LUMIX Presents: 10 years of Filmmaking - What Changed?

10 years ago I made a short film in college. I was trying to make something that felt like a Scorsese movie. I was no Martin Scorsese. As a fun experiment I'll be remaking this short with the Lumix S1 II and 10 more years of filmmaking experience behind me. We're going to go through it category by category. What worked, what didn't, and whether experience and technology actually change anything. First, the story. Two guys at a table. Some kind of debt being repaid. The tension never really arrives. This place wasn't too hard to find. No, not at all. Please sit down. The characters don't have much dimension. We jumped into the middle of a scene and never gave the audience a reason to feel anything. The new version is still a mid-scene drop. No setup, no backstory, but this time both characters have something real underneath them. Not just caricatures of a mob movie. Alex isn't just menacing. There's something fragile in him which is scarier to me. The camera we shot the original on was actually also made by Panasonic. It came out in 2010. It was bulky, only HD recording, and its low light performance meant you needed serious lighting fixtures to compensate. We're spoiled now. The S1 II has 15 stops of dynamic range, shoots in Arri Log-C3, films in 6K, and has open gates. The dual native ISO changes what's possible for budget lighting and practical locations. Something with this image quality in 2010 would have been tens of thousands of dollars. I mean, don't get me wrong. Skill always matters more than gear. But if you have something to say, if you know what you're looking for, the cost of making something great is less than ever. Looking back at the lighting, it's honestly not bad. I was going for something Godfather-ish. Low dramatic overhead lighting, but it's a little too flat and too uniform. There's no separation between the characters and the space behind them. The guy in the dark jacket against the dark wall essentially disappears. Nothing is guiding your eye. The wide shot puts the two characters at opposite edges of the frame with dead space between them. There's no psychological weight to that composition. I mean, we covered it fine. Wide, two closeups, some inserts. But that's just standard coverage for the sake of coverage, not intention. For the remake, I want the camera to be a participant in the scene. Basic moves. We don't want to overcomplicate anything for the sake of making it flashy. For me, that can pull you right out of the story. Blocking is hard, especially when characters are moving throughout a scene. To help with this, I like to study other films. I record movie scenes related to what I'm on my phone and scrub through them at high speed. At normal speed, you're just watching. You're in the story. At 4x, you start seeing decisions. Try it. The logic starts to reveal itself. When lighting, always be looking for light and dark in your frame. A camera is a 2D tool trying to create a 3D world. The thing that makes an image feel deep instead of flat is contrast. Your eye naturally travels toward brightness. So where you put it is where the story lives. If everything in the frame is the same value, same brightness, same tone, the audience isn't drawn in. The original short does exactly this. One tone, wall to wall. The new location gives us room to fix that. So we already have great light coming from outside and we're continuing that with our key light here. And then we have our tube light that's going to edge out our subject from the background. And then we have the spotlight here that's going to hit the fabric on the floor to give us a little underglow. This isn't a meeting that happens in a nice restaurant. It's a meeting no one is supposed to know about. The rawness of the space works for the story. The location should make the audience slightly uneasy before anyone speaks. Come on in, Jonathan. I hope the place wasn't too hard to find. No, it was easy. There you go. We're good? Grab a seat. You know, I really can't. No, no, please. It'll take a second. Take a seat. I asked you for this five months ago and you gave me every excuse not to give me this money. You know what I did? I actually felt bad for you. I did. I felt sorry for you. No, no, seriously. No, I did. I said to myself, you know what? For the first time in my life I'm going to actually get serious with you. I'm going to give you an actual deadline. And then what do you do? You show up right away like it's nothing, like it's no problem. Yeah. Am I soft? I'm actually asking, do I seem soft? No. Or do I just look soft? What is it? Is it my hair? You know what it is? Maybe it's the fact that I like people. That's what it is. I like people. I really do. That's not a good trait to have in this business. It makes you do stupid things. Like let someone tell you that they can't pay, when they really just won't. What are you talking about? I can't let that slide. I want 20% more. Come on, you're kidding. You think I'm joking? 20%. By Sunday. Alex, that's not possible. Jonathan, come on. I'm a soft guy. Don't make me do hard things. 10 years is a strange thing to hold up to the light. Some of it's the gear, some of it's the eye. Most of it is just reps. Making things, looking at them, critiquing them, and making the next one. If you want to see the edit and grade breakdown, let me know in the comments. See you in the next one.