This was a short film product piece imitating the popular “I Am Legend” feature film starring Will Smith. The product is an immune boosting oral supplement.

Here is the production write-up:

We wanted to create a short film based on the popular “I Am Legend” feature film to promote an immunity product. We had spent some time studying the popular feature film taking note of wardrobe, props, set decoration, lighting & color palette. Our intentions were to match these as close as possible. Principal photography was to be done with two Canon 5D Mark II’s.

We filmed the car scene in an open parking lot against a large green screen. We wanted the creative control to film the car parked and add the background plate later in post. The sun was directly behind the car so we used bounce reflectors to light the talent and the dog through the front windshield. PA’s helped rock the car to create movement and fans were used to simulate air flow. The two lenses that were used were the Canon 50mm 1.4 and Canon 85mm 1.8.

First interior scene was filmed in an unfinished apartment complex (due to recession). One 5D was fitted to a redrockmicro shoulder mount the other on a handheld glidecam HD-1000. We utilized natural lighting and used clear plastic sheets to diffuse the light and blocked off some windows to get the right amount of light we wanted. In retrospect I wished we would have used a smoke machine or hazer to add atmosphere to create more of the look that we were going for.

The dark hallway we used a litepanels micro to light our talents face so it would be visible to the camera. We once again had one camera on a shoulder mount the other a glidecam HD-1000. We had to block off some of light from a few practicals and we ended up getting a nice red light source from the red LED on an exit sign. We lit the doorway at the end of the hallways to draw the attention of the viewer to the source of the sound the talent was hearing.

In our final scene we had picked a well furnished inviting apartment. We had some challenges with lighting as we had mixed sources. The apartment had a large bay window allowing lots of daylight temperature light in and the interior lights were much warmer tungsten like sources. With the mixed sources I tried to balance this in color correction in post as much as possible. We used kino-flos to augment the daylight coming in through the windows.

Post production workflow consisted of transcoding footage from the 5D’s to full resolution apple pro res, editing in final cut pro, visual effects/sound outsourced and color grading done in Apple Color. As I didn’t participate in the edit or visual effects I can’t comment on those but I did grade this using Apple Color. I took frame grabs from the movie to use as reference in the grade. I utilized a lot of corrections in the secondaries room to gain the custom control needed. I used the still store feature to reference back and forth between the grade and the film. Film grain was added in Magic Bullet Looks.

frame grab from movie

original

graded

2.35:1 cropping was added in final cut pro under “widescreen” plugin. This allowed control of moving the film up or down in each individual shot to stay focused on subject. The actual cropping of resolution was done during output in compressor from the geometry room by specifying dimension 1280 x 540 and cropping 135 pixels off the top and bottom from the source 1920 x 1080 material. This allowed for a clean 2:35.1 HD encode by vimeo. Lastly we converted the finish from 30 frames per second to 24 frames per second.

Here is the 30p to 24p conversion that I detailed some time ago on Cinema5D:

Superb 30p to 24p Workflow

1. Cut video in 30 fps timeline

2. Create copy of finished edit so you’ll have two clips, one to convert to 24p and one to preserve audio.

2. Open Cinema Tool (part of Final Cut Studio), File, “Open Clip”, choose “Conform”, specify “23.98″ to conform to.

Explanation: This keeps the same number of frames in the clip, it only changes the timebase from 30fps to 24fps, essentially creates overcranked footage by 6 frames, (desirable on some shots). As a result this makes the clip longer and slows the audio down which is undesirable where audio is important. At this point you’ve already created a copy of the original clip therefore preserving the original audio which we’ll relink later in Final Cut.

3. Open compressor 3 and specify deliverable format and destination. Now open the inspector window so we can do some tweaking. Under “Frame Controls” tab, click the button to the right of “Frame Controls:” to enable this feature. Once enabled, select “On” for “Frame Controls:” Underneath the “Retiming Control” section is where we’ll make changes. For “Set Duration to:” click the radio button where it will allow us to put in a duration. NOW THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART, OPEN THE COPY OF THE CLIP WE CREATED THAT STILL HAS THE 30 FPS TIMEBASE AND PUT IT INTO THE FINAL CUT PRO TIMELINE, DELETE THE VIDEO TRACK AND ENSURE THE TIMEBASE OF THE SEQUENCE IS SET TO 23.98, GO TO THE END OF THE AUDIO AND READ THE TIMECODE, THIS WAY WE’RE ENSURING THAT WE’RE RETIMING (SPEEDING BACK UP) THE CLIP SO IT WILL MATCH THE ORIGINAL AUDIO. This number is the timecode you’ll put into the duration field, (example01:08:01:06) then depending on how well you want the footage to look also taking into consideration the time it will require to compress it choose the desired quality under “Rate Conversion:”. I choose, “Best (High quality motion compesnation)” to get superb results, however this increases the compression time.

Important: Make sure that no matter which codec you use that it remains as a 23.98 fps timebase.

4. Now take the treated clip into Final Cut, we’ve already set up the sequence from step 3. Add the clip to video track 1, relink and presto!

I’ve extensively tested this and find it to be the best way to convert 30p to 24p for the time being, or atleast until and hopefully Canon comes up with a firmware to address the issue.

Additional Tips: If you have multiple clips to treat, in Cinema Tools, choose “Batch Conform” locate one file where all the files are located. Then setup batch conversions in compressor, if you have a quad core or 8 core configure Q master to take advantage of all cores otherwise it will take longer.

Cheers,
Denver Riddle

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