Leap is a new short film from filmmaker Dan Gaud of Vancouver, Canada. Dan has worked on other small movies that you may have heard of: Watchmen, The Spirit, District 9, Underworld, Invictus. Leap is the story of a man who can travel between parallel worlds, using SCUBA gear. According to Dan: “I tried to take something fantastic and bring it closer to the real world. The diving gear is a good example of that approach of using real life stuff to survive the fantastic aspect of parallel world traveling.”
Dan shot the movie with a Red One camera. It’s a (relatively) new digital video camera capable of recording at resolutions up to 4096 horizontal by 2304 vertical pixels, directly to flash or hard disk storage. The Red One is significantly cheaper than old-school movie making equipment, finally allowing for what William Gibson referred to as the Garage Kubrick.
The Red One was developed by Jim Jannard, founder of the sunglasses company Oakley, Inc. No kidding. According to Wikipedia, Jannard was placed at #134 on the Forbes 400 in 2008 with a net worth of $3 billion.
The Red One sells for $17,500—almost 90 percent less than its nearest HD competitor. The savings are even greater relative to a conventional film camera. Not that anyone buys those; filmmakers rent them, usually from Panavision, an industry stalwart in Woodland Hills, California. Panavision doesn’t publicize its rates, but a Panavision New Zealand rental catalog quotes $25,296 for a four-week shoot—more than the cost of purchasing a Red. “It’s clearly the future of cinematography,” Peter Hyams says. “You can buy this camera. You can own it. That’s why people are excited.” (wired)
Gaud explains that it’s taken him a year to complete Leap, which has a running time of 6 minutes. That’s a lot of work.
Well I did pretty much everything except for sound and music. Writing, storyboarding, 3D animatics, organizing the shoot, renting the equipment, lighting up scenes, on-set vfx supervision, setting up the greenscreen in my living room (rebel filmmaking my friends!), setting up the camera and lens, shooting, editing, color correction, all the visual effects.
My girlfriend Virginie Goulet gave me a hand keying the greenscreens and she comped 2-3 shots during the battle sequence. Music will be done by the extremely talented Maxime Goulet and sound mix will be done by Yan Doiron. And of course, Luc Godbout starred and gave a really good physical performance. It’s always a nice feeling to see your character come to life from page to screen.
It’s kinda depressing to say that, after one year of work (in between the long hours I do at my job), the finished film will only be SIX MINUTES. It started out as a 10 minute short film, but that extra 4 minutes was mostly full 3d vfx shots.
After a while, seeing that I was all alone, I decided to cut the film into something more dynamic and less time consuming. I didn’t want to spend two years on this. I want to shoot something else. I love the adrenaline of being on set way too much to spend my life doing visual effects. (jokeandbiagio)
It’s an exciting time for filmmakers given the development of inexpensive equipment (Dan rented his gear for $900 for two days). But the time involved hasn’t changed, especially when it comes to production value. And no technical advance will ever solve the problem of creating quality scripts. However, with film being the 21st-centuries leading art form, it’s nice to know that the ability to create is slowly becoming a reality for the rest of us.
Like it says at the end of Dan’s trailer: “Coming Soon To A Film Festival Near You.”
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