With the tools that are available today, a small group of actors, cameramen, writers, and technical people can pull together a cool noir style internet program.

According to the write-up on Kickstarter, the “Dominion” web series is a dark tale of mystery told in the classic detective noir style. It features a rich world of supernatural creatures who live side by side with humans... in our own world. They prefer to stay in the shadows, the stuff of legends and myths. But one Private Investigator is finding out that sometimes the truth is more dangerous than the myths they hide.

Writers Andrew Stoute and Rodney Smith of Flyin’ Monkey Films have worked on short films for a few years now. The plan is to shoot for nine days in September and spend the rest of the time in post-production to meet their release date of Halloween, which will premier six episodes to an Internet audience. They are also partnering with Nice Guy Productions for grip and support gear, and for their expertise.

The production is being shot on a Panasonic HVX200 with Brevis 35mm Adapter and Canon Rebel T21/550D. To keep the camera steady the crew will use a number of devices including a Bogen-Manfrotto MV525 Tripod with 501 Fluid Head, Cinevate shoulder support system, Skater dolly, and GlideCam V-8 Stabilizer system. The whole program is being shot on the HVX: 720 24PN DVCPRO Format MXF; On the Canon 1080i 24p.

According to Andrew and Rodney, they’ll be converting the final files to the h.264 format and uploading from there. What they’re doing is highly compatible with Flash and Quicktime players. Compression is done using Adobe Media Encoder CS5. Post production is being handled using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Adobe After Efects CS5 on a Dell Inspiron 1520, 4GB RAM running Windows 7 (64Bit).

When asked how long the filming would take, Rodney explained, “We tend to shoot a lot of coverage, but on average we use up to 4x 4GB P2 Cards. That’s 16 minutes of footage apiece. So that’s roughly 64 minutes of footage in total. On fast days it’s just 30 minutes, but we do tons of covering shots and angles to make it easier to edit.”   The main series involves about 20 people both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. They have actors on-board and a good solid crew to make sure production is done efficiently. Post-production crew has been working out the kinks in the system through production of a number of one-minute episodes that are available online. And, of course, the goal is to see the series developed into an hour long television series for SyFy, or even a mini-series, which is why we structured it the way we did. Each block of six episodes is about 45 minutes of screen time.

Some shots require use of a crane, which is where Nice Guy Productions comes in. But with the weight of the Canon T21 being so light Rodney explains that they are also able to use lighter crane/jib setups.

During production the team will be using a three-system backup for all of the footage. As footage is offloaded from the cards, it will be sent to two sources via firewire. Dual 500GB Hard drives for on location work. At the end of the day, one drive will be copied onto another set of 500GB Master Drives, which are then locked away. The other 500GB drive will be sent to the editor, but the main footage will always be safe in a third location.  

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