Go Naked pt. 2

A month ago I called your attention to a teaser for a short film called White Red Panic by Ayz Waraich. The film is now complete, and viewable on Vimeo as well as on his site, dimeworth.com.

Don't you dare watch the video in this little window though. Go to the Vimeo page, download the full-res movie (requires logging in) and watch it full screen. I watched it projected at 1080p 90" wide played off a PS3.

And it looked damn good.

Ayz is my new "shut up and make movies" poster boy. He didn't fuss with 35mm adapters and carbon fiber matte boxes. Instead he tamed the toy (the in-spite-of-itself Canon HV20) and put some fine actors with a good, simple story into shots he knew he could make look great using a combination of well-considered camera settings and ample color correction.

Thankfully for all of us, Ayz has started to share some of his production methods on the Rebel Café, including these color correction before/afters.

Read the thread on the Rebel Café and get inspired—but don't make the mistake of thinking that you need to do exactly what Ayz did. The point is that he got off his ass and made a film at a scale he knew he could slam dunk, with the gear he had available.

See, I love Redrock adapters and follow focuses and jibs and backrubs from supermodels. But I worry when I see young filmmakers thinking that they should not embark on a project without having all that stuff. Ayz estimates his budget at somehwere south of $1,000. Add the cost of a brand new HV30 to that and you still haven't come close to the cost of most fancy DV matte boxes. Think real hard about that the next time your gear lust overtakes you. I know I will.

Rock on Ayz. You deserve all the attention you're getting for this flick.

Go Naked

As I type this, the Canon HV20 is available on woot.com for $550. The sale will probably be over by the time you read this (Woot features one deal per day), but its successor, the HV30, is only $760 on Amazon tonight, and the AVCHD-shooting HG10 is only $635.

And while I'm a fan of burying these Coke-can-sized 1080p24 shooters under a ton of accessories, sometimes the DV Rebel needs to focus her limited budget on stuff that goes in front of the camera. Just as often, agility is more conducive to production value than shallow focus. Lest you ever allow the perceived need of fancy lens adapters and Nikon glass to slow you to the Just Do It phase of filmmaking, keep a 720p MP4 of Ayz Waraich's teaser for White Red Panic on your desktop for a quick refresher on the power of going naked.

The DV Rebel Mini-Crane You Already Own

Had to share this discovery by the good people of the Rebel Café:

Thanks tslesicki!

opencut (no, not a post about Amy Winehouse)

For those aspiring to learn the craft of film editing, one of the trickiest aspects of the journey can be finding good footage to practice on. Even more rare is the opportunity to see how other, more experienced editors would treat the same footage. If you'd like to improve your cutting chops, or flex them for all to see, you could try entering the current competition at opencut.org. You'll get about 160GB of footage from a short film called Susannah (shot with the RED One camera), slice it and dice it however you see fit, and enter the results for judging. From the site:

OpenCut is a completely open-source film competition designed to encourage people to take professionally shot material and edit it in their own way. As there is no "one way" to tell a story, so too can stories benefit from being re-edited and re-told from many different vantage points and perspectives.

The winner of OpenCut 1.0 will receive a brand new AJA IO HD from Silverado. They will also be recognized as the "editor-of-record" at IMDB and will have their cut submitted to multiple film festivals.

Entry will cost you US$25. Grab your copy of In the Blink of an Eye (and maybe even the editing chapter of The Guide) and get to work!

UPDATE: Don't ignore (as I nearly did) the other awesome aspect of this—it's a great way to get your hands on some professionally-shot RED One footage to practice your color grading as well! From the looks of it, the contest is not strictly limited to picture cutting—your finished film will aparently be evaluated for polish and creativity in sound, music, and color as well.

UPDATE UPDATE: You'll notice a comment below from Torrey Loomis, Project Director of OpenCut, addressing many of your questions and concerns. Here's a salient snippet:

We've included an Ubernote to the resources section denoting that this project is NOT limited to Mac.

Second, we've changed the upload requirements to h.264 720p or 1080p. ProRes is not required.

This project is open to anyone--PC or Mac, period.

Thanks Torrey for chiming in! I'm sure ProLost readers appreciate your responsiveness. Read the full comment below.