A Short Film for your Halloween!

…or for your Friday for those who don’t celebrate this holiday.

I humbly submit for your viewing pleasure the first fictional, short film I ever created: Lullaby. From concept to script to pre-production, production and finally post production.

I’d definitely appreciate any feedback. It’s not perfect and I’m the first one to admit it.

This slasher short film is definitely NSFW.



I apologize I don't have any "before-after" images available for this writeup. Time is short these days but for the next film I'll certainly have them.

The way the film was shot, we used two cameras. One to capture the master shot while the other served as the OTS shot. We had one day to shoot five pages so we captured three takes using two cameras on Sylvester and then 3 takes on Lana.

Fortunately FCPX does a great job with multi-cam clip and Mark Spencer from RippleTraining.com does a stellar training on how to do this. When I got the footage on my Mac, it was tagged, organized and a 7 minute rough cut done in under an hour. From there, adding some b-roll as a connected clip was easy.

I really tried hard to follow the rules for color correcting but this proved to burn way too much time. I could never get the footage to either look right or match other clips. I finally broke down and purchased Red Giant Mojo and used Mojito for what I think is fantastic work. The entire film was color corrected in under 15 minutes.

Sound was a nightmare: not only dialogue but also foley and music. I read that 20-30% of films is ADR and I would believe it. We had about a minute of dialogue that I thought was lost. Fortunately a sound engineer buddy of mine is a Wizard Level 60 and using his bag of tricks saved the audio. For my next project, I’m seriously considering using Invisilav from Rode Mics to capture audio.

Is it just me or does all the free foley sound horrible? I created my own for this project. It’s not bad but it’s definitely better than what I found online. Admittedly this was incredibly fun. Who knew that hitting frozen lettuce with a wooden dowel sounded so cool?

For the music, I used Sonic Fire Pro . This is a great tool for cutting music to anything length you need. My problem with it is that if I create a great song that lasts for 15 seconds and discover I actually need 18 seconds, SonicFire Pro changes the song slightly. Steve Martin did a tutorial on how to shorten music so I tried the reverse. I made the 15 second song into an 18 second song.

Holy cow did the artifacts drive me nuts. I invested in NeatVideo , which did a great job of cleaning the footage up. I pushed it about as far as I could without turning the actors into plastic. It looks alright but still bothers me. I learned that this is a combination of the ISO setting on camera but also the compression used during recording. I double checked and the camera recorded in h.264. Lesson learned. Next time, we’ll definite shoot using an Apple ProRes codec.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this entire experience and I certainly look forward to future projects.

Nice production values, the FX were pretty impressive.
Its just the genre I have problems with, another violence against women movie, I realise that this is a popular genre though, so this is my opinion.
Apart from that a very good effort!

Thanks! My wife is a makeup and SFX artist so she was able to do some really cool stuff. Everything was practical.

I understand the "violence against women" thought. I love watching documentaries about the horror/slasher film genre. Unfortunately these types of movies don't work well with a male in the lead role because the audience is wondering why the male is so weak and can't defend himself. Women do a better job of communicating the fear and terror to the audience. This is what the "experts" claim and probably why women are always cast in the lead roles for these types of films.

My challenge for this project was trying not to be "cliche". I watch these slasher movies and I always see patterns. With this project, I tried a different approach and it worked out.

I certainly do promise to get better. This was too much fun!