I'll try to get at a cleric involved in every future film project of mine, since our
Open Source road trip documentary „
Biker's Soul” has been blessed from the beginning, while our sci-fi feature film „
The Last Drug” is giving me nightmares for years now.
It's completed and going straight to the pressroom. The netrelease under a Creative Commons license will follow in early 2010 - as soon as I come up with a sponsor. Meanwhile, let me share some production details:
Camera
I have been using the Sony PDX10P for 3 films now. It's a 1/3" chip 3CCD handycam - technically outdated, but still in use in a certain niche, last time I saw it was in
Long Way Round. I can still recommend it for productions like these - it's extremely robust, tiny & handy and has a great full automatic mode, which I almost always used, since it's so reliable. Colors are good, sharpness is okay for SD and auto focus is fast and precise with some faults at extreme back light.
What I don't like anymore is SD resolution: I'm missing the sharpness, the possibility for jump cuts, keying and motion stabilisation. Another drawback is the bad low light capability - if you are gonzo filming on a trip like this there are always low light situations where you just can't pull out a video light. If you are on a tight budget and you can live with these limitations: the camera sells for under $1000 on eBay - I found it always better to buy outdated professional equipment than the newest consumer stuff for the same price.
For my next road trip documentary I'm thinking about experimenting with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Not a dedicated video camera, but I have the feeling, that you can achieve
extremely interesting esthetics, that will work excellent in a gonzo style documentary.
Color Correction
I did the color correction in Adobe Premiere and all it took was a correction of the RGB curves. Maybe some saturation adjustments here and there.
My 63 minutes project file was very unstable after I put those effects on every clip. More than 20 crashes a day was quite common - I was hoping CS4 would be more stable, but I have to admit that my editing workstation is an antique 2GB Dual Core E6600. My
new system is about to arrive, now that I finished the post production, how stupid is that.
After rendering I'm running every frame through a Photoshop Action as well, using the new "vibrant" adjustment to desaturate everything but the skin tones. My color correction school was this:
Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction. I don't like the writing style but I learned a lot.
Editing
I like Adobe Premiere. Quite unstable when you max out your system, but it perfectly fits my workflow: SD capture here, HD capture there, this codec here, that codec there, drag in some internet files, edit in photoshop and throw it back in a second, create some minor animations - it always works the way you expect it. I'll stick to Premiere.
In January I'll get back to our feature film production
The Last Drug. I learned quite a lot with this documentary - although I didn't expected to. I hope this will help me getting The Last Drug done - I certainly feel the urge to get my hands on it again.
Jesus, this text reads like shit. I'm just to tired to write a proper english right now.