for now Rec. 709 will be used.
I tried a couple S-Log2 to Rec. 709 LUT’s out through my Shogun and a couple gave a good look. I ended up liking and choosing one which I selected to burn straight into the footage instead of applying in post. It didn’t change the footage drastically but mostly just spruced up the colors to my liking.
I will definitely be experimenting with LUT’s and production color settings more in the upcoming future.
Anyway back to the actual short film which is titled “Cloudy + Chippy” for the two characters Eliot plays. Chad the main character has two versions of himself: one the sad cloudy type and the other a more joyful chippy guy.
This is a 5.1 surround sound project since I’ve gotten quite accustomed to working with 6 channels when sound designing/mixing. It’s basically much more entertaining creating pans through different channels and experimenting layering sounds and effects through multiple speakers. I believe most of the work that will be coming out from us now will utilize surround sound; especially since I’m led to believe that Youtube supports 5.1 even with its heavy compression methods.
Well here’s the short film’s link while also being embedded on this post, choose which ever you prefer, but I suggest clicking the link since it will be higher quality. Feedback on how the seamless transition effect can be perfected or just what you think of the short is appreciated. I can also answer any questions about LUT’s or using them through the Atomos Shogun.
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Cloudy + Chippy
Insane LLama Productions 