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I just directed my first feature and wanted to post some stuff about how it went. Cinematography was done by Olan Bowland, Jean-François Metz and myself (our team name is "the black sheep"). I wrote the script and we produced it with about no budget. All we had went into tapes, food and some shooting permits we couldn't avoid. The whole crew was 4 people, got great help from our fellow filmmaker Quentin Aksajef.
The story takes mainly place in a little more than one night from sunset to sunrise. We follow a girl coming back from a long travel in Thailand who'll somehow meet a guy who just left everything and is basically waiting for the first train to escape from town. The movie's about their journey, the people they are going to meet,... If I had to pitch it I would say something like Lost in Translation meets Last Life in the Universe meets Before Sunset (wow, that's serious stuff ;-) hate pitching ideas, always feel miserable making up connections with great movies...). The movie is shot mostly in English with a bit of French and a couple other languages; It's part of the story as his mother language is English, hers is French. They'll meet different characters so she switches from one language to the other.
Knowing I wouldn't have any budget, I wrote the story so it could work in terms of cast, schedule, locations... Very soon in the process, we knew it had to be a very "light" shoot because it was the total opposite of the "one location script". We decided to avoid using any additional light except for few interior scenes where we kept it minimal so it would match (chinese lantern, replacing light bulbs,...) . We searched for locations with enough light which wasn't too hard, we already knew most of them. We all live in Brussels for years now so we simply shot most scenes in our neighborhood. One of my references was the painter Edward Hopper. I really liked the idea of shooting night sequences close to what we see with our own eyes. Could somehow be close to what they tried to do in Miami Vice but without budget so no 10K or Dino's for the far background.
Also, we knew we would shoot without a permit almost all the time which sometimes meant being very patient but it was fun. We avoided busy streets and crowded places. Our day-off was on Saturday. Police came by a couple of times but they were friendly and mostly intrigued by what we were doing. We shot some scenes with them observing, felt very safe ;-)
Also, I wanted the movie to be completely hand-held so we could move quickly and also add a bit of movement. I wanted the film to be played in a mix of wide to very wide shots and close-ups. We shot 16x9, framed for 2.40 (taped the LCD screen). We watched a lot of old movies shot in cinemascope, trying to figure out how to take best advantage of this format in terms of composition. Moving hand-held shots were done using wide lenses so they were not too shaky. Camera height was kept at one characters eye level.
Our camera system was a PAL Sony FX1 with a SGPro Rev2 adapter (SGpro's website). We can't praise this adapter enough, it's simply amazing. We used probably every possible adapter (homemade, P+S, Movietube, Letus, Micro,...) and it offers the sharpest and cleanest picture of all. It has the most filmic bokeh, allows you to stop down even to F22 without the GG grain showing up. It's even one of the cheapest. Thanks a lot Wayne, we couldn't make it without your adapter!
To work faster, we decided to use a zoom lens. We bought a Sigma 24-70 2.8 Macro in Nikon Mount which is a great lens especially considering it costs only 450$. We also had a Sigma 20 1.8, Nikon 85 1.8 and a Sigma 70-300 4-5.6 that we used for a couple of shots in the early morning. We shot almost everything at 2.8, sometimes at 1.8 on the two primes when needed. The long shots at 300mm where at 5.6. Depth of field was short as the adapter has a SLR 24x36 gate. We liked the fact that is was still spherical but had a depth of field closer to anamorphic. We added hand-grips from CaVision and a custom made shoulder support made by my father. It made the camera way more heavy and well balanced which really helped.
We didn't try to rate the camera with the adapter, we simply went to shoot tests on location. We knew we had to face severe underexposure so we did color-correct those shots to know how far we could go. We kept the shutter at 1/50 all the time except for an interior car sequence where we had to switch to 1/25. Wasn't too bad, as the frame is static, most of the movement is in the background, slightly out of focus. We shot day sequences with +3 to +6db of gain, night with +6 to +9db of gain. Didn't mind a bit of grain, doesn't look too bad on that camera. We turned down sharpness a bit knowing we could precisely do it in post and played a lot with white balance settings. We didn't try to correct the different shifts in terms of light color but simply embrace the changes. Sometimes it was more yellow, sometimes red, pink, blue, green,...
We shot 19 days, short days. For night sequences, we would eat all together and leave our house at 10pm and shoot until 2 to 4am. It went very smooth. The three first days, we staged all the sequences precisely on paper but after that, we just improvised. It felt better, wouldn't work on all projects for sure but it was right for this one. It helped being very focused on what happened on "set" and react quickly to what the actors offered. I operated the camera and also did the focus (unfortunately no follow-focus). I know... I shouldn't do that, surely won't on every project but I'm somehow used to it, done that on many music videos, shorts,... For this project, as it was very simple technically speaking, it felt like the right thing. We didn't even have an external LCD, just the onboard LCD so Olan and Jef where often looking at the screen while I was operating. Fun shoot, very very guerrilla style ;-)
Here are a couple of pics, very rough CC, heavy compression. Hope they'll look ok on your monitor. I always have troubles finding the right gamma setting.
We still have to shoot the intro/title sequence. The movie will begin with her memories of Thailand. It will be quite chaotic, all as her POV. To give this part a different feel, we plan to shoot on regular 16mm (with a K3) using a wide range of filmstock we have in our fridge (EXR100T, EXR50D, Eterna 500T, 7240-7250 cross-processed). We plan to shoot a lot of slow-mo and maybe even try hand-crank. We would telecine to HD on hard-disk. It surely will be grainy, especially cropped to 2.40 but we think it would work. We're still waiting to have enough money to leave but we plan to travel across the country for two weeks, simply shooting the things that moves us. We know that the people's reaction to three guys with strange cameras will be way different than if we simply shot on HDV, it'll be fun. It's been a long time we dream of traveling with backpacks and our K3. We keep our fingers crossed ;-)
We'll start editing pretty soon, still need to convert all the footage to mini-dv for the offline edit, our computer is way too old for HDV editing. We aim for a 75min feature that we plan to distribute on the web for free (download and hi-quality streaming). We think that we need to find an audience first, the rest will follow. We'll also sell DVDs too for those who want to support us and send it to festivals. The DVD will also include a video guide explaining everything we did. We wrote a PDF guide for our short Marla (Marla's website) and we want to do a new version to share the little knowledge we did acquire over the years. We'll probably cut a small teaser that'll be released before end of this year. We plan to have the movie ready for may 2008.
Wow, that was a long post...I'm sorry... It feels good to finally post something. I did learn so many things through this website and I can't thank you all enough. It's probably the only site I checked more than once every day. It feels good to contribute. Here in Belgium, I can't say I get a strong feeling of community when it comes to filmmaking in general. I don't hear the word "sharing" a lot, it's all about little secrets that are really none if you think a bit about it. Pretty lame...this country is so small...I have to get out of here... So thanks a lot!!! I feel better, less isolated every time I check this website.
If you have any questions, I'll be pleased to answer. And yeah, if someone needs a hand on a project, we're always ready to move!
Take care, cheers
Olivier
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