“SHOCKED JOCK – A 15-minute High Deffie?”

“Shocked Jock,” a 15-minute HD short movie, was recently produced by Michael J. Warner and 718 Productions in Astoria, New York. The quick cut: A shock jock lives through a nightmare when a listener kidnaps his 4-year-old daughter and calls into the show to take over. The twist: The listener is really his conscience and the whole story was a dream, a crisis of conscience, about whether he should be treating women the way he does on his show while he’s raising his little girl.

The footage was acquired using the Cinealta Sony F900/3 and Fujinon wide angle 13X4.5 BERD HDTV lens, and edited on a Mac G5 with Final Cut Pro 5 and a Blackmagic Pro HD card utilizing an X-serve storage system. “It was certainly a nice luxury to have top-of-the-line equipment at my disposal in order to realize my creative ambition,” points out Michael, who works at a rental house and also wrote and directed “Shocked Jock” after having written several full-length screenplays in the last fifteen years, but who has not directed since graduating from the University of Michigan twelve years ago. Not to mention, Michael had a top-of-the-line crew to match the equipment. He recruited Jim Mullen to DP and Jeff Edrich to work audio since he was familiar with their high quality of work and professionalism from the several times they had worked with Michael’s colleagues on shoots. “We have the same rhythm and high standards and the same desire to expand our HD knowledge, so I knew it would be an asset to have these guys working on the short,” states Michael. “And Jeff had a new piece of audio software he wanted to test out.” “Yes,” Jeff concurs, “I recently purchased Metacorder for my Mac. And the scenes in the radio station were ideal for me to test out recording each actor speaking into their respective radio mikes on a separate audio track in 23.98. I was then able to burn a few DVDs at the end of the shoot in order to provide Michael with clean audio for post. It ended up working as easily as I had hoped it would.”

Jim was especially interested in the challenge of having to light for HD in two cramped locations. One was in an apartment in which the living room and bedroom scenes were shot. He used a customizable, portable lighting grid with connected pipes in order to build a lighting grid in the living room that along with the color from the TV set made the living room, the location of the “kidnapping,” rich in color, yet ominous and dark at the same time. An air mattress, a pillow and a sheet swapped positions with the couch in the living room to create the scene where Abel, the shock jock, wakes up from the dream drenched in sweat and in a panic. After a few quick adjustments with the lighting, and the addition of a small key light that had been mounted on a block of wood much like a hi hat would be on a piece of wood, giving it the perfect height to strike the side of Abel’s face in bed, the scene was captured.

“Having a 23” HD monitor right on site made the set ups of every scene a snap. In addition, the professionalism and trust I have in Michael and James Palczewski, the camera operator, made it easy for us to know exactly what we wanted and how we were going to obtain it. And having instant playback when a scene was being shot near the end of the tape guaranteed we didn’t miss anything,” states Jim. Michael adds, “It really got us through the day at the radio station where we had many different angles on all of the actors in the studio as they went through the script many times. Shooting 20 pages in two days isn’t easy, but shooting in High Def afforded us the opportunity to do it. And we pulled it off.” Expanding on this point, Michael explains that the budget would have been around $16,000. Of course, his own out of pocket expense was closer to $4,000 since he does work at a rental house and was able to call in a few favors. “Think about it, though. Even at the full budget of $16,000 for 15 minutes. If I extrapolate those numbers, I could shoot a movie in High Def that runs an hour and thirty minutes on a budget of about $70,000, assuming a one-time fee of around $3,000 for production insurance, with about 10 locations in roughly ten days with 6 actors and more. That seems pretty amazing considering the tremendous crew and cast of young up-and-coming talent that I had. To be able to shoot at the high-end of HD and not have to rely on the lower-end HDV and 24p cameras that aren’t true HD in order to maintain a low budget is extraordinary.”

The lighting for the radio station scenes was another challenge. The crew was shooting in a well designed, but tiny, production studio in Farmingdale, New York. “We couldn’t do what we did in the apartment. I had to attach the lights to track lighting that was already up in the studio. And we had to deal with making everyone look good while avoiding any glare into the camera,” explains Jim. “I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to make this production studio look like a professional radio studio that one would believe a top DJ would work in. He set the mood with the lighting to a “T.” I never imagined it could look this good,” boasts Michael.

Besides the lighting, another key component to making this short look dynamic in High Definition was the makeup. “I hired Lauzanne Nel (of SLM Production Group LLC) to do the makeup on my excellent cast of characters because she told me that the best way to make the actors look good is to air brush them. I liked the fact that she was aware of the main concern of many actors who are afraid that they won’t look good in High Def because it picks up every little detail, basically placing them under a microscope. And I have seen the horror of which the actors speak in a few interviews shot in HD that made very attractive people look very unflattering. Suffice it to say, Lauzanne’s ability made the actors look like models in front of the camera. So, I am left with the conclusion, and this will probably be a boon to makeup artists everywhere, that makeup is an incredibly important detail in shooting in High Def and selecting the right person will make all the difference in your finished product. You can’t light or shoot in High Def to make up for bad makeup or no makeup. So, just hire someone who knows what they are doing, and then you won’t have to worry about it,” instructs Michael.

Lauzanne informs us that she used “Kett Jett Air Pump with Kett Cosmetics airbrush products which are waterbased. These products are great to work with because they are odorless and flawlessly blendable. I love how the actors are more comfortable and then more confident in front of an HD camera knowing their makeup is ideal for this high resolution and detailed format."

For post, they dubbed the tapes down to DVCAM so that they would have the 24p time code match. They did an offline rough cut and handed it off Kevin Patrick, keyboardist for Blondie, who tailored a soundtrack to the footage utilizing his experience scoring for films such as “Bride of the Wind” directed by Bruce Beresford and creating sound designs for spectaculars presented at The Museum of Natural History NYC among other on screen outlets. “When I was young, I used to watch movies with my eyes closed just so I could interpret the sounds and concentrate on the inner visuals getting me closer to the pulse of the script and not only the film itself. It certainly paid off in helping to create the sounds of this roller coaster drama that is filled with almost every emotion you can think of, and it¹s played out in such a short time frame. I really had to be sharp because in a matter of seconds, in a matter of a few lines, the tone of the film went from panic to anger to submission to strategy back to anger then panic, well, I think you get the idea,² Kevin tells us.

They then ingested the video from the HD tapes into the G5 as well as the audio from Jeff’s DVDs and the audio soundtrack they had received from Kevin. Michael concludes, “We pieced it all together and made a short HD gem. Or so we hope.”

Then there are the distribution concerns. Although Michael isn’t too concerned. “I have so many avenues because I shot it in HD. First, I’m going to send a DVD to all of my industry contacts. Then I’m going to enter the short in Sundance and HDfest and possibly others. There is also the possibility of raising funds in order to shoot this as a full-length feature where the kidnapping actually occurs and isn’t just a dream. And then of course, I could always pitch it as a pilot for a ‘Twilight Zone’ type series I wrote a few years ago that did very well in screenwriting competitions called ‘The Warped Variant.’ Or I could hopefully always sell it to an HD channel looking for quality content.”

Michael goes on to say, “What we still really need is a good catch phrase for referring to shooting an HD feature or short. It’s so cool to say, ‘I’m filming right now.’ Or for people to ask, ‘How is the film going?’ It doesn’t work if you substitute the format. ‘I’m High Deffing right now.’ Or ‘How is the High Definition going?’ We still need to work on that. But the format itself is great.”