***RELEASE THREAD:*** Control

Through my misfortune, you all prosper.

Since I'll be gone all day tomorrow getting a new pair of glasses (my old pair fell out of a moving vehicle), I wouldn't be able to upload Control as promised. So you all get an advance showing!

If you're interested in the film's background, check the announce thread. If not, then how about just the movie?

Quicktime, 6:09, 52.6 MB, Sorenson 3 compressed.

The golden hour color correcting is thanks to Lord_Charisma, while hosting is thanks to -Phi-. Laszlo stars, with StoyBoy720 in an advisory role - he was going to star in the initial attempt but logistics kept him from joining us the second time around.

 

Just watched it.
One thing I noticed right away was the pixelation of your "Dealer/Assassin/Driver" titles. Even as a lo-res file, I don't think they should look quite that bad. Did you not work with these in a high enough resolution?

Other than that, I liked it. Editing flowed nicely, the car shots worked pretty well. The tire squeal was a touch loud in a couple places considering the other audio (3:00ish).

Wasn't expecting your choice of end song. It works, kinda. lol.
What was with the post-credits shot? Just showing off?

Good stuff, per usual.

-Vaportrail

 

The final shot is a nod to "The Hire", a series of short films featuring BMWs. Control was originally going to be a The Hire fanfilm, but without a BMW, the idea fell a bit flat. Still, we worked that last shot in there as an homage. And yes, towards the end there, it is showing off. Funny how that single shot's effects took more time than any of the other post-production work aside from the basic editing.

 

Whoa. A car chase in an amateur/independent dealie. Wasn't expecting that. Though I confess that if there was a plot in all this beyond "sunglasses guy wants to kill fat guy", I missed it. Still, I'm pretty impressed that you did all this and no one crashed.

Is Driver's vest/shirt an intentional nod to Han Solo?

Your replacing the gun in your shirt in the first minute seems a little tentative, as if you can't remember just how it should go back without blowing a hole in your crotch. On the other hand, your chucking the gun into the seat during your run back to the car is my favorite bit, I think it's funny the way it bounces back up into frame.

I find that speeding up footage is a risky prospect (you risk going into Benny Hill territory), and some shots worked better for me than others. I dunno. I haven't used Avid in ages, but its speeding/slowing looked better to me than anything I ever got out of my otherwise-beloved FCP.

Some color correcting leaned a little bit green for me, but that was over with soon enough. I mightn't even have noticed if I hadn't remembered that "golden hour" thread you posted.



Rick McCallum loves you!

 

Good stuff. Kept my attention throughout, and any indie flick with a nice car chase has to be a winner.

 

There was no plot aside from using Boter's workshop dialouge.

As for crashing well... no one crashed that time but our prior attempt in New Year's Eve 2005 was... cut short.

 

New Year's Eve 2006, actually.

And yes, I was actually very glad that I was able to set up the premise with just character names. You could read a lot more into things - say, Assassin only needs to kill Dealer, and since Dealer died, Driver isn't getting paid, so he keeps the briefcase of cash for himself, but it works well at face value, which I'm proud of.

 

I watched it, but forgot to comment So here goes...
I love it.

 

Figured I'd elaborate a bit on that crash bit.

We were going to film New Year's Eve of 2006, but before a single frame of film was even shot, we hit black ice and then a curb in rapid succession. You can see a picture of the wheel wrenched back into the wheel well of what was going to be the Assassin's car on Control's official webpage. That, and another accident, made me really not want to drive Mom's car in the winter... and I have a preference for the Gordmobile anyways.

 

And then we filmed a snowball fight instead.

 

The car chase was nice, you don't see them a lot! But it is very obvious the footage has been sped up, and the cars portrayed can be outrun by almost anything on the road is kinda a downer. You have to make do with what you got, but it's things like that that leave a mark.

Loading a gun is naturally something you need to have in a flick like this, but now it looks very awkward. I actually assume a assassin, a good one anyway, has his gun ready to go well before he gets in the car.

Firing an SMG (it looked more like a miniature AK47) singlehandedly might look cool, but is very un-assasin like. Later he tosses it in the car. Naturally we all have fake guns, but a real one would not have bounced up like that from the passenger seat.

With work this could become a pretty cool short! Maybe something for Control II?

 

For all its little odds and ends, I enjoyed the boldness in making a car chase on our type of budget. The highway shots looked good, and the editing was pretty slick and kept the pace moving. It could have used a few more driver shots, but besides that I eenjoyed the ambition of the project. Nice work Andrew and Laz!

 

Does this not give you the urge to steal your parents car and drive like a psycho-manic all while you hit record? Err... Rephrase: inspire your own car chase movie (of course, obeying the rules of road in your region)?

 

Okay, that was funny. I really liked it, the lack of speaking except for the required dialogue... not to mention the music choice, which I didn't catch on to until the credits.

Cute on the level of Unbearably Cute Fuzzies. I hope you guys keep doing random stuff like this.

-Vaportrail

 

Thanks to everyone for the comments so far! I'll respond to a few more of them here.

I think it's a combination of a diagonal line being cut down to half size. Looks good at the source 640X360.

Not intentional, no. Driver isn't really meant as a Han Solo analogue; if I had Solo in mind, though, I would have picked that up in an instant... and probably stayed away from it so it wouldn't be too obvious Going through Laz's closet always gets some interesting results.

I didn't do anything special in post-production for speeding up the footage. Instead, I used a slow-shutter setting on my camera that has the effect of undercranking and then did a simple Time Stretch >> 50% in After Effects.

Thanks! I agree that some shots are still a bit green... where grass is concerned, really. Looking at it all next to the original footage is fun to do.

We joked that this is a car chase for the masses. At least, I did. If you want, pretend that they're meant to be deceiving, in that they have a lot more horsepower than a model fresh off the showroom floor.

This does work as a proof-of-concept - we can do a car chase at safe speeds and have it look pretty good. The next car chase will use a better car, rest assured.

I played around with the gun cocking shot. I toyed with removing it, and with moving it around in the movie. Justicetoall, I agree with you - a good assassin probably wouldn't do that. I suppose he's not a very good assassin. Explains why he's driving a Saturn wagon, at least. Admittedly, firing the SMG with one hand (Laz can tell you what it originally was before the stock broke off) and tossing it into the car were, shall we say, cop-out artistic choices.

I deliberately don't want to do anything more with Control. When we see more and more films getting unnecessary sequels, I want this to stand alone. It is, as previously mentioned, a proof-of-concept as well, so it will have at least a spiritual successor at some point.

 

In other words, different movie + car chase. I'll watch it.
Then again, I watch all of them.

I find that for such things, when you're shrinking them down in even increments, like halves or quarters, then line is usually alright and stays unpixelly. It's when you shrink or stretch like, 3% or some weird random number that it ends up looking, well, crappy.
[shrug]

Upload a full-res version and we won't have this issue.

-Vaportrail

 

Id highly suggest, for your next car chase, to find a road that is traveled lightly during some hours / days. Even where I am at, Plano Texas, I know a few streets that practically no one drives on when it's Sunday.

Now I won't say you should go blasting past a camera at 100 miles per hour. But you could get away with some "spirited" driving. And if you have a vehicle that is capable, you'll get some real nice shots. On top of that you won't get any "bystanders" in the shot either. Takes away from the realism, but like I said... Spirited driving... That and bystanders don't mix.

Be warned though, if you have LOUD cars or burn some rubber, do your shots and get out of there, as people will pick up on something like that and call the cops. Even if they don't live around there.

To bad you guys aren't from around here. I would have let you guys film my 05 mustang GT as one of the cars. (I'd have to be the driver though, since no one drives it but me... okay... and my wife...)

 

Just admit it. It's her car.

That was one thing I wondered about, was the traffic. Granted, you're blasting past these cars in yours, but with the way it's shot it makes it look like they're also going pretty quick. Well actually they are, in terms of the footage. I wonder what a good way to do something about that would be. Multiple passes prolly wouldn't work too well.

-Vaportrail

 

Yea for whatever reason the River Parkway we filmed the external driving scenes at was busier than the previous day we went scouting at the same time. All the internal dialouge scenes we fillmed at the X-Farm (where I work) and while the speed limit is 30 Kph (about 20 mph) I was driving about 3 times that speed...

Our next charchase scene would definatly be part of Cannibals on the Run, whenever we decide to geenlight that.

 

We lucked out in that there weren't really any shots where another car is keeping up with us. We appear to be going about 120, 140 km/h when passing that van... of course, it appears to be going about 100... oh, and the guy on the bike was definitely racing along at a good 40, 50 km/h.