How I shot a CINEMATIC Short Film (with no money)

Today I want to talk about how I shot my first short film, Dark Side, and I shot this in one day with no budget and a super small crew of only four people, and that includes someone who was mainly shooting the behind the scenes and of course a very talented actor. I'll share a bit about the pre-production, but I mostly want to go into the actual production, so how we lit the shots and some of our thoughts on set. This video is sponsored by Audio and we'll talk more about them later on. I'd been wanting to shoot a short film for a while, but things never really lined up and especially having a location was always an issue. And that was until my friend Frida, who was also a part of the small crew for this film, mentioned that the house he used to live in was currently empty and we would be able to shoot something there. I knew I wanted to make something dark and to keep things manageable with only one character. So I had the idea that the film would be a look into the world of this disturbed character who has some sort of split personality and is constantly going between different emotions. But I wanted the images to convey the mood of this character and not so much tell the story through dialogue. Partly also because I didn't have that much time to actually write a story. That actually leads me to finding people or a crew for a short film. Now fortunately I had a few people I knew willing to help out as a passion project and I found the actor Simon Mutt through a website called Crew United, where you have the option to post a no-budget job in the film industry. And I was lucky enough to have someone as talented as Simon to apply because he really did an amazing job and just made the whole idea of this character work. So once I had this rough idea for the film and the character, I started putting together a mood board in Milanote. That way I could start shaping what this character would look like, what the location would look like and also what the overall color palette and mood for this film would be. And this was great to communicate with the actor and also the rest of the crew what my vision was for this short film. Next I started putting together a shot list per each location or a scene. So for each shot I wrote a small description of what would be happening in the shot and also what camera movement I wanted. I added some reference photos to all of the shots so what I would like the shot to kind of look like. And having this shot list made communication on set and especially remembering things on set a lot easier. I could just always refer back to this shot list and it would make things a lot less complicated to explain when we were setting up different shots. So with pre-production out of the way, shoot day finally arrives and because this house was completely empty we actually had to build every set from scratch. Now luckily enough we were able to get our hands on a lot of furniture and things like an old tv, lamps or things to put on the wall. Basically anything to make it look like this was actually our character's house or apartment and he had been living there for years. And I think that this set design really helps in making the film a lot better and it's something I would probably spend even more time on in the future. So gear wise for this short film I used a sony a7s3 and most of the shots were either shot on a helios 44 or a mirror one which are both vintage soviet lenses from the 60s. And for some shots I did need a wider angle lens and also autofocus so here I used a sigma 20 millimeter and I had a mist filter attached to take off some of that digital sharpness and also to match those vintage lenses a little bit better. A lot of the other gear that we used for this film was actually borrowed so even with no budget you can try to reach out to other people and borrow pieces of gear here and there in order to get the equipment that you might need for your short film. Okay let's start with breaking down the first scene of the film and that is the bedroom scene. Now this was actually the last scene that we shot on the day because we were hoping that there would be less daylight coming in through this window by that time but it was still too bright so we built a little tent out of black fabric around the window to block out any of that light. Then we put an aperture 600c inside and bounced it up towards one of those five-in-one reflectors to create an indirect light source similar to moonlight. We also put a layer of diffusion over the window and then the curtains add another layer of diffusion. So all of that together allowed us to get a very soft glowy light coming in through that window. And to get some more control of the bouncing around everywhere in the room and basically making everything brighter we put some black trash bags up on the ceiling. And this is a great little run-and-gun trick to get a darker look in a completely white room. That aperture 600c outside was set to i believe 10,000 kelvin or maybe even cooler because i really wanted to get that super blue cool light to give it a nighttime look. And this light then contrasted really well against the practical light we can see here. And there's an aperture b7c bulb in this lamp which was set to about 2700 kelvin to get a warm orange color. And the other warm light we see here on the floor and on the bed was a great idea from Frida. We felt like the scene was missing a little bit more color contrast so we placed a nanlite forza 60b also set to 2700 kelvin in the other room with the projection mount attached. And that just splashes a little bit of warm light onto the floor and the bed here which could be household lamps coming from another room. And what was very cool and unplanned for is that our actor Simon then played with his hand in the light and that to me makes this shot just like a lot more dynamic and adds a bit more interest to the whole thing. Now to give the room a little bit more level and not underexpose any shadow areas we had another aperture 600c set up as our key light. We needed this light to be a very soft source as it would be enhancing that moonlight from the window so we attached a light dome and then threw a diffusion blanket over it. And this was our main lighting setup for all the bedroom shots. The only thing that changed with some of the other shots was the addition of a nanlite pavo tube to serve as a rim light. You can for example see that here in the close-up where it just adds a bit of orange rim on the and the hair. And you can see it again in this shot on his shoulder so it looks like this light could be coming from the bedside lamp or maybe even from the other room but it's actually coming from the pavo tube which is placed just out of frame. And you can actually see it again very subtle in this shot on the back of his neck here. We put a grid on the pavo tube to reduce any spill and for the close-up shot by the window we even put a t-shirt on one side to control the light from spilling on the curtains. Now before we move on to the next scene I just want to quickly talk about something that is just as important as the lighting, the camera or any other visual aspect of a short film. The thing I'm talking about is the music and the sound in the film. So one thing that was really high on my list when making this short film was having music that would fit the vibe and the mood that I wanted this film to convey. And thanks to audio's latest tool Linkmatch AI it was actually really easy to find the perfect music tracks for my short film. What Linkmatch AI allows you to do is copy a link of any music from pretty much anywhere like Spotify or YouTube and then paste that link in Linkmatch AI. It will then analyze the music and present you with a bunch of tracks that sound similar to your original song. And that is exactly what I did to find the music for my short film. I copied a few links from movies or series soundtracks that I liked, I pasted those into Linkmatch AI and right away I found a few songs that had the exact vibe I was looking for. And this tool is such a huge time saver because you're not having to go through endless libraries of music to find the track that you're looking for. What's even better is that the fine people over at audio are giving my viewers a huge discount. So if you're interested in checking out Linkmatch AI and audio's amazing music and sound effect library, use the code stan70 to get 70% off an audio pro subscription. There will be a link down in the video description if you want to find out more. And thanks a lot to audio for sponsoring this video. All right now let's have a look at the living room scene which was definitely the most complicated one when it comes to lighting and set design. Especially because we had that shot from higher up where you would see almost the entire room. So we had to make sure that there were no lights showing up in frame. And another thing was that we had planned to shoot this scene from about 10 a.m. till just past midday. So that meant we had to block out all the light from outside in order to control the lighting and create a dark and moody look. So we built another makeshift tent around the main window. And this is the window that's behind our character in the close-ups and just very prevalent in all of the other shots. And similar to the previous scene we had an Aputure 600c inside the tent and bounced it up to the white side of a 5-in-1 reflector. Again just like in the living room scene we put up two layers of diffusion on the window to create a nice soft light. The Aputure 600c was set to 10,000 Kelvin and with all the practical lights in the room which are all about 2700 Kelvin it created that nice color contrast in the shots similar to the ones in the bedroom scene. One little issue was that we didn't have enough black fabric to build another tent around the second window. So we blocked it completely with black trash bags. And so that it's not just a black window we put a Nanlite Pavotube behind the curtain on the left here also set to 10,000 Kelvin and that way we still had a little bit of light coming in that second window. To bring up the overall exposure in the room we used the Nanlite Forza 60B with the projection mount and just pointed it at a wall that was just out of frame. And this is a great way to get a soft light when you don't have the space to set up a bigger light and a modifier. We also had a Nanlite Pavotube just out of frame on the right here and that just gave a bit of a harder edge light on some of the furniture and on the actor. Probably a little bit overkill to have both of these and looking back I would say that the Pavotube alone would have done the job just fine. So that was the setup for the wide angle high up shots of the living room scene and also for the gimbal close-up shots. For the door frame shots we removed the Pavotube on the wall on the right here simply because it would have been in the shot. And we put it by the TV on the floor and set it to a continuous on-off mode to mimic the TV static that was going on and off. And we used another Pavotube to add a bit of exposure to the door frame so it wouldn't be completely underexposed. And that was it. So no big changes here. Now one specific shot I quickly want to share something about is this one right here where Simon picks up the pieces of newspaper blows them away and then makes this like entrance with his leg. And I really love this shot and again this was not planned for. Similar to the one in the bedroom where he puts his hand in the light. We just did a few relatively long takes and I just let Simon do his thing. And we could then kind of say give us a bit more of this or less of that and it just made for really interesting shots like this one. All right next we moved in for the two close-up shots and again not a whole lot changed here. We boomed a Pavotube above and behind the actor to give him a warm edge light motivated by the lamp next to the couch. And these little accents of light make such a huge difference as you can see here when we turn it off and on. We also turned the Forza 60B with the projection mount to the wall opposite of the camera and that would be our main key light because again here there was no space for an actual key light to be there. We added some negative fill on the camera side and that combination created a very nice contrast on the actor's face with the darker side towards the camera. And the last little lighting detail in this shot is when the camera pans over towards the Japanese cat figurine and also with the over the shoulder shot that follows it. Here Frieder was holding a small LED panel to give the figurine an edge light and that just helps to pop it off the background. The last scene of the film is the bathroom scene and lighting was really basic here simply because we didn't have a lot of space to set up any lights. I again wanted to create the same color contrast and color palette that we had in the previous two scenes so blue and orange. This time I wanted the light from the window to be warm so it could be like a street lamp. And we originally thought of setting up a light outside the window but that actually wasn't necessary. With just some diffusion paper and CTO foil taped to the window we were able to get a very nice warm and soft light. And then adding the curtain in front of that made it look perfect. Okay so our key light was a Nanlite Pavotube set to 10,000 Kelvin and with the grid attached we were able to get a nice directional light down onto the actor. And that was pretty much it. Like the only extra light we used in this scene was for the top-down shot. Frieder was holding a small LED panel again for just like that little bit of extra edge light. Alright the last thing I want to talk about real quick is the color grading of this short film. Now I'm definitely not an expert when it comes to color grading so it might not be 100% perfect here but I think it looks good and I guess that's what matters the most. This is one of the shots without any grading applied so it was shot in Sony's S-Log3 profile and this is what it looks like converted to Rec. 709. And the way I did that was to first convert the S-Log profile to DaVinci Wide Gamut and then at the end of my node tree convert that to Rec. 709 Gamma 2.4. And this should give you even more dynamic range to play around with when color grading. At the end here I'm using a film emulation by Dehancer. So I'm using the Kodak Vision 3 250D film stock with a Kodak 2383 print film. And I also added some film grain and halation to give it more that filmmake less digital look. Then I got the levels to where I like them in this node right here. I added some saturation in this node and in this node here I just boosted the saturation of the oranges a bit. I will say that a big part of getting the colors right and the way I wanted them so this blue and orange look was already getting them in camera. I knew I wanted this look before we started filming so the lights were set to either 10,000 Kelvin for the blue tones or 2,700 Kelvin for the orange tones. And the camera was then set to 4,000 Kelvin to get that color contrast in camera. And that just helps a lot when color grading. Alright that was it for this breakdown of my short film Dark Side. I had so much fun making this film and being able to create a vision that I had in my head. So a huge thanks goes to my small crew of people that made it possible to actually shoot this film. And I strongly encourage you to try and make your own short film if that is something that you're interested in. Because honestly the best way of learning things is by doing things. Anyway I hope you enjoyed this video and thanks a lot for watching all the way until the end if you're still here and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!