Charles Ward has been a part of the Lemac Rentals team in Melbourne for the past 2½ years, and over this time has continued to further his own production knowledge through a series of projects on varying formats. He has recently completed a 22-minute short film, Star Struck, shot on Red Epic – a major undertaking for an independent short, using crowd funding website Pozible to reach it’s intended budget.
More from Charles himself:
When I’m not in the Melbourne rentals office liaising with clientele, I like to write, direct, produce and edit the occasional music video for my production company ‘Enjoy Yourself Productions’. I go under the directing alias of Cheese Whiskers. With each new project that I take on board I try and stretch myself by working with different media formats which allows me to give feedback to clients having dealt with the equipment first hand on set.
Star Struck (January 2013)
Star Struck Trailer from Charles Ward on Vimeo.
I recently finished my first short film ‘Star Struck’ which is about a 14 year old boy named Kevin Welliger who has a meteorite stuck in his head. A loveable outsider, processing the death of his father and the burden of being unusual (see above re: meteorite in head), Kevin catches the attention of Leila. From here evolves an inspiring, at times ridiculous and convincingly heartfelt story about life, love and the pursuit of happiness.We shot ‘Star Struck’ within 9 days and used Red Epic most days with 2 days being shot on MX with Super Speed MKIII’s and the 15-40mm Cooke zoom. DoP was Jaque Fisher.
Envy (April 2012)
SOLILOQUY : Envy from Charles Ward on Vimeo.
Soliloquy’s "Envy" was shot with the Sony F3 set to S-log with the Pix 240 recording ProRes 100mbps. We chose to shoot with the F3 as our client wanted the clip turned around very quickly to coincide with the release of his EP. Working with S-Log and the Pix I was able to copy the files onto a drive and then drop them onto a timeline, edit them straight away, then send the footage into After Effects for a quick grade. It was a much smoother post path than the Buckley Ward clip. Shot by Jaque Fisher.
Into The Darkening Blue (November 2011)
BUCKLEY WARD : Into The Darkening Blue from Charles Ward on Vimeo.
Buckley Ward’s "Into the Darkening Blue" was shot on a Red MX with MKII Superspeeds. We chose to shoot it on Red as there was going to be some SFX in post such as a zombie with no legs and the Melbourne cityscape in the final few shots ruined by the zombie apocalypse. To do these effects we needed to give our SFX artist as much data to work with as possible. We opted for the MKII Super’s over the MKIII’s as they were a little softer and gave a dirtier, gritty, disheveled look, which is what we felt a zombie clip should look like. We also went mostly handheld with the aid of an Easyrig because let’s face it, you wouldn’t have time to set up a dolly when a horde of zombies are running towards you screaming “Brains! We need more brains!” Shot by then Lemac co-worker Nick Turner.