Spamorama (short) filmed with Scarlet

[Mondo Ghulam]

Hi!

I'd like to share a short we shot last year for the Virgin Media Shorts festival last year. It combines puppets and animation and though it was a challenging shoot it was an absolute hoot to make. We were going for a lo-fi look in the spirit of South Park with a touch of Creature Comforts. Work commitments meant that we couldn't make the festival and only now have we been able to complete it.

It was shot over two extremely hot days in an un-ventilated space in Edinburgh last summer. Happily the Scarlet worked like a charm and never once gave us a problem.

All of the puppets were markered and required tracking / paint-outs before the face animation was supplied. The tracking was done in Syntheyes and the edit was pulled together in FCPX from Previz to final. The Scarlet 4K images excelled in tracking allowing us to grab a hold of details that were quite blurred making that part of the process almost automatic at times. The metadata was super-useful for lens matching in Maya.

Visually it's really simple, probably not the greatest example of cinematography shot with a Red, but I think we can all agree that it puts the skin tone discussion to rest

If you like, please share!

Mondo

 

[Ben Scott]

Lovely stuff Mondo. Would love to know how the process with Virgin went and if you'd recommend it. I know there's no money there but I do like the idea of seeing my films on the big screen before a feature.

Also why did you go for red over say a 5D for animation?

 

[Mondo Ghulam]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for watching and for the complement! As we'd missed the submission I can't vouch for the process (yet), but it is my intention to submit something this year. The thing with VMS that I don't really like is that to qualify for the final group it is dependant more on your ability to drive views / votes for your film. That said, I had seen the VMS team at a BAFTA/Shooting People event and I really liked the way they came across and also Luke Snelling who had won it that year with his short 'Mixtape'.

I went with the Scarlet for it's resolution and shutter. The puppets motion was really what appealed to me, but it's super-fast. At HD, tracking would have been very challenging, if not impossible for some shots. I've tracked a lot of footage with the 7D in the past. Using 4K with nominal rolling-shutter was a joy. Syntheyes was able to grab out of focus tracking marks on Godric (on the couch) even while motion-blurred.

Even with the Scarlet, I was worried about whether we'd have to really reduce the motion on the puppets, but after testing, I was blown away. I did have to use quite 'chunky' markers.

I can't stress how hot it got in the room too - it must've hit 40 degrees celsius at certain points and the camera just kept going. All I had to do was blackshade over lunch and we were good to go.

Mondo

 

[Ben Scott]

Fantastic stuff. Really well done.

 

[Mondo Ghulam]

Thanks Ben.

We'll post some making-of, BTS shots soon(ish). Learned a ton about capturing motion in this way.