Crash Time

Crash Time is a non­com­mer­cial short Sci Fi action movie that I shot back in 2011.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPHTydV2sTo]

The goal was to walk through the entire process of moviemak­ing start­ing with pre-pro­duc­tion and fin­ish­ing with dis­tri­b­u­tion and doing it with a low to none budget.

The need for me was to build a strong under­stand­ing of each stage of this moviemak­ing process — its prob­lems, dif­fi­cul­ties and specifics. I want­ed to walk in the shoes of as many key fig­ures in a film pro­duc­tion as I could.

In pre-pro­duc­tion I was the writer of the script, I walked in the shoes of a pro­duc­er and of a pro­duc­tion assis­tant mak­ing pro­duc­tion boards, bud­get­ing and plan­ning. The roles of the pro­duc­tion design­er and the direc­tor were assumed by me as well on this stage of the pro­duc­tion, mak­ing  the sto­ry­board and the pro­duc­tion script, scout­ing for loca­tions and cast­ing actors. I had to gath­er all the equip­ment I need­ed and to stick to the low­est bud­get possible.

In the pro­duc­tion stage as well as a direc­tor I played the role of DP, a gaffer, a key grip man and so on. 

In post — I edit­ed the movie and worked with CGI effects. The movie is in Eng­lish, spo­ken by Bul­gar­i­an actors so Eng­lish and Bul­gar­i­an sub­ti­tles were writ­ten and added to the movie.

 

Dis­tri­b­u­tion com­prised mak­ing of DVDs and DVD labels, ban­ners (one of them you can see at the begin­ning of this post), mak­ing a Face­book page for the movie and also its own web­site where I’m offer­ing a walk­through of the mak­ing of the film. My goal is to share my expe­ri­ence and con­clu­sions, to give advice to every­one who wants make his own short movie with low or no bud­get. The site is still in Bul­gar­i­an but I’m plan­ning to trans­late it in Eng­lish soon.

Here is the DVD cov­er made for the movie.

 

Here are some excerpts from the Crash Time site show­ing two impor­tant phas­es of the pro­duc­tion of the movie. 

1. From sto­ry­board to shot. One of the most impor­tant things about moviemak­ing is plan­ning! Every movie mak­er must know what he/she wants, what he/she will shoot and how it will be shot way before the shoot­ing peri­od. Care­ful­ly planned and organ­ised shots in pre-pro­duc­tion are very easy and quick to shoot in pro­duc­tion, where the cost of the movie is the high­est. Below are images of a sto­ry­board con­cept for a shot and their footage equiv­a­lents. You can see how close the scenes are to their sto­ry­board concepts.

Crash time has a lot of CGI effects. It’s a Sci-Fi sto­ry. 🙂 All the CGI were made using Eye­on Fusion 6 com­pos­ing soft­ware and Pho­to­shop. Here are some exam­ples of a shot before and after CGI effects.

Build­ing brand­ing at the left side of the shot, mic brand­ing and plates with text:

CGI: a track­ing device, made entire­ly in Eye­on Fusion:

Futur­is­tic lock­pick — before and after CGI:

Futur­is­tic device and its inter­ac­tion with the envi­ron­ment:

Envi­ron­ment changes:

Phone screen added:

Green screen back­ground replace­ment and plates with text:

More screen replace­ments:

You can down­load the movie from this link: Crash Time
Down­load sub­ti­tles: ENG or BUL

Vis­it the Crash Time web­site (only the Bul­gar­i­an part is full of con­tent) or check and like ( if you like it) its Face­book page.