A Strange Confession
A Strange Confession was awarded a Certificate of Merit for Cinematography, 53rd Rochester Film Festival and also screened at the Anthology Film Archives in downtown Manhattan, May 25th 2011. Click this LINK for the trailer. Below is the short film.
"… A Strange Confession explores that one person that Catherine studies and internalizes, but cannot forget. I was exploring what it might be like to internalize a role so much that it takes over my life, leaving me completely alone and questioning how I’ve lived life before. " – Emily Bennett (lead)
"… the creative process in which we (the actors) had a large influence on writing the script and telling the tale. At its inception, Jhoe, Emily and I began a series of improvisational rehearsals. We ‘Jammed’ almost every week …" – Joey Giambattista (supporting)
"… so lucky I was responsible for the main theme … A Strange Confession is vampire related, but it’s not a horror film. So I used the piano and the smooth melody to reflect the mood." – Van Zeng (musician)
"… I wanted it to have a darker and minimalistic sound – that is why I choose cello, some strings and piano. I tried to represent the main characters loneliness, the tragedy she is in constantly." – Gregory Bakay (musician)
Directors Commentary – (contains plot spoilers)
How do you find and convince a church to let you use their location to shoot a vampire film? Well it wasn’t easy and it took forever but in the end we didn’t get one, we got two. The first was used to make the dolly shot across the pews and for that church I have Cris Hozven to thank. The second was found by Emily and we shot the confessional and the opening scene with the candles in the Actors Church in Manhattan.
All the exteriors were shot uptown around 189th st at The Cloisters. I did a lot of hunting around to find the perfect stone wall, doorway and arch to create the gothic look.
The apartment with the red walls is mine so this is a ‘shot in New York movie’ 100%. The inside of the confessional booth is also shot in my apartment. This is the final scene where vampire Catherine is staring at the camera. The mesh she looks through was bought at Home Depot.
Through careful planning and editing I was able to make the interior and exterior of the confessional and the pews from the two different churches all look like the one church. When I was writing the ending I was fascinated by the pregnant pause (the delay in dialog that adds consequence to the following words) and …
Please leave a comment or ask a question.
Jhoe, I really enjoyed this piece!
Great acting, impressive locations, fantastic colors/imagery.
However I am really sad, that it’s only 14 mins in length… I would have loved to posses the OST if the musical comopositions had all been as great as the snippets I got from this.
Nice one!
Dankeschön Jono !
Hey what’s an OST ?
oh look – Mister Davis shows off his German
An OST is the Original SoundTrack of a movie ! – however an OST of a short would much rather be a single I guess.
Keep up the good work. I like.
nicely done
a bit slow, and not grasping in the beginning, but it gets a lot better at the end
I have some concerns about the back-break thing and the glass thing (maybe you didn’t have the means to do anything more “spectacular”, maybe you just chose to tone it down… too much)
also, I learnt something: if you use shallow DoF all around but conservatively switch to deep DoF for the steadycam shot following the lady in order to keep focus, it looks kid of weird; probably 99.99% of people wouldn’t even notice, and probably I was over-conscious about the shallow DoF because you had just done a big (and beautiful) focus pull, but still, that cut called my attention too much: first she was sepparated from the world around her, then she was just pleasantly walking in the garden
Hi Samuel, thanks for watching. About the rack focus then cut to steadycam at 10:55. During the edit I never noticed, but I see what you’re saying. Normally you would cut from shallow dof on a close up, to deep dof on a wide. I really should have had the dof more shallow on that steadycam medium close up shot. BTW, thats me walking with the camera and using smoothcam to stabilize it, I didn’t have budget for a proper steadycam. For lighting I used one of Richard’s (coollights.biz) LED256 units with battery on the end of a boom pole. Carried by crew walking with us = portable moonlight!
About the back breaking. My first edit had a nice loud crunching sound. But it didn’t feel right and I spent almost a whole day placing different volume levels on that back break! So I’ll go through my reasoning here.
It goes back to the writing stage – with quite a bit of research on paralyzing victims and different techniques that Catherine could apply. When writing I decided on a spine break because it immobilizes someone, paralyzes them and then she could have her dinner conversation ritual. We’ve all seen the cliche scene in a movie “hey I can’t feel my legs” – so that is what I wanted to do but not in a cliche way.
I thought about the process of an accident where someone gets there spine broken. The actual breaking of the spine causes you to lose feeling and not feel pain or anything from the waist down. But lets say this were to happen in a car accident. Then the pain you would feel would be from all the other injuries like bruising to the face, arms, other broken limbs – from the waist up.
In this case, it is a perfect clean spine break from an inhumanly powerful creature. Nothing else is damaged or hurt. I came to the conclusion that this act is not causing pain – it is removing pain / feeling, and mobility. We decided to act it thru with only the barest grimace of pain followed by confusion from the part of the victim, then the victim’s realization as to what happened. The choice of a low volume break sound is because I wanted the audience to identify with the ‘what just happened?’ feeling that the victim had. The plan was for the audience to realize what had happened after the back break had occurred. I’m hoping that it worked.
spoilers below……………………….
Some amazing shots! Loved the look you gave the film all throughout. Great choice in using a red walled apartment too. Fits in real well with story. And terrific use of the church! Really liked the way you used the camera. Especially for the last scene! That was a strong choice to film the vampire through the screen and to film her directly looking into the camera.
Acting… The vampire performed well! The end was the best part for me. Thought she really hit a home run there!
I thought she nailed most of it too, she followed the man around like a disciplined sort of shark. ( with her eyes and her body language, etc. )
the man was only ok. he played the dying part well, but he was off in other parts, he looked choreographed. … He didn’t seem in love with her. He didn’t have that passion that would make him remove his cross. And I think she would’ve played off even better if he did. She’d have to almost fend him off until he removed his cross. It seemed as if she was looking to work with something more there, something that never quite arrives.
And he wasn’t quite believable where he spoke to her of her fate while he began to die.
And that’s not only on him, that’s also the story/script i suppose. I wished for something like, ” I am now to off to see God… I am not afraid,” then pause and then we can see this sort of relief for he finds that he truly is a man of God. He has faith. And then he turns and sees her. His reason for dying. and instead of anger, he feels sadness for her, for he loves her and she is lost. tragedy. Then his words will hit more like a freight train when he says them to her. i guess i missed the power of this scene because i cannot feel for him or his death at all. he does not come off as real but only as a device for her, and that’s ok because this is a short but i, as a viewer, cannot so obviously know him to be a device or for me the game is up. does this make sense? I hope so, lol.
The music… i thought it mostly worked ok. i liked how you kept it out while the man was dying. I really didn’t like the end music after she asks , ” where is my soul.” the music cheapens the scene. That scene is soooo good. leave it alone there.
Loved the transition at 10:37. Real cool!
Also liked the different telling on the vampire story as a whole. Neat question posed here.
All in all I liked your film!
Congrats!
This short film had me drawn in within the first 30 seconds. With all of the vampire type media and television going on in today’s market, I think you shed new light on how to capture and intrigue an audience using the most important artistic means possible. Use of vision, color and music keeps the audience in anticipation of what may come next. The story itself develops well and allows the viewer to sit back and really loose themselves in the plot and the vision created. My only criticism is I wish it were 155 minutes instead of 15. Well done, exceptional work. I look very forward to the places you will take us over your career in film.
Cris – “he looked choreographed. … He didn’t seem in love with her. He didn’t have that passion that would make him remove his cross. And I think she would’ve played off even better if he did.”
My production plan for this film was to rehearse a lot with the actors so that during the shoot I could concentrate on cinematography. And to this end I succeeded. But this film is probably going to be the last time I am operating the camera as my work as a director is being hindered. There were problems and tensions that arose because of scheduling difficulties and I think that it shows. Its easy to point a finger but things are not as they seem. Maybe if I had not been so caught up with being a cinematographer …
Anyway for the time being I’ve pushed cinematography as far as I want to go. I’ve reached a turning point and my new series ‘Just Actors’ is where I avoid cinematography. This way I can concentrate on actors methods and create a base for the feature I am writing.
Cris – “Really liked the way you used the camera. Especially for the last scene! That was a strong choice to film the vampire through the screen and to film her directly looking into the camera.”
The end is the only POV shot in the film … glad you picked up on that. Actually everything was written around this end shot with her looking thru the mesh screen and into the lens. My goal was to have her stare at the audience and have the audience stare back … and have absolutely nothing happen. No dialogue. Nothing but tension building. All done with facial expressions. She is a RADA graduate so I knew she could do it. But still we did 50 takes. We both put a lot of work in that scene.
It was fantastic to sit in a theater in Manhattan and during this moment, I stood out of my seat near a wall and watched the audience. The ‘pregnant pause’ lasts a full 30 seconds and no one in the audience broke away their eye contact! Its was beautiful.
Cris – “I thought she nailed most of it too, she followed the man around like a disciplined sort of shark.”
lol cris you crack me up. I’m looking forward to reading these sketches your planning you crazy cat
Very well done. Bravo! Reminds me of a classical piece of theatre with its use of lighting and staging. Strange lol. I really enjoyed the language of the piece, seemed ‘old world’ which i assume was the intent. Smooth camera work as well, somehow I was actually waiting for another character to be introduced due to the camera perspective in certain frames. Both actors did a great job. They were very direct with their words and bore tension in their guise. (I highly doubt they speak and act in that demeanor in life) my hats off to both of them.
Chip,
Sunrise Films
Love this!
The t2i looks great here, questions!
-what picture profile/setting did you use here?
-also, do you use any of the “magic lantern hacks?
-sound? mics, recorder, etc.
and just generally curious as to what you post-production setup/process is like?
Anyways looks great, nice detail in the shadows! The sound is actually quite clean and has that sweet cinematic bassy feel to it.
Hi Blake, Chip, Hank, thanks for watching.
Blake to answer your questions – the picture profile I use on the Canon T2i is Neutral with Sharpness dialed down to -3, Contrast to -3, Saturation to -1. The reason for these changes is to minimize aliasing and moire artefacts from the sensor.
The magic lantern hack actually came out while I was in the middle of shooting and I was too scared to implement it in case it disrupted the workflow! So there is no ML camera hack on any scenes.
None of the dialog was recorded to the camera. Instead it was recorded to an external recorder called the Zoom H4 (not the newer H4n model but the older one). Be careful when plugging any mic into a Zoom H4 or H4n because these little recorders have very hissy preamps.
To circumvent the preamp hiss I use the Sound Devices MM1. So audio path was Rode NTG2 shotgun to Sound Devices MM1 preamp to Zoom H4 recording at line level.
When recording audio separately it is important to keep accurate slates this way when it comes to the edit it is easy to find and match up the files. Remember the DSLR is also recording a poorer quality audio so you are simply matching up and swapping out the poor audio for the good one. The on-set workflow I use is outline in my post here
http://jdmax.com/a-trick-for-audio-sync-on-a-shoot-without-a-slate/
Thanks so much for all the info. now i am blown away that you pulled this off with the onboard iso settings. Also that you pulled off good audio indoors with the ntg2……great stuff.
Makes me re-think my potential audio set up to include the mm1 with the hn4. Thanks again…….anything new going on with the film?….video dist? other fests?
Hi Blake, be careful with the H4n. Unlike the H4, the input for H4n XLR is mic level only. If you’re going in with line level its is the mini jack on the side of the unit. You also want a boom operator to keep that shotgun mic as close as possible to your actor without appearing in frame.
No more fests for A Strange Confession, once its online it is pretty much disqualified from entering. Online is my distribution medium. Free for the world to see !
this is great work !