Hi I'm Louisa from FXhome by Artlist and what you just watched was shot entirely for free
using items that you probably already have lying around the house I know that
I'm surrounded by lots of very fancy, expensive equipment here in this studio at FXhome but
the average just starting out filmmaker isn't going to have access to those things
but no excuses guys if you have an idea for a film, you can still bring it to life
and I'm going to show you the process from start to finish for how I made mine for free
before you can start filming you need to do your pre-production you need to flesh out your idea
I did this in google docs which is a fantastic tool you can collaborate with other people you
can write your scripts you can write your shot the list honestly I can't believe it's free so this
is where I did all of my planning and for my storyboard I could have used a fancy graphics
tablet is drawn it all out digitally but we've gone back traditional and I've done it pen
and paper and to be honest nothing was ever going to make these drawings look good
which is okay because you don't need to be an artist to do a storyboard as long as it kind of
tells you what you kind of want the shot to look like then that's good enough or at least
it's gonna have to be good enough because this is as good as it gets for me and when it came
to active and location I managed to keep this free by asking, begging, threatening my friends
to be involved in the process to be the actors and to give me access to some of their locations
you probably won't have to threaten your friends if you're passionate about something they probably
want to help out in any way you know the options always there so you're going to need something to
shoot your short film on for mine I just use my phone because smartphones these days most of them
will film in up to 4k which is more than enough resolution than you're going to need for your film
if you want proof of that you're watching this right now in 1080p HD and I think I still look
quite professional quite crispy. Smartphones are also much more lightweight than using a
a big bulky expensive camera so you can get some more interesting motion into your shots and you
can probably get yourself into smaller gaps that you may not have been able to get into a big
camera and just also they're a little bit more durable you can duct tape them to places you can
leave them in some more precarious places and not worry so much if they fall that you would with a
a very big expensive camera so as long as you've got a good case and a good screen protector on them
then you're pretty much ready to go I have one of these pop socket grips on the back of my phone
not gonna lie so I can just sit and watch TikTok in bed without dropping the phone on my face
but for this film it came in handy because it gave me something that I could use to stabilize myself
while I was filming so multi-use and also you can use them to just prop your phone up if you don't
have a tripod and the audio from your phone is probably going to be decent enough for your first
short film just make sure that you're close to your subject so don't film from the other side of
the room and expect to get good audio sorry sound guys and in terms of lighting tom already had me
covered didn't he he made a video on the channel a couple of months ago talking about cheap lighting
hacks which we then used whilst on set to help light the film so if you're interested in more
detail on these then you can click the card on screen right now but if not i think we've covered
everything and we are ready to get to the shoot day so we've arrived I've sourced some friends and
a house so we are going to we're going to do the shoot basically so we're going to get set up
get some of our little diy lighting stuff set up and get going so let's go a lot of tape i think
yeah you had it it's kind of like a thing on there sitting in it um I think it was sitting
in that way yeah yeah okay looks good new iPhone does it look it doesn't look good does it really
cushioning that landing just ever so slightly yeah. Should I like test? that's it all right let's just test it.
that was smooth!
this is what we call flagging this is just placing a small sort of hood around the lens
I want this to do is stop all the light kind of like coming in from the different angles
so we are going to try and fake the look of a slider now like in my storyboard so the drawer
is going to open and we're going to pull the camera backward so we're going to do this by
putting it on top of a blanket and just pulling the blanket back
so what we're trying to recreate at the moment is the shot in my
I'll do I'll put an insert into it probably better but the one it's basically was trying
to make a zip line basically to create like a zoom in on the face kind of sharp crash zoom
that's the term um so we're trying to build a zipline basically and fingers crossed it works but
I haven't got a lot of faith in this one I'm not going to lie
so the thing about the tape sticking it the tape stuck out tape
and that's a wrap so next up was the edit which i did in hitfilm express
because it's completely free and it does everything you could possibly need to do so
let's go through some of the things that I did to make my footage look a little bit more cinematic
the first thing I did was I grabbed my music and my shots and I just line them up and cut
them to the beat to make the storyline using my storyboard and then I made sure to go through and
find the shots which my DIY methods didn't quite work the way I wanted them to maybe they were a
little bit shaky like this slider shot to turn them into composite shots and stabilize them we have a
short so you can watch right now that goes into more detail about how to stabilize your footage
and of course, if you'd like a full tutorial then just let us know in the comments but that's what
I did there just to kind of make everything look smooth and then to make the footage look a
a little bit less like it had come out of a phone and more like a camera I just went crazy with
the color correction tools that are available in HitFilm express so I made a grade clip I extended
it across the whole timeline and I added the curve effect um I changed the color temperature
played around with the brightness contrast the saturation and just just generally played around
with the settings until I got the effect that i wanted and to make it look like it came out of an
the expensive wide-angle camera I just put black bars on it which I did by just creating two new plane
layers and just changing the position so that only a little bit was showing at the top and a little
bit at the bottom just literally black planes used as black bars on the top and bottom and well bam
looks like a very fancy very expensive little film I've made it there but everything was done for free
it's time to export so I just exported this using the youtube 1080 HD presets but if you made it as
a vertical video because you wanted to put it on tick tock or Instagram reels or something then you
can use a preset that will match the settings of your project but once I was done I just clicked
export and let the magic happen and then the only thing left to do is to publish your video
and show it off to the world you can do this on Youtube or Vimeo social media these are all great
free places that you can upload your video and it could be potentially seen by millions of people
which is very exciting and also a little bit scary I hope mine goes viral and then we're
done my short film is now out there in the world ready to be ripped apart by everybody if you're
interested in more videos you can click here if If you like this video make sure to like subscribe
give us your firstborn child all that good stuff and we will see you guys in the next video