Watching... looks very good so far, very funny and great acting ... review to come....

EDIT/Review : I thought this was VERY funny and also good visuals. The acting was great, spot on. The grading was very good. My 2 favourite seens where 1. The polar bear scene... absolutely hilarious! the fact u can see its a teddy and that theres a guy holding it really makes it humourus. 2. Where that wierd black smoke thing came to that guy and he says "Nothing, just some weird ass CGI effect." I thought that was very funny. I love how it keeps its proffesionalism with the shots and techniques but shows like the funny fake sound effects which obviously you did on purpose etc.

Great Stuff 5/5

Matt

Although I really like Lost, I thought you were spot on with several of your jokes. The flashbacks were great, especially when he learns how to make bombs, and then he has a stick of dynamite in his hand back on the island. Sadly, sometimes in the actual show there are similiar scenarios like this with the characters.

My favorite part was the island security system (a.k.a the black smoke). Executed incredibly well. Just like the show. The sad thing is how similiar your effect was compared to Lost.

Great job... yet some parts annoyed me because I am a fan of the actual show.

Loved it! Comedy wasn't even my style, and I still thought it was great! Good camerwork, decent acting, good comedic timing, good editing, good titles, all around a very good piece of work.

The only thing I have to nitpick on is the grading. Why? Why add the glow, it looks obvious and slapped on! This same thing was done with the Coalition of the Ring, and nobody agreed with me, but here I actually have an argument.

Tarn, you told me that sometimes rather than being stark and contrasty, sometimes it needs to be subtle and unoticeable. Well, here, you've gone too extreme with the glow and saturation, (not to mention one or two obvious blue-to-yellow tone gradient maps, SOME look good though) and it makes the video look unpolished and unfinished at grading. Why not just a add a light bleach bypass, up the contrast and saturation a TAD, and add your selective colors in VLab? Why, god why, do you have to kill all the great colors, sharpness, and contrast of your video with a glow? Some people have a lagging halo around them in some shots, for God's sakes!

It ruins what was an otherwise frame-for-frame perfect Lost lookalike/parody. 4/5, and PLEASE don't retort about the grading by just saying I like high contrast. There's clearly some issues here, which is sad because it detracts from great special effects like the black smoke or the CG'ed (is it?) hatch door flying down.

for some reason only half of the movie is dowloading??? huh, anyone else hav dis problem?

Hi guys, thanks for the great comments!

Cooldude - seems fine here. Maybe try clearing your browser cache then right clicking the link and downloading it straight to your hard drive is the best bet?

Klausky - both myself and Tom (the guy that 'summons' the polar bear) are fans of Lost, so it's meant to be a fairly affectionate look at the show's sillier aspects.

Mattio - Glad you liked it! I can't take much credit for those aspects, that's mainly down to the spot-on writing. I agree, the 'serious' style etc mixed with the silly sounds and acting etc make for very funny viewing.

Ben - Good to hear you liked it overall. Grading is very much a matter of taste, so I won't go into too much detail. I agree that some of the grading is very exaggerrated in 'Get Lost' - it's not going to work for everyone.

A bleach bypass look wouldn't have served the right tone I was going for, which was that of a tropical paradise. Given the source footage, it would have made it look more like a war zone. I'll be putting up a before/after movie soon so you can see the original.

The occasionally obvious gradients are unfortunate, I agree, but that's mainly due to an extremely tight schedule. I only had a week and a half to do all the grading, effects, titles and a little bit of additional sound/video editing. Given that the last couple of weeks have been some of the busiest here at FXhome due to the Paris show, it didn't leave me much time! That's not meant as an excuse, just a reason: given more time, things like the occasional wobbly gradient and loose masking on the smoke monster would have been fixed.

The hatch door flying down was actually real, but the smoke trailing behind it was CG.

Thanks again for all the comments people, keep 'em coming! I hope to do an in-depth video tutorial on some of the grading and visual effects techniques used in 'Get Lost' as soon as I get a moment.

Heh, really nice. I can't really find anything to complain about, it captures the Lost feeling perfectly, and still in a silly way.

Oh, I actually got a small Muffy & Jebediah flashback watching this.

This short was fun, eventhough it's not all my humour, some stuff got me laughing. Acting was good, atleast by the men. I prefered this over Coalition of the Ring in every aspect.
The grading was spot on at some places and too much at others. As you said it's a matter of taste. The only thing that I really didn't like was the flashbacks. The transition between exagerrated grading too almost none became almost too much, the flashbacks really looked like DV then.

Other then that, it was good watching and worth the time.
Good work guys and Tarn.

I think the reason I probably enjoyed this as much as I did was because I'm a big fan of Lost, and the timing is pefect given the current Lost Season 3 discussion going on in the general forum. I'll just say that this was brilliant parody, and even though I'm not seeing the entire festival/presentation where it's being used, I can picture it fitting in to such a program to great effect.

Of the various special effects used, I also found the black smoke monster to be the best and the most sad at the same time. Mostly because yours was certainly equal to what they used on the show.

I had no problem at all with the grading on the island footage, but like Andreas, I found a couple of the cuts to flashbacks with such different grading to be a bit jarring. (The biggest was the cut to the scene in the flat with the bombmaking instructions.)

Speaking of which, in terms of props, holding up the book titled "How to make bombs and stuff" was simply brilliant. Another high point was the hatch landing. All of it was a well deserved, sharp poke in the ribs to Lost season 2 and I laughed out loud at a number of spots.

I also thought the acting was very good for the most part.

The night shots where the guys were hold the torches seemed to be a bit on the weak side for lighting and film information... kind of bleached out, but that didn't really take much away from the film.

I hovered between a four and a five, but finally gave it a five. Very funny, very well made, and I really enjoyed it. Nice job!

Glad to hear your understood what I was saying about the gradients, Tarn. Like Jazzmanian, I really did hover between a four and a five, as did Atom when he walked into the room and saw me watching this.



Perhaps we're thinking of using bleach bypass in different ways. What I was suggesting was to use a VERY SMALL amount of it to bring out the texture and lightness on the subjects faces, that way you can add contrast a little without sacrificing detail (a reason Sollthar has used to supplement his lower contrast argument, haha), then you're open to just add a color tone. So basically you define the blacks and white with a certain subtlety, then get whatever motif ytou want with the color. 'Lost', though having sort of mysterious, dreamy themes, doesn't often tout such a hefty 'dreamy' cinematographic appearance; though you do often see the whites in it a little overexposed in post. I was thinking the bleach bypass could do that, especially seeing how awesome VLab's b-bypass is compared to the ones in Premiere or Vegas. You'll notice in my sig pic, the it does look a little glowy, but al I did was add bleach bypass, up the color curves and contrast, and enhance the luminosity.

For those that may be interested, there's now a before/after comparison video available that shows the ungraded and graded footage, as well as the original shots with visual effects.

I'll be working on a video tutorial at some point in the future that takes a closer look at some of the techniques, but if anybody has any specific questions, feel free to ask.

Andreas - Thanks for the comments! Good to see that the video is enjoyable even if you don't necessarily share the same sense of humour.

For the flashbacks, I wanted them to contrast heavily with the stuff on the 'island'. The pub flashback, for example, was designed to have a dirty, gritty, Ken Loach, very British kind of feel, with the bleach bypass appearance. The sofa flashback was intended to be warm, clear and comfortable, so I went for clear, strong colours but without it being over-the-top or dreamlike. Contrasting them with the island stuff does indeed make them look very normal, but that was partially the intention - though not so much to make them look 'like DV'.

Jazzmanian - The timing of Lost s3 is rather fortuitous. Good to hear you liked the smoke monster - it was rather tricky to pull off in such a short time, due to the intensive masking required around Will's head. It's not perfect, but it just about works.

One question when we were making it was how good to make the smoke look - everyone agrees that the smoke monster in Lost is an astoundingly terrible special effect, so we wanted to make sure we captured some of its simple wobbliness!

Ben - Thanks for the additional info, I might have to give that a go and see how it turns out.

Great work, loved the grading, thought the comedy was brilliant. Good stuff!

I must say, I didn't really quite understand a great part of this piece, probably because I've never seen Lost. There were definitely those high points, though, that anyone would find amusing ("how to make bombs and stuff"). Sound design was also a good plus. However, I disliked the overly glowing over-saturated feel of many of the scenes. The problem was that I watched it and said "that's been graded too much" and didn't say "that looks cool." I believe that the grading shouldn't distract from the movie, and once it does, then you've detracted from the movie's power (not to mention "watchability").
Now, perhaps the glow does not detract from sharpness on your full res DV version, but a version compressed with the h.264 compressor most definitely loses tons of definition at the edges. The "coalition of the ring" also suffered from the same over-saturated look. The problem is that you are not starting out with enough color definition, so over-saturation looks extremely fake. As such, the scenes here with (in my opinion) the best grading, are the forest scenes, because they do not try to grade very far from their starting color (which was much more vibrant and saturated to start out with than other scenes). I also found it somewhat odd in the beach scenes where a gradient caused half of the actors' faces or heads to be a different color.

My final suggestion is:
Grade to what you think looks good in terms of glow and saturation, then cut back on the saturation and halve the glow.

EDIT: I do not use your products for grading/glow, so forgive me for speaking in general terms rather than specifics about your effects.

Henry

I thoroughly agree with you there. Whether the grading detracts or enhances Get Lost would seem to be a matter of opinion, with some people clearly loving it while others finding it irksome. As they say, you can't please everyone.

What I'd love to have been able to do was somehow poll the audience members that saw it in the theatre. In that environment, they wouldn't have been thinking about the techniques in the video - they'd have been there for a fun, comedy night out.

That kind of neutral opinion is something I'd really value, but of course it's not easy to find. Here, of course, everybody is technologically very aware, and focuses on different issues.



With regards to Coalition of the Ring, you're absolutely spot on. The difficulties with that piece was the low quality of the original footage, which meant an enormous amount of work had to be done to get it to look even vaguely 'fantasy-esque'. Getting vibrancy from footage that was often nearly black and white wasn't easy.

Get Lost benefited not only from better cameras but from much better cinematography generally. However, it still had a zero budget that didn't really allow for decent lighting and, as you can see from the comparison video, the beach scenes were shot on quite an overcast day. This resulted in the grading being more 'obvious' than in the forest sequences which, as you point out, are richer to begin with.

Personally, however, I actually rather like the style of beach sequences. It creates a dreamy tone that I think works well in context. If I'd had more time, I may indeed have reduced it slightly, but I think most of it would have been retained. A matter of taste, and I see your point, but to me I actually quite like its artificial appearance - in this case, that is.



That was partly down to time constraints - given longer I would have isolated the faces so that they were not affected so strongly by the gradients. However, I still quite like the general texturing it gives the faces most of the time, even though it is rather unusual.



I have been known to be rather addicted to glow. It's a bit like Ben is utterly addicted to mega contrast.



Not a problem. What we're discussing here is more to do with technique and personal preference rather than any specific software use. The ideas and tips being offered are applicable to the use of any video software.

I'm glad you agree, but I think you may have missed part of my point. The fact some people like and some dislike the grading is moot–the problem is that–even if they love it–the audience is being distracted by the grading.


I totally understand. I've often been too rushed to finish and wished I could have had more time to spruce up various mattes and effects. I did like some of the gradients, just not all.


Ha, I've noticed both . I really see glow's greatest benefit to DV in the realm of filling in missing color data due to the 4:1:1 ratio before authoring to DVD. I usually achieve a glow by gaussian blurring (no more than a 4-5 pixel radius) a duplicate of the comp and setting blend mode to lighten (or darken, depending on the desired effect). I tweak layer opacity and blur radius from there. So, I don't do the whole 20-30 pixel glow thing you have going on in this movie. But, to each his own (though I still think you should cut down on the glow )

Henry