The Briefing Room

By David Butler

As a commercial director based in Annapolis, Md., I have recently made quite a few short films, one of which, I Will Not…, won the Baltimore stop of the 48 Hour Film Project (48HFP) last July. Because of this accomplishment, my team was invited to participate in the Panasonic/48 Hour Film Project HD Filmmaker Showdown, which pitted winning teams from various 48HFP cities against one another in a separate, high-def competition in January 2007.

The challenge with any 48HFP movie is the extraordinarily short turnaround. You have to write, shoot, and edit an entire film in only 48 hours–drawing a film genre, character, line of dialogue, and a prop on Friday night, which all have to be used in your film that is turned in as a completed project on Sunday night.

Panasonic lent each team an HVX200 to shoot the HD Filmmaker Showdown films. I had used the HVX200 several times before and had actually shot I Will Not… with it, so the workflow had been developed pretty well in advance. Since we had access to an additional unit of the HD camcorder, I opted to shoot much of the film with two cameras to increase the coverage. One camera generally shot wide, while the second would get a closer shot from a different angle. This gave us matching footage, making the edit go very smoothly.

The cameras are small and easy to get into tight quarters. In our HD Filmmaker Showdown film, Maestro Percival, we had to shoot in a moving car as well as inside a bathroom. For the interior car shots, DP Rege Becker held the camera from the passenger seat into the dash area and easily got a really nice shot, requiring no stabilization or mounting due to the HVX200’s size. We were also able to put the two cameras in the bathroom, which would have been very challenging had they been larger. For other parts of the production, Rege mounted the camera on a Steadicam/Merlin for smooth tracking shots.

We set up the cameras to record 24fps 720p native for the cinema-quality look, which also gave us the added advantage of increased record time to the P2 cards. Running at 24fps, we could get about 11min. on a 4GB P2 card–that‘s the equivalent of a 1,000ft. load of 35mm film.

There are several other advantages to using the P2 format over traditional tape. The biggest advantage is how fast the footage can be available to edit. All our footage was in the computer and ready to cut in less than an hour after our shoot wrapped. We were able to review takes on the set by selecting the clip in the VTR mode using the camera and playing back the data–no worries about missing the cue or dropping time code because of looking at playback from tape.

For the entire film, we had to work fast. The script was six and a half pages and our main location was only available for ten hours. I tried to work very quickly and only did a few takes of any setup. While editing my co-editor and writer, Sean Murphy, and I decided to use the last take, unless there was something obviously wrong with it. We have worked together a lot and he knew that once I get a performance I like, I usually move to the next set-up.

The workflow for the camera system was very simple. Once a P2 card was full, it was given to the editor on set, who was equipped with an Apple G4 laptop and a Firewire mirrored RAID drive. The card was copied to the RAID drive and then imported to Final Cut Pro.

We decided to be a little bit redundant for data protection, so we had the footage in QuickTime format through the import process and also in its raw format as the copy of the card on the drive. The footage was duplicated to another FireWire drive after the shoot to allow Sean and myself to edit simultaneously– and as a safety in case of drive failure. Using this method we had a rough cut of the film done by about 4:30 a.m. on Sunday morning. A few more hours of finessing and massaging the edits and we were off to mix by 10:30 a.m.

The film was turned in with a few minutes to spare, then we had to wait until March 10 for the results. I was thrilled and excited when I heard Maestro Percival announced as the winner of the HD Filmmaker Showdown. All the films were fantastic and it is amazing to see what can be done in just one weekend. We were able to get a phenomenally good-looking picture from the solid-state recording of the small, mobile HVX200.

David Butler is director/owner of Butler Films, Inc. Annapolis, MD. www.butlerfilm.com