Epic + DJI Ronin + Spooky Mansion = "Single-take" Horror Short

[David Zimmermann]

Hey guys!

David here, from Cinesaurus (creators of the YouTube channel Gritty Reboots). We take popular and nostalgic video games, TV shows, comics and more and turn them into gritty, live-action trailers.

We recently picked up the DJI Ronin, and designed a shoot that would allow us to test out its capabilities! A friend of ours had an idea for a reboot of the classic children's story, "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie", but with a disturbing 'Se7en'-style vibe to it. The idea was relatively simple to begin with, but we decided to go for the "single-take" approach using the Ronin, which made things equally difficult and fun (SPOILER ALERT: there are 2 cuts in the video :thumbsup. Here's what we came up with:

For this video, we had one person flying the Ronin (myself) and another on the transmitter controlling pan/tilt/etc. We were quite pleased with the results, considering this was only our first shoot with the Ronin. There's still much to be learned in terms of handling/fine-tuning, but overall, it's been a ton of fun to shoot with... and you really can't beat the price considering the ease of setup/breakdown, lightning fast auto-calibration, load capacity, etc.

Let me know what you think!

 

[Ryan Sauve]

Haha, that was great!! Thanks for sharing! Don't know if it was intentional but the subtle zolly shot at 0:22 was awesome. Really set and added to the creepy tone. Another thing that caught my attention was the guy cutting his hair. The timing was just right to see his spit drooling out of his mouth. The creepy mural at the bottom of the stairs then transition to the grandfather clock, very nice. Camera movements and angles were fantastic. Good job!

 

[Jeff Klevins]

Nice! That was really well done guys!

 

[Eric Santiago]

It was fun but was that a red laser pointer dot just as you go into the room with rocking chair?

 

[David Zimmermann]

Thanks a lot, guys!

Eric - The red dot was just some kind of lens flare... weird though! Does look a bit like a laser pointer.