Getting the Hollywood Look Without the Hollywood Crew

Thanks to lastpass for sponsoring a segment of this video when you think of Hollywood movies, you think of great actors, great

crew

s, great sets, great explosions, great cameras, great equipment. By now you know that the Hollywood movie machine is a well-oiled old contraption with a lot of motion. parts, but of course, it's also a steam engine or an airship and you don't see us walking around anymore. I think that today the modern way of making films is like that and I want to find the Tesla, do you know what cyberspace is? In the realm of modern filmmaking, there is so much technology available to us right now that there has to be a better way, so I've had an idea for a short film for a few years now, but I haven't shot it yet because it needs to

look

like a movie. legit, but the way I need to film this is with no cheap equipment and just a couple of friends on my

crew

the same way you or I or anyone else would have to make a movie these days if you wanted to.

In this video, I'm going to show you how I plan to achieve that great Hollywood

look

at no cost so that you and I can go out and make better movies, so let's figure it out together so that the short film is called u. -Monster, I don't want to look up old news here, but remember the time Logan Paul ended up filming in Japan's suicide forest and it brought home something I've been thinking about quite a bit, which is how people can lose their two-way humanity. ways. You always live your life to get other people's attention, whether they are going to a restaurant just so they can take the Instagram photo or they are doing an activity just so they can film it, the second facet is what responsibility we have.

As an audience we have these types of pieces, how much of our fault is it that as an audience it got millions of views, we saw it, we ate it up, so this piece brings together all the stories about a social media influencer? They have made very bad decisions in what they have decided to use to become popular and in turn they are chased by the camera of the fourth wall, they are literally aware that someone is watching them every second of their life and it does not matter where they go or where are they hiding because the camera is always showing them and driving them crazy, so for this job it has to look like a movie, it has to feel legit and real, the drama has to have weight, there are times when it makes sense to have a great crew , but that small silver of cinema is at the top, those wonder movies and Star Wars movies, well, there is a lot between that and independent filmmakers, there are all those shows that you see on television. there are all these low budget movies and they are all doing the traditional Hollywood system and it is expensive and prohibitive and it is time to reimagine things, it is time to apply new technology to things, so all these problems arise first from the old technology.

First, the camera in the past, cameras were film cameras, so you had a bagel camera with film reels and the thing was literally mechanical, so you had to have someone who could operate the camera, you had to having a camera assistant, your job is just to deal. with the machine itself, often that camera assistant is focusing, then we have the film loader, the person whose job it is to take care of loading and unloading the film, they also have a second assistant camera operator, very often that person It is the one that works with the tablet.

That's all well and good for operating the camera, but what about the tripod, the camera is on, what about the dolly system? What about the dolly system? You have your dolly technician. Oh, did I forget to mention that on a Union Hollywood rig you can't play the camera without it? hire someone to do it for you, that's right the vtr operator, your job is to press the play button on the camera, that's not right, again, it comes from old technology because in the past, on a camera film, it would actually have to run a second. video camera that was connected to the camera's viewfinder, that video stream would then be sent to a guy running VHS tapes, who is recording them and can play them back for the director.

You know solving the movie camera made sense, but is it ever an old holdover. Again, it's some damn old technology that's slowing things down for you monster, the camera is locked for the vast majority of the movie and at one point it turns into a dolly shot where it keeps moving forward, those are the only ones movements in the shot, no camera movement beyond that, I don't want to use a tripod, this is about as light as you can get for a tripod that can hold like a 50 to 60 pound rig. I mean, this tripod is designed to hold 100 pound cameras, but look how big they are. this is look how big this piece of metal is look at these legs here it's a pain in the butt I love red but I don't want to use red this is too heavy I lift it and it bothers me now but earlier this year a camera came out that shoots 13 steps of dynamic range a camera that shoots in raw format and only costs a thousand dollars and only weighs a pound that is the black magic pocket this is the black magic pocket 4k they too Black magic pocket 6k both are basically the same, only They have slightly different sensor sizes and shoot at different resolutions, but beyond that, you get exactly what I always wanted, which is a small light camera that shoots in raw format with 13 sur. dynamic range, so this camera solves a lot of problems, what do I get for this light weight?

Let me show you that this is a gimbal, the zun crane 3. Now, this gimbal with this camera allows me to get basically all the types of shots that previously required special hardware to no longer need a steadicam the gimbal covers it I no longer need a dolly the gimbal covers it I no longer need a crane unless I go very very high the gimbal covers it because the gimbal will stabilize my shot and make it look smooth no matter what I'm doing I no longer need a tripod because the monopod with arm you could say which is a third simpler than a tripod requires a third less effort to set up look at this footprint it's a leg I want to be higher Do it like this that's it and then I have a still camera and then I have a crane and I can stand on a skateboard and I have a dolly.

I didn't need a grip for the dolly. I didn't need a second camera assistant. I don't have to worry about

getting

my fingers pinched, I didn't even worry about dropping a hundred thousand dollar rig and you can even focus with this little knob and have the motor up here spin the lens, this technology changes the rules of the game, but the image is only half of the equation here we have to talk about sound hello humans my name is jazulu and today's sponsor is lastpass lastpass took the burden off having to remember passwords hello I heard you like using technology personal computer internet when was the last one? time you forgot a password, I'm here to provide you with lastpass technology.

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Sign up for free, simply click the link in the description below. Goodbye humans, very good alien, thanks again to Lastpass for sponsoring my trip. I think you should return to your planet now. Alright, here are our actors doing a scene. In fact, sound is important. Sound is the most important thing on your film set, you wouldn't expect it, but it's much more important than your camera department. It is much more important for your image. It's more important than anything else. Good sound makes everything else seem expensive. So on a film set, they have a lapel mic on each actor right up close to make sure they capture the little intricacies of what they're saying because you can't go back and do it again, and they have a boom mic on top. at the top and these three channels of audio are then piped back to a person at your sound station, who is then you as a sound technician adjusting the knobs and adjusting the volume, it doesn't seem like many people do that well.

Don't forget that blackboard, that's right, the blackboard is part of all this. You literally have to take a moment at the beginning of every shot of your day. Put that whiteboard in front of the camera. Make everyone wait, clap your hands, and exit. Take, you know, taking a little time for the whiteboard may not seem like a big deal, but if you take 30 seconds on each shot, do 40 setups, well, you only have 20 minutes of your day, just go film a whiteboard, not to mention having to take the camera out of your setup, get the whiteboard and then put it back into this app isn't always a big deal but it adds up and then in post production you have your assistant editor who is on a computer and then has to sync all your sound so that the sound department becomes your boom operator, your list of sound technician and then editing and publishing assistant, so I need to remove some people from this, this is how I'm going to do it, so I've been thinking about this for a Although we usually don't worry too much about sound in a hallway video because most of it is action based, but this one isn't drama.

I need to have clear, crisp audio from each actor, so how am I going to do it with the microphone on? the arm is wireless, so it goes back to a mixer and the mixer is recording multiple tracks, so we'll have lapel mics on each actor. I'm using one right now and we'll have the boom mic on all three microphones. the sources will go to our mixer, our multitrack recorder wirelessly, with no cables

getting

in the way, we have a person at that mixer listening and we will even have the operator on the arm listening with bluetooth headphones so they can hear if Whether you are getting good audio or not, that mixer will record all three audio tracks in the past.

You have to use a whiteboard and then sync these audio tracks to the video, but I'm not going to do that. I am using a program called Davinci Resolve. Recently I used to use it for color grading. It is a wonderful color grading tool. I'm starting to use it more and more for editing and it has a feature where if you have the audio on camera somehow, you can grab your other audio files. and having the program sync everything automatically just by looking at the waveforms, just listening and saying, "oh, these sound good, and then just doing it, it's crazy, it's magic." What I can do here is run all of these audio channels into the mixer.

I'll throw one more wireless mic link into the mixer to the camera and record a mix of all that audio into the camera. I won't program, all I'll do is say the name of the take out loud before each take. my session I roll the audio with all the takes, I get the takes, don't worry about slowing down for the whiteboard and then in post production auto sync, that means we can now capture clean professional audio with multiple channels without having to use a whiteboard. sound mixers and sound utilities and all that kind of stuff, it's all been removed, it's just good, clear audio, all synchronized for editing, all right, the next big lighting department, now look, we've got lights, there's a light Right there, look at this, we have a big light box right here.

We already have two lights in this room and there's not even a rig here, how the hell do we do that? Okay, let's talk about lights. Well, you might think the lighting is simple, it's not about filming, old technology, they like to use big old lights. They are starting to use LED lights, but a lot of big lights are still used, do you know why? Because they have big, old cameras that need big, old photons hitting their sensors. They don't have little low light sensitive things that might work. with whatever they need, big lights, big old lenses that shoot big old beams, you know what holds a big old light, a big old stand, you know who cares about a big old stand it's the big old grips every time that you see a guy in cargo shorts on a film set, he is a grab, in fact, these guys are responsible, more responsible than anyone for the safety of the people on the set, they will never take anything away from people for that reason and it's good because when you're dealing with an 80 lightpounds in let's say 200 degrees Fahrenheit on a 60 pound rack, if this thing falls over it's going to kill someone or start a fire or kill someone by setting it on fire, so the 10 club country lane, which by the way takes place in a room, you have one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve twelve grab to make sure your lights are set up right, twelve people hold stands, that's crazy, but it can't get worse than that, guess what lights they need electricity and these lights need a lot of electricity you think you just plug them into a wall you would be wrong these lights have big horn wires that go down to big ballast boxes and these ballast boxes then go out with these big thick wires to something called a lunch box and they turn off to a diesel generator literally in a trailer parked outside with a security guy to watch over it, generally speaking when you're doing a dialogue scene inside you don't need any of this anymore, all of this can be removed and simplify and you I can get the same results that's how nick I'm here over here hey what's up I'm on this side of the room now lights are something we take for Of course, LED lights have been coming out, they've been kind of a thing for the last seven or eight years on film shoots, but the thing is, they haven't been widely adopted partly because they're not super bright yet, check it out.

The really cool thing about LED lights is that you can change the colors and it looks magical. I can have any color I want and you know, another cool thing about LED lights is that it's not hot, it's not even hot. What is this? There isn't a battery, wait, there isn't one. cables, all of this is so light you can hold it with one arm, many problems are solved by using technology, the lights themselves don't have to be bright, they just need to be bright enough to give you the exposure you want. work, so I'm going to light and film this scene with a camera that gives me low light capabilities so I can use dimmer lights, smaller lights and that means no generator, no fire marshal, no power distribution of the to worry about, no heavy supports to worry about. heat to worry about no gels to worry about done i don't want to forget the simplicity of being 14 years old and having a camera and just going out and trying to take a photo oh it looks really beautiful you have removed all the barriers between your creativity and imagination and to make that happen in real life, that's the goal, so the short film was filmed.

Our team was so small that we couldn't even have a BTS guy for now, I'll break down what worked. Honestly, I'm really excited because it seems like all these plans, all these crazy experiments that really seemed to have worked, so let's talk about this for a second, first things first. Nowadays, everyone shoots with digital cameras, but what people don't realize with digital cameras is that you still need to develop the image just like you had to develop it with film. I'll give you a quick summary. It's very, very simple how to do it now. on camera this is what it looks like, it's a little flat, but it's set up so you can make your own adjustments.

I'm going to use an evil lookup table to map iwl tbap, which is one of our favorite lookup table packages. and a lookup table is basically a filter like something you might see on Instagram and with Blackmagic you can load these lookup tables, these filters basically into the camera and shoot with it on so you can see what it looks like on set and adjust your lightning. Consequently, it is a perfect example of new technology that is changing the way we do things. This little adjustment makes everything look really good and really cinematic and looks like it was shot with a film camera.

Good cameras are no longer expensive nowadays. Blackmagic 4k is only a thousand dollars, okay, next is the lighting. Note that this actually looks pretty good. I'm not going to lie, I'm very happy with it. Adrian did a great job. Two things we did here. One of which we use. Hazer, so there is a bit of haze in the room, this helps separate the foreground from the background and gives depth cues to your eye. You can see how there's a background behind the actor and there's a foreground and you can feel those layers in the atmosphere the perspective of the atmosphere, so to speak, so the fog isn't expensive and goes a long way toward making your stuff look cinematic. , it gives you that depth that you really only see in movies, it gives you rays of light from the windows, it looks really good and I'm really happy with it, so you might remember that I mentioned that I wanted to eliminate a lot of complications related to Sound.

I didn't want a tablet. I didn't want to have a person on set who had to do that. it worked oh yeah it worked it was great I'm really excited about this this is going to be like the latest addition to the way we process a sound on set using waveform analysis we align everything automatically using davinci resolve functions , so we look Here on these waveforms, we can see how all the waveforms line up incredibly because I no longer have to use a clipboard to find a visual sync point for things. I can just use the camera's scratch audio or the audio will be pumped into it to match that. recording audio because all the waveforms should line up worked great, now we can record audio from a bunch of different sources on set, sync them all automatically.

I don't have to have an air conditioner with a whiteboard in the chamber. I don't have to slow down for any of that. I can just roll and roll and roll and that's a game changer, so I'm really excited about how this is turning out. The images look great, all the experiments worked and now it's up to me. Hopefully I told a good story and did good editing; it'll probably be out in january so consider subscribing so you don't miss it if you've never been to the runner's channel check out youtube.com's runner yeah that's it. where we put all of our short films on and, you know, subscribe to the Quarter Crew channel while you're at it, you know, give us a two-for-one special if you're smashing the subscribe buttons these days, Christmas spirit, Christmas spirit, or kwanzaa. or hanukkah or whatever you celebrate uh, you know, winter solstice, pagan holidays, everything's fine, I'm depressed