When our theaters in Montana re-opened, my wife and I went to see "TENET". I was blown away and left the theater with a headache (though that could be from the sound mix). I haven't been able to stop thinking about what I saw and finally decided to make a little short to pay homage to it. We shot it the day after Thanksgiving in about two hours using my Ursa Mini 4K and three Neewer LED panels.
My wife is a bit camera shy still so I would setup the shot with her as my stand-in, then we'd switch places and she'd run camera while I acted. It took a big longer that way than if I just directed and did camera, but it was still fun.
For post production, I ingested in DaVinci Resolve and made offlines for editing. I did the main editing in Avid Media Composer, then brought it back into Resolve. Final edits were done in Resolve. I did the VFX in the Fusion tab, mostly to see how it would perform.
The VFX shots are:
The word "TEИET" on the TV
Making the "PUSH" button glow on the phone screen
The Entropy beam shooting out of the phone
The shot at the end where I catch the bullet (a reverse shot) while my wife comes up the stairs and speaks a line (forward shot)
The cell phone screens were done in camera by making them up ahead of time in Photoshop and sending them to my phone as .jpg images.
I use Mixcraft Studio 8 for the music and did all the mixing in the Fairlight panel of Resolve rather than go into Pro Tools or Reaper like I usually do, again as an experiment. I found Fairlight to be a bit cumbersome, but I have to say it was nice to just hop between the different pages as I needed during the final tweaks.
Overall, using Resolve for everything was nice and convenient for a short like this, but I did run into an issue where I had to redo one of the Fusion shots again as the final render would error out. For a feature, I still think using the right tool for the job is the way to go, but man it's an exciting time to be a filmmaker!