As filmmakers we need to seek out and experience these short films and learn from them.  It’s easier than ever to find and experience these films with websites like Vimeo and Short of The Week curating them on our behalf, and Smart TV’s and web streaming devices bringing these films into our living rooms for a proper viewing experience.  As we experience these films, we then need to experiment with our own narratives, as well as get creative about how we deploy these films to our audience.  It’s time we create our own paradigm, because we can be nimble. Hollywood is too big a machine to make quick course adjustments.  They’ll be looking to us to lead the way for the next generation.

Just look at what Louis CK did with his new concert film: Live at the Beacon Theater.  He self financed and self distributed his film.  By by-passing all the “normal” channels he was able to sell it for only $5 a download and has made over $1M.  Sure he’s Louis CK and has a built-in audience, but you can too. Use sites like Poptent.net to challenge your creativity and create branded films with the chance of monetary reward.  Build a fan-base by sharing your work and experiences with your peers via social networking.  Make your films and the experience more interactive.  That’s what I’ve been experimenting with while making The Specimen.

As filmmakers so many of us make our New years resolution to write or make more content.  But for 2012, make your resolution to not only make more content, but seek it out.  Participate in it.  Experiment with audience building.  Find news ways to make your films stand out in the crowd.   In doing so, one of us may just create the next great distribution and monetization scheme.

It won’t be easy.  I’m as guilty as anybody. Life finds a way to pull you many different directions, some of which are unexpected and wonderful, others difficult but necessary. Through it all it’s up to us to persevere, to create, to inspire, and be inspired.  Let’s make 2012 the year we took back film.

Film-making is a magic trick.  We take bits and pieces of filmed media and reorganize and juxtapose them to create a story and emotion.  The reality is an 8 minute short like The Specimen is shot over the course of 2 days, and also included 2 additional pickup shoots.  So different images from this film were all shot hours, days, and even weeks apart.  Try as we might to be perfect there are always going to be differences from take to take or shot to shot.

During the initial shoot I had retained the services of Branwyne Smith who had done the excellent FX makeup on Mercy, to do our actors makeup and make them look their best.  However on the subsequent re-shoots, we didn’t have the time or budget to bring Branwyne back.  You don’t really realize how much a skilled makeup person brings to the table until you look at some footage of an actor without it.

When cutting the pickup shots of Brian Pope without makeup in next to the takes from the initial shoot of him with makeup there’s a stark contrast as you can see below:

Original shot of Brian with makeup (click to see full resolution)

Pickup Shot Without Makeup (click to see full resolution)

If you click on each image you can see it in full resolution and the differences and evenness of the skin tones are much more apparent.  With makeup Brian’s complexion is a little warmer and even.  Without makeup, his complexion shows more blemishes and is a bit more (sorry Brian) pasty.

Now having slight differences between shots is going to happen, and it’s why people color correct their films.  In color correction you compensate for differences in lighting, white balance, color to make all the shots match.  One way to correct between these shots would be to warm up Brian’s skin tone in the non-makeup shot to get the same warmth, and until the advent of new digital tools that would probably be all we could do, but now we can add some digital makeup to make this shot look even better.

Enter Red Giant Software’s Colorista II’s Pop tool.  Colorista is a powerful color correction plug-in for use with a variety of editing systems including Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.  It’s my go to color corrector for its speed and intuitiveness.  In version II of the software they introduced the “Pop” feature, which is a simple slider that increases and decrease local contrast in a unique way that adds or in this case removes details from a shot.

By using this feature, along with Colorista’s built-in keyer, you can isolate the skin tones and decrease the “pop” to  smooth it out, giving the effect of having used makeup.

Colorista's Keyer Quickly Isolates the Skin Tones

With Digital Makeup

While this isn’t a substitute for having a real makeup artist on set, it can do in a pinch.  If you’re interested in learning more, the inventor of Colorista, Stu Maschwitz has created a tutorial on this exact subject that you can watch here.

Since my site stats tell me the most searches and page views on this site are for “superflat” and my “Changes in latitudes“  post, I figured I owed it to everyone to take some time and check it out.  So last night I took a break from editing and downloaded the picture style and loaded it up on my 7D.   I was immediately blown away by the additional latitude this picture profile delivers over my previous settings of Neutral, Sharpness 0, Contrast -4, Saturation -2.  Others have done much more testing  and provided some great visuals with this.  So rather than recreating all that, I’m going to stand on the shoulders of others hard work and point you in their direction for more info.

• Vincent Laforet’s Cinestyle Post
• Cinestyle vs. Superflat, Marvels, and Neutral
• Cinestyle is a Must Use
• Planet5D
• Crooked Path Films

I’m going to shoot some tests with people to see how the skin tones come out, but it looks like this could be my new flat shooting profile.  I’ll report back when I’ve done those tests and add them to this post.

One note, with the profile you can also download a look up table (LUT).  This can be applied in your NLE using a free utility called LUT Buddy. This LUT simply adds an S-curve to the footage which makes it look natural for editing, instead of the flat  image.  It is NOT a color correction and should be removed before you apply any color correction.   I’ve seen a lot of misinformation about this.  Color correcting after the LUT is applied effectively takes away the dynamic range you achieved by shooting with this preset in the first place.  So please remove the LUT before you color correct.  For more info see this post by Jay Friesen.

Happy Shooting.

It was a longer shoot than anticipated but we got all the shots in the can, and used just about every piece of gear in my arsenal.   The entire film was shot on the 7D with the 17-55mm f2.8 IS lens and the plastic fantastic 50mm 1.8, and D|Focus follow focus I picked up from Express35.com with some rails.  One workhorse that was used a lot more than I anticipated was my igus based camera slider.

I did rent the Marshall LCD50 5″ Monitor to assist with focus, but I have to say their choice to use AA batteries is unfortunate.  We were constantly changing batteries in that thing, and it’s peaking function for focus assist was really inaccurate.

All in all the shoot went well, and I’ve been laughing my ass off at the dailies.  It’s going to be fun to edit.  You can keep up with more production updates on the film by subscribing to its own web feed, liking it on Facebook, or following it on Twitter.