archived-videos Award-winning action viral - shot on RED

J

JonPlant

Hi

I wanted to share the last film I shot with you all. I shot this in a weekend for a budget of just under £2,000 which all went on rental, insurance and expenses.

It's short and fun, so you don't need to be in any particular mood to watch it! So far (touch wood) it's been universally positively received and it's starting to pick up some awards on the festival circuit.

I hope you like it - if you do, please participate in the viral spirit and rate/comment and most of all share!

Thank you very much

Jon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xSj-fKnZ3g
 
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Haha, there has actually been one genuine game of this! The last hour of filming in the carpark, we were getting pickups... so I just directed the players to actually see whether they could do it - it actually worked surprisingly well as a game... shame we don't have the car park every weekend!
 
Yeah -

And how did you get the lighting like that? Looks great.

Obviously you had to use the natural lighting on the top of the roof when you got up there,

but did you use any lights inside the structure or is it all natural?

Did you wait until a specific time of day?
 
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Hey!
@ Onix - thank you... if you didn't already work it out from Roc's post it was shot on the RED ONE camera, using a set of primes... most of the budget went on the camera (approx 1,250 including insurance). You really need a RED to get the decent quality slow-mo that we wanted... a canon 7D might do the job for cheaper but it wouldn't have been as good and the Canon DSLRs really aren't very helpful by the time it comes to post production as they don't shoot RAW footage. Also the RED has a 4K resolution which is a real plus.
@ Life - it won the Roots to Shoots award for Best Cinematography. Only competition it's been entered in so far, but I'm going to start submitting it to others soon. Fingers crossed
@ ROC - thank you. Almost all of it was naturally lit - we didn't have the time or money to light an area that size - other than the CCTV room which is clearly lit, we had a couple of 2.5K HMIs to light the sequence at the beginning where they're breaking in. The rest is a mixture of exposing for the action or the background on the silhouette shots. We tried to do the roof stuff towards magic hour (shot for two hours prior to sunset each day) but cloud coverage was inconsistent so we had to do a fair amount of colour matching in the grade.
Thanks for taking an interest!
 
Beautiful to look at. Of course pretty much anything shot on RED is going to look stunning, but the DOP obviously knew what he was doing :) Love the slow motion work, not easy to pull off at the best of times, and it's amazing that you managed to pull the whole thing off in one weekend!

Out of interest, where did you find the freestyle footballers? I've been meaning to do something like this for a while, but wouldn't know where to find suitable "actors", I know a few parkour guys but they're not great with a ball :P

Cheers in advance :)
 
Of the five players two were traceurs and three were freestyle footballers. I initially intended to have people swapping costumes but decided that 1 we didn't have the time, and 2 people were unlikely to notice because of the pace... I did make sure to have shots where the parkour guys gave the ball a bit of a flick, and other shots where the footballers in some way dealt with an obstacle in order to try to make it seem like everyone was doing everything.
The credits have got the details of the people I used if you want to approach them directly, but I think if you can offer people something fun and different then they'll do it for expenses - I didn't know any of them and they all came on board because they liked the concept - I find the same is true of crew. If you have a concept that's going to make for a fun shoot then you won't have too much trouble getting people to give their time for free.
 
Dude the cinematography is great, a bit to over the top at times but still nice. Did the editing process take an enormous amount of time, it seems like it would. Also this would like it would have require an ass load of coverage.
 
JonPlant said:
I did make sure to have shots where the parkour guys gave the ball a bit of a flick, and other shots where the footballers in some way dealt with an obstacle in order to try to make it seem like everyone was doing everything.
Click to expand...

This is a great technique :)
 
@ Knightly, thanks
@ Blanc/Noir, the edit did take a few months - but that was because me and the editor both had jobs and he was also contending with moving to Australia. I think that we were on about version 40 by the final cut... that's a bit of a misleading number as there were about 5 or so versions that were substantially changed... the rest had a small list of changes.
In terms of coverage - our ratio was lower than you might expect. The only two parts of the film shot in coverage are:
1) the final sequence where they score the goal - we basically followed every player individually, shot one that followed the ball and shot another looking out through the wind screen.
2) the sequence that's largely done in silhouette just before the ball goes out. Which wasn't really coverage so much as it was 3 sequences where they just played, the Land Rover drove round and round and we rolled the camera for a few minutes at a time getting a variety of angles.
The rest is pretty much story boarded (with occasional use of safety cutaways)
If I'd had more time I think I would probably have shot more coverage than we actually did - with some closer shots on e.g. feet dribbling etc.
The biggest problem is that by the time you've got a camera in one car, another moving vehicle, and people trying to do tricks with a ball you've got so many variables that you need a lot of takes to actually get your shot in the can at all, that by the time you get it you need to move on. Ideally you'd need more than 1 camera to shoot effective coverage.
 
Thanks for all the support guys - it's really appreciated! Just to keep people updated, I really happy to say that it's currently at the top of the leaderboard of Shooting People's film of the month (you'll either know what I'm talking about or you won't!).
If you do know what I'm talking about please do drop in next time you're logged into SP and rate it - thanks a lot!
 
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