the autumn Queen : production

The Autumn Queen was produced for the DV Challenge Five at dvinfo.net. The film made the top list of contenders, but did not win any snazzy prizes.

We filmed the entire short in 24 hours in the middle of a hot, torturous summer day and in a nest of mosquitoes and angry ticks. Dehydration was a constant bother, and the actors had to constantly be cleaned of sweat.

An ambitious experiment

On many levels, the Autumn Queen was an experiment for Crowfeather Films. We wanted to test out various special effects, including greenscreens, as well as to experiment with voiceover storytelling as a viable short film structure.

This was the first use of the HDV format and the Sony FX1. All special effects were done in mutliple layers of Vegas, except for one easily noticeable particle effect. The leaves had to be completely recolorized in post to make it look like a lush autumn day. This required massive amounts of rotoscoping in Vegas to not "autumn-ize" the actors.

This was also our first experiments with greenscreening. There are noticeable fringes and green fill reflection in a few shots.