SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE - Quasi-Fan-Film...

Okay, its more of an actor's audition reel than a fan-film, but I think you guys will get a kick out of this.

This is an audition reel for an actor friend of mine - STEVEN A. DAVIS - who is screen-testing for an upcoming Japanese martial arts flick. He needed something weighty on his drama reel to show the producers he was right for the part and so he commissioned us to shoot a $900US screen-test for him. He wanted to use an original scene, rather than taking one from another film, and because he was a big fan of Austin Grossman's superhero novel "SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE", he decided to adapt a scene out of that instead.

[image=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v631/nealnz/Invincible4.jpg] [image=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v631/nealnz/Invincible1.jpg] [image=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v631/nealnz/Invincible5.jpg] [image=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v631/nealnz/Invincible2.jpg]

There's a few changes we made for the sake of the reel: we changed the names of the two characters and restaged it so its a prison breakout scene rather than a prison interview scene, but otherwise it stays true to the spirit of the novel (we feel).

Anyways, would love any feedback on this.

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSnTOaQgq3w&fmt=18

Facebook: http://vupload.new.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=37084785989&saved

Vimeo (incl high-res download): http://vimeo.com/1891966?pg=embed&sec=1891966


The statistics:

$900US ($1200NZ) budget

5 man crew (DOP, gaffer, sound recordist, boom operator, director)

Camera: Sony-DSR 350

Recording format: Mini-DV

Editing: 3 days on Final Cut Studio

Color Grade: Nattress Film Effects on FCS

Sound Design: 1 day

VFX: Maya (modelling) and After FX (compositing) 2 days

Music: sourced from Alan Silvestri, soundtrack for "BEOWULF".


Enjoy!

 

Not too shabby.

 

AIEE INTERLACING! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

Other than that little technical nitpick, I actually quite loved this. You made me want to read the book and, if there were a movie, I would want to see it as well. I think you got a couple "freebie" points with your very good use of the soundtrack, but -- and I don't say this often -- this really felt like a movie.

Nothing too flashy with the camera, but quite honestly that's something I like about it. There's a difference between "simple" composition, and "basic" composition. There's movies that stick to very basic "rule of thirds" compositions and they feel textbook and dull. Then there's movies that stick to the same core stable of composition techniques, nothing too fancy, but with an actual understanding of what they can achieve dramatically, and those movies -- while not having a super-dynamic camera -- just spring to life when dynamic camerawork is used judiciously.

The camera, of course, was not locked off entirely, but it was fairly static -- not super-wobbly handheld, and not dollying all the time a la Michael Bay. Still, you have a great instinct for choosing moments to dolly with the action, or against it, or push in, or pull back, or even hit the zoom. I liked your use of the zoom at the shot starting 3:17, though I wish the timing had been better so you could have cut away before it jolted to a stop, or that the stop could have been a little smoother -- although watching it again it seems like there was some kind of jolt to the camera itself. You might consider trying to stabilize it, right at the end; unless you were going for something artistic, in which case I didn't get it. (Also, the cut between that shot and the previous is the only one in the scene that I found distracting, mainly because of the sound editing which truncated the end of "glance".)

The one thing I would say is that when the camera got into extreme close-up territory, the camera didn't really move to accommodate when your lead actor looked up and down; we'd lose his eyes behind the 2.35 matte. Since you appear to have shot 16x9, you should have had between some room to do a little bit of vertical pan and scan to keep his eyes in frame (if only just a little more) throughout those closer shots.

I like the color grading and lighting, though you might have maybe desaturated or darkened the skintones a little at a few points, they were a little "neon" where they went to higher brightness but didn't hit full white on all channels. I'm also a fan of grain, so well done there.

The VFX are kinda meh, but they get the point across and for an acting demo that's enough.

As for that -- this being an acting demo -- I think your lead knocked it out of the park. He's got kind of a Peter Stormare look -- a little too angular and intense to be a good guy, but the perfect look and intensity for the dangerously handsome villain. I'm sort of giving a backhanded compliment in the sense that I'm saying he does this role so perfectly, I can't imagine him doing anything else. In a different situation, with different lighting and tone and a different performance, I might think otherwise, so I guess I'd need to see more before judging his range.

Point is, if I saw this, and I had a role like this, I'd probably hire him -- especially if he's got a solid stunt reel. And if you put this on a directing reel, and I were a producer looking for a director for a similar project (or maybe the actual film of the novel you used), I'd probably hire you.

In short (heh), good work.

 

Apologies for the double post, I'm out of the edit window...

Just another nit: FCP-default Lucida Grande font for the titles? I think there are other typefaces that would have felt more appropriate. Also, random nitpick, standard screenplay format would be:

"INT. ARCTIC CONTAINMENT FACILITY - DAY"

You inverted the use of the period and dash.

But seriously, this is me nitpicking. I do think it's great overall and would even say that the less experienced ought to study the camera work and composition -- you didn't even shoot HD!

I would love to see what you would do with, say, a RED.

I intend to share this around a bit and see if I can get it some views. If you want to submit it as a video response to RvD2 on YouTube, we still get a couple thousand hits a day and if I can funnel some your way I'd be happy to.

 

Agreed on most points. This is really good, and Steven does a fantastic job. I can't say the same for the other fellow, though. He kind of distracted me actually. I know it's not his reel, but sharing the screen with Steven, who I think did a superb job here, really emphasized the difference and kind of took me out of it when I watched him. I kind of wished there were someone there with a stronger performance for Steven to play off of, but it didn't seem to slow him down.

I think the music worked alright, but felt like it repeated about 3 times during the front three-quarters of the film. I think most of it could have worked without music at all, so that was again something that kind of distracted me when I heard the same part come around multiple times. The overall sound design was not exceptional, but the dialogue is good, which is really the most important thing by far.

Those were really my main kibitzes. The lighting is very good, and it's shot just fine, though I agree with what Mike said about losing the framing a bit in some of the tighter shots. And I naturally have my own ideas on how I would do the effects differently, but the bottom line is that it all works fine for what it is. And that's everything supporting the performance, which I think is great, and so the whole thing is great. He has great dialogue to work with, I was captivated, and he really brought it to life. I want to cast him. Well done.

 

To Ryan and Michael - thanks with utmost sincerity for the time you took on your feedback. It really made my day and I'm really glad that you got a kick out of it. It gives me and Steven a lot of confidence for how his reel will be recieved with the big-wigs in Japan. Thanks SO much!

I know!! I've been trying to figure out where its coming from - we deinterlaced the footage before we graded and the film-look grade is running at 24P...I suspect the Quicktime Conversion is doing it. It doesn't help that the VFX footage is in Animation codec to boot. *scratches head unsuredly*

Thank you - I can't take credit for that, I had a great DOP and also we had a lot to shoot on a single, 8-hour day with only two guys doing lighting. Our hands were forced to do simply camera setups, however we did everything within our power to make sure we never picked ugly compositions and we were always smart about our lens choices (or in this case, how to manipulate our only lens to do what we wanted it to).

Ahhh i know the one you mean - its actually not in-camera, but FCS's Smooth-Cam plugin freaking out. That entire zoom shot was done on a handheld camera because we didn't have low-legs on the day and the camera did not balance on sandbags well enough to keep it stabilized. We stabilized the shot, but I think that last moment was so shaky there was little the plugin could do. It's something I'll just have to live with, but great spotting it!

Once again that is some keen spotting - it's one bit of lazy sound-editing I didn't bother to fix. You're seeing all of my seams!

In the process of doing it as we speak actually - I'm not well-versed with moving an image inside a matte without making it look unnatural. Lots of keyframes and lots of experimenting will be the secret to getting this right, I'm guessing?

Absolutely - we just had no time to get this done and I'm counting my lucky stars that we got anything resembling what we got within the short span of time we had. Our fx guys whipped all of that up in about 8 hours of work outside normal business hours.

Thanks heaps, I'll pass this onto Steven. It'll really boost his confidence! And you're on the money regarding his villainship ability - its for that reason I've got him in my first feature film playing the handsome and quite crazy bad guy!

 

I keep saying that to my DOP! He's wasted in the TV-centric culture of the NZ Film Industry!

Heartfelt thanks for the compliment again, I'm in the middle of trying to get my first feature off the ground and, naturally, it'll be probably shot on RED ONE (or possibly RED EPIC knowing how long preproduction takes on NZ feature films). There's a lot of cool stuff we'd love to try in terms of lighting as well as motion (we'd like to see if its possible to shoot an entire action sequence over-cranked and then slip things back to 24fps in post to give us the option to slow-down ANYTHING we shoot ANYWHERE in the edit...do you know anyone who's ever tried that?)

A thousand heartfelt thanks again - I appreciate the time and effort you are putting, even if it is very little, and also the opportunity to get more feedback. I will do as you recommend!

Bingo - caught me out again and you're right, I intentionally looped it three times and it drives ME crazy. I didn't actually have the guts to leave that first-half of the film without music and then when I decided to use a soundtrack, I had a bitch of a time trying to find something appropriate. In the end, I committed a personal no-no and looped the music over and over. It's grating to me as well, so rest assured you're not the only one!

Again thanks so much for the compliment and the kind praise (which I will forward to Steven). I will definitely be taking your and Michael's feedback into account.

 

That was nice. Definitely something to be proud of.

 

Actually fewer keyframes is probably better. "Easy Ease" in AE is your friend on this one.

Yes. I didn't like it because it smacked of indecisiveness; but to be fair, there were a LOT of other problems on that shoot, and the directors were crap. So perhaps it's more the execution than the idea itself that was the issue. If you were to shoot an action scene properly, I could see that working, but it seems to me that you're adding a lot of extra data you're unlikely to ever use. You're also locking yourself into shooting the whole action scene with a fast shutter, getting the Gladiator-look -- although shot properly instead of Confus-O-Vision that might be interesting.

In my case I would probably shoot overcranked only if I knew I was going to be ramping and/or going slo-mo. But that's just me.

 

That's good food for thought - I've not had the chance to experiment with restoring overcranked footage back to 24p and seeing the results. If recording overcranked will create a 180-degree shutter angle effect when sped up to normal playback speed, then it could be a monkey-wrench for some of the stuff we intend.

As always, camera-tests are the way to go. Thanks for the heads up, that's really useful!

 

180-degree is your goal. That's what you want in order to look normal. The problem is that when you shoot slo-mo and speed it back up, it becomes a much lower degree shutter speed, since you're essentially discarding most of the frames, leaving gaps in the blur. That's how you get that Gladiator/Saving Private Ryan hyper-crisp motion look. It has very little blur. It's a difficult thing to re-introduce blur back into footage like that. In fact for it to be "true" it's nearly impossible if you shot at say, 48 FPS. The only way would be to film at such a high framerate that you have most of the information that you would have in the timespan of the blur and use something like Timewarp or Twixtor to build realistic blurs out of it. But, as Mike said, you'd be dealing with so much more data at that point, that it would be essentially unmanageable, and basically impossible for filming a whole sequence that way, especially multi-camera.

You have to sack up and do some forethought toward what moments deserve to be slo-mo.

 

Your data and my research seems to be saying the same thing Oh well, that's what fight-blocking tapes are for! Cheers Ryan!

 

Well, sadly I can't give as insightful a response as dorkman or ryan. But great job anyway.

The actor was definitely the hilight of the film, as he should be. And I noticed the 2:35 matte thing, too. I generally lean toward shooting everything a bit wider than normal, (even in comparison to others matting out 16:9 footage) and I can just crop if the shot is too wide (benefit of HD, don't really notice the quality loss depending on what your final film resolution will be).

 

Thanks dvdcr! I appreciate the input!

Yeah that 2.35:1 crop did prove to be a bit of a bitch. To be honest we did not intend it to be cropped, it was sort of an arbitrary decision made in the last minute. As you can clearly tell, panning and scanning around an aspect-ratio matte is not one of my fortes!

 

I've got to say, I really enjoyed this. Watched it three times now. Steven is a powerhouse of an actor.

The reason why it worked is clearly that this is a case where the actor, script, and director really collaborated very well. The unison created a small performance where the subtle reactions and emotions really have a profound effect. Simply put, I believe him. I hang onto every word, everything he says, and I really see him as this evil villain. I have no other performances from Steven to compare this too, so I can't say if he disappeared into the role, or if he's simply playing a character similar to himself. However, without any prior background on the actor, it really worked.

What I liked as well was the simple blocking. How he would linger over the psychiatrist, dropping the hand cuffs, then how he gets chummy with the doctor, then stands, ready to fight near the end.

Now maybe it's my film teachers voice in my head, telling us time and time again that it's about the visuals and not the dialogue, but perhaps the reel could have benefited to have a few moments where it's really about how he moves through the space, how he reacts to the environment/people around him without dialogue... but it's a choice of what you want to show I suppose. For an actors reel it may be more beneficial to focus on dialogue.

Then again I'm not seeing the full reel, just this section.

Two thumbs up!

 

Thanks Nitro - Steven himself has checked out all you guys comments' on this page and he's quite taken aback by the positive comments you've made. He sends his warmest thanks - he has some difficulty getting work in New Zealand for a lot of different reasons (some of them being that he doesn't look like a typical New Zealander and his acting style is certainly not what they look for in television commercials and films down here). He is humbled that international audiences can see his potential!

Well the collaborative process was very interesting - although par for the course in terms of the methodology and commitment for any kind of film. Steven showed me the script and my first reaction was "wow okay this is a hell of an ambitious piece to attempt as an actor's showcase reel" and the fact that it was a super-villain monologue initially made it feel all the more problematic.

But our trick was some very long discussions about the scene, literally breaking it down section by section and figuring out character motivation (i.e. "okay, this is a supervillain trying to escape from jail...why is he taking his time to smell the roses and say ALL of these different things to this guy?"). From those discussions, we were able to build a psychology for the character and figure out what the scene was really about if it were part of a larger film and then Steven was able to carve a "journey" for his character across the scene and work out what it was his character was trying to achieve before the guards managed to break into the room.

The first few lines of dialogue - we figured - was in fact the continuation of an earlier conversation. Our idea - in our heads - was that this was a psychiatric interview in which Dr Webber was conducting with Nick Napalm and a superhero was in the room as protection. Something terrible happened, the superhero was knocked out cold and Nick was now free to begin his escape out of the prison. When the scene opens, Nick says his lines as if he was trying to carry on some deeper, philosophical conversation that was already going on before the crap hit the fan.

After that, we established the both characters were ideally locked in a pause of action that was surrounded around the door. Nick Napalm, despite his powers, cannot escape the room until that door is opened. Likewise, Dr Webber could not escape the room until the guards broke in and rescued him . And so the subtext of the scene was two characters waiting for the door to be opened for quite different reasons...and because their course of action was prolonged by this, this gave Nick and Dr Webber the moment to carry on their philosophical talk in which Nick tries to make Dr Webber see that he really isn't such a bad guy and that - like any villain - he's trying to do what he thinks is for the greater good of the world.

Then we plotted out what Nick would do in this conversation. Clearly he knows that Dr Webber poses no threat to him, so his next course of action is to slowly uncuff himself and then sit down and have a good ole chummy chat with the doctor while he waits for the sealed doors to be opened. This - and exposition of Nick's philosophies on good, evil and superheroes - drives the majority of the scene until the guards start to cut the door open.

The last major beat of the scene begins when the doors start to be cut open. Here, I figured that this was a multi-layered sequence where a culmination of different parts of Nick's psychology would drive him to make his "closing statements" to Dr Webber before kick

 

Sorry if I'm kind of just reposting my comment on Vimeo, but my feelings are the same. This was FANTASTIC! As a big fan of the novel I have to say I loved this. Steven A. Davis did some amazing acting work there and I think he should get any role after he shows this. Plus the writing in this scene was excellent and conveyed the novel's theme and tone very well, plus the editing was also exceptional (especially at the very end). Very well done.

 

Cheers dan_yoda, really appreciate your feedback and support!

 

Ah, yes I've seen those two. Big fan of Fanimatrix. Never noticed he was dante, guess it's the accent, hair and glasses, lol. In part it's a good thing that I didn't notice. However, to be honest, it wasn't a very strong performance. Not bad, a fun role, funny even, but not strong. I could see that in his reel as well, some of those roles just didn't hit home for me. His choreography is amazing, but that's the main thing that stood out. This scene will absolutely help boost his reel, good decision on his part (or whomever thought to do it). From what I've seen it's by far his strongest piece.

 

Indeed - it goes to show we've come a long way since 2003

 

I don't post here very often, but I just wanted to say, that was really good. Not just as an actor's reel (as which it was brilliant), but just as a small film too.

I loved the concept behind it so much I actually went and bought the book. I'd never heard of it before now, but once I saw that, I really wanted to read it. I just thought you guys might like to know you actually converted at least one person into going and reading the source material. (It wasn't easy to find either, everywhere seems to not have it anymore, so thank god for Amazon marketplace!).

Well done on a brilliant film and a brilliant acting showcase. I can't imagine he won't get the part with that behind him!

(And thank you for introducing me to the book!).

 

Thanks Vivli and just an update for everybody - Steven just got offered the part in the movie a couple of days ago! So its an all round success for everyone concerned! He will be going to Tokyo around Dec/Jan to film it.