Yeah, i forgot to add that the clicker is only tmporary until proper sound mix is done.

Patryk, you've done it again. Good job!

As the guy was running down the stairs to "save the girl" it appeared, in one quick shot, that he had glasses and black hair. That struck me as confusing. When I went back and watched it frame by frame, I was it wasn't the same guy. I'm not sure that cutaway is there. Otherwise, well done. Good story, too!

Facet, to bylo swietne. Gratulacje
Can you share a little more details? What still camera did you use, digital or film, what frame rate, etc.
Looked awesome

Ah, you are a man with talent. Keep up the good work---

Patryk... you must have used a digital SLR or one with a very high burst rate, correct? Certain sections almost seem at a normal 30fps, yet others seem very stop-motion like. I enjoy these sorts of things.

You might be interested in the Brothers Quay (if you aren't already). They've done some cool stuff over in Europe (where stop-motion is/was more than California Grape Commercials) were they animate live people.

Also, a French film I saw back in college called "La Jetee" (what the move 12 Monkeys was based on) was shot using still camera. Really f**cked up short film that f*cks w. your head. I highly recommend it.

http://www.film.u-net.com/Movies/Reviews/Jetee.html

Good job..

That's really cool -- very curious to see/hear what the final sound mix will be like.

May I forward that link to a few friends (who might, be warned, forward it as well)? I don't want to overload your server.

Rob

I'm shocked -- I figured that if anyone would read all the credits in a film, it would be people interested in film making themselves. ;-)

The camera's listed in the credits as a Canon EOS 20D.

Rob

If you are interested in the proces. Yes, we shot with still camera (Canon EOS 20D) that's capable of shooting up to 64 frames at a time at about 5 fps. The best thing is that the res of the stills was that equiwalent of HD and since the project was suppose to end up on SD then i could zoom in at will and reshape the compositions up to 80% without loosing any resolution (!). I could make close up from medium and medium from wide! Moreover the camera can have it's ISO setting set to 3200 (!) so with low shutter speed (about 1/25) it can see more then the human eye (it gets noizy due to the 3200 ISO but still you will hardy see it). Pretty sweet stuff from technical standpoint. I suppose the most rewarding thing was that the whole production costed like $17 (the camera i got from the girl) and we could go anywhere we wanted and improvise scenes on the spot (the opening scene is actually improvised by the actors as they felt they should "meet" before and since we were waiting for someone to return from the store and there was just enough light -- i said lets do it! Moreover the camera doesn't look at professional so if we needed i could go into a restaurant and have them site and talk and we would shoot a scene like turists taking some family pictures.

Over all pretty rewarding experience.
RafalK : Dzieki!

Rob: i got 40GB so no worries about my server for now. Go ahead! If you could use this link instead:

webpage (prefered):
http://patrykrebisz.com/stills/FINAL_movie.html

Really cool concept and ties into the story very well. Wish I had thought of it

Jay, the dude in glasses was suppose to be just soemone he passes by. In one of the cuts he bumps in him and keeps running while the dude looks pissed off but i took it out as it wasn't that exciting.

Patryk, that was great! (Happy to hear that's not the final sound mix).
I live in 11211. Never thought I see my gas station in a movie. Great location scouting.


I liked the ending. I liked that you left it ambiguous what happens afterwards.


Well done.

Very cool! I really like how the substance of the filme - revolving around the still camera itself -- tied into the form of the flick. Good job!

busterkeaton: isn't that weird people get to know each other through work shot in their 'hood and posted for whole world to see...

You made my day, man...

\Ü/

Nice idea, pleasant style, and nice execution
I am very interested in reading a diary (post-mortim) of the production -- as are all your fans -- expecially mentioning (may I suggest):

person-hours to produce
lighting (decisions about type-quality, how (night tracking)
difficulties with gear / quality of gear / happy surprises
equipment - lenses
discoveries - where's your head now that you finished this project?
and most important -- where you want to arrive -- commercials? DP? Feature? TV?

I for one would pay two-for-lunch money to read it.

MY VOTES:
Best shot: discovery of water tower and pan-to -- worthy of 60's spy thriller -- maybe Hitch himself. Also best executed shot.
Most enigmatic moment: She kicks the good guy and runs after the bad guy. Maybe she should have run THE OTHER WAY??? (Ah the differences between commercial and literature.)
Coolest: all the macro in the appartment
Even cooler: Time from 7:59 running the macro.
Biggest film problem: film quality (just for kicks get yourself a couple of 1/2 black mist filters and shoot a couple similar scenes and take a look. It's a great way to kick up the glam a notch to 16mm pancro / tri-x / ektachrome glow.)

MORE QUESTIONS
Biggest question: what did you learn about the technique and in particular the beat you used, sync'd to frame rate, which you didn't vary What if you had a longer piece and could?
Rendering question, that was a very high quality 26 meg on my screen -- it rendered to quicktime at the same frame rate as you shot it I presume? So the staccatto beat is therefore key to high quality frams / low file size I see. That of course limits the technique to short film, perhaps with narration, do you agree with that assessment? The minute you start to use panning technique you have to render a normal frame rate and you're back to video.
(Ever since Matrix ...)
How is the technical quality projected to 6' or so?

Good luck to you !
Xgenei

Hey Xgenei, i'll try to answer soem of your questions.

The only day when we had extra crew was the first day where a friend of mine (who got thanks to credit) drowe me and the running girl around. I had to reshoot the first day though as the girl decided to wear something else then the clothes i picked for her (the ones she's wearing now) and wore almost all black and knowing night scenes are coming i feelt it's gonna look like crap. Moreover i wasn't too happy with my framing. Lately i was shooting lots of wide shots but for this project we needed to go med and closeups (we were rushing to finish it before Amazon/Tribeca Film Fest where we didn't get in as the server was down on the last day of the uploads...).

I did lots of tests beforehand to see how little the camera can see and what's the best setup. For instance 3200 ISO introduces very weird kind of grain with "horizontal lines" which was OK by me because as i said the delivery format was suppose to be a tiny 320x240 screen so those lines wouldn't be visible (and even on SD monitor they are hardly there). Moreover often i had to open up the shutter so you see lots of strobiness which again was fine by me. It was more about finding proper locations with just enough light and some cool colors in the bg. A few days ago i was driving around looking for locations for MiniDv shoot and i would never use some of the locations picked for this short because there was just no enough light and withouth the telephoto lense that nicely blurs the bg the specs of light were part of a structure rather than abstract pattern. Other then that we were working with side/back light. Of course on the rooftop we have pleasant almost-sunset light and the character making 360 around the camera so we have nice lanse flare going on. ...I mean the only light we had for the night scenes was a small on-camera light i have for my video camera that i told one of the free actors to hold usually to the side with diffusion or one fo the gels (yellow, green or blue).

The girl runs in more or less direction of the bad guy because she was too confused to know better.

I try to make sure the clips on my site are as high quality as possible to it took me a few runs through Sorenson Squize to figure out the best settings especially since usually i check "Drop Frames to Maintain Quality" which in this case might drop just too many frames. So on one hand no you see only 12 frames per second as the original project was edited at 24 and even though those 24 were more like 16 here at 12 you see more like 8 frames per second.

The question about what's next... I'm shooting a commercial spoof of very politicaly touchy issue where each time i'm thinking of something i'm asking whether i'm crossing the line or not. All those disciplines (commercials, DP, Feature, TV) provideo oportunities as in you can do great stuff the DP part is probably the least stressful but they all are hell lot of fun. So i'm trying to find my niche (way to make a living) trying out all of those with a low budget feature shot in El Salvador this summer.

Yeah, it's all about relationships, finding the ones that work for you (or others you), and staying flexible in the meantime.

I thought the girl had gotten kung-fu and was off to perform on Mr. Badass!

I am amazed by the results you got with a simple video light. That demonstrates very well the critical nature of color balance and diffusion (or contrast), even without any elaborate setup. But amazing when often on a daylight shoot you see about 5 kilowatts of lighting happening!

I am very interested in finding a balance of simplicity and sophistication, and you have reminded me of the potential of still equipment. My main issue still is with digital's narrow bandwidth -- the latest DVCAM gear (panasonic 50Mbps stuff) is better but is big dollars and difficult to work with. Those same advances are happening in still gear and could provide a quality relief for SD to HD. Would you have a different camera preference now?

Thanks for the details and for the inspiration! I am sure we would all like it if you would let us in on your efforts via a blog! You can scope out my educational venture, which I am just getting underway commercially (as of yet the website is in sorry state indeed) at TheCognitivePhysicsStore.com.

Anyone know how you can achieve this effect with video?

Maybe change the frame rate so it's a bit 'jerky'?

A video effect?

I know I've seen this in videos before. Do you think they used a still camera also?

So, do you just dump all the stills into your PC/NLE and then literally string them all together and edit as you would any other film/video, or does the camera output all the stills in some kind of aggregated .avi format?

Thanks in advance,

~Shawn