“Ingenium”: Creating Big Cinema with Limited Means – Part 1

Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 20, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

“Ingenium” is the name of director Steffen Hacker’s debut film, which he realised in “guerrilla style” on a small budget. Post-production played an outstanding role: Scenes and dialogue had to be reshot and replaced without blowing the already small budget.

In the first part of the two-part series, Hacker describes how he was able to master the different mix of formats:

Even as a student, I was on the road at trade fairs and roadshows for Adobe to present their video products and report on my work in the VFX field. Despite working with Adobe Creative Cloud every day, I could never have imagined developing such an intimate relationship with Premiere Pro CC and AfterEffects CC – through this project, which kept me at the computer for countless nights and weekends over five years. By the way, until August 31 you can get Creative Cloud with Premiere Pro CC and many other tools, such as AfterEffects CC and Photoshop CC, at the special price of just €35.69/month.

For thirteen years, I have worked as a commercial director in the directing duo “Alex & Steffen” and as a VFX supervisor at the Stuttgart company Unexpected. At the same time, I had always dreamed of making my own feature film. So in the winter of 2013, after six months of preparation, I set off for Thailand with actress Esther Maaß to shoot the first scenes for a thriller whose story I completely rewrote several times over the following years. This also meant that the scope steadily expanded, which made us especially dependent on our post-production tools.

Scene shoot with actress Esther Maaß in Thailand

Wild Mix of Formats

Premiere Pro CC helped us enormously because it natively supports all formats without transcoding in a single timeline. This is a feature we relied on heavily, as we shot the project with a total of eleven different cameras over the years (including Sony’s FS700/FS100/F5, Panasonic’s GH2, Blackmagic 2.5K and 4K, Canon 5DMK 2 and 3, as well as the C300 – and ultimately even an Alexa Mini from Arri).

Cameraman Benjamin Nolde during the shoot of “Ingenium”

This means that many different wrappers and codecs were mixed wildly on the timelines and then usually even played back from external USB 3.0 hard drives without expensive high-end video RAIDs: Everything without problems, without any transcoding or consolidation. PluralEyes was used to synchronise the audio recorded by the external microphones and output it directly as a Premiere timeline, reducing manual work to a minimum.

I always edited the timelines according to the pancake principle so that I could continue working directly with the selected takes. The colour coding for the edit was mostly content-related, such as close-ups, shot/reverse shot of characters during dialogue, or wide shots. The different cameras only became relevant again during colour correction.

In Part 2 of the series, Steffen Hacker explains how he easily made cuts within an edit with professional results and, despite the small budget, was able to create impressive scenes with the help of visual effects.