The 4 L's of No Budget Filmmaking

in case you missed it we just announced our new short film competition the make film challenge so if you haven't seen it check the links below we have 20 000 in prizes and a chance at developing your own feature film with a hollywood producer so make sure you check that out to get all details and get involved now because we do have that proof of concept challenge going on right now i thought it'd be a great time to show you some bts from my friend zach's latest short film we've shown his work on the show before and recently he put out a short film that stars zachary levi who you know is shazam so definitely watch the short film before you watch this because spoilers but the reason i think this is great for right now is zack made this short with basically no money at all and very minimal gear and crew so i asked zach if he would put together a making of that showed how he made this high concept sci-fi idea with little resources and a major celebrity action warning this video will ruin the entire film the statement please pause and watch the film if you haven't watched it already okay bye what's up guys my name is zach ramlin i am the director editor i kind of wore many hats on the making of this movie but this is a film that we shot completely during covid19 i want to break down how we made our short film the statement uh using limited resources and what was sort of around us the the four things that i really want to dive into on this movie specifically are sort of the the four l's which is lighting lenses limitation and location uh as well as sound sound didn't fit in there so it's like four l's and one s but those five things are really the things that made this movie dynamite so the first thing is lighting whenever you're doing your independent movie lighting is going to be a key factor to creating that space now we had three sort of different lighting shifts within the movie primarily our first lighting was natural light now a lot of independent movies um on like the super indie level you'll notice they filmed them as exteriors in forest because they have a lot of depth within them and they have a lot of character there's some sort of rustic nature to it and above all else it's usually free we shot a lot of our exteriors in our backyard using some of the best features of that property now again you can shoot this anywhere usually to find some nice beautiful exterior locations as long as you're playing your six feet rule you're you're all good so we found this beautiful exterior location down by the river to film at uh and the time of day is very important we shot kind of at sunset in blue hour for two primary reasons the first one is it's kind of the nicest lighting of the day especially within that location it's not too sharp and harsh on the main character and if you choose it correctly you're able to get a bit of depth in the background with the sky and the clouds at sunset the second one is just temperature texas was incredibly hot so filming at sort of sunset was kind of the coolest time of day as well to get our daytime shots our second setup as far as lighting goes is the big fire setup now for all of these setups that you see within the movie a key factor to making sure it all played out well was having my storyboards and shot lists available every single shot that you see within the movie was pre-planned so therefore there wasn't any sort of frantic uh last minute thinking now we were obviously creating stuff as we went along because the way you visualize it in your storyboard sometimes isn't as accurate as what you see it on set but fortunately for us we were able to be relatively parallel to the storyboards as well as having the set in our backyard really helped with that because we do a lot of our pre-planning the day before and figure out a lot of our shots and then the final lighting setup is our final location which is this interior storage container that we trimmed the edges with uh led lights and then carl janice our cinematographer created this glowing triangle that was sort of the centerpiece of the space as well as putting led lights behind the headset now again in this movie we didn't use any movie lights i think the only light that we used was during our flaming fire scene and that was a tiny little uh falcon eye f7 light panel it's like this tiny little deal i think you can get it for under 100 bucks and that was just sort of giving a little kick on our main actor's face but outside of that there was really nothing uh no other additional lighting sources that we used it was just using time of day and a beautiful practical element like a huge flame the led lights were like i think you buy them for like 40 bucks on amazon uh and that's sort of what we were able to use for our primary lighting within the space now we had considered using uh something like an aperture or really using a lot more lights within that but we found that a within the space we didn't have enough room to tinker with other lighting and b it just kind of detracted away from it so using just practicals gave us that sort of depth that we were wanting with the shadows as well as shooting on a camera like the sony a7s mark ii uh we were able to crank up the iso and uh capture the image that we wanted without actually having to bring in more gear and lugging and more stuff to do a much larger setup so having uh those uh limitations we're actually able to amplify our productivity and speed which cuts into my next point which is limitations in the project now depending on any sort of indie movie that you're going to work on you're 100 gonna come into the limitations it's like independent and limits are almost like the same word if you're making an independent movie chances are you're making a limited film so for us we had a lot of limitations within this one of them was gear uh the main gear that we shot this film um was the sony a7s mark ii and the sony a7 iii now the reason why we shot on those two cameras is that we had two cameras ready to roll at all times the reason why we had those cameras in those two ways was one lived on a gimbal and that was my sony a73 and then the other camera lived on a tripod to get more of our stable shots and locked off shots that we really wanted to get like the opening shot and the fishing shot now so as far as gear goes we didn't have red epics and red scarlets and the most expensive gear that you can imagine we had small consumer cameras to shoot this on and in fact i think that elevated our speed and productivity in a lot of ways having something small and nimble we were able to capture in tighter spaces like the storage container at the end of the movie film using a single-handed gimbal as opposed to a full steadicam system and finally since we were shooting in a sort of remote location like down by the river uh having smaller cameras that we could just put on our backpacks was much easier than carrying around big cases and big charging docks and all of that craziness but with these limitations there was errors one of them was the gimbal that we were continually shooting on for some reason just didn't want to work that day and just kept messing up never i think you broke it the second thing was the auto focus that we were relying on because we didn't have a follow focus or a monitor um was was continually hunting especially when we were starting to shoot in the darker times we were getting that in and out of focus thing so we had to shoot the takes a bunch more times and just say oh the take wasn't right secretly it was just the technical error that constantly kept messing us up so within that we were kind of limited to some of the shots had to be perfectly symmetrical not out of user preference but just because the focus cross hairs were right in the center and that's sort of just how we had to frame it but overall i think that added to a really nice image to it but just remember that even with videos that you see of i would say that quality they still come with their major limitations i'm gonna pause that there so we can thank today's sponsor nan light who creates incredible lighting products for filmmakers we actually just got their lights about two months ago and already they're some of my favorite lights in fact my key light right here in this setup has been their two foot pavo light tube and back in the bookshelf there i have their one footer tucked away given a little bit of extra kick and in the back corner what you've been seeing there every week is the four footer they've been saying it and from my experience it's been true that they strive to design lighting products that provide image makers with new possibilities and push them to expand their creative horizon they listen to customer feedback focus on design details and optimize the user experience of their products and they stand behind all their products and provide really great technical support as well and again i've been using them non-stop lately and really loving them in my workflow especially working at home their lights have a very small footprint but are still really bright i have all their tube lights here like i talked about they're really easy to rig just about anywhere thanks to how light they are and they are rgb so i don't have to try to gel anything just flip to whatever color i want right on the dial it's just been really great to stay so minimal and free up space in the small room while shooting at home which we are actually giving this one away which is the forza 60b which b stands for bicolor and we're giving this away in the make film challenge for all three winners so you can check that out in the links below but it's incredibly small and still really really bright so definitely check out the links in the notes below to check out more details on all of these lights another major limitation to this film was sound now since i didn't have a sound person on set to capture the audio that i wanted to capture we had to do all of the sounds in post-production since i was too busy focusing over the shoulder of my cinematographer called denise to uh record any of the audio on set i just kind of pulled the card we'll just do it all recorded in mos and then just re-amplify a lot of those sounds in post-production unfortunately i was able to create a lot of that space by using sound effects off the website epidemic sound [Music] they have an amazing uh library of different sounds to choose from as well as that's where you hear that sort of symphony score in the background and that's also where every single sound effect you hear in the movie came from from the water splashing to the sounds of the bugs the trees the thunder crackling the wood crackling the fluorescent lights you name it every single sound was off of that website none of it was recorded in real life and that just shows you the power of post-production and sound the time frame to edit the movie was very limited it only took me about an hour to edit the first pass of the film the sound design took weeks it took nights after nights days after days implementing the little tiny tweak here creek here flash there flicker here crackle there and eventually it made that whole movie but if i could have done it again and could have done it properly of course i would have had a location sound person there to capture all the sounds as we were filming so therefore i didn't have to replicate them in post things like footsteps breathing natural sounds like a cast like a fishing rod cast are hard to emulate and some of them are even just impossible to find online i couldn't find the sound of the fishing rods going out and reeling out for the life of me so i actually just had to find another sound and replace it i don't even know what i ended up using i think it was like the sound of like metal sliding but it it works for some reason so sometimes you got to fake it till you make it within the edit in order to get a good uh piece of art another big limitation that we had during production was the access to just things obviously since we were making a movie during uh coven 19 a lot of businesses were closed down i couldn't go to a wardrobe place i couldn't hire someone to do production design so a lot of the materials that we had to gather together were either on property on site sort of rummaging through bags and rubber maids looking for things or going on amazon a little production element that we used to really elevate the entire thing was these hazmat suits at the end of the film i think it just gave this cool sci-fi vibe and uh the reason why we delayed production just for so long was just so that we could get those hazmat suits to elevate the value of the project to me i think wardrobe is one of the major overlooked elements of a short film or feature film and it is such an integral part telling that story because that you're when you're looking at your character the whole time you're looking at their wardrobe the entire time so we really wanted to make sure that our wardrobe told some sort of story from the cowboy hat that he wears at the beginning to the hazmat suits the one suit that he wears at the end which was like some sort of mechanic suit that zach had so we really wanted to leverage the most diverse wardrobe pieces in order to tell as much story as we could in our limited time and obviously with our limited resources this is something else you can do great wardrobe doesn't necessarily cost a whole heck of a lot of money in comparison to what a great location would cost a space suit is a lot more affordable than a space ship so when you're making your next independent movie try and see if you can stretch a dollar a little bit further by just getting really good wardrobe and then seeing if you can creatively implement a cool location because at the end of the day you might have a cool location but if your wardrobe sucks the two aren't gonna match and now finally let's go into lenses on this project what did we shoot it on uh the entire movie except for one shot was done on a 50 millimeter focal length with the only shot diversifying from that is our overhead looking down which was sought on a 16 to 35 2.8 the major glass was a sigma prime art series lens at a 50 millimeter 1.4 and then the other one was this incredible little robust lens that carl owns and it's it goes up to a 0.95 and this has this beautiful bokeh dreamy feel which we shot a lot of our beginning scenes on just to create that fantastical mystical vibe the reason why we shot a lot more on the sigma rather than this fantastical beauty lens was just because of the autofocus capabilities that the sigma provided us because we had a lot of gimbal shots but to tie it all together what i want the lesson to be out of this entire production of making this movie is the fact that we made a movie during covet 19 that stands up to a lot of my other short films that i've made that i had unlimited resources to and i actually think limitation can propel creativity to a whole new level i wrote and created this concept mostly out of the fact of just not having anything but that made me just focus on the things that i did have so if you don't have a set if you don't have actors if you don't have the wardrobe that you want look at what you've got in your backyard and string those things together this concept came together because i saw a vr headset and a storage container that we had and i knew that nature was in the backyard i paired the three together and that created the narrative that we have today it wasn't just because i had every single thing at my disposal limitation is one of creativity's best friends despite what everyone tells you oh before we wrap all this stuff up i want to do a little bit of a plug for my online film program which is known as pocket film school pocket film school is an online film school created by myself amongst a bunch of other incredible filmmakers myself and my team at pocket film school decided to wrangle together every single creative that we knew and worked with and collaborated with which were kind of experts in their field to create an online film program that taught all aspects of filmmaking from writing directing producing cinematography production design wardrobe music composition editing vfx you name it we've got a long laundry list of programs available there and there'll be a link to it in the description of this video but you guys can take a look and give it a gander and sharpen up your craft filmmaking skills when it comes to making movies and learn the strategies even deeper into what i used for the movie like the statement but that's it thank you guys for watching me babylon about this hopefully you can lean into those limitations learn a little bit more about what uh you can do with a little bit of nothing and amazon prime goodbye what i love about all of that is that even though zach was making a short film with zachary levi they did the whole thing incredibly diy it's just proof that you don't need money to get out there and make your film so big thank you to zach for putting that together so make sure to follow him on all the socials links in the description and don't forget about the make film challenge going on right now that's it and until next time don't forget to write shoot edit repeat [Music] foreign

Channel: Film Riot

Views: 164,824

Keywords: film riot, triune films, ryan connolly, filmmaking, tutorial, how to, adobe, film school, low budget, no budget, low, no, budget, filmmaker, filmmakers, 4 L's, tricks, tips, zachary levi, zach levi, short film, shazam, The statement, diy, do it yourself

Id: Ue8HqdIrjko

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020