http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFZ_SDk4hYw

This is a first-person/home-movie-style short film I just posted today. It's intended to have a very surreal feel. Like walking in the night when something weird is happening, like in the video.

It's my first first-person movie, which I enjoyed doing. Though I believe that style only works for certain projects, I think it can be benneficial to many movies.

From a technical standpoint it was very different. Things that might normally require a lot of preperation, like lighting, tri-pods/dolly ECT were much more straitford on this project. However in their place came other complications. Compositing 3D onto shaking camera work, for instance. None of the footage was shot with camera tracking, so it proved too time consuming to composite the longer shots frame by frame (or close to it). Instead I froze a frame from the general shot, composited the 3D onto it, and then turned in back to shaky/hand held footage in After Effects.

Another thing different about the first person style was the longer shots. These were easier from an editing standpoint, but were obviously much harder to film. Especially for the volunteer actors.

Since we didn't use any artificial light, it was very difficult to get the night scenes lit right. In the final video, only the opening scene is actually filmed at night. The others were filmed during the day and then processed in post to look like night. This ended up contributing to the stylized/surreal feel of the film.