Pushing URSA Mini to the limit: Short Film "Last Line of Defense"

[Ehetyz]

So I finally put my first Ursa Mini short film up on Youtube. It's a horror short called "Last Line of Defense" and was shot in spring 2017 to serve as a stress-test for the then-new Ursa Mini 4,6K. It's not a test video though, it's a full - if short- short horror film with serious effort put in the filmmaking essentials - from wardrobe to the effects.

 

The main mission here was to put the UM into as extreme lighting situations as possible, so I drew up a story about a border station in some unknown future, where a group of men guard the station against an unknown threat, in the darkness, with only emergency flares to serve as lights. So we were able to experiment extreme contrast scenarios and low light.

We shot the short film over a weekend, spending one night in the "border" set in the woods, and another one in the "bunker" set we built in the basement of our studio. The biggest cost in the whole short film were the emergency flares, of which I bought 10, mainly to get enough coverage for the finale - one flare gave us less than a minute of shooting time.

This was my first touch with the Ursa Mini, and it's what sold me on the camera. The grade is quite simple by my current standards, but the images we were able to capture in those quite extreme lighting conditions turned out shockingly well. Most of shooting was done handheld with unstabilized lenses (Sigma 18-35 1.8, Samyang 24 1.4 and Pentax Super-Takumar 50 1.4) The forest set was lit with a set of Aputure Amaran led panels and a 4000K 1600 lumen light bulb that were all cast through a large diffuser, and the interior set used mostly  a mix of small tungsten practicals and available sunlight.

Once again, the worst bottleneck for the image quality ends up being the Youtube compression.

 

Hope you enjoy the short, and feedback is very much appreciated

 

 

[webrunner5]

Wow that was nice. You did a great job.

[Ehetyz]

Thanks! 

I'm lucky to work with some very talented individuals. It wouldn't be what it is without the great FX/wardrobe/prop people.They bring my crazy ideas to life. 

[mercer]

Man this not only looks incredible, it is a decent little story and really done so well. What ISO were you shooting at? And how bright was the footage before your correction/grade? Also was this ProRes or Raw and I assume it was 4K?

Man I am such a fan of your work. If I can get a quarter of the quality you’ve been getting, I will be a happy filmmaker. 

I may pick up another Micro eventually after seeing what you do with BM cameras and how John Brawley edits the Micro footage with UMP footage on the show he DPs. They’re so cheap right now, they’re almost a no brainer. 

[Ehetyz]

Thank you!

Everything was shot in 800ISO, RAW 3:1. As far as exposure goes, the darker exterior scenes were underexposed, while using the flare pushed the whole dynamic range to use. The interiors were exposed "correctly" (I've later picked up a habit of exposing one stop to the right on the UM4.6K). I pulled down the shadows a bit in post.

Funny thing about matching BMD cameras, the newest Resolve has an option to conform them into BM Color science 4, which has huge benefits. Not only does it make matching them a breeze (I've been grading a feature we shot with two cameras rolling throughout, URSA and BMCC2.5K), but it also alleviates some problems the previous color sciences have (Poor color distribution on BMCC, magenta tint on skintones on URSA). Saved me countless hours on mixing and matching the two cameras. 

[mercer]

It seems like your exposure method paid off. In your original post, you mention that this was a simple grade compared to your current methods, do you remember how much you did here? Did you start with a utility LUT or color space transform and then adjust accordingly? I really love this look... it has that modern, gritty, sci-fi look. 

Is the new color science 4 transform available in the Lite version or only the Studio version?

[Ehetyz]

Not sure about the RAW controls on the Lite version, I've been using the paid/Studio version since 2014 or so.

 

This one was made back when I used premade LUT:s pretty heavily, I think in this one I used a Visioncolor Osiris LUT, either KDX or Vision 4. In addition to the LUT I added a manual soft clip on overexposures and separated the skintones and gave them a warmer look than the rest of the image. I think there was a denoise on the first node as well, at a strength of 2.0. That's my go-to denoise level, on 4K/4.6K RAW footage it removes distracting noise but retains the detail.

Aforementioned method provided a hard-edge, modern look to the footage, but currently I gravitate (in narratives) more towards the early to mid 90's filmlike look with softer details and tones, smooth rolloff, less contrast and more pronounced grain... And lots of haze. Probably because it reminds me of the movies I grew up with - and now it's actually attainable with low budget.

[mercer]

Thanks! It’s funny, you’re last sentence encaptures why I love my 5D3 so much. With ML Raw, I feel like it closely captures a 70s/80s film look... what I grew up on.