do more with less. (no-budget filmmaking)

one of the most rewarding aspects of film making is learning to do more with less even if you're just recreating someone else's shot it's pretty incredible how far you can get with just a little imagination and a ton of persistence and eventually those results can look like they otherwise should have taken a massive crew or really specialty equipment haters will say it's a green screen but I got receipts baby keep M keep I recently posted a series of three short videos titled r g and P and I made these with a really simple story in mind I wanted R to represent birth and growing up and especially the the loss of Innocence that comes with growing up and then G was just meant to represent life it was supposed to focus on all of the best parts of life and be a really vibrant representation of what it feels like to exist at all and then be of course represented death and I wanted it to feel like a very Bittersweet but also very peaceful representation of death so there's way more symbolism and personal meaning that I tried to pack into these videos but I won't dive into all of that now I will say though that I feel like I can't take much credit at all for the feeling Behind these videos the the music in all three and the voice over in be just carry so much weight for the feeling that's created that I just had the simple job of creating some nice visuals on top of artwork that I already believe is so great on its own so with all of that said I'm just going to break down a few of the shots that I'm especially proud of and a few shots that were requested in the community post that I put up last week so with all that said here's just a breakdown behind the scenes of my RGB series if you enjoyed r at all if it made you feel anything I guarantee you 99.9% of that is because of this song by Jean Dawson this song is phenomenal and I feel like my shots on this song are just like a Sprinkle of spice on top of the like delicious meal that no scope is my gosh Jean Dawson is such an incredible artist probably my favorite artist on the planet so with all that said most of these shots were pretty straightforward and simple to capture so I'll start with the one that was not straightforward and that's this skating shot thankfully I had an experienced crew helping me with this shot my good friends Alex gaso and Aaron mcginness have gotten this shot for me before couple years ago in Huntington Beach we did this same type of shot and to this day it's still one of my favorite shots that we've ever gotten so I wanted to do it again in Denver for this series this time it was a little more complicated we rolling it's a on lane road it's rush hour right near this office complex no not selfie mode Aaron's driving the van while Alex has the gimbal out the window trying to keep the camera on me while there's trees going past and other people walking on the path cars passing them on the road so it was hectic but somehow they nailed it perfectly the very first try and that's what resulted in this shot oh that's sick through the rail right there yeah Dream Team strikes again and then the next one is probably the shot I'm the most proud of and I think maybe the most requested that I explain how it was done and that was this red floating falling shot this one was kind of a process for me when I was listening to the music I felt like I wanted some type of floating imagery it just felt like it would fit really well but at the time I had that idea I was by myself I had no idea how I was going to get a shot of me floating and then I remembered this magician that I saw when I was a kid on TV and for some reason the magician explained how they did it thankfully but they made someone Levitate by basically having a forklift uh rais them up and down and there was a curtain blocking the actual forklift and the person on the forklift was just wearing a really loose jacket so that it would dangle down and cover the forklift um so I had that in my head and somehow that led to me doing this I took this stool that swivels and I attached a friction arm to the base with a June M20 RGB light on it and shined that upwards beneath me with just a red color and then I spun on my back on this St so this was in my garage I had the camera mounted up in the rafters above me pointed down at me I just filled the garage with fog from my fog machine and then I just spun around on my back um as long as my abs could handle it I also filmed this in 120 frames per second so that I could get it really slow making it feel even more floaty pretty stoked on that one I'm stoked how that one turned out took some trial and error because I started with that magician's trick in my mind and tried filming it from the side and it was so bad it was so so bad and so dumb looking but thankfully I stuck with it I kept iterating until I came up with the idea of just placing the camera above me and lighting beneath me [ __ ] that sucks next shot that I'm also super proud of and so stoked how simple this was to get I love love how it feels like it's just this rapid passing of time it's it's like it's like watching time just slipping away before your eyes and it's it almost feels like watching me go through days and days rapidly um but this was done at a children's playground Little Tikes merrygoround toy what we doing Jake we're back at the vomit 9000 once again had Alex and Aaron with with me to help make sure I didn't throw up and to make sure my camera didn't fall off in the ferris wheel and make sure I was in focus and um it was a big help having them there for this a got something on there you don't have a air blowy thingy with you do you no [ __ ] don't do this at home kids do you want me to go oh my God I wait I can go run and get it right by your house that's okay it's okay I got it just don't tell anyone I got it I was sitting on one side of the marryg go round I stuck my tripod on the other side of the marry around and friction armed it to it kind of sketchy at points but eventually we got it figured out I used this for quite a few different shots and set my camera at different settings for different shots in this scenario I'm going to verify the settings and I'll put it on screen but basically it was it was time-lapse mode to get this shot for other shots I just used 24 frames per second but I slowed the shutter down to like 1/4 so that it has that really streaky disconnected feeling next shot a bunch of you already knew that it is just a direct ripoff of Michael slovis the cinematographer from Breaking Bad it's this scene where Jesse Pinkman it's his first first time doing heroin and it's just him floating out of bed as the Euphoria kicks in I wanted to recreate that shot even though it was a direct ripoff because a I I had an idea for how I thought I could attain it just by myself um and B I really liked that shot to help convey the idea of a loss of Innocence that's why I preceded this shot with me popping a bottle and falling into bed I wanted it to kind of continue to contribute to that Narrative of a loss of Innocence whether I'm getting drunk or high whatever doesn't matter that's the purpose of having this bed floating shot and the way I got this shot was completely the result of this motorized standing desk that I'm working on right now so basically I took my standing desk I programmed it to go from its lowest possible setting to its highest possible setting with the push of a button so so I was laying on a a perpendicular 2x4 on the desk so that I could hang off the desk without the desk being in the shot and then I friction armed and Gaff taped my tripod to the desk with the camera up above me and then hit the button so that I would move upwards it was hilarious just looked so stupid from the BTS but hey I'm stoked with how it turned out I think it's a pretty close Rec creation of the breaking bad version similar in jankiness are these few biking POV follow shots honestly I hesitate to even share this one cuz it was so sketchy I don't know if I'd even recommend doing it but I essentially just friction armed and shoelace tied my tripod to the back of my bike it basically was so not stable and so shaky that that's why I decided to just film with a really slow shutter because it was already going to be so shaky I figured why not just make the shot blurry and slow shutter anyway because the rig was a disaster there is way less to talk about in G than there was in R R was where I got really experimental and put a lot of work into some of the shots G was more so just taking archived shots from the year and putting them into a fun little montage and I I think the takeaway here is that a ton of the shots in this video are from my iPhone which is kind of beautiful that the video that's about life and just being a human most of those shots are taken on the iPhone because they were the best memories they felt the most authentic and the most just like real life so I used a ton of those in G but the one shot that I will break down is this bicycle shot this was similar to my janky bike rig in R but this one felt way more secure but this was actually done with a GoPro Hero 6 which I think is like eight years old at this point or something so I was really stoked that such a cool shot came out of such an old GoPro but basically I had two friction arms which if you haven't picked up on it already friction arms are like a godsend for solo film making or maybe just for film making in general I'm going to say my MVP tool but yeah this was just done with two friction arms and this little extendo selfie stick thing and then a GoPro 6 the GoPro did have an ND filter on it which was crucial to get the motion blur otherwise GoPros are so fast shutter you don't get any motion blur so other than that I think G's pretty self-explanatory tripod shots iPhone shots just being human you know be was actually the one that I was initially the least happy with so before I had the voice over from Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium in it I just knew that I wanted it to feel very Bittersweet and very isolated and open um but to me it just felt pretty empty I had it edited with this song and all of the shots that you see in it I had it edited and literally until the night before it went live on YouTube I was like okay I guess it's just so so I don't really like it that much and then thankfully probably at 1 p.m. before I put this video up I remembered the line that Mr mcgorum delivers before he dies and that just made this video it tied it all together honestly thanks to Zach Helm who wrote and directed M mum's Wonder important because I think this video would have been pretty terrible without it it just felt so lacking and that voice over pulled it all together I will talk about this windshield shot though this shot requires a ton of precaution because you don't want to be causing an accident when you're filming a video you don't want to be dropping things on the road or doing anything dumb so with all that said you have to be very very careful I don't recommend you do this type of shot anyway but the way I did it was I bought these two suction cup windshields moving tools from Amazon and then of course attached friction arms to those and attached those to my camera um and then you also have to have some type of anchor cable tied around your hood or tied around something to your camera and the vehicle so that in the event the suction cup fails you're not dropping your camera onto the road but that's really all there is to it once you get it suctioned and rigged up you're pretty much set from there I didn't need a polarizer but if you want to play around with the reflections a bit a polarizer would help a ton hopefully that covers any questions or any Curiosities that you had about these videos I had such a good time making these I hope too that this just helps show how much you can do with just a little bit like you can you can get so far just with a creative imagination or with using whatever you have available go down the rabbit hole of thinking about magicians from when you were little and how they did tricks and as you're filming if things don't look good and they don't turn out exactly how you want don't just stop there and tell yourself you suck like there's always iterations that you can make there's always ways you can tweak it to keep making it better and better so that's all I've got on this one I feel like I've been talking for 6 years at this point so I'm going to go not talk the rest of the day thanks so much for being here I really appreciate you and I'll see you [Music] soon

Channel: Jake Frew

Views: 427,520

Keywords: filmmaking, filmmaker, rgb, jake frew, jake frew rgb, jake frew filmmaking, filmmaking breakdown, diy filmmaking, jake.frew, cinematic, cinematic video, cinematic filmmaking, cinematic vlog, aesthetic video, do more with less, filmmaking tips, filmmaking advice, learn filmmaking, no budget filmmaking, low budget filmmaking, no-budget filmmaking, free filmmaking, filmmaking basics

Id: r-g_lmajdiU

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2024