Cinematic first person tutorial (hardcore henry)

We got the short movie virus and are aching to a awesome short movie for you guys. But for now you'll have to make do with a new Copy Cat Friday. Not that you mind, you guys love Copy Cat just like we do. It's the best day of the week! And in this week's tutorial we have something really cool planned. When searching for an idea, we came across an old music video from The Weekend named False Alarm. It's an action packed music video all shot with a POV camera and in one take. Or that is what they want us to believe. In Our tutorial we are going to explain how you can recreate such a one take shot, from lighting to movements.

One Take Movies

Most one take shots in movies have a duration of 2 minutes, which is quite long for a single shot. It takes serious planning and choreography to pull off such a shot. But what if you want a shot that is longer then 2 minutes, like an entire movie? Well then you use a simple and old technique, hide your cut. Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first directors to try this technique when making his movie The Rope. With this movie he wanted to create an one take shot movie. However in those days, the cameras could only record for 20 minutes. So he had to hide his cuts every 20 minutes and did this in a creative way, such as going close with the camera  to the actor so in would turn black. Make a cut there and go back out. Creating a fake one take shot.

Another movie that took the One take shots to a new level is Hardcore Henry. This is an action movie completely filmed through a POV standpoint and uses a lot of one take shots. The sometimes use hard cuts, but more transitions to make the shots flow together. The transitions I speak of are glitches are wipes in which they then hide cuts. The same technique we are going to use in our video.

Equipment we Used

The most important film equipment we used can be found in this gear collection.

The fluorescent lighting was recreated with the Spekular kit from Spiffygear. By adding green colored filters to it, we could get that grungy look. These lights could easily be attached to the ceiling using the Kupoles.

It's important to create contrast, definitely when working with cold lighting such as green or blue. That's why we used warm tungsten light in the opening scene. Here we used a Stella Pro 5000 together with an orange (CTO) filter. This light is super portable and runs on internal batteries which helped to work super fast.

Finally, the camera that this whole project was shot on is the Sony a6500 with the Sony 10-18mm F4 lens. Everything was filmed on the 10mm focal length.

Audioblocks

This video is supported by Audioblocks, a growing library with royalty free sound effects and music. Thanks to their service we where able to sound design this project and save a ton of money!