Tag Archives: Film Making

Bastinado – finished principal photography! Trailer Up!

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Hi All

We recently finished the principal photography on our next movie, Bastinado!

I’ve just put together a first teaser trailer: check it out here: (right-click, save as to download it):

http://www.elegancestudios.com/page23/page24/movies-5/files/page25-movie-0.mp4

This was the first outing for our digital cine camera (a RED, as used on Hollywood blockbusters like The Hobbit, Prometheus and Contagion). It was very exciting to discover how easy it was to use- actually easier than the HD video cameras we’ve been using for the last couple of years.

And wow- how good does the footage look? It is awesome even down-converted to full HD for the web- you should see how the original 4K footage looks! I wish everyone had a cinema grade digital projector in their house so we could distribute that way… ah well, maybe in the future we will, and we can re-issue all our films for theatrical presentation 🙂

It was a very intense and sexy shoot, with Ariel having written and scheduled so many bastinado punishments to be inflicted on her in the course of 36 hours that we weren’t sure if she would be able to take it. Hywel somehow bore up under the strain of inflicting them all… and Ariel took her punishment like her character in the movie- with great fortitude despite the intensity!

We still have a few set-up exterior shots to grab. It was lashing with rain and blowing a gale on the morning we were due to shoot them, and the rain hasn’t really let up since. When we get a day with Ariel around we’ll grab those shots, then we’ll be ready to really get stuck in to the editing.

With a long film like this (we shot over 5 hours of footage) the editing will take quite a while to put together, but we’re planning on releasing the film in the summer. Until then, enjoy the trailer! And we’ll get a stills gallery up soon too.

Progress report – Haunted and Slave Auction

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Update… Steve, Ariel and I just had a viewing of the rough cuts of Haunted and Slave Auction.

Both are looking good, but Steve and I both ended up with two pages of notes for fine tuning, and Slave Auction needs finishing the rough cut as well. Steve’s got everything he needs to finish hopefully, so that should come along as soon as he has time, but I need to shoot a few inserts and record some more soundtrack stuff as well as editing the last few scenes of the films.

So we’re hoping to get the films out on a timescale of a month or so, but we’re definitely going to take the time to do it right so don’t hold us to that!

Cheers, Hywel

How do you shoot at night?

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A lot of the content for Haunted was shot during the night. This as it turns out, is a huge challenge and presented technical difficulties to overcome.

Shooting video on set at night requires light. In fact the lighting set-up is so critical, it probably took as much time to create accurately then actually shooting the content.

What our eyes see at night is quite different to what the camera picks up and conveying the correct feeling and atmosphere of a night scene is pretty tricky. It required a moon lit feel with sufficient light on the model to maintain visibility without looking fake.

Is this impossible to shoot? No, but it did require 2 important aspects to the solution. The first is using light weight, battery powered controllable LED lights. These can be placed virtually anywhere with no trailing power leads and full dimmer control. The second part is having the expertise and knowledge of Hywel on set to arrange them in such a way to create the correct feel. It’s a daunting task and taking sufficient time to really get it set-up properly is vital. Once you have them roughly in the correct place and pointing in the right direction, there are a lot of fine tweaks to make including colour correction, diffusion, camera set-up and monitoring the output on a large screen to check the final look. But if you can achieve all of this, the results are very impressive.

I’m about to edit these night time sequences, so hopefully I can do justice to all the hard work Hywel put in.

Why does everything take longer? :)

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Hi All,

It doesn’t matter how many good intentions you have, everything takes longer (and costs more). I’ve not had time to progress with editing Slave Auction because I’ve been shooting and editing pics for Restrained Elegance for the last couple of weeks. And, I must admit, because I had a two week holiday for the first time in YEARS.

Gearing up to polish off August’s RE updates, may get a chunk of September done as well if I can, then hope to clear my desk and get back to Slave Auction.

In the meantime, some really good news- Steve has just taken a copy of all the footage for Haunted and is going to start editing that. Hopefully we can get a new film released before too much longer!

Cheers, Hywel

P.S. at least the new version of Apple’s editing software, Final Cut Pro X, has come out. This is a lot of fun to play with so I am really fired up to get down to some editing again as soon as possible!