Kevin Dietrich's "Overlap", Orlando, FL Production

[Drew Suppa]

Hey all:

In October, I was brought back to my college town of Orlando, Florida to shoot a film for first-time director Kevin Dietrich. Kevin, a cousin of my friend Joe from film school, has long had a passion for the film industry and began producing for his cousin when we both attended UCF. An accident years ago left Kevin a quadriplegic, but his determination and drive shone through like no one I've ever met.

The short was shot with Build 21 (Beta) in 4.5K utilizing RED's own 17-85mm T2.9 zoom and a variety of accessories from third-party companies available as part of IndieRentals' "Ultimate Package" out of Los Angeles.

I'd love to discuss the positive and negative attributes with both RED hardware utilized and this Beta Build.

I've followed RED from it's public announcement and was proud to be at "The Lot" two years ago for it's official unveiling. I also had the pleasure of meeting Jim Jannard there. I've always been fairly pleased with the RED One body, but this production was my first time using RED lenses; on past productions, I'd stuck with Zeiss, Arri, Angenieux or even Panavision glass.

The 17-85mm T2.9 was chosen because the rental house's Optimo 18-85mm had been stolen two weeks prior to checkout. I did a lens test in-house and was pleased with the glass and attributes of the RED zoom. I was actually very surprised with the quality of glass and sharpness, as well as weight and over-all feel. Recessed witness marks seemed to be the biggest complaint from the lens, until an issue arose half-way through production... I'll explain momentarily.

My Gaffer recommended to me a Key Grip out of Florida; a few phone calls later, I was able to secure his services and his 10-Ton package. The light loss from the Optimo T2.2 to the RED T2.9 was noticeable, but between the G&E package and Build 21's processing, I was confident what I aimed to create would be possible.

I'll continue soon, but does anyone know where I can host larger files so you can see the 2K .tiff files?

 

[Jerrod Cordell]

Can't wait to see what you guys have done.

Let me know if you're doing any more work in Orlando because I would love to come out and help.

 

[Drew Suppa]

Thanks man... I'll post the rest of the story as soon as I can find a place where I can host .tiff files above 20MB.

Any ideas, anyone?

 

[Luis Otero]

Can't wait to see what you guys have done.

Let me know if you're doing any more work in Orlando because I would love to come out and help.

Same here... We have petty good access to many great lenses, lights and grips. :smile5:

Hope to see the final product soon,

 

[Jerrod Cordell]

Thanks man... I'll post the rest of the story as soon as I can find a place where I can host .tiff files above 20MB.

Any ideas, anyone?

I can't find any. There used to be Red Relay but I don't know what happened to it.

PM Evin Grant and see if you can put them on his Mirror site.

 

[Drew Suppa]

Well, it's been far too long since I've posted anything here that I said I was going to post. I've had to reduce the size of the images, so I apologize that they are grabs from the 1080 files and not 2K.

Without further adieu:

The shoot starred up-and-coming actor Nick McCallum; he has done speaking roles on CSI and a few other shows, as well as independent features such as "Player".

"Overlap" is about a young scientist hellbent on discovering and proving time travel; he time travels himself, but in doing so, the water molecules in his body start to deteriorate. He races to find his younger self and gives him all of the information on his research up until he went back in time, so that his younger self has a decade to perfect what he did wrong. However, the younger self, seeing how disfigured he becomes, abandons his time travel research and instead focuses on his marriage to his young wife. A time tangent occurs when the scientist returns to his own time, and there are now two versions of the scientist.

I assume you can all figure out where that goes.

The 30-minute short has one major goal in mind: to prove to investors that the group can create a professional product with proper funding. Between a manager, an agent and great PR, the goal is to shoot a feature in the next few years and have it debut at Cannes with a bit of a following.

It was such a pleasure working for Kevin and Joe Dietrich; Kevin's story has been so inspiring to all of us, and only a few days into production, even the Union guys who came out were cheering on our novice but visionary Director.

The budget of the short was roughly $80K; some of the funding went to equipment (RED rental, Fisher 10, Chapman/Leonard Zeus II), but the rest went to set construction and design, locations, flights and payroll. We had a great production crew in every department, and I was so pleased with not only how well things turned out, but also with how well the whole team worked together.

 

[Drew Suppa]

McCallum had a difficult roll before him; he not only played the scientist, but also his younger scientist counterpart and alternative scientist in his present day... all the while maintaining eye lines and emotions. He had a stand-in for scenes involving two different versions of himself, but this in itself was a monumental task. He also brought the differences in these characters to life in a way I can honestly attribute to Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker. Yes; I just made that analogy... his performance was amazing.

I'll post more shortly.

 

[Jerrod Cordell]

Damn, those are some great looking screen grabs Drew. The lighting looks fantastic.

 

[Drew Suppa]

Thanks, Jerrod.

The director wanted to do two things with the cinematography... one, pay homage to the horror films of the late 1970s and 1980s, and two, create the most realistic looking night time interiors and exteriors keeping that homage in mind.

His goal was a lot of noir-ish lighting while maintaining depth despite the shadows... this wasn't exactly easy.

Build 21 allowed me to accomplish just that, though: this is the first build I've been comfortable exposing from 15-40 IRE and being confident that both the information was there in the .R3D file and the noise was not overbearing. Most of this picture was shot at 320 ISO, but I set the metadata from the camera side at 500 and 640 without much noticeable difference in the noise. I have worked with previous builds where I noticed a difference in the noise at 400 ISO... Builds 16 and 17 most notably.

The new color space rocks, in other words.

Despite a (hopefully) natural look, we were constantly throwing thousands of watts of light in a given scene.

The RED 18-85mm T2.9 was a surprisingly good piece of glass, but it quickly became apparent to the AC and I why it costs so much more for comparable zooms: heat and humidity affect the lens... seriously.

We had one exterior where the night started off at 91 degrees with 90% humidity. In five hours, a cold front rolled through and the temperature dropped to 49 degrees and 30% humidity.

Not only did we have a back focus issue as result, but the entire lens was off: witness marks did not line up on either side of the lens, and the zoom became sticky from 70mm to 85mm, where it eventually clicked into place at 85mm.

This was the result of the rapid temperature and humidity shift, and I would not recommend this lens for those dealing with locations of extreme temperature change.

Luckily, my AC was an amazing focus puller.

 

[Jerrod Cordell]

We had one exterior where the night started off at 91 degrees with 90% humidity. In five hours, a cold front rolled through and the temperature dropped to 49 degrees and 30% humidity.

Hah! Welcome to Florida.

Definitely a good heads up though. I had no idea the humidity would throw the whole lens out of whack.

 

[Drew Suppa]

Seems there's just Florida people on here... any comments or questions from anyone else across the board?

 

[Nigel Wallace]

looks great man, good job!
also i never realized how many red users live around orlando...

also where abouts was this shot?

 

[Drew Suppa]

Thanks for the feedback.

This was shot from Winter Springs through Oviedo and to downtown Orlando.

I don't actually live in Florida... I went to college at UCF years ago and now reside in Los Angeles.