Short Film from my Class

Size Matters

This 30 second video is a fake commercial I shot in one afternoon with 2 students from my filmmaking class as actors. I wanted to render it as a video game kind of short.

By Franc Peret

Sound design is important as it supposed to be a commercial for sound recording device.

With a small recorder (Zoom H1) I recorded the Violin class next door which is always bothering us while we are trying to shoot something with live voice or sound recording.
For once, I took advantage of this nuisance.

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No idea what he was playing as this student is just so bad and hopeless. Some local Chinese people force their kids to learn something fancy in Shanghai, even if their kids don’t like it…

Anyway, I used the Panasonic AF103 to shoot this with a sigma (Nikon mount) 24-70mm f2.8 which is very nice lens, despite its size (FX format). I also used the Tokina 11-16 f2.8 to capture the wide shot.
On the AF, it means 22-32mm lens + 48-140mm lens.

I wanted a convenient lighting to shoot from any angle without casting shadows from the camera on the actors during closer shots. I did it by bouncing a 150W HMI light on the ceiling and by adding 250W (2 x 125W) backlight from low consumption bulb light, clipped on the upper bar of the background.
Actually the 150W HMI are closer to 500W in term of luminance.

I should put more backlight behind Simba as his dark black hair tends to melt a bit with the black curtain in the background.

Classroom is very small, so no much space to separate actors from background which could helps on that too.
Don’t forget that I wrote, set up, directed and shot this piece in less than 2 hours.
Simba learned Kung Fu and was a great help on that video as Sarah had no fighting experienced.

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