Ladies and gentlemen, here it is! Our short film A House for Marge is finally online for viewing! The screenplay was written by Aubrey Hansen and the music was composed by Rick Holets. Enjoy!
By the way, Rick Holets has released the score as a free download on his web site. If you enjoyed the film, please check it out!
Words can’t describe this. Thank you again for everything – especially for doing such a wonderful job bringing my script out to the world!
I know I probalby ask this. But I’m a filmmaker to so yeah I will. What types of lights were you using?
I meant probalby should “not” ask this. Also the acting was good. Except when that guy from the builders says “oh a volunteer.” Somehow it seems ackward.
There are a few places where I would have expected a stronger lighting scheme. For instance when they are in the living room talking about what thier project could be, the lighting is very flat. I think it would grab people more if there was one strong light coming from one direction. I liked the part at 4:52 when she is calling on her phone. Thier’s a strong light from the right. Putting a little more light to the left could have put the shot over the top. (Kind of as a backlight.) At 5:05 when thier sawing and building something, it looks like it was cloudy. The shot would still have benefited if you had a strong light coming from one angle. Its a nice shot how you pull back reveling the person cutting wood. But the person is up against a white wall. The wall itself is pretty boring to look at. If the garage door had been a different color. It would have a lot different. Or possibly you could have took a few steps and found a different more interesting background. At 3:52 Anna’s face, Marge’s face (when she walks by.), and the little boy’s face go into shadow. Having a stronger key light would have been a lot better. Having the camera lower and tilting up towards them would have nice to. (But now I’m now I’m just being picky.)
I also am having great trouble trying to see if you did any color grading. Which is good in a way because it isn’t rediculus. But I can’t halp feeling that the brightness was off somehow. Did you under-expose in production and then not increase the brightness in post? It definitly looks like everyday was cloudy. Or maybe I’m expecting there to be more yellow in the image.
We used a small Lowel lighting kit on this film.
The goal for our lighting scheme on the project was to make the lighting feel natural, not like an action movie. We were going for a comfy feeling.
There is color grading on the film, but it’s subtle.
As far as camera stuff goes… We were shooting very quickly for the bulk of the film, trying to work around actor schedules, location schedules, and all that stuff. Our main location was only available for one day, so we had to shoot quite a few setups as fast as we could.
I totally understand. When we were shooting Spy Sprain we shoot 30 pages within five days (And they were only 3 and 1/2 hour days.) Not to mention I was the director, DP, and main actor. There a few different parts of a scenes where we had to leave the location so it was get what we could get. Don’t follow the script.
Also I understand about going for a realistic look. It did look very realistic. There was one shoot where I noticed the light was flagged, but other then that I didn’t notice at all. (That was the one shot where Anna was walking up to a wall to hang up a poster.) Its good to have the lighting reality based, but it is also imporent to make your images ingaging.
Do you think you would be interested in me writing a few articles for your blog about the importance of lighting? I have some pratcial experience and I went to the Christian Filmmakers Camp. Which a lage focus this year was about cinematography.
We’re not looking for guest posts at the moment, but thanks anyway. 🙂
okay, I will write it and post it on cf.org.