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watch Strangers: Short Film

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This is a first-person/home-movie-style short film I just finished. It's intended to have a very surreal feel. Like walking in the night when something weird is happening, like in the video.

It's my first first-person movie, which I enjoyed doing. Though I believe that style only works for certain projects, I think it can be benneficial to many movies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFZ_SDk4hYw

From a technical standpoint it was very different. Things that might normally require a lot of preperation, like lighting, tri-pods/dolly ECT were much more straitford on this project. However in their place came other complications. Compositing 3D onto shaking camera work, for instance. None of the footage was shot with camera tracking, so it proved too time consuming to composite the longer shots frame by frame (or close to it). Instead I froze a frame from the general shot, composited the 3D onto it, and then turned in back to shaky/hand held footage in After Effects.

Another thing different about the first person style was the longer shots. These were easier from an editing standpoint, but were obviously much harder to film. Especially for the volunteer actors.

Since we didn't use any artificial light, it was very difficult to get the night scenes lit right. In the final video, only the opening scene is actually filmed at night. The others were filmed during the day and then processed in post to look like night. This ended up contributing to the stylized/surreal feel of the film.
 
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I enjoyed it. It would be difficult to watch a long film shot with that kind of video and audio quality, but as the short that it is, it was entertaining.
 
Thanks for your comments!
And very true about the length. I think the only way something like this could work as a feature would be if the first person stuff was mixed with a good bit of more traditonally shot footage.
 
Good work, different style. I didn't quiet get the end of the story, though.

After the alien blasts the guy and he comes back out of the hole, walking around like a zombie. How does this connect to the story?

Perhaps there was something visual that I missed?

Thanks for sharing.
 
Several things--

1. Started off as real found footage type documentary. But, the second scene you add a music track. Not just that, the music is drowning out the voices. Lose the music, if you want to present it as documentary footage.

2. Special effects didn't work well. Better to leave it up to the imagination, than to do cartoon flying saucers.

3. Sound effects would have been better than the visual alien ships.

4. After he's zapped by the aliens, why the hell would he give a shit about the camcorder anymore?
 
I understand the look you were going for but the quality of the video was too bad. The flying saucer thing took a lot away from it. Good idea though.
 
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