Chicken

[Matt Kieley]

So all summer I've bene working on this short film, which is in the Sound Design/ADR/VFX/Scoring stage right now. It's the first really "serious" (as in made with the intention of submitting to festivals and not just dumped online) project I've done since my first feature film way back in 2009-2010.

Chicken is a horror comedy about a woman named Brenda, who has fallen on hard times financially, and is working as a mascot sign dancer for a chicken fast food restaurant, Wally's Chicken. But her boss, Steve, is a pill-popping abusive lunatic who bullies and pushes her to perform up to the standard of the former beloved mascot, who has recently passed away. As the stress of her job mounts, Brenda begins to believe she is being stalked by Chicken mascot.

Here are a few grabs:

From the fake crappy local commercial that opens the film. The signs of the restaurant we filmed at still need to be replaced.

Guinevere P.H. Dethlefson as Brenda

Brandon Nebitt as Steve.

Shot ont he Sony a6300 with mostly the Rokinon 16mm, and occasionally the Canon FD 35-105mm 3.5 zoom. It should be complete by the end of the year, and probably premiere next year. I may even share a private link here before it's premiere if there is any interest. Here's a little glimpse of some sign dancing:

 

[Liam]

Any updates?

[Juxx989]

Clear this song for your credits I think the boys from Red Letter media Made it perhaps you should ask..

 

[Matt Kieley]

This is more along the lines of what we're working on musically:

 

[PannySVHS]

@Matt Kieley, nice, I really like what you get out of these Sony DSLMs. I like the color palette as your honor the Sony color and don´t try to fight against it to look like Alexa:) I was thinking BMPCC. What is your recipe or color profile? I think what works well that hues are towards one direction rather than trying to have a strong color contrast. Chicken color give the main impulse for color palette.

[Matt Kieley]

On 12/13/2017 at 4:48 PM, PannySVHS said:

@Matt Kieley, nice, I really like what you get out of these Sony DSLMs. I like the color palette as your honor the Sony color and don´t try to fight against it to look like Alexa:) I was thinking BMPCC. What is your recipe or color profile? I think what works well that hues are towards one direction rather than trying to have a strong color contrast. Chicken color give the main impulse for color palette.

I got the settings from Dave Alitzer on another thread, which he apparently got somewhere from dvxuser:

"THE SONY PROFILE

Black Level: 0 (it's disabled in s-log2 anyway)
Gamma: S-log2
Black Gamma: Range- Narrow, Level -7
Knee: auto
Color Mode: sgamut3.cine
Saturation: +32
Color Phase: -2 (this is for a7sII and a6300, for original a7s use -5)
Color Depth: +6 (all of them)
Detail: -6

Expose 1.5 to 2 stops over."

I used the Sony Profile settings and graded with Lumetri in Premiere. I only used those settings and never found a need for anything else.

[Matt Kieley]

I finally finished and released this film yesterday. 5 years late is better than never, right? I was dissatisfied with it for a while, and there's a lot I would still change, but I've come to appreciate it. Now. So here it is, at last:

The film has been given a makeover with FilmConvert Nitrate. I'm pretty shocked at how good this a6300 short looks and how much I could recover from overexposed shots. There are only a couple of shots with sorta mushy compression.

[PannySVHS]

Awesome! Gonna watch it later. I also got a very old passion project close to picture lock. Very close I hope.:) It's astonishing to realize how much time some personal projects take, kinda like some other seemingly simple things in life.

[IronFilm]

13 hours ago, Matt Kieley said:

I finally finished and released this film yesterday. 5 years late is better than never, right?

With the benefit of five years of hindsight, what might you have changed if you were to go back in time? 

[Matt Kieley]

5 hours ago, IronFilm said:

With the benefit of five years of hindsight, what might you have changed if you were to go back in time? 

Better sound. It was a no-budget movie and while we had good equipment, we didn't have people who knew what they were doing. I don't fault them for messed up sound since they are just friends we handed the gear off to. I've been paid to do sound on other people's projects so I know what I'm doing there, but I was focused on directing and shooting. The best sound was from the times where I just put the mic on a stand and monitored the audio myself. I should have just done that the entire time.

Script-wise there were things I wish I had kept in the script, but what's int he final film isn't bad. The original ending was more climactic and scary I think. There are a lot of little things that annoy me, like some of the sign replacement VFX shots, but they were done for free, so I can't complain too much, and it's better than what I could have done myself.

[kye]

1 hour ago, Matt Kieley said:

like some of the sign replacement VFX shots

There were sign replacement VFX shots?  Didn't notice them at all.

[Kisaha]

Sound is the single most important technical aspect of film making (taught in film school, and known by experience).

Maybe doing ADR would be much better and consistent. 

Also, the office sequences have a strange axis rule tweaking going on..or is just weird shot selection.

These are the 2 things that put me off a bit.

[IronFilm]

1 hour ago, Kisaha said:

Sound is the single most important technical aspect of film making (not taught in film school, but known by experience).

FTFY

[kye]

6 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Sound is the single most important technical aspect of film making (taught in film school, and known by experience).

Maybe doing ADR would be much better and consistent. 

Also, the office sequences have a strange axis rule tweaking going on..or is just weird shot selection.

These are the 2 things that put me off a bit.

Did you think they were breaking the 180 line?

I'm curious because I didn't notice anything like that, or don't remember noticing anyway.  Maybe you're more sensitive to that than I am.

[Matt Kieley]

23 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Sound is the single most important technical aspect of film making (taught in film school, and known by experience).

Maybe doing ADR would be much better and consistent.

I actually recorded a ton of ADR for it, and I dumped it. Ive always loathed it ever since I made my first feature film, which also has a lot of ADR. You lose so much of the performance with ADR. I don't like bad location sound, but I'll take that over ADR. It's really more like prioritizing performance over technical perfection. I've been thinking for some time about remastering the soundtrack of my feature to include the original location sound.

I've had much better success just doing the sound myself, even if it is kinda difficult juggling many tasks. Here's a short where I had zero help besides two actors (who are both in Chicken):

There's even an exterior tracking dialog scene where I was having to hand hold the blimp below frame. I would use lavs for a scene/shot like that now, but I didn't have a wireless system at the time. There's one little audio goof that bothers me a bit, but I again had chosen the best performance take over the best sound take. 

[kye]

The latest Resolve has a few AI audio cleanup tools including Voice Isolation and (from the examples in this video) it seems to be witchcraft or something....

Maybe this could help you clean up some of your dialogue?  

@IronFilm - keen to hear your thoughts on this too.

[IronFilm]

3 hours ago, kye said:

@IronFilm - keen to hear your thoughts on this too.

Interesting, I didn't know DaVinci Resolve had added this

[kye]

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

Interesting, I didn't know DaVinci Resolve had added this

I think it's literally just been added in the last day or two.

Obviously that video only showed a few different scenarios, but how well do you think this compares to other third-party options?  

I'm not that familiar with the professional audio processing tools, but when I first got Resolve I remember some of the features were equivalent to separate packages costing many times what Resolve cost (eg. Twixtor which used optical flow for interpolated slow-motion) etc, so maybe it's right up there with the alternatives, or maybe not.  

I think this feature would be really useful for the occasional shot that I might have with someone talking in a loud environment, so it's caught my attention.

[IronFilm]

1 hour ago, kye said:

I'm not that familiar with the professional audio processing tools

The two industry standards tools for dialogue clean up is iZotope RX and Cedar DNS, anybody doing this seriously professionally would have both. 

Brusfri is what I'd recommend in the past instead for people doing it casually with "no budget".