Make a Short Film with an iPhone: Learn DIY Filmmaking

1. About The Course: This course is a case study that I call the DIY short bone guide. And it will look at how my iPhone shots short film pre-owned was made. The idea of being for you to learn my process and then use it, make your own short film. This isn't just about the gear. This is a complete script to screen blueprint that I have successfully used for years. And that's making short films, digital series, and also in the feature films. Here though I'm concentrating on producing low to no budget DIY shorts. And that all starts with taking an idea and turning it into a script. Then how to take that script and turn it into an actual movie. And so that means figuring out how to pay for it. How to cast actors and book a crew, had to do preproduction, including a script breakdown, shot listing and storyboarding, also, how to schedule the shoot. Then we move on to production and how I shot the film. And I show what gear I used to make it. And finally, my post-production workflow. How I edited the film and did calibrating sound design and music. Also included are the actual shooting script, storyboard, shot list, and the schedule from pre-owned. That way you can preview or download these to use as a reference when you're creating your own. Additionally, I include several production forum templates and a PDF version of the entire DIY short film guide. Again, for you to download and use as a reference during the course or refer to it later. So ultimately I'm providing this blueprint for you to follow. And if you do, you'll be on your way to successfully making your own DIY short film. I guess, Blake Calhoun. If you've taken any of my other courses, this one's going to be a little bit different. On this one, I'm going to do more of a one-on-one consultation, kind of feel less hands-on with the gear, although I will be doing that more just discussing and going over my short film pre-owned and how I made that. It's a DIY short film. So how I use various techniques and approaches to make that and then how you can do the same on your project. But before we get into it, we need to watch this short film. And so that's in the next section. So go check that out and when you're done, I'll meet you back here. 2. Watch the Short Film "Preowned": Enjoy your next I will. Yeah, I just picked it up. You're gonna get it now. I mean, I I just couldn't pass up this deal. Ms. almost too good to be true. That's great, man. Yeah. Come on. Come on. Yeah, you got me. Okay. Super funny, but that's enough. Alright. We talking about the car stuff. The messing with the seed, the cranking up, the weird music really loud. Don't know what. It just needs to stop. Well, somebody's doing something. I want to know is it's not me. Why don't you have them check it out? Okay. Okay. You're sure it's not you? I think it's malfunctioning or something. I don't know. Maybe somebody's getting it at night. I don't know. I just well, you lock it right here that I lock it. Like super careful. You can select up to chew custom driver settings. And then when you get in the car, you push the button and it automatically adjust to that? Yeah. I mean, yes, it's working. But I mean, what about the stereo? I mean, that's weird, right? It's a used car. So sometimes they have a mind of their own, but I'm sure it'll work itself out. And if it doesn't, we have the 15 a money-back guarantee. Okay. Sound them out. You can select up to two custom driver settings. That way when you get in the car, you just push the button. It automatically goes to that setting. Just make sure to not accidentally hit it with your legs when you get the car. Enjoy it. Thank you. I will. I'm talking about I'm talking about right. Well, now that you've watched the movie, I hope you liked it. I did shoot that on an iPhone, an iPhone 13 Pro Max, and I use a variety of gear which I'll go over later. And when you're making a short though, that part doesn't really matter. I know that's probably why you're here because I shot it on an iPhone and it's a DIY project. But in reality, everything I'm going to talk about in this course could be applied to a whole lot of different cameras, any kind of camera, truth be told. But in particular, I'm gonna focus on affordable ways, DIY ways to make that happen. 3. Ideas & Scripting: Now again, I'm going to get into the actual gear and more of the techie stuff later in the course. But this is actually training to teach you how to make a short film, not only during production, but from the beginning. The idea, the concept, the writing. Now, I can't tell you what the right and nor should I. That should be your own creative choice. And that's what makes filmmaking an art interesting and subjective. You write what you want to write. But a general rule that I go by is write what you know. And you've probably heard that if you've listened to any type of writing, podcast or taken any kind of writing training. But writing what you know, can be a great way to start and you don't have to. You could write space opera. You can write whatever you want. But if you write what you know, that way, it becomes more personal and it typically is easier to write something. Now, of course, in my short film pre-owned, it's a supernatural story about a car that kills people. So I didn't actually know anything like that. But I have done a lot commercial work in my past. And so it was also a little bit of a story about how car dealers could be maybe unethical. And so again, the story doesn't have to be exactly something that's literal or something that happened to you, or autobiographical or anything like that. But it just is helpful for you to know the topic. And the other point to that is especially on these DIY kind of projects, is right around ideas or things that you have or have access to. So in pre-owned, I use my mom's car. I had access to my mother's car that I thought would be perfect as a used car. I had access to a friend of mine, his house, the house, and that had a very cool retro vibe and I just thought it fit the story really well. And then had access to a car lot because again, I used to do car commercials. And so I knew and agency guy who got me in contact with a car lot. And so the point there is, doesn't matter what your story is about. But right, with things you have access to and that are ideally free. This, I got the idea from a famous book called Rebel Without a crew, written by Robert Rodriguez back in the early 990s. So if you're younger than 40, probably don't even know that book exist. But back in the early days of Indie film, Robert Rodriguez had made El Mariachi, and he made it for like $7,000, famously shot at by himself and Mexico and 16 millimeter film. The book talks about how he took everything that he had access to and put it into the film. He got production value that way. Now, it's a little bit dated since he shot on 16 millimeter, which today most people don't do. In a weird way. Phones today have become our Super eight or 16 millimeter cameras that we used to use. But the ideas still apply very well to Indie filmmaking. It's a book I highly recommend picking up. And as a matter of fact, I'm going to mention several books in this course, and I'll put them in the additional resources section. So if you're interested in those, and I do recommend them, be sure to pick those up. But on these low budget DIY projects, It's great to have access to what you're wanting to shoot, whether that's maybe a swimming pool at your parents house or at your house, a farmhouse. If you're doing a horror film, a car, maybe you're doing a movie like I did about a car or a car race or if you have a horse farm, whatever it is, anything you can get your hands on that will add production value to your short without adding a lot of cost to your budget. 4. The Script: When you're writing the story, I would suggest keeping it short. We're making a short film here. Sometimes you see these shorts that are well done, but there are 40 min long. That's technically a short film, anything under 70 min as a short film. But if you're trying to get this on YouTube or put it on YouTube or trending, get it in a film festival, five-minutes or under is really the sweet spot. 10 min tops, maybe 15 if you've really got a good dramatic story. But I would keep it short. The shorter the better. I think five-minutes is a sweet spot. So if you haven't written a script, keep in mind that typically speaking, one page of your script equals 1 min of screen time. So a five-page script would be five-minutes. Now that is not exact because if you write an action sequence that is maybe just a paragraph on your script, that could be 2 min and a movie, because it depends on how you direct in, how you shoot it, and then how you edit it. But generally speaking, movies like features and stuff are 120 pages or so for 2 h or 90 pages for a 90 minute movie. So when you're writing your script, tried to keep it under ten pages. Again, five works the best. And then one other interesting thing, especially for shorter films, again, five-minutes or under, comedy tends to work the best. Now again, I'm not telling you what the right, I'm just telling you, typically speaking, comedy works well and then horror works well too. My short I just did. I mixed comedy with supernatural. And those tend to do pretty well, especially on the Internet and YouTube. Festivals can be hit or miss. It really depends on the type of Festival, but today, I almost don't make my films for festivals. And matter of fact, I don't. I do enter occasionally the bigger festivals like Sundance or South by Southwest, et cetera. Pre-owned though I actually didn't enter any festivals. I made it for my YouTube channel. I got it out. And I have really been making those to share them on my channel and share them with the world. You'll find that in the end, you'll get a lot more people to see it online than you ever would at a festival. Festivals can be great, especially if you're trying to make a feature version or if you're trying to network and meet people, or if you're just trying to support your local arts community in that respect, festivals can be great. But otherwise to me, there's just so many festivals now and they cost a lot of money, a lot of more rip off truth be told, I don't enter many festivals unless you know the organizers, unless you're invited or again, unless you're supporting your local arts community. The idea that you're gonna get in Sundance or South by Southwest is really a lottery. Truth be told, they get five to 10,000 films submitted and they pick a couple of hundred. So your odds are very low. Now I'm not trying to discourage you. If you make a short you want to enter it, do it. But in my experience, you have a lot better chance of doing well on YouTube than you do at a festival. 5. Scriptwriting Software: Now regarding actually writing the screenplay, if you're making this film for yourself, meaning you're gonna do it yourself, not making it for yourself, that you're going to be the only person that sees it. But making it by yourself or with a close-knit group of people you already know, then it doesn't really matter what you write in. You could write it in Microsoft Word, especially if you're on a budget, you can write it in the notes app on your iPhone. Doesn't really matter. However, if you want to take to the next step and do it in a more professional manner. And especially if you're going to submit the script to other people or share it with actors, et cetera, then it's really best to work in a screenwriting software. The industry standard is called Final Draft. That's what I use. It cost a few hundred dollars, ethnic, maybe a little bit less if you get it on sale and it is an investment. But it's super important to have the script not only be written well, but also to be formatted properly. Especially again, if you're gonna be sharing it with other people, crew, actors, et cetera. The great thing about final draft is it's not just for writing screenplays. You can write other kinds of projects, corporate video, et cetera. And so it can be a multi-purpose purchase if you end up buying it and you don't have to use final draft, it's just the industry standard and they have an iPad app is great. I've used it for, I don't know, 20 years, but there are other options out there and I'll put those in the additional resources at the end of this section. 6. Screenwriting Books: Now the last bit on writing is if you've never written a screenplay, it's probably a good idea to learn how to do that. And one of the best books I've ever read was a book called screenplay by Sid field. It's been around forever. I think it's probably 30 or 40 years old, although it's been updated over the years. And it is great. It'll teach you how to use various plot points, midpoints, et cetera, how to structure your screenplay. Now, it's really for feature films, but a lot of those concepts do apply to short films. So I really do highly recommend reading that book or pick up Robert Mickey's book called Story. A great book on just well story. Another one would be Blake Snyder's book called Save the Cat. Again, these are really geared more towards feature film making, feature screenwriting, and that may be what you're working towards. But the same principles really apply when you're writing any kind of story and creating characters, whether it's a short film or a feature. So again, I definitely recommend checking out those books and I'll have links to those in the additional resources section. 7. Paying for Your Short FIlm: Alright, so your script is written at night trying to figure out how you're gonna get it made. And what I mean by that is money. Well, in these type of projects that really money is not involved, that you're doing it DIY, you're doing it for no money or very low money. However, it just depends on the type of project you're doing with pre-owned. I did it for a few hundred dollars. Now, most of the short-sided done, especially on my iPhone channel, have been zero budget or a couple of hundred dollars budget projects. I've done other short films that had been up to maybe $3,000. The thing to keep in mind is, you're never really going to make money back on a short film unless you have a YouTube channel and you make some ad revenue on them. And even that though, unless you get millions of views, you're not going to make a lot of money back. That's not the reason you make a short film. Now, the reason you make a short film is or experience, or it's a calling card, or just for fun. For me, it's been all three really. But mainly I do them because they're fun and a creative exercise. Now get on YouTube. I do make a little bit of money on my channel when I put my short films out there. But mainly I do them as camera test instead of doing a boring camera test, register them for fun. If you aren't going to finance a short film, you didn't need to have a rich uncle or maybe you have a trust fund. I'm kidding, but not really. Because really no one's going to invest in a short film, typically speaking. Or you could use credit cards. Now I'm not encouraging to go into debt, but that's one way to do it, or just save up some money ultimately though. And these kinds of films you want to get people to probably work for free. Find some like-minded people in your community, whether that's on social media or whether it's at your school or wherever you may be. Get them to work for free and maybe you'll work on their project for free. That's what I have done a lot. Or in my world, I hire people on paying jobs because I do corporate video on commercials and other film work. And so I'll get them to do me a favor on a short film and then I hire them on a bigger job. The other thing I do is sometimes do with very low budget where ii pay people like $100 a day. Now, it's not a lot, but it does help pay for gas and it gives them a little bit of pocket change. You can also give gas money. I've done that before and especially right now when I'm making this video, gas is super expensive around the world. Helping them out like that unit. It's a passion project is a good idea. One really important thing too, is don't overwork your crew. Typical film shoot days or 12 h for doing a short film, you're paying people little to no money. I don't do that. I tried to keep them to maybe eight to 10 h or even do half days. Make it quick, shoot it as quickly as possible. You want to do as best as you can, but obviously you don't want to take advantage of people. And one other thing regarding money and your crew making a movie, regardless of whether you're making a feature film or a short film, even if it's a no to low budget project, you want to feed your crew, feed your crew well, and not pizza. Spend money on good food, good catering, good craft service, makes sure that they are happy. A happy crew usually means a happy movie. Doesn't mean it's going to be a good movie. But you want your career to be happy because then you want them to work with you again. And also again, you don't want to take advantage of them. So good food usually makes a happy set, which hopefully makes a good movie. 8. Crowdfunding: This course is really about making no budget or low budget films. But sometimes you might want to actually try to raise a little money through crowdfunding. I've been involved with a few campaigns, but what I wanted to show you is the biggest campaign I ever did was for a web series called Morgan bill. But this one is a little bit bigger than what we've been talking about in this short. This was for a series. I had some pretty well-known people involved from the web, like Felicia Day and a well-known author, Rachel came from a well-known book series. However, there's some good lessons that I learned from here that I wanted to share. And so what I'm going to do is show you the actual Kickstarter page and then play the video we made. If you're going to do a Kickstarter or an Indiegogo, whichever site you go with, you do wanna make a video. Video is super-important. The campaigns with videos are almost always more successful than one without a video. Our goal was to raise $75,000. We were doing an hour-long show. It was actually five or so episodes broken into ten-minute long episodes, give or take a few minutes here and there. We ended up making our goal. We had 832 backers. We raised just under $82,000. And that may sound like a lot of money and it is a lot of money, but it's not for what we tried to do. We're trying to do a TV quality show on the web. We end up getting some pretty well-known actors in the TV world. Especially we got Amber Vinson from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And we got Robert Ricardo, who you may not know his name, but you know his face. He was on Star Trek for years and has been in just tons of movies, is a great character actor. And then we had some excellent actors, local actors we cast out of Dallas, but they came from Los Angeles as well. But we did the normal thing where you get rewards and we had different reward levels. And the rewards went from $5 up to $5,000. I think we even had one-person donate $5,000. We had a lot of people donate in the 100 to $500 range. Again, this was based on a book series and so that did help. But even this was really hard to do. That's kind of an overall point. Doing crowdfunding is not easy. It's a full-time job while you're doing it. And so another tip I would suggest though, is make your campaign fast. Do a 30-day campaign. Don't go longer than that. And what will end up happening is you'll get a lot of attention at the beginning and then you'll have a hole in the middle, even though you gotta be emailing and tweeting and mom, Facebook, et cetera, the whole time. And at the end you'll do a big push, that urgency people will actually, people will tend to contribute. It's a fine line though, because you don't want to be spamming people. You don't want to drive your friends and family crazy. However, It's a great way to get them to donate without having to ask them in a weird way, like, Hey mom, when you pitch in $500 in my short film instead, Hey Mom, we're doing a crowdfunding campaign. Will you pitch in $500 in a way, it's easier that way for them to feel like they're part of the project more than just rewarding you. They're rewarding their project, if that makes sense. And so now I'll play the campaign video and you can decide whether this is something that you might want to try or not. And again, you could use Kickstarter Indiegogo. You use Indiegogo. You can do a campaign where you get the money no matter what. It's called a flexible campaign on Kickstarter, if you don't make your goal, you don't get the money. If you're doing a short film, you might set that low. We want to make it $1,000 or $5,000 or whatever it may be. That way if you go over great, but that way you're guaranteed or you're somewhat guaranteed to get the money. And so here's the video I made. I shot and edited it, and it stars Rachel K in the book author. Hello, I'm Rachel Payne, the author of The Morgan field vampires series. It says story about a girl who moves to a small Texas town and discovers that it's owned and operated by vampires. And once she's there, she can't get out. I've been writing these books since 2006. And whether I'm traveling the world promoting the books or going to conventions or Comic-Con. Or I'm just at the store picking up a gallon of milk. I get the same questions. And the question is, when is Morgan Bell going to be made into a movie or a TV show? My stock answer is always been, we're trying hopefully soon. But in truth, I didn't know. We've had several traditional development deals, but none of them are quite worked out. Did I mentioned that we have a huge fan following and we've sold millions of copies worldwide. So we've tried it their way. Now we're going to do it our way. With your help. We're not going to make a movie or traditional TV show, but we are going to make a web TV show like the guild. But with vampires. There have been many petitions worldwide wanting to see this made into a show. Recently. Glass houses was voted the number one book among UK school kids ahead of even books from the Harry Potter in Twilight series. And interestingly on that list were the only ones at the top who have not been made into a movie or TV show. And we're here to fix that. A few years back, I became friends with Felicia Day, the wonderfully talented creator and starve the guild. You know, the one with no vampires. I think they need vampires. We talked about the possibility of my books becoming a web series. And she introduced me to filmmaker Blake Calhoun. Calhoun. Like is from texts, which is important because I'm from Texas. Morgan villas said in Texas, and we're going to film it in Texas. This shows have millions of online views and fans around the world. And now he's onboard to produce and direct our show in front of the camera. We're very excited to have Amber Vinson attached as anomaly, the founder of Morgan Bell. And this time she'll be playing a vampire. Instead of slang vampires. Producing a TV quality web series is expensive, and that's where the majority of the money we raise will go to paying the cast and crew, studio space, equipment, editing, visual effects, original music, and so on. The remaining money will go to cover the rewards, things like DVDs, posters and more. This fall, our plan is to film six episodes which will run about 10 min each. If we go over our fundraising goal, will feel more episodes. And that brings us to you. We're doing this for you, for fans of the book series and for fans of genre series like Blake produces. But to do this, we need your help. So please take a look at the rewards below. Choose something you like, contribute and become a Morgan. No record. What was that? Where's Rachel? Did a vampire just kill them writer. So again, I would suggest trying to make your movie for little to no money. It's DIY. But if you want to do something a little bit bigger, crowdfunding may be a good option. 9. Booking Crew: I was just talking about cast and crew and feeding them well and keeping them happy. Well, how do you get your cast and crew? Well, the way I do it is sort of like I mentioned previously, I get them from other jobs I've done. I asked him to come work on the short film because I've worked with them on another project or on a corporate video, etc. But if you don't have those kind of connections, again, reach out to people on social media. You want to try to get the most experienced crew you can that is willing to work on your passion project because likely they won't be much money. But you'd be surprised how many people are out there. This is cast and crew that are willing to work for no money to loan money to build up their resume. Again, you don't want to take advantage of people, but especially green new people are willing to work. And oftentimes, especially with YouTube today, there are a lot of really talented people out there that I think are chomping at the bit to work. So again, find some like-minded crew to help you and the main guys are going to need. Now, let me backup though. On my short films, on my YouTube channel. I've made almost all of them with a two-person crew. Now I have a lot of experience and I can wear a lot of hats. But ultimately you need a director or producer, a DP or cinematographer. It's kinda interchangeable name there. Then you need someone to run audio. And audio person would be ideal, but it's not always available because of budget. So there's ways to get around that using wireless mikes are putting a boom pole up on a stand, et cetera. And then you might also want to get a gaffer or a grip to help with lighting and just moving things around onset. And depending on your project, you might need an art director or a prop master, or maybe even a costume designer. However, for most DIY work, I do these roles myself. But if you're doing a period piece or something requiring custom wardrobe, probably a good idea to consider finding these crew members as well. Now again, you could be the director, the DP, and the producer. I do that all the time. And you get someone to help with the lighting and the audio on your shoot. For me, I've done it with two people. Again, we have a lot of experience and so that might not work for you. But if you can find those type of people, even a production assistant, someone just coming up could be handy in those situations. Now I will say when you regarding audio though, you don't want to have your little 12-year-old sister hold the boom pole. Audio is super important. So don't skimp there. It gets someone that knows what they're doing. And sometimes it's better to pay that position than other positions because it's so important to have good audio on your movie that I can't overstate it. That and good acting are really the two most important things. Even more than the cinematography in direction and script truth be told, everything is important. The bad acting and bad audio will kill your short film very quickly. 10. Casting Actors: I always say the number one job of the director is getting a good cast. That is by far the most important thing. Whether you're doing a Hollywood movie or an indie film. But an Indie film, I think it may be even more important because you're usually working with less experienced people and bad acting will kill your short films so quickly. How many times we'd been to a festival or watched a YouTube video where you're like, wow, this cinematography, it looks good. I like the score, the color grading, the editing is all great. But the acting is so wouldn't, and bad pulls you out of the story. That's because people are casting again their family members or non actors. Now, you can use non actors. Shawn baker, the well-known indie film director, has done that a lot, but not everyone is good at directing non actors is a general rule. I would cast professional actors even if they're just getting started. Actors in particular, always looking to work and build up their resume. And so I don't think it's hard to find good actors really, no matter where you live. And that is the case whether you're doing it non-union or union. Now, for these kind of DIY short films, I've almost always gone non-union. But I have done a few short films where I spent maybe 1,000 or a couple of thousand dollars where I went through sag because sag has micro budget and low budget. And I think they have a short film contract where you can get actors to work for zero or even $100 a day depending on the project and the contract. The main thing though is it does increase paperwork. Again, I like supporting SAG actors and working with SAG actors. Not always a reality, however, it can increase the production value because you are more than likely to get better actors that are part of the union, at least more experienced. And so you really should consider a sag deal depending on the scope of your project. If it's just you and somebody is going out and shooting one weekend, maybe a skit, then no. But if you're doing a more involved short film, even shooting on a phone, then considering making it sag is not a bad idea. And I'll put links again in the additional resources to the different contracts through sag and the newer ones that are for micro budget and low budget stuff aren't that complicated. So you don't really have to hire a line producer to do that anymore on features and stuff that's a little different story. But I'm short films and low budget Indies. It's very doable today. And so the overall point here is don't skimp on your actors, get the best actors you can. And you will thank me for that and so will your audience when they're actually watching your short film. 11. Shooting with a Two-Person Crew: After today were square. I mean, I'm forgiven. You guys, Blake Calhoun here I directed this short film and in-between setups. I would also run the behind the scenes camera. This is handheld GoPro, so excuse the shaky cam. If you've watched any of our tests videos, you would know that we were going to shoot this by a fence. And right here you'll see that fence in the background. But as it turns out, it was really hot today. We shot this and the cameras kept overheating. So solve this building and I thought, well, let's shoot in the shade. That's what happens on shoots you improvise and ended up working out very well. All of our sound was recorded double system, meaning it was recorded into the iPhone camera as a reference, and then it was captured into a zoom recorder. That was the actual audio we used and sync to the picture and editing. We shot this short film on the moon dog labs anamorphic adapter, and also a lot of it on the native iPhone tele lens. In my opinion, shooting telephoto on an iPhone just gives you that extra feeling of a movie. It also can help you get some shallow depth of field. And using the helium core rig, we couldn't mount any telephoto lenses that we owned. And so we put in D on the front of the helium core and just use the native tele lens and the iPhone. And overall it worked out great. What are you doing? Are you seeing this? In this setup? We were in the direct sunlight and it was really hot. We ended up using a giant silk to soften the light on the actors. Most of this scene from this angle was actually shot on the tele lens, like the previous scene, although I did use the moon dog labs anamorphic lens some two, we actually had the phone overheat on several instances, and I'll do a video about that in the future. But it's something to look out for if you're shooting in direct sunlight. So I would recommend covering the camera when you're outside like this, a courtesy flag, that kind of thing. The reason we use the icon monitor on the helium core rig was when you're shooting low angle or high angle. It's hard to see the screen outside, not to mention with the sun. I used a small rig adapter so the monitor would articulate up and down and the shade allowed me to see the image outside. And that's the moon dog labs anamorphic adapter and an ND filter. Again, we went back-and-forth between shooting on that and the native iPhone tele lens. You're all set. You understand the deal, right? Yeah. Now, repeat it back to me then. You realize how insulting notice this is important. We've been doing this for nine years. I don't want to be Miranda anymore. After today. You don't have to. So you might have noticed this scene was shot on a Canon, see two-hundred know, this isn't a smart phone. This was a new camera, and so we wanted to test it out and use it as an experiment. This was the only scene we use lights on to. Everything else was available light, and this was very minimal lighting. Use an awesome little applets or light as a spot and then a practical light on the wall. And that was really it. Short films more or less our experiments for us to learn different things about technology and to improve our storytelling skills. How about I just take the vector down myself. We work as a team. You know that plus you lost your weapon. You don't have to be an acid. Just get the guy horizontally. Getting brag. Don't steer the conversation. You'll get there. Once we hear you say, Miranda, the cavalry with bust through the door and save the day. It's like last time. Action. Here we use the gimbal is a steady cam. The helium core is on a xy Ukraine. We use the crane because of the weight. That's me again, shooting behind the scenes and running sound. Again, the nature of a two-person crew. One thing we did a little different here too, is we shot everything on the tele lens. Normally you shoot gimbal stuff or steady camps though with a wider lens. I went with a tele lens for a little different look and I think it worked out great. 12. Development & Pre-Pro Overview: Now we're on to development and or pre-production. They can overlap depending on the size of your production. Development typically covers the whole process of before you make the movie, The writing, the fundraising, the budgeting, the script breakdown, et cetera. In this instance though, they overlap because in pre-production you do a lot of that. And pre-production on a movie can last anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months. Maybe longer could be a year on a big Hollywood movie. But then development can be as short as a few months up to years. Some people develop a movie for ten years, 20 years. It doesn't matter. They're continually trying to work to get one made. I know myself, I've been trying to get this wrestling movie made since 2007. It's a big feature about the Von Erich wrestling family. I've been close multiple times, but it hasn't happened. It's a multi-million dollar project and so it's hard to get that kind of money together. It's a period piece, et cetera. So the point is I've been developing that for a long time. Hadn't happened. But once I get it to happen, I hope I do one day. I'll go right into pre-production. Then pre-production also involves the casting aspect and wardrobe and all those kind of things that make the movie what the movie is. In other words, you have to get all of those pieces of the puzzle together during pre-production and then you go into production. But the number one thing you have to do in pre-production, the pre-production aspect is a script breakdown. And this again could fall under development because you need to break your script down before you can do a budget. Now, for this kind of project, we're not really budgeting necessarily because it's free or DIY. Although it's still a good idea to have a general idea of what you're going to spend, whether that's on food or gear rental, et cetera. But budgeting is done with breaking down your script and breaking on your script is done through software. And that's one really cool important thing about using final draft. Final draft will import that script into other software. You can number your scenes and final draft and then import that into a piece of software called e.g. shot list or shot list or is one I use and I really like it. And it does just that. It lists your shots. You can break down your shots for each scene in a movie, and at the same time, you can create a schedule. Now, there are other ways to do scheduling that are more involved. You could use Movie Magic, that's the industry standard, or you could use gorilla. And there's also a studio binder. There's a lot of options and as I've said several times during this course, I will put links in the additional resources to check out other kinds of software. And again, if you're doing this super DIY, writing your script and Microsoft Word or in notes. You don't really need to do this and you don't need to do a full breakdown. But you do need to do a breakdown for your scheduling. At least get an idea because unless you're shooting a movie in a couple hours in real time, you need to know what scenes you're shooting, what day and what actors have to be there and what crew have to be there, and what gear has to be there. And you do that by breaking the script down and creating a schedule. Again shot list or I found to be really good. It has an iPad version and the version for your computer. And I used it on my short film pre-owned. And the other thing I did in connection with that, as I used a great piece of software called pre-built Pro. And what it does is allow you to very easily storyboard your movie. Now, I use the storyboard only my action scenes, okay? Now with previous Pro, I storyboard everything because it's so easy, you can import your final draft into previous Pro, as a matter of fact. And then it creates boards for you in the beginning. And then you can go in and modify them at different characters. The different ways they look, et cetera, prompts. It's super easy and it makes your movie that much easier to explain to your cast and crew. You show them the boards and then they're like, Oh, wide shot of the house, I get it. Or hey, a dolly shot of this or that. It makes it so much easier to communicate using storyboards. And it also helps you get the movie out of your head onto paper and eventually into the camera and into the edit. So I highly recommend storyboarding and shot listing for sure, you don't have to do both. But I would recommend trying it. Shot listing almost Always I do. As a director, you're going through your day with your schedule. You're scratching off the shots, you've done storyboards. I don't always do them, but I really liked them. Now, one other note on storyboards. Now with all the AI artwork options out there like mid Journey, et cetera, you could technically do some quasi storyboards with that. Enter your prompts, have the AI doing for you, and then take those and show those to your crew and your caste, et cetera. So there's a lot of great ways. Previous Pro is probably better for being more customized and getting exactly what you want. But if you're in a hurry and there's also the type of storyboards where you can actually hand draw them on an iPad. Or you could just print out paper drama with your hands. A lot of different ways to get your ideas across to share with your cast and crew. But that I'll start with breaking down your script. And by the way, I'm kind of doing a general overview of all this because I can't go into super detail on each part. Like a full tutorial on shot LR or previous PRO. Those are courses in among themselves. And so I'm trying to give you my process of what I do when I make a short film or a feature film. And that way you can go out, approach it that way and then learn the fine details on your own. But it's a great way I've found to get my films made without spending a ton of money. 13. Script Breakdown & Shot List: Alright, just wanted to do a quick screen recording here of script breakdown and then a shot list. This is final draft, as I've talked about in the course. And this is the shooting script. And here I have the pages numbered. Now again, you don't have to use final draft. But in this situation it's important because I'm going to import final draft into shot lr. Now some of the other screenwriting software you can convert those files, the final draft, and then some other programs you can import those. It just depends. And so I'm not gonna go into that minutia, but just understand that's why I'm using these two things together. So breaking down the script is different for a short film like this compared to a feature. Obviously, feature has a lot more to do on a short film like this. You don't have to do a script break down, as I've mentioned, but it does help to at least create the schedule and your shot list. The overall breakdown for this project was pretty simple. And for me, when I do a breakdown, I'm looking at the locations. I'm looking at how many actors there are. I'm looking at the props, the wardrobe, that kind of stuff. Some people will print the script out and then go through it with a highlighter and highlight the different props, et cetera. Like in my script, the car is a prompt. The camera, the surveillance camera near the end as a prop, the different wardrobe, if he was changing his wardrobe every day, that would be noted in the breakdown. And by the way, as a side note, that's one reason I had him work at a Best Buy type store. We never say it, but he gets to wear the same wardrobe every day. A little sneaky thing to do in a script like this. If you can keep the characters in the same wardrobe, it's not only easier to shoot, but it helps you with continuity. Now understand this breakdown approach is a DIY method. If you're using a software like movie magic, you would enter it in the software. This is a screenshot from that software. And so a lot of this would be automated for you. However, again, affordable DIY approach is you do it more in a manual mode and you could use a sheet like this one here. This is actually a download I got from studio binder. So you would enter the breakdown information per scene using a sheet like this. And so you would still like to go through and mark up the script and break it down that way and then enter that information on the sheet and then ultimately create your schedule from that. So just to understand, there are ways to automate this process, but they will cost you more money and you'll have to learn additional software and for small DIY short film projects, really not necessary. One thing about final draft that I'll just quickly show is you can do reports. And so you have seen reports, location reports, character reports, cast reports to you can come in here and look at the cast, whether you have speaking scenes non-speaking. And you can do a report. And of course in this story, I only have three characters, really two main ones, really one main one Arnie, but the car salespersons another one and then the new customer at the end. And so this report breaks down already has 11 scenes with dialogue, et cetera, et cetera. And so these kinds of reports can really help. Again, when you're breaking down the script. Another one would be a location report. This can be helpful because then you see how many different places the scenes need to be shot. Which again, when you're shooting your movie, you shoot your movie typically out of order. Like all the scenes of the car lot I shot at the same time. All the scenes at the house, I shot the same time. And again, you shoot that out of order. But once you figure this part out and again, you can make your own notes and another Word document, but you can print the script and highlight it however you want. Then you would take your script into, I'm using shot list or again, there's lots of ways to do it. And you would import it. This is how it looks when you first import it. Have all the scenes broken down here. This movie has 17 scenes. And then it's nice too, because you've got page counts here which comes in handy when you're trying to figure out how long each thing is going to take to shoot. And it also has the cast broken down, which is nice because that way when you do your call sheet, that's another component to this process. You know which cath need to be there at what location and if this was a more involved shoot, what casting to be there each day. Now I shot this in about 6 h and I would recommend the most of these small DIY short films. You shoot them in a day. Almost all the short films I've done on my iPhone channel have been a one day shoot. So now I've got the script imported. And from this, I will do my shots, my shot list. And all you do is you can double-click on the actual scene and then you open this. Now, I added these already. This is work I've done previously. And so to do that, you come over here to this button and you would click and enter a shot. I'm going to delete this one because I don't need it. And so what I did is I came in here and I knew my establishing shot. And by the way, I referred to my storyboards to make these match my storyboards. Again, you don't have to do both. But in this project I did. If you had an establishing shot and then I've got a close up of the salesperson and then I got a tight shot of the keys. And the nice thing is in here, if you want, you can move these shots around. And then when you're on set and you're shooting, you can slate each shot and you can mark these numbers. You have one, A1, B1, C1, D. Eat scene can have as many shots as you want in there. So here's seeing two. I've got five shots. Seeing three only had one shot seen four. You get the idea? I went through and I added all these shots. And then on the day when I'm shooting, I go through and I mark them off my shot list. But the nice thing about shot list there is once you enter all these shots and again there's 17 scenes I went through and ended all this information. You come down here and you have your shoot days. And again, only have one shoot day with this project. And at the top here it's going to tell you you have 83 shots, seven and three-eights pages. And it's estimated it can take you 10 h to shoot. Now, fortunately, it didn't take that long and you can go in and adjust that. So here's the actual schedule. And you go through this once you've done your shots and you put it in the order, you want to shoot. As I mentioned, you shoot things out of order. So here at the beginning I've seen one that I did shoot first because we're at the car lot. But then I go down, I shoot seen ten here. And right here, you estimate the amount of time you need to do each shot. So I estimated at 30 min of setup and then I did 15 min on this shot, 10 min here, five-minutes there, 10 min here. Now, this will depend on the stories since we weren't using lights, lighting setups take a long time. Typically, these went pretty quickly. And so my first setup took 40 min roughly that was the plan anyway. And then I skip down to seem ten, and then I skip down to 17. So again, just to understand, we're jumping around in time in the movie because we're shooting them all at the same time, one location. And then I had the information in here, a short description of what the shot is and then details of the lens. I think it would be. You don't have to add that, but I did because I was switching the telephoto and anamorphic back-and-forth. And so I knew when I needed to be on the telephoto versus when I need to be on the wide. So again, this is one day shooting with the schedule. And if you're wondering about these colors, I did that because these different colors were things that I wanted to shoot at the same time while I was set up in one location, e.g. I. Have these front view from hood and they're all blue. And so what I did here is every shot of him through the windshield when he's in the car. Even though these scenes jump all over the place, I did those all at the same time because you wouldn't want to shoot him coming out the door and then move over and shooting at the car, that kind of thing. And then the same idea, whenever he was walking out of the house, I shot all those shots together. So this is how I approached it with shot list there. And then from there what you can do is create a call sheet. So this is a sample call sheet that I include in the course, and this is basically a template. Now for this particular job, I didn't create a call sheet because again, it was just me, one of the person and a couple of other actors. And I've worked with these guys a lot. So depending on your project, you could do a call sheet. You would list the different information that you need here and you would pull this from the schedule. And now, if you're using more advanced software like movie magic or one of the other ones I've mentioned, you can do this within that software. Here. I did it separately. I just use a template. It's a Microsoft Word document and you enter it. And what you would typically do is email this to the cast and crew the day before each shoot, depending on how many days you are shooting. In this case, I shot one day, so it would have been a one day thing. Working in final draft, having the ability to do the script breakdown, numbering your scenes, figuring out your prompts, your locations, your wardrobe, and then bringing that into shot list are to first create your shot list, each of these, and then your actual shooting schedule, and then ultimately your call sheet. So simple tools that are somewhat automated that can really help make your project successful. 14. PreVis Pro Storyboarding Overview: If you've ever made a narrative project, meaning a short film or a feature film, or maybe even a commercial. You've probably done storyboards. Storyboarding can be kind of tedious and kinda tricky. And I've done it myself on various projects and for the longest time, I would usually just get something with my hand. And I would only do action scenes. I wouldn't do every scene in a movie. It was just too much work. And when you're doing independent stuff, you don't really have the budget to do that. But now using an iPad or even an iPhone, there are a lot of great apps you can use to do storyboards, even if you can't draw. One we're gonna look at today is called pre-built pro. Alright, so I've got my iPad Pro and I'm using previous Pro. This is the splash screen when you open the program, what I'm going to show you today are the main things I like about using previous pro. The number one thing that I like about this app is how easy it is to use. These are the storyboards I created for my short film pre-owned. I'm just going to skim through these real quick. If you've seen the short film, you should recognize some of these shots. Enjoy your next. I will. And I actually went in and storyboarded the entire movie. All 17 scenes in the short film are shown here in the storyboards. But we'll come back to this. I just said previous, Pro is super easy to use. And one thing that makes it really easy to use is that if you write and final draft, you can import your script from final draft. And it will automatically create all your scenes and your basic storyboards for you. So right here at the bottom of the screen, it imported successfully pre-owned shooting script 17 scenes, three characters. And then it has the various seen headers and et cetera there. And so that is so incredible and makes this thing so fast and easy to use. I almost can't tell you how awesome that is. It just really speeds up the process. And so once you do that, you come in here and set up the project settings. I shot anamorphic. And then you can choose the size cameras sensor I shot on a phone with you choose phone and it really crops in more than I'd like. And so if you just keep a normal camera, it's fine because this is how you're envisioning the storyboards in your head anyway, it's not exact to the millimeter of the lenses you're using. At least not the way I do them. And you open it. And then what I just showed you previously were the storyboards that I had gone through and done detailed work on. But this is what happens when you first open the program. And again, it's already done a lot of the work for you. I can't stress how cool that is. When you hop into a panel, you have a 2D view. You're looking top-down here. You can slide it around. You get a 3D view. In the 3D view, you can also just come in, slide it around anywhere you want. You can grab the camera with the camera wherever you want. Up here in this preview window, you see what the camera is doing. And then you have various controls on the camera to Dolly, back-and-forth, to pan or tilt. You can swivel it and then you can also boom up and down. And so in a weird way, it's sort of like playing a video game here, but it's all touchscreen. You can come in and just move the camera wherever you want. Now once you're in here, you can actually do some refinements within the actual frame. So you can set focus, you can do autofocus. You can see that a little indicators went around her face and not the background out of focus. And you can choose the lens you're using here. Or you can go into manual and then you can set the depth of field yourself. The other thing is while you're in this view, you can also slide the camera around and re-frame, or you can zoom out and see the characters. And what I'm doing here affects the camera and the previous view in the 3D and the 2D view. Now when you come back out here, you can see the two characters and the camera has moved back. You can duplicate a frame if you want a copy of that frame and just make a different angle. So now I can pull a camera around over here, pan around, and I've got a side angle that when I go back in here, I got this wide shot that I have a side angle. So it's really fast. The duplicate frames keep going within a scene. A scene typically you're going to have like seeing one H1B, whatever different shots within the scene. And then of course you can add any kind of prompts you want in here. You can add objects, you can add characters. You've got another camera, you can add prompts. You can have walls. They have a ton of different prompts. Let's say we're going to put a tree in here. There's the tree. And you can control the way the tree is positioned, how the camera sees it. Put that behind them, go back into 3D. So now you go back up in here, you can see this tree behind them. Now I'm just doing this as an example. Obviously this would be kind of weird to have a tree there. But I just wanted to show how easy it is that prompts and then with the characters, you can add it the way the character looks. You can change the skin, the hair, the eyes, the different height, the different clothes aspects, the colors. You can also go in and change the different poses, which can be really important. Whether they're sitting, whether they're moving, running. Let's say that guy is running away from her. So as I'm going through this, I think you can see how quickly and easily you can manipulate what's in the shot. And it's all done in real time. And then you come back out here and you would go through each scene from there. And so in the beginning I said how easy this is the storyboard and it is, and what it's done for me is make it to where I will storyboard every scene now instead of just action scenes. And I really liked that on this project, I actually printed out all my storyboards to take with me on location. I'm more old school in that respect. I use them in combination with my shot list. Of course, you could also just have your iPad or iPhone on location and scroll through them in the app or on a PDF. I'm going to jump back into my actual storyboards and just wanted to demonstrate the proper aspect one more time, a little more detail. This car is obviously a prop, and so you're able to pop a car in here and then move the camera around the car and also a character. So my character is in the car here. And I did all these storyboards and probably a day. I mean, I thought about them for awhile as I was writing the script. But then the actual storyboarding process for this knocked it out really quickly. In addition to the car, the house played a big role. And so there is, if you've seen the short film, this is sort of like the beginning of the film where I did this big wide dolly in as he had arrived when the car. And the great thing is, again, once you had those prompts, you can cut and paste them and use them repeatedly throughout all the storyboards. This is a good example. So I did the tracking shots as it came out of the house. He's walking out to the driveway that is looking at the car. It's all the same storyboard. I just reposition the camera within the storyboard. Now he's looking up and there's a surveillance camera. There is all very shots and there's a POV of the surveillance camera looking down at him. And then this is a shot of him looking at a phone. This is like a background plate. I didn't actually put the phone prop in his hand. Here's the main storyboard. You can see all these shots are done in the same setup. The cameras down here, now the cameras shooting across the car, all I'm doing is moving the camera around, changing the focal length and re-framing the shots. And so it makes it so easy within one scene to create multiple shots. A sequence I've used quite a bit in the marketing and the film. This is the salesperson and this is the main character and it's his car. He bought a shot. This a little bit differently as you always do. But this is her talking to him and the actual film, instead of being so low, I raise the camera up and shot across the door. She was down on the ground looking at the seat in the beginning. Here's the side of the seat. You push the button and it automatically adjust to that? Yeah. I mean, yes, it's working. But I mean, what about the stereo? I mean, that's weird, right? So you can get some really similar looks that what you're going to actually do in the film. This is a nice sequence here. I have the camera up above the car. He runs out and then he runs into the yard and the arrow indicated here as the camera dollies into him, I was on a gimbal. It looks back at the car. He looks into the car. You haven't seen the film. These are some spoilers here, so be sure to check that out if you haven't seen it yet. Now he's looking at the car because he hears something in the trunk. Now it goes back to the trunk. And this is him looking up into the trunk and that's actually a photo I took in the actual location to help sell it here for the storyboard. And speaking of photos, the other thing that this app can do, and I didn't actually use it on this particular project. It has an AR feature that can really, really up your game when you're doing location scouting and previous for your movie. They sample shots are from the guys at previous Pro. It really shows how you can place your characters and real-world locations, real-world environments using AR. And this is something I will definitely use on a future project. Prevents Pro is a professional app and while it can be great for hobbyists, It's really for you guys that are more serious about making films, commercials, Digital Series, et cetera. They have several different ways you can pay for the app, including student pricing. I would suggest doing the lifetime, it's a onetime fee or you can do annual. But the onetime fee is just like buying a piece of software for your computer and you can do use it or ever know subscription or anything like that. And you get the continuous updates. And speaking of a computer, if you have a newer Mac with the Apple silicon chip, you can now use previous pro on that too, which is pretty cool. This really does make storyboarding easy and I really recommend trying it out. Thanks again to pre-bid. It's Pro we're partnering with me on this project. And thank you guys for watching. 15. Storyboard Animator Overview: So here's a short sequence from the actual movie. And here is a storyboard that I took into Premier Pro and create an antibiotic. And antiemetic is just an animation, the shots from the storyboard editing them together. And in this case, I actually had the music picked beforehand. And so I was able to create an antibiotic to the music. I will show you the first minute or so of this just so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about. Now. Normally I don't storyboard every shot. Normally what I'll do is storyboard, action scenes or complicated camera moves. So here I did it mainly because he was just gonna be me shooting. And so I wanted to have a good plan going in. Often on bigger projects, you would do this so you can show your DP, your director of photography, what kind of shots you want that is if you're directing. But really the main thing I want to show here is how easy storyboards can be to make. I think people get nervous when they hear storyboarding or think of really high-end professional drawings. And while those are great, you definitely don't need those at all. And really you could just do stick figures if you want it. But here I used an app on my iPad. It's a free app called storyboard and animator. There is a 399 in-app purchase for the pro version. It gives you more panels to work with and that kind of thing. So in this storyboard app, you're doing simple sketches. That's all you're doing. It's not complicated. You're not using any 3D objects or anything like that. I have other apps like that and I rarely use them. So all you do is you use your finger to draw. You can click through each panel full screen. You can play them back in the app in real time. You set up the duration of each panel there at the bottom right. And you can quickly scroll through all the panels at one time. You can also add information for each panel, which is nice. And then when you go into that particular view, you can see it. And if you printed this out as a PDF, that information would be there. So now I'll do a very quick demo on how easy it is to do a sketch. You do not have to be a good artist. You just need to know what kind of shot you want. So here I am drawing the close-up of somebody's face. If you mess up, I want to make corrections, just use the eraser. So there you have it that took me a couple of minutes and it's a very simple sketch, but it would translate to what I needed to shoot. And yet, I guess he does look a little bit like, Hey man doesn't eat. What's cool too, is you can use different layers, different colors. This app offers quite a bit and the key is it's really easy to use. So once you're done, you can print it out as a PDF. You can export a video, an antibiotic, or you can send out images. There's a lot of flexibility here. Using an app like this. There's really no excuse not to storyboard if you want to. So here's the short film now synced up to the storyboard so you can see how it all kind of aligned. Hello. 16. Location & Tech Scout: Now another important part of pre-production is location scouting. Location scouting is typically done through a location scout or location manager. Here being DIY, you'll most likely do this yourself. Ideally look for locations that are free and try to keep it simple. And by the way, when you write your script, you should really only have one or very few locations involved on a low budget, no budget short film that's especially important. And once you have your locations chosen, you need to go back and do a tech scout with the principal crew. Now if you're shooting at your parents house or your backyard, you may not need to location scout. But if you're going out to any other locations in your city or another town, or even a studio, you need to go check it out beforehand with your DP, your gaffer, whoever, your audio person, or if it's just you and another crew member, you gotta go check those out in advance and you're looking for sound. You're looking to make sure that you're not right next to a railroad track. Or if you are, When did the trains come by? You don't want to mess up your audio. You want to check if you're shooting outside, where does the sun hit? When does it hit? If you're in a building, you want to find out where the power is or if you're outside, whereas the power, are you going to need a generator to run lights or are you going to shoot with natural light? Or are you going to be near a river that's making noise if you're inside like I've shot in kitchens before you go in there, it looks great. Then you don't realize that the refrigerators are running and it messes up your sound and you can unplug them. And so it's just a good idea to location scout and get a plan before you actually shoot. No matter where you're shooting. Again, even if that's in a studio, you want to go into the studio and figure out where you're going to hang your lights, where the sound person's going to be, where wardrobe is going to be, et cetera, et cetera. Now, depending on your project, you might not have any of those worries. But location scouting is a vital thing to do when you're preparing in pre-production for your film. 17. Rehearsals: One other component to pre-production would be rehearsal. And now this can overlap with production. It really depends on again, how big of a shoot you're doing. I personally do not rehearse. I don't like rehearsals unless I'm doing technical rehearsals with blocking with actors. And often I'll do that on the day right before we're going to shoot. Unless it's really complex, then you go out and a location scout, as I just mentioned in the previous section, with your DP, maybe it was stumped coordinator, whoever figure out a plan of action, shown the storyboards. But as far as rehearsing with the actors, it's subjective. A lot of directors love it. A lot of actors love it. A lot of directors hate it. A lot of actors hate it. For me. Most of the time. I get what the actors beforehand. We know the character, we know the script. We have conversations over the phone or sometimes in person depending on if they're in town or how much time we have. But I just make sure they know what's going on in the story and their character. And then when they're on set on, in the day or in the moment, That's why I like to look at it. It's fresh, it's not rehearsed. Now, a lot of actors are great actors. It doesn't feel rehearsed, but less experience actors can get a little bit robotic, almost like a stage player theater show. That is a different way of working in those scenarios. You have to rehearse because you're doing an entire hour, 45-minute long P set of one stretch. In movies, you know, you're doing sometimes 10 s or 30 s and the whole story comes together in the edit. Now, that's an over-generalization. Sometimes you'll have ten-minute long monologues with a slow dolly into an actor's face, whatever it may be in those situations, it might be a good idea to rehearse, but for me as a general rule, I'm not big on rehearsals. And then when you're working with low to no money, there's really not time to do it anyway. And so I like to work in the moment. But rehearsing is something you should consider depending on the project and depending on how you like to work. 18. You're Ready To Shoot!: The day has come, it's time to shoot your movie. Now, this can be an extremely exciting day and a scary day. At the very same time, trust me, I've been there, especially when you're just beginning. The thing is if you've done everything we've talked about so far in pre-production, development, et cetera. You've got everything planned out. You've got a blueprint. So you're ready to go. Now you gotta do is execute that plan and bring your story to life. The things I've learned over the years, I think we're really help. Number one, be sure to get plenty of sleep. Being more rested will keep you sharp and be able to make quick decisions on your feet. Because I promise you things will not go as planned, even though you've got to plan. It won't go as planned. That's just the way this works. And what I would expect to happen is you'll lose a location, it might rain. Someone will call in sick. You won't have your full crew there and maybe a cast member. You can always work around this stuff, but just be prepared. Who knows? You may be at a location and someone starts up their lawn mower or a lawn crew shows up and they're blowing leaves everywhere. As a side note, what I always tend to do, his bring some bribe money with me, like $120 bill that wave along crew does fire up and then you can go there and ask them politely to come back later maybe in an hour and you give them some money. It's worked for me, doesn't always work, but it's worth a try. Keep a notebook or a clipboard with your version of the shooting script along with many shot list or storyboards you have. You will reference that throughout the entire shoot and each day in particular, what I do is actually scratch off the shots I've gotten and be sure to put your name on it because what will happen inevitably as you'll lose it, I always lose my shot list and my clipboard. And so part of my struggle is keeping up with it. But if your name is on it, people will find it and bring it back to you. If it's a small crew, not as big of a deal on larger jobs though it's good to keep it labeled, but be sure to bring that with you because you will reference it all day long. A few other ones are show up early. Be sure not to eat junk food during the shoot. Drink plenty of water. Always be open to suggestions from other cast and crew members. Now, it's your vision, don't compromise and don't have someone maybe give you suggestions in front of the whole crew. Maybe they pull you aside, but you'd be surprised how often even someone who's not directly involved, maybe a day player, a grip might have a good idea on how to light a scene. Or an actor would have a good idea on maybe what their character needs to make a scene work, always be open to input because filmmaking is very collaborative. And it will really make your job much easier and make your movie better. In the end, if it's a good suggestion, you can take credit for it. And above all else, have fun. I can't stress that enough. You're working for little to no money. Everyone's working for little to no money. And so the reason you're there is because you're doing something you love, you're passionate about it. And so you want to have a good time. Again, I can't stress that enough. So keep a positive attitude even when times get tough because I assure you they will and enjoy the journey. 19. Production Gear Overview: Alright, now that, that overview is out of the way, That's really the guide part, the short film guide. Now we're gonna get into the gear. And gear can be subjective. And this part right here will really be specific for my iPhone. Although some of the stuff like lighting and Gimbels, etc, could crossover to traditional cameras. The previous sections I went over could apply to any kind of camera. The camera is not really important for that. You're telling your story, figured out what your story is going to be. But now we'll talk about the gear we're going to use and what I used and how maybe it'll work for you. Keep in mind that gear changes all the time, especially phones, technology changes. This is a general overview of what I used during the production of pre-owned, but don't get too bogged down on the exact models are brands, et cetera. There are great options out there and they will continue to be as phones change, gear changes and technology advances. And so in this overview, I talked about the principle gear here. But after that, I have a couple of other sections that go into a little more detail on different aspects like the cages, ND filter, Gimbels, et cetera. So what's this overview and then check out the subsequent sections for additional details. My original idea was to produce this short film to test out the ProRes video codec that was added in the iPhone 13 Pro Series devices. As I was preparing for the film, I quickly learned that the new larger sensor and camera bump on the 13 pro affected the way third-party external lenses worked on the phone. Many actually didn't work. So I shot some charts and determined through my testing that the moment 58 millimeter telephoto and the Beast grip 1.33 times anamorphic V2, the version to model. And that's important, worked very well. And I'm talking about on the iPhone standard wide lens. The lens is, I tested had soft edges and or chromatic aberration. I loved the way the B script lenses have this screw on Mount filter. They're very easy to use, robust and of course work great with the beast cage. So in the end, I decided to use the two lenses from different brands, but also there are different types of lenses. The telephoto is a traditional spherical lens, and the anamorphic is well anamorphic. But on smartphones you don't actually get the oblong vertical bokeh that traditional anamorphic lenses have. I wasn't too worried about them matching. I really just wanted the best image I could capture. But this actually caused additional problems. Shooting with a phone in wanting a cinematic look with the proper shutter speed and motion blur, I have coerced needed to use neutral density filters since each lens has its own mounting system that made it kinda tricky. One is the moment bayonet mount and the other is a universal 37 milimeter map. And I also only had one variable ND filter that I wanted to use. The idea of constantly changing lenses and moving the filter back-and-forth was not an ideal situation. And I mentioned the beast cage and that's what I wanted to use because it is by far the most robust iPhone filmmaking cage out there. And it has mounts for both lenses. But to use them, you have to unscrew them out and replace it each time. Again, not ideal. So what I ended up doing was shooting with the two different rigs using one phone. I use an iPhone Pro Max and the filmic pro app shooting for k 24 frames per second, ProRes log on the beach. Cade's setup I use the B script pro 1.33 x anamorphic V2 lens with the free well two to five stop VND, missed filter. Shooting the car stuff. We're using a zoom recorder and a road in Tg microphone and a big shotgun mic. The beast cage. And we've got an ND filter on here with the beast script anamorphic. And then my second rig was the small rib-cage for the iPhone Pro Max. On it, I use the moment 58 millimeter telephoto with the moment filter mount that DIY gap, they break. And then I would add the same free well, B and D filter to it. That way the only accessory I was moving whenever I change setups was the filter. The lenses stayed put on each cage. But of course I did have to move the phone in and out of the cage each time. So that's pretty easy, much easier than switching the lenses out in this particular situation. In a perfect world, I would have been great to have two different phones. And I actually do recommend that for shoots like this, if you can make that happen. I shot most of the movie on a tripod, but I did do a handful of shots using a gimbal. And this gimbal was the jeoneun crane in three. When shooting on the tripod, I use both lenses. But on the gimbal, I only use the anamorphic. And I did have one scene where I needed a polarizer filter because we shot through a windshield. And so here I switched out the main v and d I was using. And I put one on that had a polarizer built-in. And all these shots, we're done with the telephoto. You might be wondering how I took traditional 16 by nine footage and married it with widescreen anamorphic footage. Well, the first thing I did was I used the guides and filmic pro to know where I would crop in and post-production. This is a really great feature that I actually use quite a bit. Then the second thing was I edited and a widescreen 23921 timeline and re-frame the telephoto shots. 20. Moment Lens DIY Gaff Tape Rig: So why do I have gaff tape on the back of this? What otherwise is a normal looking moment lens and a filter map. I posted this behind the scenes picture on social media. I wanted the number one things people ask is, hey, why do you have tape all over that lens? I use this setup on this small rib cage because it is a bayonet mount ribs. That way I can add filters to this moment tele lens. The moment filter mount is a 62 millimeter and this is a step-up bring on here, 62-77 mm. And that's because I used the 77 millimeter mount V and deep builder. This one is from free well, and it also has missed built-in. Why the tape? Well, maybe you're starting to get an idea. This is becoming a pretty heavy setup. You've got the lens itself, the filter mount, the step-up ring, and then the actual filter. And here's where the tape comes into play. If you've ever used the moment filter them out. It is simply a rubber ring that goes around the lens. And they make one for each of their lenses. This one is for the anamorphic. This one is for the one-hundredth millimeter. And then the one on here is for the telephoto. Then the actual mount, this metal piece here slides over that and then onto the lens. You can see it right in here. And note that I said it slides and so it just slides on, doesn't click on it more or less just fits over the end. Which if you're not doing anything too dramatic to bouncy too involved is no problem for me when you're moving around a lot. And then you're changing filters constantly, you need some reinforcement. And that is where the tape comes in. This is just plain old gaff tape. And it works great. No, it doesn't look pretty, but who cares what it looks like behind the scenes? It's all about what it looks like on camera. This setup works very well. 21. Camera App: For pre-owned, I use the filmic pro app. It doesn't really matter what app you use as long as you use an app that gives you manual control. And that is the key aspect. You want to be able to set your shutter speed and your ISO, and then also adjust your focus as needed. Although often I will just run autofocus, but manual settings including white balance, being able to set a preset or a custom white balance. That is vitally important when you're doing this kind of project. Now, you could use the native camera app. The native camera app actually has ProRes now a great codec. This is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. If you have a 13 or 14, you can shoot ProRes, not completely necessary, but for hiring content for higher-quality stuff. I like to shoot in higher-quality codecs. And of course, you also have cinematic mode in the native camera. Now for me, I really like cinematic mode, especially in the 14, because you can now shoot 24 frames per second. And for k, However, for a narrative project, I would not shoot in cinematic mode, just a word of warning. It's subjective, but that's just my own personal taste. While the cut-out is really good and it's getting better all the time. It is definitely not perfect. And so I would only shoot cinematic mode for me anyway. Unlike B-roll or maybe even a travel film, you might do it for a shot here or there and your movie or on a music video. But anything more complicated where you're tracking something, the focus will not be perfect. Maybe one day it will, but right now it's not. And so I would shoot in regular video mode. You're going to use the native camera app and what the larger sensors now, you actually can get some shallow depth of field, especially when objects are closer to the camera. But typically speaking, I would use a third-party app, whether that's filmic pro or one of the other ones that I've covered on my YouTube channel. You probably know by now that filmic Pro is going through a subscription model. I've been a big filmic pro proponent for shoot since 2011 or so. And I still am. But I know a lot of people don't want to subscribe to an app, a mobile app in particular. And so there are other options out there that you can look at, depending whether you're on Android or iPhone four iPhone my top ones right now are the cinema P3 camera app. B scam, movie pro, pro take, and probably the moment app on Android. There's some differences because these are mainly iOS. So I'll put links to these apps and other apps for Android in the additional resources section. But the main takeaway here, especially when you're doing a narrative project that you want to use a manual app so you can set your ISO and your shutter and of course your white balance and just have control over your image instead of letting the phone automatically do its thing. Manual apps are very important. 22. Gimbals: So in pre-owned, I use this gimbal and I don't want to go into the specifics on the brands of Gimbels that I use are the brands of gear necessarily, because gear changes all the time. This is more of a general suggestion or idea on what gear you should use or what gear you might use depending on your setup. What I like about these kinds of Gimbels, this is what I would call a hybrid gimbal, is they work with smartphones and traditional cameras. Small traditional cameras, mirrorless cameras are point and shoot, or even go pro, etc. This will hold a couple of pounds, maybe up to four. And so it's more versatile than say, This gimbal. This is a DJI ON for SC. So this came out actually after the OM five. And at the time of this video, there's now an OH M6. And that's kinda the point I wanna make. Gear always changes almost yearly. So don't really get bogged down on the type of gear. Again, in the end, a gimbal is a gimbal is a gimbal, and they all work pretty much the same unless you're looking at different cameras, sizes, and weights. That's where these type of Gimbels or you're much better bet. So if you're doing a short film and it's super DIY, super minimalistic. You're not putting anything on the camera. Then this type of gimble a smartphone only gimbal will be more than fine. But if you're putting anything on the phone such as I did in pre-owned where I use the cage, I use an ND filter, I use different lenses, et cetera. Then you absolutely want to use a more robust gimbal. Now with modern phones, the stabilization is really, really good. So you may not need a gimbal is what I'm trying to say. It just depends on your shoe, depends on the project. Lots of times for travel style films are just YouTube videos. I bypass a gimbal and just use the phone stabilization. However, if you're shooting something, what I call more steady cam like meaning tracking shots, following characters. Very traditional movie style shots than a gimbal is still necessary for a lot of reasons. You just have more accuracy and you can be more precise with your moves. And also, again, if you're putting anything on the camera, then you would definitely want to have a more robust set up. Also with these larger gambles, you can grip them with two hands if necessary, which can be a big benefit. You could do that with these smaller Gimbels, but that's not really necessary because the weight is already so light. You normally do that with a bigger gimbal, two-handed when you have more weight. Now, if you want to learn more about these Gimbels, I've done lots of videos on my YouTube channel, review type videos that will give you more details. Again, I'm not going into that here. I'm really just going over what I use for pre-owned and making suggestions for what to use on your film. And again, I think a hybrid gimbal, if you're doing narrative type work, music videos, et cetera, is the way to go. And this crane in three or similar type Gimbels are ones you should look at. 23. Phone Cages: I mentioned using a cage and the gimbal section. And these are the two cages I used on pre-owned. In the overview I talked about why I use two cages. That would be non-ideal. And in a perfect world, you would just use one cage. I had to do it because I always switching lenses and they wouldn't work a little bit convoluted, hopefully again and your situation that wouldn't be necessary. But cages are really important when doing narrative type work. Not only to give you more support and like I've got this grip here. This is a beast handle. I've got a side group. This is a small ribcage by the way. Then on this cage I've got an ND filter mounted. And I'll talk about ND filters in a minute. And then I've got a little nato rail here on top. But I could put a monitor on. Now it didn't actually use the monitor shooting pre-owned. You could though, depending on the scenario. This is the beast cage. I have an adapter on here right now, but I can mount a filter on here without lenses, which is nice because you don't have to add external lenses by the way. I did, and I went over that in the overview. And then if you haven't watched it, be sure to check out the moment telephoto where I do the gaff tape rig with the actual ND filter that gives more explanation. But today, smartphone lenses have gotten much better. However, one of the main reasons I use them as I like using the main camera in the most. And so if you put a telephoto on the main, or you could even put one on the telly, although some lenses now don't actually work well on the telly. The three-times tele, the longer tail is on the latest generation. Iphones don't work as well with lenses, but the mainlands is great. Not only the best lens, it also is better in low light, it has the best quality. And with the iPhone 14 Pro, you now have a two times tele in that. And so you can push in with that and go to four times by using external lens. Let me be clear though, even though I use iPhones, you can use any kind of phone you want. It's just what I am used to and what I prefer. Shoot your film or whatever you want. And again, doesn't have to be a phone, it could be a mirrorless camera. This section obviously is going over my phone setup. But the main thing about a cage is again, attaching that kind of accessory lens, but mainly ND filters and also microphones if needed. If you're using a cage, you want to use a larger type of gimbal or like with this hand grip here, especially for shooting handheld, you can just do it like this. You can hold it with these different handles and not even use a gimbal completely depends on the type of film you're making or the type of project you're making. If it's a music video, whatever, the cages are a great thing to use. And also, not only does that make it easier to work with, especially in larger productions, but it actually makes your camera look more professional to some people that matters too. It doesn't really matter to me. But it is cool to trick out your camera and make it feel like a more traditional camera. But that's not the real reason you do it. You do it because these accessories that you're adding to it are necessary, especially when doing narrative type work. 24. ND Filters: I'm pre-owned, I use this ND filter. This is a variable ND filter. So you can adjust it. 2-5 stops. What an ND filter does on a smartphone is helps control the shutter speed. Ideal motion blur is what you're going after. So if you're shooting 24 frames per second, you want your shutter speed to be 148. That follows the 180 degree rule. Now again, this isn't a tutorial about that kind of thing. But just know that ND filters are important, especially when you're doing narrative kind of work, shooting in bright, light, bright sun. The other thing I did on this shoot though, is this has missed built into it. And so it gives a very subtle highlight bloom and just softens the image ever so slightly. Which is good because smartphones have very sharp images and so it makes it more cinematic. And quotes Miss filters are super common. They're used all the time, sometimes heavily in light news or even in some movies, especially when you're talking about people's skin or their use light just to bloom highlights and that gives it more of a filmic look. You don't have to use a misspelled word though. There's a lot of different kinds of diffusion. Blackness filters that do different things like lowering contrast. And then again, just softening the image ever so slightly, which for smartphone footage I find to be very important. And so doesn't really matter the brand per se. This one is from free. Well, this one's from moment. They both make very quality products that are affordable and not too crazy expensive. Again, a lot of brands out there. I just wouldn't skimp on an indie. I would personally spend a little bit extra money and get a really good quality in D, because you don't want there to be any kind of weird color shifts or vignetting. And the nicer indies, we'll always keep your image looking great. 25. Lighting: So now we'll talk about lighting, and this is a little LED light. But I'm pre-owned. I actually use natural light, meaning I shot outside. And so I didn't really use any light except inside the car when he's in the driveway. As the day got longer and we started losing light, which you'll hear that on a film set. Occasionally we're losing light. I did use an LED as a kicker light on his face. That's it. Everything else was available light. And so it really depends on your project. But if you're doing a DIY project, I would highly suggest trying to use natural light, or sometimes called available light. Although available light is the amount of light in a location, like if window lights coming in, etc. But natural light, meaning the Sun, is a great way to go. But a couple of things you need to keep in mind. Number one, you don't want to shoot in the middle of the day. You'd want to shoot in the morning like the first couple hours, There's a term called golden hour. You don't want to just do golden hour because that's just for a short period of time. But if you shoot from just after sunrise to about mid-morning, depending on the time of year. And then if you shot in the later afternoon and the evening, Those are great time to shoot outside. Now if you shoot during the middle of the day, you can, but you need to be in shade or you need to have some sort of a silk or a cover, something to diffuse the light. Or like with pre-owned, we actually had cloud cover on the day of the shoot which worked out great. Because not only did it fit the story, it also gave us a very nice soft light. So it's hard to plan around cloudy days, but if you can, that's a good way to shoot if it fits because that way you don't have hard lighting and harsh shadows from the sun map you're shooting inside. You can use Windows, and you can also use reflectors. Reflectors are a great thing that I use all the time to bounce light into people's faces. So you can use just a board like a whiteboard to bounce light. You could use something that has a shiny side to it, or you can use even a mirror. There are a lot of different ways to go depending on your particular shot or you're seeing. And of course, one thing to note is you can also use available light, natural light, so to speak, shooting at night, not nights, a little bit tougher, especially with a phone. But e.g. if you shot under streetlights or maybe lights outside a store, you can pull that off with available light, natural light. And even inside you can use practical lamps, et cetera. But shooting at night, you may need to add some artificial light. But the easiest and most affordable thing is just to pick up a reflector. You can get them on Amazon for low-cost. They have multiple different sides to them. And again, I'll put a link to one of those in the additional resources, including other type of lights. If you're doing a more advanced shoot, we're doing a more advanced shoe. You'd probably rent lights instead of going out and buying lights. But again today with LED, affordable LEDs like this and others, you can really get away with minimal lighting. And in particular, when you use the best light of all, and that's sunlight and shoot with natural light. 26. Lenses: I'm pre-owned, I use two lenses. This is the moment telephoto, and this is an indie mount that's on there. And I use the B script, anamorphic version two. And so I mentioned in the cage section two where you don't have to use lenses today. Iphone cameras have some pretty nice lenses. However, these are two that it's hard to achieve, but the camera less so the telephoto, you can get good telephoto shots now. But the anamorphic, you really can't, yeah, you can cheat it. You could just do a letterbox or a crop and post-production. But it really doesn't do the same thing because the anamorphic has several features. Of course, yes, it's widescreen. It also has distortion with some people like, some people don't like. And then importantly it has a lens flares. And so to get those type of characteristics, you really need to shoot with an anamorphic lens. And to do that is when you would need to use a cage or a case depending on the lens. Because some anamorphic lenses, like moment and other brands will fit right onto a case. This one would require a cage. But when it comes to using lenses, if you're gonna do something that adds a little more character, like again, I use this telly to get more shallow depth of field, but I'm sure it'll work itself out. And if it doesn't, we have the 15th day money-back guarantee. And then this again gives it a interesting widescreen look. Or you might use a fisheye lens. That's when you need to add lenses to your phone. Otherwise, oftentimes you can get away with just using the built-in lenses depending on which phone you have. 27. Audio: So now let's talk a little bit about how I did audio on pre-owned. I shot with a boom mic. This is the road in T G4 plus. Now as I've said, don't get bogged down on brands or exact models. What you would need is a shotgun mike similar to this to do what I did on pre-owned. This is a very common way to do audio on a movie in particular or commercial. Anything narrative. This is a dead cat. And so this knocks down when you put that over the mic itself. This plugs into a cable, then that cable goes into an external recorder. Now this is a task cam recorder, not the actual one I used on the movie. I used a zoom recorder, but they are virtually identical, just a different brand. And so I don't have the cable right now, but an XLR cable would connect these two. And then that way you can record the dialogue or Nat sound or whatever you recording sound effects directly into this system. It's a stand-alone system. And so if you're recording dialogue in a scene with this, because of the nature of smartphones, you can't plug in XLR mics. You would record the audio into the phone. So here's a phone. All I would do with the phone is typically what anyway, what I do is that only put a mike on there. I just use the built-in mic because that's just reference audio. And so then when you get in post-production, you take this audio, they're really nice, clean audio, and marry it with this audio. So you sync those in editing, and then you delete the reference audio and you have the clean audio. That's called double system sound. That's the way I do pretty much everything when I'm recording on my phone. Again, what I'm talking about, more advanced stuff, like a movie. If I'm doing a YouTube video or just shooting B-roll, I will rig out a phone with a microphone on it, and that works fine. And in particular, if you're using a small shotgun mic that's on the actual phone, this one would be too big. That works fine for certain things, but you've got to be really close to the phone within three or 4 ft to really get good sound. So obviously that's not going to work for a movie in this situation, we actually boomed it and because it was a two-person crew, I had the microphone on a boom pole and then I had that on a stand. And I just put it over the actor. Unless they're moving, then you've got to have someone operate the boom. Now, the other way you can do audio for a narrative is with wireless mikes. Now wireless mikes you can run into a phone so you don't have to do double system. However, if you have more than one person talking, it can get a little tricky because then you don't want them to overlap. You want to have discrete audio with rode my x and a couple of others. You can do discrete channels into your phone. But in my experience on a narrative project, even if you're doing wireless mikes, it's probably best to go into an external recorder, a dedicated recorder, so you don't have all that going into your phone. Again, it just really depends on the job. Because if you're doing a YouTube video or you're doing a new story, that is probably the way to go self-contained into the foam. Again, if you're doing something like a movie, it's best to have standalone audio that you didn't sink in post-production. So hope that all makes sense. Again, don't get bogged down by the mike brand because other great Mike brands out there like Sanitizer, et cetera. And so just get the mic that you can afford and it works best or you can even rent it might depending on your project. But recording good sound, getting clean audio. I can't stress enough how important that is. And so don't skimp on your audio, get good sound. 28. Post-Production Overview: Now we'll bring it all together and talk about how I did post-production. Now, this is subjective as well, at least the way you do it, what software to use I use Premiere Pro. You might use Final Cut Pro, you might use luma fusion. Davinci Resolve is another good one. A lot of different ways to go and then the end, it's just a tool, your story and how you tell your story is the important part, not the software you use. And so this isn't going to be a full-on tutorial because as I said earlier, these kind of things can be of course all of their own. However, what we will talk about, it's what I did for pre-owned and how I took an iPhone and made it look, I think a very cinematic filmic look out of a phone. And if you didn't know better, you might not realize it was shot on a phone. And ultimately, that's what I'm always trying to do. No matter what camera I'm using. I'm trying to make it look filmic. I'm trying to make it not look like it's shot whatever camera I'm using. Unless I shot film, shot film before film looks like film. The old joke is, if you want your movie to look like film, shoot on film. Because every thing today has its own kind of look. Red has its own look, area, has its own look. Iphone has its own look. Although with shooting techniques and software, you can absolutely make it look much higher end and much more filmic. And so that's what we're going to talk about now. The first part of post-production was actually handled during the production because of the integration of frame IO and filmic pro. Each time I rolled a clip, a proxy file was recorded and uploaded to the Cloud. Then that can preview it or share it with my iPhone or iPad or on a computer. And this was particularly great with this project because I shot ProRes and those files are huge. So I was able to instantly see my footage in my editing app. That would be Premiere Pro. And I can even start my editor if I want to, before I even transfer the files to my computer. I did the actual editing in Adobe Premiere Pro, but of course this can be done in any editing app you prefer. The nice thing about using Premiere Pro here was that it links to frame io as I just mentioned. And so I can preview and work with that footage directly again without even transferring it to my computer. Now in this case, because it was only a one day shoot, I did go ahead and transfer those high res files and use those to edit width. But if it would have been a multi-day shoot or if I would've had even more footage, I would have done an offline edit using the proxy files. And then later all you have to do is really linked to the high-risk files. We recorded all the audio to a zoom recorder. And so I had to sink that in post-production with the video and the reference track I recorded into the phone, which was just the camera Mike. With that done, I then proceeded to the actual editing. I spent about six weeks or so in post on this film. The first assembly edit, just putting the movie together was done in only a couple of days. But of course, the process of editing is re editing and revising. Onenote too is I actually shot both for k 1.33 times anamorphic and traditional spherical 16 by nine footage. And so what I did was I edit in a 2k23 921 wide aspect ratio. Then I re-framed the 16 by nine shots within that. So this process took me about several weeks and simultaneously I was doing rough sound design. For sound design, I did record some original boldly on location while I was shooting, e.g. when the key drops from the trunk near the end of the movie. And then depending on the scene, I add another sound effects I either recorded or that are already owned, or I also use artless. I haven't artless subscription where I get sound effects along with music. Speaking of the music from art list, I actually largely score this movie with music from there as well. That's one of the great things today is the quote, unquote, stock music sites are really good. They don't sound like stock music from the past, that's for sure. And of course there are numerous services out there. This is not a sponsored video by art list by any stretch, I just use art list, but music bed is great. Sound Stripe. There are lots of others out there. Really great way for indie filmmakers to get much higher in sounds, music, and sound design without breaking the bank. The hardest part of that process is actually finding and choosing the music. But once I got that pig, I didn't edit it in and added that to the various sound design and I locked picture. And that's very important. You want to picture lock before you move on to these next phases. And of course, picture lock means that the editing is done. You're not going to be moving things around are shifting. At least that's the idea. Sometimes it doesn't stick, but that's what you want to try to have done before you move on. The next phase for me was doing the cleanup and sweetening of the production dialogue. Then of course from there going onto the sound mix, I did all this in Premier Pro, but also use audition, and I use several plugins, including one of my favorite. From isotope RX eight, which is really great at cleaning up dialogue, removing unwanted noise. Doing dialogue cleanup like that can be really tedious, but these type of plugins can really save the day. And there are other ones including in Final Cut Pro et cetera. Everything I'm mentioning here is just what I use. There are always options out there depending on what editing app or what audio editing apps you're using. But to really show what I did check out this before and after sample of some really noisy audio recorded in the car lot. There was tons of traffic driving by. But then I cleaned it up. I think it's malfunctioning or something. I don't know. Maybe somebody's getting it at night. I don't know. I just lock it right. Login. Super careful. I think it's about functioning or something. I don't know. Maybe somebody's getting it at night. I don't know. I just you lock it right here. Lock it like super careful. Another option of course, would be to do looping where you go in and you replace the actor's dialogue with something new you recorded in a studio. But that takes time and money and lots of times it doesn't sound nearly as good as the original production audio. And so in this case, for me, the plugins worked well. And just to be clear, I did this process throughout the entire movie. Most scenes weren't this noisy, but I went through and cleaned up all the dialogue and then did the sound mix. With the sound mix. Now done, I moved on to color grading and visual effects, the color grading, I also did directly within Premiere Pro using Lumetri color, that's their color correction tool. But then my LUT packs. In addition, I use thumb convert nitrate. Again, these are plug-ins that I use. There are other ones on the market that you might prefer, but these worked well for me. Shooting ProRes log gives you a nice latitude in post to be able to bend the footage around when you're doing color correction and using lots. And so it's a great way to get started with color correction and grading. But of course you will have to finesse it. And I did a lot of that on this project. For this particular film, I wanted a desaturated and cooler look, somewhat bluer tone. And as a side note, one thing I did that was kind of tedious, but it's also kinda cool that you can do this is his shirt was blue and the color grading I did in certain shots, it made the shirt look black, almost very dark. And so I added a secondary color correction. Basically, I use the eyedropper and created a key around his shirt that particular color, and I added saturation to it and some luminance. So that's just something else to consider when you're editing of how you can manipulate the colors, not just from a stylized grading point of view, but from a practical point of view, depending of course on what you're trying to do. And I mentioned film convert as I wanted to do a film emulation on this footage, and I chose one from Fuji. And I also add just a little bit of grain. Again, this is an optional thing, but I really liked doing this to really any footage, any digital camera. But in particular to mobile shot footage. For the most part, this footage was pretty clean since I shot outside in a fairly bright environment, but I did get video noise sometimes in the shadows. I used a pretty heavy ND filter. And if you've ever shot with a phone, you know that sometimes even in brighter conditions, you can get video noise using indie especially, or even just bringing the exposure down to a level that you want. If the phone auto exposes, it'll usually brighten the shadows and eliminate the noise. But in a movie often you want to have a moodier look and it will bring in noise. And so to fight that, I use neat video, It's a great plugin that will de-noise your footage. Unfortunately, I didn't have to use it a lot, but I did use it some. And in a couple of shots in particular, it really made a big difference. And just like the other plug-ins I've used, there are other types of plug-ins depending on what app you're using. E.g. DaVinci Resolve has its own built-in. Just depends on what app you're using. The only caveat would be if you're editing and luma fusion on an iPad or an iPhone, currently they don't have any de-noising product, at least not one that I know. We have some really noisy footage. You may have to bring it into a traditional editing app. The last piece of the puzzle was some visual effects shots. Now one shot and this movie is an obvious visual effects shot spoiler alert. It is when he looks in the trunk and gets basically disintegrated by a fireball. But before I talk about that one, I want to show one that is not so noticeable. And as a matter of fact, these types of shots get done all the time in movies. On this wide shot here, I inadvertently captured the mic and actually cliff, the guy who shot the project with me holding the mic. And so I had to go in and erase him out in quotes from the shot now, But what about a background plate for this exact shot? It wouldn't have been a big deal, but unfortunately I didn't. I had moved the camera and so I had to combine a couple of shots using Photoshop. And within Photoshop I had to use content aware that it'll fill in spaces. It copies the pixels close to it and almost clones it and makes it disappear in quotes. And then the trunk shot, of course, we're Arnie, our hero, looks in and then catches fire and his burned alive. That's shot was done by Cliff Richard, who I mentioned earlier. And he used After Effects to do that. And some particles from trap code particular, along with fire elements from the action VFX collection, some Spark elements from video copilot, action and essentials, and smoke and some sound effects from Envato Elements. I was really happy with what he achieved here. One interesting thing too, I wanted to show, we actually did two versions. Here's the one in the final film. And then here is the alternate. I like them both, but I thought the first one was better in the end because it happened faster. And I think it fit the story better and it was a little more of a surprise. Then the last thing I did was create a master video file for my archive, which was a 239 14k ProRes file. I upscale the movie from two k for k within Premiere Pro. And then of course I exported a file for YouTube. It too is for k, but it was H.264. And on that one I did a two-to-one aspect ratio. Currently, YouTube does not allow you to do full widescreen 23921 and keep video elements on the end of your videos. So that's why I didn't do that. But I used the widescreen and other places like Vimeo or any future screenings at a festival or whatever. Although I have not entered any, so I may never do that. So that's it. That's how I did post-production on the short film. 29. Color Grading Demo: Yes, now there is ProRes log and they are calling this new version log V3 plus. And of course, yes, this is ten bit four to two pro rata log on a phone. Filmic Pro has supported logs since back in 2017 with log V0, V1, I have covered each iteration from log V2 to the recent ten bit log V3, which uses a TBC. And that one is really quite good. I still use it all the time. But now this latest greatest version uses the even higher-quality ProRes codecs. Remember to ProRes is only available on the iPhone Pro and Pro Max model or on later devices if you're watching this video in the future. For those that don't know, shooting log video allows you to get the most dynamic range out of the sensor and into the footage. This allows you to have the most latitude and flexibility for color grading and post-production. Of course, remember this is a phone with a small sensor and you're using computational imaging here. So it's not the same as shooting law with a traditional camera, but nonetheless, the idea of shooting ten bit for two to ProRes log on a phone is still pretty mind-blowing and really can help you create some very cinematic looks that we're really unthinkable just a few years ago using phones. Alright, so I'm in Premier Pro doing a screen recording here, but of course this will work in any app. Luma fusion, Final Cut Pro DaVinci Resolve whenever you're using. Now here's a shot from my short film, and it's shot on a telephoto lens, the moment 58 mm. So I got some nice shallow depth of field going here. It's also, of course, shot ProRes log. Now this is not the final grade. This is a great I'm just working on but I applied a lot to it. A correction let which corrects it more or less to what is called rec 709 because we're working in SDR, standard dynamic range, and in Premiere Pro. And again, depending on what app you're working on, this works in a very similar fashion and resolve Final Cut Pro luma fusion, et cetera. You can control the light intensity here. And so I had chosen 87%. Every shot is going to be a little bit different. And so the LED intensity will be different depending on the shot. And that's a good thing there. As a reminder, using lots is really just a starting point. You almost never drag-and-drop a lot and it's perfect. So keep that in mind when your color grading, and again, what I'm doing here is I'm doing color correction and grading simultaneously, which isn't always what you would do. Often you would do a correction using a utility ladder, a transform. Then you might do some general correction and then you might do some shot matching. And then you would do your grade at the end. I'm kind of doing that, but I'm combining a few steps in this process after you get the look you want. And that actually looks pretty good. Then on top of that, I add film convert nitrate. Now again, this isn't my final look in the short film on going for more desaturated, a little bit of a blue or look. But you can really see the difference that I did. That's more of a warm look. And then when I did nitrate, I added more blue into the highlights and really an overall blue look. And then in this one I'm using Fujifilm emulsion and just a little bit of grain. I don't like adding a ton of grain, but adding some film grain, especially it's a phone footage, can really give it an extra texture that makes it look much more cinematic. To me, this shot looks really cool and does not look like it was shot on a phone. And I'm talking about this for years shooting filmic pro log and also just gives the image a more flattering filmic look, less crunchy sharp images. And that equals typically speaking, more cinematic images. And so that's another benefit to shooting log, is you get a quote unquote softer image and speaking of softness here, I also use the midst filter and the mist is very light. I think it's maybe like one eighth or maybe a quarter at most. It's not overdone. And so it really just softens the skin and I really liked the way it looks. Alright, now one more shot. This is the log shot. This is another character from the short film. And again, you've got to be really careful, especially when it comes to skin tone. If you look at his hand right here at the bottom, that got borderline overexposed and same with the edge of his nose and his forehead. Use zebras when you're shooting or the histogram. What I've been doing as a tip here, whenever the phone exposes, bring that down just a little bit. It's better to underexposed and overexpose. You can always denoise, but if you clip a shot, you can't do anything about that. You really can't even shooting log because the sensor just doesn't capture enough information, enough data. However, it's pretty incredible. From this shot, here is the lot. You can see how much the lot brings it down. And again, with this leg just like the previous one, you can control it. I went ahead and did 100% on this one. You can do whatever you want, whatever is required for the shot. Then I went in and did the specific color correction I wanted to do. And just to repeat myself, I'm doing a transform, let a d log lot, and then I'm correcting within that same effect. Some people might make that separate Effects and Premier, I tend to do it in the same effect. If I was in Resolve, I would do a different node. And so then that looks pretty good just using the correction lot and doing some correction to bring it back. And then of course, as I've done in the previous shots, I added nitrate. And then that really gives it a much more cinematic look. So I'm adding a little bit of grain. But then of course what they do is they take the Gamma curve that you would have shooting that film and they emulate it. So again, there is the original ProRes log. There is the lot with some correction done in that. And then here is the grade. And again in the short film, I'm going for a more desaturated blue look. 30. FiLMIC Pro Frame.io Overview: You've probably heard that Adobe acquired frame IO last year and it's now part of Creative Cloud. That part was just announced recently, which is pretty great. And now you can add filmic pro into that mix. If you don't know what frame I0 is, It's a Cloud-based collaboration platform for a client. Video approvals, sharing footage, reviewing dailies and a lot more now, including C2C, camera to cloud. And that's where filmic pro comes in, which by the way, they've had C2C for higher-end productions for a little while, but now integrating that part with filmic pro is what's brand new. Now as you're shooting, you can automatically upload proxy files to the cloud to frame IO within filmic pro. And anyone on your production team, including your editor, view that footage. Not only can they view that footage, they can download that footage. So that means that anywhere in the world they can simultaneously be editing while you're shooting. So to use this new feature, you do need to have the filmic pro cinematographer kit. And you need to have a frame IO account. And by the way, there are some hardware limitations to using this. It works with the iPhone 11 or later, and then on Android it works with Android seven or later. And then it will depend on the device you're actually using. Within frame IO on their website, you need to set up a new C2C folder, camera to Cloud folder. Once that's set up, you come back and filmic pro, and there's a frame IO icon here. Now you click that. Now I've already gone through this, but you would on this top line here, login to your frame IO account. And then that will actually connect it to filmic pro. After it's connected, you choose the proxy quality. I've tested all three. And for me, the best quality that meets file size is the LQ ten ADP LQ. I tried 720 P, and I found that it was a little bit too blocky, especially for checking focus, what I found to be pretty cool. So 720 p is a little bit too low quality because of the compression. So I would choose ten ADP, LQ or HQ and LQ I found to be the best. And the other thing you need to do is choose your upload method. You can do automatic, which would obviously automatically upload as soon as the shot is taken. Or you can do prompt or you can turn it off if you're not going to be using this feature on a particular project, I have prompt on because if I shoot a shot, that's a bust, I don't upload it. But then of course if you want to use it, you hit Okay. I'll record a quick demo clip here. I'm shooting ProRes four to two. Soon as that's over, I get a prompt upload to frame IO. Do you want to generate a proxy and add this clip to your upload cube? Hit Yes. And so it Dan samples that clip that quickly and it uploads it in the background, right then as long as you are connected to the Internet, you obviously have to have an internet connection either via Wi-Fi or four or five G. They're all very quick. I've discovered, regardless of which way you're connected, you come into the library and then it instantly signifies is that proxy has been uploaded right here on this purple strip in the bottom corner. And the original file is there too. That way you have both bile is the original and the proxy on the phone and the filmic library. And then the proxy file is up in the Cloud. Now that file is available in the Cloud and the frame I a website which you can look at it there on a computer, or you can check it out and the mobile app on an iPhone or an iPad, it's also now available directly within Premiere Pro or in luma fusion. Remember you can connect either one of them with the frame IO plug-in. If you use luma fusion, you can do an offline proxy at it and then export and XML to finish that in Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve or in Premiere Pro. So again, this means that an editor can start working right away, or a client could review the footage. Let's say they're not on location or a member of your team, your production team could do the same thing. What I've been doing is using it in combination with shooting ProRes on my 13th Pro Max, because those files are huge, they're really big. And when you transfer those to a computer, it takes forever. You've gotta do that at some point. But using this method using frame IO, you can then see the files instantly on your computer or on your iPad. And that way, you know what's going on, you know what the footage looks like and you can start editing. So again, having them instantly available to review or edit using the C2C feature has been awesome. I recently shot a new short film and had a days where the footage, alright, at my fingertips before I transferred anything to the computer, not only was this a big help to organize the footage, and also gave me peace of mind that I got certain shots in focus because with this, you can quickly see them on a big screen on a computer or iPad versus just on the small iPhone screen. So you may be asking, Who is this for? And it's really for anyone in my opinion that wants to collaborate, share footage, whether that's with team members on your production or with clients, or even if you're doing solo stuff and you have a lot of footage, you're dealing with light large ProRes files, as I mentioned, but I would think right now it would be especially great for mobile journalists. Shoot something in the field and how the editor or producer back at the office start working immediately. Or if you're doing long-form projects like a movie or documentary, this is an ideal option, or if you do corporate video and have clients involved this another great tool to use for those kind of projects. To me, this is a natural fit using this type of technology, meaning your phone. While it also works great on high-end production, you have to have a lot of additional expensive hardware to make it work. Here, it's all built right in. Of course, shooting on your phone is totally different than shooting on area Alexa. But as phone video quality continues to improve, I could definitely see where this could be adopted by more and more professionals depending on the type of project. You have to have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription or a paid frame IO account for all this to work. And since a lot of people already subscribed to Creative Cloud, this is gonna be a great value add for using that. But if you don't use Adobe frame I0 is affordable. I've been a subscriber for several years, but since I also subscribe to Creative Cloud, I'll now be able to combine those which will ultimately save me some money. So I think this is incredibly cool tech and maybe one of those things you didn't know you needed until you try it. 31. Director's Commentary: Now you know my writing approach, my shooting approach, how I edit. And now let's hop into the actual short film one more time. I know you've already watched it. Go watch it once again with a director's commentary. And I'll point out a few things within the actual short that I did and hopefully enlighten you a little bit on what I did and demystify the process even more. So thank you for taking this training. I hope you learned a lot and it was beneficial. And now we'll roll a short and I'll see you later. Alright, here we go. My short film pre-owned. This is Susanna give, and this is Troy grant. That lens flare is not real. I did that as a visual effect and post, I just thought I'd add a little bit of character to the shot. Susanna has been in a ton of my short films. Troy grant has been at a bunch of my other projects. First iPhone short film. They shots of him driving in the car. We're crazy noisy. I had to use neat video on. Those are whatever reason the ND filter I was using in here, combined with the outside, the low exposure went crazy. Now this shot where I pull in the driveway, this was a one take deal and I was on a gimbal and I was really happy with the way that shock turned out. It looks like a dolly. And I don't think I did really much stabilization at all in post-production. I really goes to show what you can do with the gimbal on an Indie film, especially that's why they can, Gimbels are still important for this kind of stuff. Now this song here is one that I ended up picking and post-production. Before I get there though, the badge there on his shirt, Arnie, no one really picked up on that and it's very much just an Easter egg. But a movie I really like is called Christine, and it's about a haunted car more or less. And the main character, his name was Arnie, played by Keith Gordon, who ended up becoming a very well-known TV and film director. So just a little side note there. But Christine was definitely a inspiration for this short. But back to the song, the song I ended up picking and post-production. And then it repeats throughout the short film and end up being a little bit like a Groundhog Day where Bill Murray wakes up every day and the song is the same. That wasn't scripted, he used the same song. I came up with that and editing. And that happens a lot by the way, in filmmaking. You find things in the edit that really helped the story. Line. The song here that plays is another one that's a stock music song. That doesn't sound like a stock music song. And I really think that fits the dark comedy supernatural Bible there. And now the song repeats here. He's going out looking at his car. He is proud of his car. That's my mom's car again. Troy is like six foot three in real life. And so he actually had a tough time getting in the car. My mom's like 55. There wasn't a lot of acting there, although of course we did move the seat back-and-forth. The song gag was another one that I didn't plan on having the same song play over and over again. I thought it would be a different song, but then in the edit, the same song being repetitive was kind of creepy and cool. Pretty much all the shots of him walking to the car were one or two takes on these small, indeed DIY projects. That's really all you get is one or two takes three Topps. You've got to move on to make your day. This shot here almost looks like a split diopter because everything's in focus, but I'm using that wide anamorphic lens. He looks really small in the frame. It's a cool shot. I think the messing with the seed, the cranking up the women here on the telephone. That's me actually only on the line. That was all done in editing because originally I didn't have dialogue there, but I thought it needed it. So I am the voice on the other end of the phone. Check it out. Okay. Okay. You're sure it's not you? Now, this is a real car law of a Kia dealership. And so I got this through a connection of an ad agency and they let me shoot there for free. We didn't show any Qia logos or anything, but that's just one thing you can try to do is use stuff from your business life, your personal life to get good locations, custom driver settings. The shot here of her doing the seat was achieved because that wasn't actually an automatic seat like that. We had our cover up their control and push it and it worked. But another way to cheat something, but you don't actually have the right setup in your crop. It's weird, right? It's a used car. So I really like the shallow depth of field I got there to using the moment telephoto on the larger sensor or the iPhone 13 when shooting with a phone in particular, that's a big giveaway because traditional cameras will usually have more shallow depth of field. This tilt up here, when I did my storyboard, I wanted a lens flare there, but it was cloudy. So in post-production again, I added that lens flare. Then all of these shots of the phone coming up with the right there with the actual surveillance, that is something I did in Photoshop. And then the actual interface was tracked onto the phone. And after effects, the surveillance camera there, I actually just stuck on the wall with a command strip. There's the interface again, that was a visual effect. Originally in this sequence, he finds a sandwich in the car and then cutting it because it felt like the story is getting too long. And it's just another one of the things you find in the edit. Routinely you end up cutting things, the speedup, the story, especially I think in the short film, not the ghost in the backseat or the aberration, whatever, That's me. Again, when you're doing indie film or DIY stuff, you're going to have to do cameos. That's my Hitchcock moment here. Originally I was going to have scored done for this, but I thought that the music I pulled from Art List worked fine. It was creepy and I was able to edit it to where it hit right on the right beads. One thing to that POV shot inside the door, actually shot that in my driveway at my house a couple of days later, I forgot to get it during the shoe. Also, this shot of the bumper of the car That's actually shot in my driveway. You can see the driveway is a little different color, but when you edit it all together and do the color correction, you really don't notice it. Originally, I wanted more of these shots to be moving but we ran out of time. But the ones that are moving Suddenly there I do like especially that little push into him right there looking at the trunk and then my mom's car trunk wouldn't pop up automatically. In my mind, I thought it would, but it's an older car and so it didn't but it ended up working anyway. And right here where he opens the trunk, I left the camera on autofocus. It actually looks like someone's racking the focus from side of the car. So I thought it worked, but that was kind of a happy accident, which are great filmmaking by the way, happy accidents really are awesome. A lot of people who have watched the short film when they see the shot here of the burn feet, they say it reminds him and Repo Man, I never even thought about that. That's again, one of those happy accidents. You can select up to two. And then here at the end, that shot of her hand, that's a repeat shot from previous. We didn't shoot that again and I didn't even notice her sleeves wear long there, so it doesn't technically match. But again, movie magic, you can get away with that. People don't notice that kind of continuity error. Enjoy. Thank you. I will. Speaking of an error or continuity error, here's one more cameo from me and I didn't even notice That's why we're shooting. But in post-production I did. I'm in the glasses there holding the gimbal, talking dishRouter. Do credits on your short films and be sure to spell everyone's name, right. That is something that happens in every movie. Someone's name will be spelled wrong. I got everybody's name spelled right here, although I got the wrong car lot name on their credit, the people that worked on your film, everyone likes to see their work acknowledged. But that's it. Thanks again for taking the course. This is Blake Calhoun and I will see you guys later.