The Last Driver - A 48 Hour Film shot on Epic!

[Chris Adams]

Hey guys! Just wanted to let you all know a little bit about the short film we shot using an Epic this past weekend for the 48 Hour Film Fest in Nashville, TN.

First off, a huge thanks to Kyle Spicer for letting us use his Epic M! I was the 1st AC on the shoot and it was an incredible privilege to get to work with this camera and the amazing team of people we had! I'm sure you all know everything about the Epic at this point so I won't go into too much detail about the camera, but I will say the images coming out of it looked amazing!

So friday night we got all of our gear and prepped for the shoot. The menus of the camera are so easy to use, there was virtually no learning curve, which was great when the camera team is seeing the camera for the first time only hours before you have to start shooting! We did run into difficulty when testing the camera that night for audio. None of the recorded audio was playing back in REDCINE X, but as soon as we updated to build 470, we were off to the races! Then we had a late meeting with the Director and the rest of the team and then tried to get a little sleep. Saturday we got started pretty early and I was a little worried because the script called for 5 separate locations with about 3-4 setups at each one. It was going to be an incredibly full day and we couldn't afford to have anything go wrong camera wise.

Well the Epic performed way better than I expected! We only had two glitches, one where the camera basically froze the left half of the image, and we had to reboot. And one power spike warning so we had to reboot. But the Epic reboots so fast that it was hardly an issue at all! The main issue we had was dealing with the lack of playback, but to be honest, it probably saved us time to not go back and look at each shot.

As far as gear wise, we had:
4 128gb SSD
5 Red brick batteries
handheld rig
A wonderful cartoni gamma tripod brought by our fantastic gaffer Kip Kubin
And we used a combination of the RED LCD and my Small HD DP6 HDSDI monitor.

I will let Justin Wylie, our fantastic 2nd AC and DIT tell you about how we handled the post workflow in the next post!

Here are some behind the scenes pics:

We can't post the film until after the awards ceremonies, but I will post it here as soon as we can!

 

[Justin Wylie]

Hey guys,

I'm just going to echo what Chris said. The Epic was fantastic. DIT was a breeze. As soon as we finished a card or finished at a location I dropped the card onto 2 separate drives using R3D Data Manager. It took quite a while to verify and copy the 5K R3Ds especially on my MacBook Pro and the couple of G-Drives we rounded up from around the office. As soon as they did finish one drive went with a PA across town to our post house then back again in time for the next reel.

Our editor, Ken Conrad, was fantastic. He had the majority of the film cut by the time we wrapped on Saturday night. We cut with proxies in FCP….7 of course Doing a 7 minute short film shot in 5k in 48 hours would be absolutely impossible without our Red Rocket edit bay. Having it made post a breeze.

But of course 48 hours is an insanely short amount of time to cut, add music, mix audio, build effects, do ADR, color correct and output. So we didn't have time to even get to color correction….which was a huge bummer. But I will say, the proxies with just a basic LUT looked pretty excellent. We ran right up to the deadline and barely got it turned in before 7:30 on Sunday.

We're going back and finishing it out before we post it online and therefore avoid embarrassing ourselves all over the internet.

All in all it was a great experience shooting on the Epic and I can't wait to shoot with her again.

- Justin

PS. I'm stoked to announce that the screening went really well we won Best Sci-Fi film!

 

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Did you have a behind the scenes crew? That would be quite interesting. I keep meaning to have a behind the scenes crew to give myself something to do after 48 hours but I never get around to it.

 

[Kip Kubin]

I believe I was the "gaffer" because I was the only one with a cargo van the production could use.... but thanks Chris.... really great crew...low stress.

It did really suck to have to stay one step ahead of the crew lighting setups because I had no time to play wit the Epic.

 

[Chris Adams]

Yeah I should have put, "Our incredibly over qualified gaffer" haha!

And Craig, we did have a bunch of people on set taking turns with a 5D shooting bts vids...I'll see if we can put something together soon.