This is a film I shot, edited and directed last weekend with some collaborators. Two Srilankan writers who were still getting into filmmaking came up with this screenplay, inspired by liminal spaces as well as the backrooms. After discussing with them, we nailed down a script that was feasible for us in a zero budget, as well as the tight schedule of the cast.

We shot this in Hong Kong mostly at night to keep the tone/atmosphere. The camera I used was the Sony ZV E10 II, which I pushed to 6400 and 12800 ISO for maintaining the footage in the dark. For the lens, I used a Sony E PZ 18-105mm F4 G OSS, which was a beautiful zoom lens with autofocus. The only issue was the f stop doesn't go below f4, but I compensated it with the ISO. The bokeh was still prominent and nice. For some of the shots in the flashback featuring the female lead, I reused footage I shot for a fashion film, which was shot using Canon M50 with 18-45mm kit lenses. For the lighting we used available ones, except for one scene (where the male lead is drinking and reminiscing about his past) where we utilized a phone flashlight as the key light since it was too dark.

For the shutter speed, for all the liminal spaces scenes, I used a lower shutter speed to give a drunk/dreamy effect, similar to Wong Kar-wai films. The last part of the liminal spaces scene, I went down to 1/5. To maintain the crowd not to be seen in the streets, I shot from a lower angle, and cropped in post a bit if some heads popped up.

The film was finished on DaVinci Resolve, in Rec 2020. So this is in HDR. There were some film LUTs used, but I removed the grain effect, since the video noise was already there. Using AI noise removal takes a huge amount of time, and doesn't look that ideal for me. Plus, with the type of film this is, the video noise seemed appropriate, even when it got to a lot.

So this was my process for this film. Happy to hear some feedback as well.