Blood Brothers - a sci fi short film.

Avene wrote on 1/31/2009, 4:44 AM

Blood Brothers is a short film by my wife Lydia that we completed a few weeks ago. It was made for Tropfest, the most popular short film festival here in Australia. Unfortunately it didn't make it in though. I think Tropfest tend to favour comedy style happy movies, so this probably wasn't exactly their cup of tea. That said, another film I shot DID make it into the finals of Tropfest, but I'm not allowed to talk about that one of course. At least until it's been shown.

Blood Brothers was shot entirely in one day including the bluescreen shots (our downstairs living area), 3 external locations, plus the ADR dialogue recording in my little home studio here - because I didn't have a shotgun mic or anyone to do the sound on location. It was all shot on the HV20 with the SG Pro (R3) using Nikon lenses including all the bluescreen shots.

The total budget was less than $70 Australian (roughly $45 US), but about $50 of the budget was spent on lunch at the Thai restaurant up the road and snacks. The rest just paid for the toy gun, police hat and badge I got to use :) Speaking of which, both police are me. I used the deform tool in Vegas to make the one on the right look short and fat.

Pretty much the whole film was put together in Vegas 7. Including all the masking, compositing, chromakeying etc. The titles were done in a cheap Flash animation program called SwishMax and a couple of backgrounds I'd fixed up were done in Photoshop Elements 5. I hate to say it, but there were a few issues with Vegas. The biggest being that it kept crashing whilst rendering. I somehow got around this by installing the v8.0 trial version and rendering from that.

The movie can be viewed at these locations -

http://exposureroom.com/members/fkurni.aspx/assets/06b9a4f548864f6fac28fe4ab29544a6/ - (best quality streaming versions + original download)

http://vimeo.com/2978357 - (HD streaming version is good + original download)

It's a 6 minute film, but for some reason the file size ended up really small. It still looks fine though if you want to download it. I'll eventually upload it to YouTube and a few other sites and will also upload a before and after version sometime soon.

Comments welcome.

Glenn

Comments

blink3times wrote on 1/31/2009, 5:15 AM

Overall I thought it was pretty good. I only have 2 complaints.

At about the 40 second mark when the electrodes were being attached to his head you've got what appears to be a "jumpy" spot. I don't know if that was intentional but it LOOKS anyway or comes across more like a flaw in the video.

At about the 2:40 mark when Jack is walking up the hill there's that sort of jump again.... I can't put my finger on exactly what it is but it looks out of place. Maybe it would work better if you adjusted it's speed a little slower or lengthened the fade.... or even take it out completely

Avene wrote on 1/31/2009, 6:00 AM

Thanks for the comment.

Yeah, that's my wife's editing. I thought they looked ok myself. I think she was just trying to speed things up to the whole thing short.

farss wrote on 1/31/2009, 3:32 PM

Really nice to see something from a local.

Don't feel too bad about not making it into Tropfest. I've had many discussions with entrants and all agree that it's lost its way to some extent. Large production houses are putting big sums of money into their entries making it hard for the little guys with the good ideas to get much of a look in. Having something topical can help your chances.

Technically your movie is well shot and well edited, apart from the one glitch Blink noted. Your effort at ADR is very well done
There's now a number a number of local festivals with short film competitions including the Sydney Film Festival. Enter all of them.
In future if you need any help with kit drop me a line, email address is in my profile.

Bob.

Patryk Rebisz wrote on 1/31/2009, 4:00 PM

I never understood people who boost about their super short production schedule or their non existent budget. Are you trying to cover up for the shortcoming of the production or trying to get your next gig because you can produce something for nothing?

You can advertise those qualities AFTER your film has won some awards and got huge audience but before...? If anything it screams in big red letters "DON"T WATCH IT CAUSE IT'S CHEAP CRAP" (as many no-budget productions are) - which is unfortunate because your productions actually isn't bad at all.

Avene wrote on 2/2/2009, 3:45 AM

Thanks Bob, yes we'll look into a few more festivals. We're still new to this.

To be honest I've never really been interested in Tropfest myself. But then I had the guy whose film I shot that did make it into the top 16 ask me to shoot his film late last year, and then my wife too. They've both been fun to work on.

The ADR, yes, I don't think I could have done that anywhere near as easily without Vegas.

Glenn

Avene wrote on 2/2/2009, 4:10 AM

Hi Patryk and thanks for the comments.

Haha, I'm definitely not trying to cover up any production short comings or trying to get another gig from this!

The reason I figured I'd post this here is simply to show people what can be done in Vegas. A lot of the tasks we used the software here for, others would go straight to a program such as After Effects for. Things like masking, chromakeying and compositing in general. Even the photos in the water, some of which were actually video if you look closely, were animated by my wife in Vegas, rendered to a new track and then rotated in 3d space on another track to match the angle of the water. That's basically it.

As for the mention of budget, same thing. Just showing people what's possible with limited funds.