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Debut feature film OCEANIA shot on Canon XL-2

F

FlavorTeam

Hello all.

I like the fact that people can showcase their own indy ventures here.
I just wanted to post my feature film, Oceania which premiered to a sold-out audience at the 2008 Cinequest Film Festival this past March. It is now available for FREE under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/).

A story about two teenagers who deal with their shattered family-life in a small California coastal town. Oceania is an independent feature-length film that I created from scratch with the help of many friends. We filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area on a budget of <$4,000. I spent my meager life savings on it. Learned about cinematography. Filmed for a year over many long nights and weekends. Learned how to edit. And finally managed to get the film to the big screen

If you are interested, please take a look at the pictures/story!
We shot on a Canon XL-2 using lots of lighting methods, from natural to a three-light kit, to flashlights :)
http://www.hdehal.com/oceania

You can download it via BitTorrent (the kind folks at LegalTorrents.com are hosting us at the moment):
http://www.hdehal.com/oceania/download

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Please enjoy!

P.S. You can now download either the 700 MB AVI w/ XVID codec or the HIGH QUALITY 3.5 GB DVD ISO.

Comments are appreciated. Cheers!
 
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I just finished waching your film in its entirity and am looking forward to you posting the ISO. At 17 years old, you've achieved something I've spent years dreaming about doing. Yes, you chose some difficult subject matter and daring scenes, but that's the beauty of it. You still have that young, uninhibited vision whereas the older I get (I'm 40 now) the more I question the "political correctness" of some of my ideas.

This better not be your last project because you most certainly have an eye and a talent worth continuing. I will watch for your name with great interest as you evolve as a storyteller and filmmaker.

Some around me constantly wonder why I spent the last year of my life with my head in books and spent ~$6000 on equipment and software. Now I have an example to show them from someone with similar equipment (I have an XL1s) and a desire to tell a compelling story with it. I can only pray that my first effort is as compelling and engaging as yours.
 
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knightly said:
Is there a non-torrent way to get hold of this?
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Well, one way is he can post the ISO, I can download it and then send you a copy. :yes: I'm anxious to get it upscaled on my 73" DLP TV and watch it again, but I am waiting for the high quality edition first.

EDIT - looks like it's posted. I'll pull it down now.
 
Congrats on your first feature and winning Cinequest at such a young age. I want to see this.

:clap:
 
I finally got it down...it was slower on torrent than I'm used to from straight downloads. Sorry, I'm impatient...and don't like the security risk torrent opens me up to. Too long protecting private data ;)
 
VPTurner-- I just want to thank you immensely for your kind words, which are of the nicest and most insightful anyone has said of both the film and myself for as long as I can remember. I really appreciate your comments and the feedback. Also, as you've noticed, I've just posted the 3.4 GB DVD ISO file [it's a little slow at seeding as most people are still at 45% as of current. It should be completed and will [hopefully] be well-seeded within a day or so]. Once again, thanks you :), I'm honestly quite happy that another soul likes the film. BTW, as you know, the Canon XL series is extremely capable. I wasn't a believer in digital at all (I was pondering shooting the film in super 16 early on), but alas, I couldn't afford the film stock. Digital allowed me to shoot 24 hours of footage which I cut down into what you just saw. And the XL's are way too much fun to play with in real-time, which is not something you can exactly do with film. I'm a firm believer now. :yes:

indietalk-- Thanks. I just wanted to point out that I didn't win Cinequest, but was just screened there as an official selection this past March. I screened alongside some very very good films, so I'm very happy about that regardless.

knightly-- Not sure how I can help you besides BitTorrent. Glad you got your hands on a copy though. I wasn't a fan of BitTorrent myself but this is the only viable distribution method I could come up with. Since the film is released under Creative Commons license, if anyone wants to take the DVD ISO (or even the 700MB XVID AVI) and split it up into rars and upload to Megaupload/Rapidshare, feel free to.

Once again, thanks all for your comments. If you like torrenting, please seed and share :)
 
No problem. On a side note, you may want to post a ratings disclaimer, e.g. "The following feature is recommended for mature audiences only. It contains violence, strong language, nudity and strong sexual content. Viewer discretion is advised." ;)

I'd like to hear a director's commentary track and, perhaps, see some behind the scenes snippets if you have them. It's one thing to see the finished work, but something entirely different understanding the decisions behind some creative choices (soft focus choices, lighting choices, etc.). For example, there is a sense of color correcting toward "blue", no doubt to highten the somber undertones. At least that's my interpretation.

I like the music, too. Some of it reminded me of Vangelis.

With that ratings disclaimer, you may get 10x the downloads now. :lol:

EDIT: Another side note, you've no doubt seen now one of the limitations of shooting digital as opposed to shooting film. There was more than one scene with blown out highlights and/or windows. It makes for an interesting visual composition, but I suspect you would want to investigate the use of ND gels to cut down the dynamic range of the scenes on future projects. If that was intentional, ignore this comment.

This is why a director's commentary would be good to have, to understand what was conscious artistic decision as opposed to what was simply a result of available resources at the time of shooting.
 
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FlavorTeam said:
indietalk-- Thanks. I just wanted to point out that I didn't win Cinequest, but was just screened there as an official selection this past March. I screened alongside some very very good films, so I'm very happy about that regardless.
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Still, congrats :)
 
I'll seed the high-quality version for you at least a couple more days (provided Comcast doesn't cut my bandwidth) since there still aren't many seeds on that one. Thanks for sharing.

For those downloading, the ISO is worth it. The image quality is excellent compared to the 700MB version.
 
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I'm about half way through the piece... not tons of time for watching stuff. I'm impressed, you evoked emotion in me with the piece. That's hard to do, something I've been working on learning.

I see it more as a visual poem than a "movie" (not a bad thing). The story develops very slowly and more from visuals and sound design than character interactions for the first 1/3 of the film. I normally don't have the attention span to sit through stuff like this that has some obvious first timer problems (already mentioned by VT, focus, lighting, exposure)... but this is just captivating, I'm not really into the story, but couldn't quite seem to shut it off for some reason. That's good!

You've successfully engaged me as an audience in something I wouldn't have had a lot of interest in watching if given a description of the plot before hand.

And you finished editing one of these monstrosities... which makes you better than me without any discussion of content of technical prowess. I'm still not done editing my feature. My hat is off to you. Can't wait to see the rest of this one and the next one.. and the next one... :)
 
VPTurner said:
No problem. On a side note, you may want to post a ratings disclaimer, e.g. "The following feature is recommended for mature audiences only. It contains violence, strong language, nudity and strong sexual content. Viewer discretion is advised." ;)

I'd like to hear a director's commentary track and, perhaps, see some behind the scenes snippets if you have them. It's one thing to see the finished work, but something entirely different understanding the decisions behind some creative choices (soft focus choices, lighting choices, etc.). For example, there is a sense of color correcting toward "blue", no doubt to highten the somber undertones. At least that's my interpretation.

I like the music, too. Some of it reminded me of Vangelis.

With that ratings disclaimer, you may get 10x the downloads now. :lol:

EDIT: Another side note, you've no doubt seen now one of the limitations of shooting digital as opposed to shooting film. There was more than one scene with blown out highlights and/or windows. It makes for an interesting visual composition, but I suspect you would want to investigate the use of ND gels to cut down the dynamic range of the scenes on future projects. If that was intentional, ignore this comment.

This is why a director's commentary would be good to have, to understand what was conscious artistic decision as opposed to what was simply a result of available resources at the time of shooting.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the comments again. I went ahead and posted a warning for language, violence, and nudity, as advised.

Not sure what you mean by the blown out highlights, unless you mean the foreground/characters being super dark and the background being super bright, which was fully intentional... e.g. the [repeated] scene where the father and mother are hugging in the kitchen... The XVID low quality version just killed any of the details of that scene, but in the DVD you can distinguish their faces and other important details. But overall, playing the XVID and the DVD side to side, I'm very impressed that the codec got it down from 3.4 GB to 700 MB... The audio on the other hand, is uniformly horrible in the XVID. :)

The DVD ISO is encoded using a quality custom matrix and seven or eight passes. I kept the audio >= 256 bitrate as well.

As per color correction, I didn't do very much. I was never formally trained in editing so I haven't yet become capable of the art of color correction. I did all in all maybe a minute or two to get some footage to slightly better match a scene to another scene, but for the most part, 98% of the film is as I recorded it straight out of the camera lens.

I really appreciate you seeding it. I' m doing my best keeping my machine online all day and all night myself.
 
knightly said:
I'm about half way through the piece... not tons of time for watching stuff. I'm impressed, you evoked emotion in me with the piece. That's hard to do, something I've been working on learning.

I see it more as a visual poem than a "movie" (not a bad thing). The story develops very slowly and more from visuals and sound design than character interactions for the first 1/3 of the film. I normally don't have the attention span to sit through stuff like this that has some obvious first timer problems (already mentioned by VT, focus, lighting, exposure)... but this is just captivating, I'm not really into the story, but couldn't quite seem to shut it off for some reason. That's good!

You've successfully engaged me as an audience in something I wouldn't have had a lot of interest in watching if given a description of the plot before hand.

And you finished editing one of these monstrosities... which makes you better than me without any discussion of content of technical prowess. I'm still not done editing my feature. My hat is off to you. Can't wait to see the rest of this one and the next one.. and the next one... :)
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Thanks Knightly. I have to agree with you whole-heartedly that the film is more of a visual poem than a movie. One of the things I really want to work on is the storytelling. Funny thing was, going into the film I wanted to just "direct" it and focus on the storytelling AND the acting (and working with them). I couldn't find a DP and no one really took a 17 year old kid seriously, so after buying the camera, I decided I would have to shoot it myself. I wasted the first couple of shoots (maybe a week or two) but I quickly got the hang of it. In the end, however, I feel I may have compromised on my initial intention of directing, focusing on the story, and working with the actors. It sort of flipped vice versa.

If I get a chance to make another film, I'm going to go in [hopefully] able to draw from my experiences as the DP and focus much more on the story aspect and actors this time. Funny thing is, now I've actually fallen in love with cinematography.

And I appreciate you saying it's engaging. I've always thought Wong Kar Wai films were super engaging and emotion-provoking (not to mention visually stunning, but that's another story)... And I've always wondered how he does it. I'm nowhere close to that I'm certain, and I still constantly wonder... How does he do it?!

As per editing... Good luck with that. It's probably one of the harder aspects of filmmaking. I spent many many months on it. The process was I'd go in, spend a month or two. Get it done start to finish. Wait a month after getting sick of the whole story and process. Go back fresh. Rinse and repeat. But instead of months, maybe weeks... I took way too long to edit :no: (9 months or so)

Thanks again guys :)
 
FlavorTeam said:
...

Not sure what you mean by the blown out highlights, unless you mean the foreground/characters being super dark and the background being super bright, which was fully intentional... e.g. the [repeated] scene where the father and mother are hugging in the kitchen... The XVID low quality version just killed any of the details of that scene, but in the DVD you can distinguish their faces and other important details. But overall, playing the XVID and the DVD side to side, I'm very impressed that the codec got it down from 3.4 GB to 700 MB... The audio on the other hand, is uniformly horrible in the XVID. :)

....
Click to expand...

"Blown out" means there is no detail because it is overexposed. Since digital has a limited range (well, at least with these under $10K cameras), in a scene like that if you expose for the shadows then all of the highlights are blown out (overexposed). If you expose for the highlights, all details in shadow are lost (underexposed). I am still learning how to apply this myself, but the key to shooting digital is to limit the amount of range, i.e. the exposure difference between the light and dark areas in the scene. A Neutral Density (ND) gel on the windows would cut the amout of light passing though without changing the color temperature and allow you to open the aperature a bit more to get details in the shadows. You would use scrims to do the same thing to a light. Adding more light to the interior would allow you to close the aperature on the camera and bring down the intensity of the windows. Do both, and you can get all the details you need and then "crush the blacks" and color correct in post. (See here: http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?p=67302).

Have you seen the movie 21 yet? There's a perfect example in a scene toward the end at a formal dinner party where they had a brief shot in front of a window. Note that even though the window is very bright and the characters are in near shadow, you can still see all of the detail in the window dressings and on the characters. This is the advantage of film.

EDIT: Your XL2 has a Zebra Pattern that will show you areas in the scene that are overexposed (or very close to being overexposed). I set mine at 90.
 
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I set at 85 (correctly exposed light skin). I switch to 95 to check for over exposure elsewhere. TO get windows within exposure range, you can either light the interior to bring it up to the point the exterior light is, or cover the window with either ND gel or a scrim (black see through fabric) - watch out for wind rippling these things if you put them outside (better than inside), you may want to construct a frame of some sort that you can use to pull them taut.
 
I just finished watching it again, this time on the big screen. The small computer screen doesn't do it justice (and neither does the 700MB downsampling, although that is still pretty decent quality). Visual poetry is right: very profound, abstract. I think knowing the outcome made watching it again all the more engaging.

Now here's where things get sticky. At full resolution (and on a 73" screen), more became apparent that much of that beautifully creative visualization may have been accidental, but it works. I'm sure you learned several things from this first experience that will make your next project that much better. For instance, sunlight is blue, flourescent light is green (well, most of it), and don't forget to check your lens often, especially in moist environments. I learned a lot from your project, too. Thank you again for sharing for free all of your hard work.

I'm looking forward to seeing your next project. Your eye, your unique sense of style, and your voice, once honed, will allow you to make those dreams come true.
 
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Thanks guys for all of your comments.

I'm just glad to be able to get the film out there and have a few of you find it worth watching. After all, this was the first time I made any video or film at all, and it was the first time I picked up a video camera. More than anything else, it was a huge learning experience [in which I also fell in love]. I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned an incredible amount as well.

I always flinch whenever I see the scenes (there are more than one :)) where the lens was dirty. Most of them are at the beach though, and with the bright light hitting the viewfinder... I guess I missed it :cool:

For that scene where the windows overpower everything... I distinctly remember putting that black cloth you described over the windows. Took a long time for my friends to cover all of the windows. I went inside, checked the viewfinder, and did not like what I saw... So we just ripped them all down and went for that overexposed, bleached look!

I really appreciate the advice. I'm working hard writing a script and new story by hand... Looking around to see if someone would be willing to finance me locally. All I know is, after all the hard work and heartache [strains on family, friends, selling my beloved XL-2, school, finances, etc.] involved with the making of this film... I still fell in love... And I'm definitely looking forward to the day when I'll once again find myself behind the lens of a camera.

Thanks guys,

P.S. Keep the comments rolling if you like !! :yes:
 
well i just have to leave so read all the posts in details.just wanted to say lighting is realy great.i hope result will be exactly same while getting projection on cimema screen too !
 
hey just want to know is it a complete movie for download??when i went to the torrent the size was to big.......! i just read all the comments of great experts and i am dying to see the movie............and also dying to buy my CAM.i have saved 100 US dollars......... still a long way to go
 
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ad2478 said:
hey just want to know is it a complete movie for download??when i went to the torrent the size was to big.......! i just read all the comments of great experts and i am dying to see the movie............and also dying to buy my CAM.i have saved 100 US dollars......... still a long way to go
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It is a complete movie and it is worth the download, IMHO. It's close to an hour long.
 
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