Making of Schnee Running

Schnee Running
Making Of
A film by Sebastian Linda

How I met Leo & Jo

Jo on the left, Leo on the right

So about 2 weeks ago, we had great sunny weather in Dresden and went out for skating at our new skatepark. We had a great session, when suddenly I saw kids jumping on the trampoline, trying all kinds of crazy flips and creative moves. After that they backflipped out of the swings on the playground at the maximum height into the sand. We all stopped skating and thought these kids were crazy.

Since I worked with professional Free Runners like Jason Paul from Team Farang or the Team Ashigaru I know about the progression in Free Running. So I was used to crazy tricks and stuff like that, but what I liked about those kids were their creative motivation and fun they had while exploring the playground.

So I went into talking to them, because I never have seen Free Runners before in Dresden. We connected via Facebook and planned to meet and shoot some scenes together. Of course at first they had to ask their parents, so I met up with them before. We concluded that the best would be if Leo´s mother would join the shoot. Because shooting with underage kids can be very dangerous if it comes to accidents.

Thinking: “I forgot the assistant… again.”

The Shoot

On the weekend we wanted to shoot it was between minus 12 and 14 degrees celsius. On Saturday it was so cold that you could not stay outside for longer than 10 minutes. I thought about aborting the whole shoot.  But on the next day the sun was supposed to be out for the whole day. So we did it meet at 11 o´clock with 3 pullovers, undershirts and what not.

The kids were like machines. You just had to put them into an environment and they would get creative within seconds. What I loved was the cooperation between them and their ideas to share the framing with creative moves and ideas.

Of course most shots were shot from extreme low angles with backlight of the sun. So you might think that the kids should be too dark and appear as silhouettes then. Right, but the snow works like a big reflector from the ground up into their faces.

The kids had something natural to them and filming everything with Slider and Steady cam just made it look like an advertisement shoot with professionals. The style of the clip should adapt to the kid´s character so I wanted to shoot everything handheld, so every shot was handheld with a Gorilla Tripod or shot from my skateboard if possible.

So at 4 o´clock we were finished and in 4 hours of shooting I was idealess and thought:
Of course we could do more, meet again, but this day was a perfect day of shooting, action, moves. Everything felt into place like it was meant to be. I thought. No more, that´s it. Let this day stand for what Leo & Jo are.

Big shout out to Leo´s mother Anette for joining the shoot and shooting the Making of Pictures.

Technical Background

I shot with the 5d Mark III in Raw with Magic Lantern. Everything was shot in 1726×606 50fps. I shot most of the shots with the 24mm 1,4 L lense. Normally this lense is not a lense for action because the Wide Angle is not big enough. But since the kids were as short as 13 years are I could frame totally different. Having the possibility of letting them coming closer to camera would make more dynamics possible, plus a small depth of field for great depth in the picture. So if you wonder why “Schnee Running” looks different  from perspectives, it is not only the filming, but also the possibility of different framings with smaller athletes. Everything was shot with a Fader Nd, to adapt the right amount of exposure.

Portraits were shot with the 50mm 1,4 lens. You can have a look at Erik Gross photos who is a friend of mine and which honest portraits always give me a good idea how strong a portrait shot can be.

Editing

What looks like total chaos, is a structure that grows more complex from version to version.

Before editing it is very good to know in which direction you want to go. What is the narrative you want to tell, what kind of concept is behind the film, what mood you want to tell the audience.

I formulated some words I wanted to keep over the whole process in all areas:

Childish – Dreamy – Fascinating – Playful – Bravery – Friendship – Joy – Exciting – Childhood

A good song helps to start your editing and get a felling for the material. When looking at the material I was reminded of my clip “The Epic and the Beasts” where I used a song by Ianborg. Silk – Giselle (Ianborg Remix) . And sometimes I search for days to find a new song. But when selecting the material the song – Oceans by Crywolf and Ianborg came up. And immidately I felt goosebumps on my skin. So I just put it under the material and it was an amazing mix. Found the song.

Within 2 hours my edit was finished in it´s first version.

Sound Editing

The sound editing is very subtle but took a lot of time. Throughout the clip you have sounds of ice, landing in snow and some swooshes that underline the flipping of the guys.
Here it was important of not doing to much. To support my keywords of dreamy, the sound should not wake the audience out of their dream.

Typography

For the typography I could win Roland Hartmann from www.graphicinmotion.com .
He found me when using material from my clip the Revenge of the Beasts for an awesome motion Design Template.

The first Designs have been very technical, with amazing animations on it, but we changed it to a more playful approach. The typo is “Sweetly Broken” and titles were tracked in After Effects which was not entirely easy cause of the heavy snow fall.

The images I shot on the next day after the shoot with Leo&Jo. We had the biggest snowfalls of the year and next time I am gonna shoot with an underwater casing in this conditions.

The Title

I am not sure if everybody can understand the mix of the title. I really wanted to have Free Running in the title on the other hand, of course: Snow.
German “Schnee” pronounced english sounds like Free. But how do we tell the audience who does not know german how it sounds?
My girlfriend Sophia and me said “Schnee Running” and I put it into Ableton, figured out the key signature of the song and played around with a vocoder to get the electric sound.
So the video begins with the electric voice “Schnee Running”. Everybody knows the how to pronounce Schnee running now, problem solved!

Color Correction

After the shoot I put everything into Da Vinci Resolve where I tried to grade all shots. Since I am not yet an expert I tried my look first in Magic Bullet Looks and tried to copy the look over to Da Vinci. But I had found a look I liked so much, I could not make it any better in Da Vinci. So I rendered everything out in Quicktime Pro Res HQ, pregraded it to have the maximum information in the image and made the colour correction in Magic Bullet Looks.

The looks of the movie was planned to have it colorful, very saturated colors, a warming sun but in the shadows I wanted to have the blue bitter coldness of the winter. The blue tones I changed a little into a baby blue to have a blue which is not so harsh and dark in the shadows.

In the highlights I put a very slight diffusion while I sharpened the mid-tones to make a good contrast between background and foreground.

The question was on Facebook:

“Judith Zöllig  Always wondered if the nice color-style of your videos is made with filters, postproduction, or just very good placing of the camera…”

Short answer: All of them!

Longer: A good start is to work yourself into Colour Grading Tutorials out there and software like Magic Bullet Looks. They have free Looks on their homepage.

But before doing that, more important. Try to lighten your image correctly. Do not loose information in the sky or in the shadows. If your original image is lightened correctly you have tons of possibility in the editing process. If not, you will have a lot of problems to get a “Hight quality” look out of the image.

And of course perspective is everything. I do not simply put my camera somewhere. I measure the position of my camera in centimeters, sometimes even milimeters to find the right framing. Anticipation of movement is also super important. Do not cut anything off in your framing. See where the light is best and adjust your object into the right place of the image.

The following image is of course no cooincidende but only exists in very specific place with the right lense, exposure, moment and place!

So this question occurs a lot of times:
“What makes a film great in quality?”

Many belives it is the technique, they can use. The quality of the camera, the editing program, lenses and so on. For me this is only a small factor. What is more important, is to have a vision you follow. A vision of a story you want to tell. If you will follow this vision in all areas of your film, and are able to use the knowledge and your style in the project it will become great, because it will be unique and speak your language.
If you want to know more about the process of filming and editing join my film course in Dresden.

Bye bye, see ya next time.