Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

Five of my students have completed their second short film entitled SHATTERED. Mike Montesa, Peter Lowry, Lindsey Black, Brandown Marsala and Carlos Espinosa have dubbed their production group YumYum² (I have no idea why). As you can see by the production stills, they’ve got a nice looking film. (You can see a few more stills and their VOLITION Poster on the same site.)

They’re getting ready to do the Film Festival Circuit (as soon as they get music clearance handled). The film is well-acted and visually compelling. They shot on mini-DV and then used two different post-production processes on the footage. Being the total techno-geek-nerd that I am, it was as exciting to see how these two processes effected the impact of the film.

They decided to use the Red Giant Plug-in Magic Bullet 1.x with the Berlin style option to make a cooler, more remote feeling film. The filter was simply dropped on the timeline and allowed to render. It took several hours for the five-minute film.

Then they used the NIK Color Efex Pro plug-in on the C41 to E6 conversion for a warmer feeling film. This required that they output the film as stills to be Batch Processed in Photoshop CS. There were 10,400 digital frames that took 4 DAYS to process. Then, the stills needed to be stitched together again in AfterEffects. It was an arduous process that crashed several times.

Ultimately, the question is how it affected the film. The audience watched it both ways. The general consensus was that the Magic Bullet Berlin version was more appealing for this particular film. There was an amazing amount of detail that was still visible in the NIK version.