THE WITNESSES
dramatic short / longtake / Winner of Instant36 2019
Synopsis
After Josephine drops the marble an unforeseen chain of events unfolds in front of her. John’s and her evening is changed forever.
About INSTANT36
This movie was created within 36 hours from the first idea to the final cut. It was our submission for the Instant36 Shortfilm Competition, an annual contest which takes place in Salzburg, Austria.
We are extremely proud of what we achieved in this short time and are honored that the judges picked our short as the overall winner of this year’s competition. 🙂
Making the longtake
There are a lot of amazing longtakes out there, like the gritty war scenes in Children of Men or the more than 2 hours lasting longtake that makes the movie Victoria. If well executed a longtake can really help to draw you into a movie. Therefore I always wanted to make a longtake myself to see if we could also achieve a similar effect.
Having submitted to the Instant36 competition before I knew it was the perfect opportunity to finally try it ourselves. Just having a couple of hours to shoot this short, we immediately started to rehearse with the actors once we had the script. The blocking of the actors and the camera evolved from just repeatedly trying over and over again. Once we knew where the film was going, we split the rehearsal into two parts: everything from the car to the balcony and beyond.
Regarding equipment we shot this short on my Sony A7RII with a Contax Zeiss 28mm 2.8. For stabilization we used a DJI Ronin-S, which worked pretty well.
When we were finally ready to shoot this thing for real, we needed about 4 or 5 takes until we were happy with the result.
All in all it was an amazing experience! Working together with a grand team of people made the shoot astonishingly easy and stress-free.
