From Youtubers to Filmmakers | Shooting A Short Film BTS

What do you get when you put a bunch of YouTubers who are also filmmakers together to create a short film? You get a really dope behind the scenes. Let's get into it. No Vacancy is about Leigh Larson, an investigative journalist who is being blackmailed and who isolates herself. It's a superhero thriller. So it's archetypes of various superheroes who are arriving at a motel and the archetype villain is picking them off because they're isolating. And it's really, this is a little bit of a spoiler alert, it's really a tragedy. It's not, it's how things are not supposed to go, not how things are supposed to go. So a little back story. I was hit up by Armando. What's up guys, my name is Armando. I have a YouTube called Mondo Bites and also I'm a co-founder of Crater. What Crater is doing is bringing a lot of creators from the YouTube space into much bigger productions like the one that you're seeing here. One of the reasons why we started this company is to not only get brand deals for our creators, but also bring other opportunities that, you know, we've never seen before. You had Brady, Kofi, Ryan, Cam Mackey, you had Lucas, Armando, a bunch of amazing, dope creators working together on this set to create this short film. This was a four day shoot and I was only there for two days. So literally getting there, it was a process of just trying to get caught up and figure out what had been happening the first two days when I wasn't there. Once I was able to get caught up, I kind of like was able to just dive right in and flow freely in the space of being a camera operator. So is Ryan here? Ryan went already. Okay. Yeah, so you guys basically split the week. Okay, perfect. So you'll be starting pretty soon. I think camera department's almost done with A-cam. Okay. You're going to be in there. We're just blacking out the windows and getting everything ready to go. I feel cold. Yeah. Hi. It's going to get cold. Brittany, yes. That's okay. I think I saw David actually get it. How are you lighting? Am I lighting? Mm-hmm. Motivated. This is our big guy. This is our motivation. So we're going to boom out a nice soft Swiss overhead. Then we're going to push in more soft from over there just like as an accent. And then this is going to be like a mainly green with a little bit of yellow. And we're going to just augment, push a little bit more. That's kind of for the first shot. And then just spice up a little bit of practicals. In the back. Yeah. And then once we flip, there's a blue neon sign that will augment a little bit through the window. Stay motivated off of mainly practicals. And then just decorate color in from there. Okay. So we are now finally outside. We've been inside the whole time on sticks. And we are now outside. So we have our first motion shot. So we're on the Dana Dolly. And we pretty much are getting the guy walk out because somebody knocked on the door. And then we're following him inside to then see the mask killer. Right. So we've got the Dana. We're going to go from point A to point B. And I am freezing my tail off. He's got a box on his thing, right? Yeah. He's got a box hiding right there. I'm waiting to try to get in the door. Where's my focus? Just on her face? Or her hands? We're never going to see her face. But it's on her top torso until she goes to the knob. And then we're kind of more on the knob. Okay. The only tracking shot is she's banging on this door. She turns and walks that way. If we have time, we'll do a lead and a follow. We're just going to follow really on the shot list first. Take her all the way. And actually we're going in that office. Into the office. Okay. So it all has to be lit. So it's kind of the biggest shot. So this particular shot, we're in this car. And I have to hold the camera handheld. Didn't really have a shoulder mount for it or anything. So I pretty much put it on an Apple box. Kind of rested on an Apple box. And then on my legs to kind of keep it sturdy. And to not get any natural jitters from me. We had it on the 21mm to try to get both of them in the shot. Coming from behind them. So it's cool. So before we get into the next day, I want to talk about our sponsors really quick. So first and foremost, Angel Bird. All the media management came from Angel Bird. We had no hiccups. I actually really, really love Angel Bird. And they gifted your girl with a couple of things. And I've been using their Angel Bird 1TB ever since I got it. And I don't use any other car with my Sony FX3. I have not had any issues. It's fast. When I tell you it's fast. Like I never run out of space. And so I never have a reason to switch a car. And I really, really love it. Period. I also want to give a shout out to iFootage. Now all the lights that you see from day 1 and day 2 that I was a part of. Now I didn't know much about iFootage until the day on set. But what I learned and what I saw, I was amazed. These are really, really great affordable lights for hobbyists, content creators, filmmakers, and even DPs or gaffers that are on bigger productions. So definitely check into them if you're looking for more affordable gear. So thank you iFootage for that. And I also want to thank a couple of our other sponsors. Thank you to Iris Lenses who provided the lenses that we shot with. And shout out to Blackstone. They provided our G&E truck as well as the location for day 2 when we were in studio. So if you're in LA, definitely check them out. And last but not least, of course, I want to thank our sponsors Condor Blue. Now I love them and I can talk about them all day. But for the sake of this video, I won't. Now everything that you see on the red was rigged up with Condor Blue accessories. I solely believe investing in the people of the company and not just the company. And the people who run Condor Blue are amazing. The rig was beautiful and immaculate like Condor Blue all the way. So thank you Condor for sponsoring this. Without further ado, let's get into the next day. But if you are still watching, leave a light bulb in the comments so I know it's real. All right? Day 4. We had 3 full nights and today we're actually comfortable in a temperate zone in a studio at Blackstone Entertainment. So it's going to be pretty good. First we're doing an old 70s TV set here. So we're going to do a green screen so we can recreate the background to whatever the director wants. I'm doing some hard backlight and some strong key light, a very high key setup. And then we're moving over to the black void back there. It's all blacked out so we can do some cool flashback scenes. Sort of like the Upside Down, the strange thing where it's all blacked out. Which is kind of in her mind. So we're going to do some of that back there. Do some high footage lights and make it real spotty. It's going to be pretty cool. The YouTubers are legit, man. They can actually shoot. No, we got an awesome crew on this set. And a lot of people are like, hey, YouTubers just sit at home and do unboxings and do reviews. But these guys are legit. They're actually lighting and they know how to do camera. And we got Brittany today operating the Raptor. We had Ryan a couple days ago. So I think it's exciting to have everyone collaborate. And there's no egos on set. Hollywood is full of egos. YouTube, I guess not so much. So it's been pretty fun. Hi, my name is Adam Krebsy. I'm the first AC on this project. So I'm responsible for keeping everything in focus and keeping our cameras running. Right now we're running three cameras set up because we're kind of mimicking a TV morning show interview. So we've got two Komodo Xs. One of them is right here and the other is over there. And then our main camera is a Red Raptor. And we're rocking Irix lenses on all three of those. And something the DP asked for that is a bit unique for this setup is he wanted his A and B cameras to match perfectly. So what we did is we used this laser measuring tool, which is a pretty common tool for ACs to use. And it'll just shoot a laser. So it'll give me a measurement readout of that distance. So what I did is I measured from the camera to subject and the other camera to subject, the lens height off the ground, and then the distance from camera to camera to make sure that both of our side angle cameras are exactly the same angle. As long as we're trying to stay in there and giving her a little bit less headroom, like the least that you can get away with, just be careful if she obviously she leans in. I'm tired already. I know. At the end of day three, when you got there for the first day, I was like, I want to go to the studio. It's easy. All of the cameras are decked out with like Condor blue gear, which is super dope because you can literally create your full rig with your camera with Condor. They got D-Tap. They got all the cores that you'll need. Everything. Condor blue. So right now, this setup, we're going to be using the green screen. We have a big overhang and like, thanks to Chad, we already have that kind of setup. So it makes it easier on the grip team. We have a nice big 20 by 20 green screen. We have some sandbags, making sure that everything's straight. Everything's going to go on the same here. And then we're also going to use some of the eye footage lights you'll see in the corner. And those are going to be key lights and back for the town that we have that's going to be in the middle. It's a simple setup on paper, but there's a lot less heavy lifting that we have to do today than we do other days. Coming from camera into the G&E department, it's very different. I'm so used to like knowing everything, where everything is, what everything's called. But I find in G&E, depending on the set you're on, depending who you're working with, things might have different names. And sometimes you have things that you've never used before, which is a bit interesting, but it's a lot of learning. After, what, three days, it feels a lot easier to kind of know your way around and kind of figure things out. But it's actually kind of fun after a little bit. Some heavy lifting, you've got to move stuff around, but you also learn more about lighting as well. So as a DP, learning more about G&E will actually help you overall make your lighting setups better. And also needing and knowing what you need for certain things, I think that's the biggest thing to learn. I do a lot of both G&E side and DP side of things, so it's not anything foreign to me. I'm kind of definitely in my wheelhouse. My style as a DP is very lighting heavy, so it's familiar to me. And I think that they go hand in hand for me to just be a DP, but also be on the G&E side of things. I think the biggest thing, especially on this one, has been power and stuff like that. So learning to distribute power to not only my lighting department, but also camera department and audio and hair and makeup. And everybody needs lighting, especially in the first locations where there was no power on the location at all. Just making sure that we had power running to where it needed to be. 153 minutes. So I have my setup here where I actually have a 1TB Angelbird card. So this is the reader. I've got my card here. So when I'm done filming, I can literally just plug this into my computer. This is legit, right? So you can either hold this monstrosity over here or something simple like this. Talk to him at the end of the day. See how tired he is. So again, thank you to our sponsors. Angelbird, iFootage, Condor Blue, Iris Lenses, Blackstone. Shout out to all of them. Thank you so much for sponsoring all of this. Shout out to all the creators. I love working with them. And at this point, we're friends now from Sony Kando to shooting this short film. We're besties at this point. I'm a broski, what Kofi would say. So shout out to all of them. I'm just thankful to have been able to be a part and continue to grow in this space. And I'm really, really loving it. So thank you all so much for watching this video. If you guys have any questions, leave them down below. Thank you all so much for supporting. Definitely check out the other creators' videos. I'm sure all of ours is going to be different from our perspective. And I think it's always really cool to see everybody's perspective. It's a full playlist that you can check out and show some support. And definitely look at the short film and let us know your thoughts. Thank you all so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.