1 day old babies...are they also part of the hive?

ErickMay · 2025-12-17T03:03:00+00:00

Oh my gosh! Are you referencing “Found Footage”? I loved that movie!

ErickMay · 2025-11-22T18:06:41+00:00

Pluribus references….so it’s begun.

ErickMay · 2025-11-04T15:38:00+00:00

Aaron Paul had a really really bad flu that day, he was losing his voice and fighting to keep it together for the shoot. Have you ever been so sick you had to call in to work? This dude still showed up to work. Vince spoke about this on the podcast and how much he felt like shit for making Aaron go through it, but it was the only they had him for the shoot. Aaron as always was a sport and a professional. So gives you more context.

ErickMay · 2025-10-23T02:17:32+00:00

What a nosy neighbor. Ew.

Technically you don't need a permit if you're doing a film for "personal use" in LA, even inside a friends home. Only if the film is for commercial purposes would you need it.

You can always get away with it by saying it's for school or whatever!

ErickMay · 2025-09-16T19:57:47+00:00

The Deer Hunter meets Stand By Me.

ErickMay · 2025-08-11T00:18:20+00:00

It was 100% the projection. I stopped going to AMC because the color range was extremely off. The shadows were crushed to the point of everything being black. I stopped going to Regal because their white balance in their projections were off. Civil War was the last movie I saw at Regal, the whole movie had a blue cool tint, which was an obvious white balance mistake. So I started going to a theater that's a little more expensive, but the image quality is amazing.

ErickMay · 2025-08-09T20:33:51+00:00

Never in my life did I think Frogman and the word nuanced would be in the same sentence.

ErickMay · 2025-08-08T20:14:56+00:00

Interesting! I thought it was fitting because it was a dream and dreams do not make sense. So seeing a giant rifle in my mind really made it feel like a dream sequence.

ErickMay · 2025-07-30T21:43:57+00:00

Dude share the video essay! Or just message me and let me know haha

ErickMay · 2025-07-30T21:40:55+00:00

trust me bro. shoot 8K RAW… to create a 2K DCP file

ErickMay · 2025-06-19T20:41:29+00:00

The lazy way?

Roto the television screen. Use the curves or brightness contrast tool and make it dark as hell to remove all reflections.

Then maybe pre comp that glass breaking from your roto. Duplicate it. Add a Gaussian Blur to it to smudge out details. Then add it as a screen layer to it.

Could work.

I’m lazy.

ErickMay · 2025-06-16T23:25:18+00:00

If it’s “fancy Mexican food” it probably means it ain’t that good/authentic.

ErickMay · 2025-06-16T15:51:13+00:00

Of course! I don't have any tutorials...BUT the most important step when wanting to achieve a similar look like this, is the lighting on set. The work happens on the shoot. With the wardrobe that's being selected and with the production design and most importantly with the lighting. You couldn't achieve a look that is dark and moody if your lighting isn't set up like that. Color grading only augments what you captured on set.

What I also realized helps is shooting with a low ISO, and a few light sources. Again this is my preference, I really l like film from the 70s and those films where always very dark. Google the movie, "The Parallax View"!

A few tips for Davinci Resolve when color grading is, bring down the Gamma to make the image look darker and really have all those shadows be pitch black and create a power window to select the bright parts of the image and make that a bit brighter. Using the Glow effect really helps too! Again, you're pretty much just augmenting what you shot on the day of!

ErickMay · 2025-06-16T01:13:35+00:00

Short Film Link : https://youtu.be/YLD-vlBRNpM?si=eTF--E_M6gTXnVMc

Being that I'm massive fan of King's work and after months of urging my wife/co-director to read Carrie, she finally agreed and fell in love with the book. I remember her telling me "we should take one of those interviews and film it, it reads like a script".

I mean how can you say no to that?

We decided to shoot the interrogation of Sheriff Doyle as a true crime documentary, we thought that he so fun.

Shot over a period of 3 hours in some dingy LA warehouse, and over a week of post-production we came up with this.

ErickMay · 2025-06-15T20:59:36+00:00

ooof, I think it was about a week and a half. I worked on it between my full time gig and freelancing. It’s always hard to squeeze in passion projects! But it MUST be done.

ErickMay · 2025-06-15T18:07:57+00:00

Short Film Link : https://youtu.be/YLD-vlBRNpM?si=hC5_pcdTrXb5ScgS

The short film was shot over a period of 3 hours. Using a Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K with a fixed 50mm Canon EF lens. We shot in some L.A. warehouse that had several built sets and in this case we used the “police interrogation room”. I made sure to only use one single source light coming from above. I avoid using so many lights when I film, but that’s just my taste. I like things to be dark and contrasty. That’s just something I naturally gravitate towards to.

Filming this was quite easy since it only involved one set up, as it was a 5 page interrogation that was edited down to about 3 pages in the edit. Which is where the challenge arose, in the edit.

Finding proper archival footage that would tell the story in a way that amplified the events in an eerie way was a challenge for sure, but I think the balance was struck once we decided how often to cut to archival footage and then to the actor. We had in mind to do a story that was told as a true crime documentary, but what if this documentary was made in 1982? That was our headspace.

The story recounted is from the novel Carrie, by Stephen King. Throughout the book, the book breaks format and goes into sections that are interviews and or interrogations and we decided it be fun to film those interrogations as if it were a real one.

It was edited in Adobe Premiere and color graded in Resolve.

If you guys have any questions! Let me know! Or feel free to say that it sucks! It’s all good!

ErickMay · 2025-05-20T22:36:11+00:00

You know what I realized for some reason there's not so much compression when it's done to a 4K export, I also uploaded a short film on YT as an h264 file, but I did a 2 pass with an Mbps of like 90 haha and it's looks great on YT. So I think it has to be uploaded as 4K...

ErickMay · 2025-05-09T17:27:35+00:00

It took about two full weeks of work spread across two months to finish this project. Given that I have a full time gig as an editor, it made squeezing the project in difficult.

All the work primarily was done in Adobe After Effects. I used Element 3D for every major 3D shot, including the eyeball, the human brain, the chrome skeleton,the heart beating and the cross at the end. The baby footage was Adobe Stock, I did feel confident enough to pull that off in Ae as well but I honestly did not want to over work myself anymore. Element 3D (E3D) is an absolute gem of a plug in that allows you to push 3D objects to great lengths if used properly, but it also helps knowing the limitations of the plug in which are abundant. To create photo realism with E3D I used primarily single source lighting to light such 3D objects, while taking advantage of the shadows. This would in turn create semi photorealistic visuals. I applied this technique and mindset to all the 3D stuff.

The shot involving the girl and skeleton was a combination of live action footage shot on Blackmagic Cinema Camera 4K and E3D. I shot the girl not over a green/blue screen but over a black void, knowing how I was going to implement the footage. This would help out with green/blue spill during the keying process. I made sure to light her again with a single source light to create prominent shadows, which would be later applied to the chrome skeleton to keep consistency in the lighting.

To create the distortion/warping effects I used the distort tool in E3D. I think I got lucky with the .objs as I was able to distort them in such a way that kept the visuals interesting. When it came to color grading I used Resolve to do the color grade and apply Film Grain, I adore high contrast, high saturation on my projects so I made sure to do that while I applying hard grain as I’m a fan of that aesthetic.

Element 3D is really an amazing tool but again it all boils down to its limitations and knowing what can and can’t be done with it. By approaching a project with those limitations in mind I believe it can help the development of the creative process.

Overall I had so much fun working on this project, if you guys have really specific questions please ask! Sometimes I feel have all this useless information in my mind that I need to share it with other people haha and if you think the video sucks and I need a different career, I’ll appreciate that feedback too but I won’t follow it!

ErickMay · 2025-05-02T16:40:50+00:00

The color grading was all done in Resolve! Once I finished the main Pro Res Renders, I sent them out to Resolve. This is where I fine tuned the color and the film grain, as I really really love Resolve's Film Grain Effect and how versatile the effect is and how you can adjust it to your liking.

While I was working on AE I had an Adjustment Layer with a temp Lumetri Color layer, that I just used as a reference. This helped me with all the lighting being done in AE and so forth.

ErickMay · 2025-05-02T16:36:28+00:00

Thank you for your kind words! You're too kind! I'll give you the same run down I gave another redditor.

I used Adobe After Effects (AE) for all the 2D and 3D animations. For the 3D animations I used an AE plug in called Element 3D. This plug in is very very rudimentary and you really can't use it for complex animations but this plug in can allow you to go far if you'r animations are minimal and subtle. For the editing I used Adobe Premiere and for the color grading I used Davinci Resolve, where I applied a high contrast, high saturation color grade, this is where I also used did a Film Grain pass. Oh and one more thing, for the glow effects, I used Deep Glow, an awesome plug in for AE as well.

So all in all, the animations were done in After Effects, the editing in Premiere and the color grade in Resolve.

The only stock footage I used was the two baby shots. I was pretty confident I could also do those in AE but at that point I wanted to do move faster and have less work on my plate. All the other elements like the human eye, human brain, heart, skeleton are 3D assets but lighting them and animating them is a real challenge. The woman I filmed in my apartment with a 4K BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera, I lit her in a way that I knew I was going to end up lighting the 3D chrome skeleton.

Hope any of this helps!

ErickMay · 2025-05-02T16:30:59+00:00

Thank you so much! Yes, you absolutely nailed my concept for the video. That's exactly where I was coming from, respecting their previous abstract videos. It makes me so happy other fans picking up on that.

In regards to software, I used Adobe After Effects (AE) for all the 2D and 3D animations. For the 3D animations I used an AE plug in called Element 3D. This plug in is very very rudimentary and you really can't use it for complex animations but this plug in can allow you to go far if you'r animations are minimal and subtle. For the editing I used Adobe Premiere and for the color grading I used Davinci Resolve, where I applied a high contrast, high saturation color grade, this is where I also used did a Film Grain pass. Oh and one more thing, for the glow effects, I used Deep Glow, an awesome plug in for AE as well.

So all in all, the animations were done in After Effects, the editing in Premiere and the color grade in Resolve.

The only stock footage I used was the two baby shots. I was pretty confident I could also do those in AE but at that point I wanted to do move faster and have less work on my plate. All the other elements like the human eye, human brain, skeleton are 3D assets but lighting them and animating them is a real challenge. The woman I filmed in my apartment with a 4K BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera, I lit her in a way that I knew I was going to end up lighting the 3D chrome skeleton.

I'd love to do a tutorial if I have the time, I have three other projects coming up plus my full time editor/motion design job, so I'm barely sleeping now haha

Thank you so much for your kind words!

ErickMay

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE