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watch SAM (Short film) TRAILER

I've been working on a film acting as director of photography and editor for a friend of mine who wrote a script. We spent months recruiting team members with the same drive and passion for the art of filmmaking. The film will be out soon but the trailer for it was released today.

Synopsis
Centered around a young man called Sam who has experienced years of bitterness and loneliness and due to this has managed to bring into existence, through his imagination, his own ideal world where he meets the girl of his dreams.

Equipment
Canon 550D
50mm f1.8 Lens
18-55mm f3.5-5 Lens
Zoom H4n
Rode NTG-2
Manfrotto MVH502A Tripod
Hague Track and Dolly

Software
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
Adobe Audition CS6
Red Giant Magic Bullet

http://youtu.be/2rS9NiSu5A4

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Why there are two aspect ratios in the trailer? One is around 1.85 and one is about 2.35.

And if you used a f1.8 lens, why there are constant reminders about lack of light?

Sorry but I cannot say much positive about cinemaphotography in this case.

Editing was fine, no worries there.
 
Aspect ratio and brightness

The reason why there are two different aspect ratios in the trailer are because in the film, the main character enters the dream world and the real world. The dream world looks cleaner, has a shallower depth of field, finer grain that resembles 35mm and colors that are more vibrant while the real world looks more gritty, the camera is usually handheld and the cuts between different angles are very minimal, lingering on the character. There are scenes that are dark because I did not use the f1.8 lens to make things brighter, I used it to gain a more shallow depth of field. The reason why the image can be quite dark is because the character is going through a dark moment in the scene, I try to replicate that onto the screen. I understand that it is purely your taste that the image may be too dark, or it may be your screen that is exaggerating the brightness of the image as this film is mastered in a Gamma of 2.2 which is the standard of Windows, not Apple's Macintosh.
 
Thanks for the info given, the brightness does not worry me, but the image noise does,

there are a lot of noise in the image, for instance in the scene where the man gets up from the bed. If you look the background (the wall) then the noise is quite visible.
 
Compression artifacts

That is actually the compression from youtube, it is more visible because I added 16mm film grain on top of the image, the image was actually artificially denoised and that shot was shot at f 3.5 at an iso of 200 with Magic Lantern (Custom firmware). I have tested the image quality in my local cinema, showing a completely uncompressed version, it looks beautiful. It's unfortunate you have to watch the film through youtube, it doesn't handle film grain so well because of it's low bitrate.
 
Well that explains a lot about the noise then. I also think that in the longer version the aspect ratio most likely works much better than in the short trailer, actually interesting idea.

I do have the same camera & software actually, altough different lense.
 
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