Pixel Wizard

READ BOOKS!

2011-06-09T14:52:00.001+01:00

I'm going to be in danger of sounding like your dad with this post but what the hell. If you want to be a writer/director/or filmmaker in any capacity, you should read more novels, not watch more films. Seems counterintuitive, I know, but let me explain a couple of reasons why I believe reading makes you better equipped to make good films.

Inspiration

With the amount of remakes, reboots, knowing winks and downright plagiarism (I'm looking at you Quentin Tarantino) in the world of cinema it is has become patently obvious that more and more filmmakers are only looking to films for their inspiration instead of the plethora of art forms available to them. This gives us a situation where the same ideas are recycled and rehashed over and over again, each time becoming weaker than the last like the page of a book that has been photocopied, and then the photocopy has been photocopied, and then the the photocopy of the photocopy has been photocopied and.... well you get the point. The reason I think books can be such a good source of inspiration for original filmmaking is simple. They can be far more specialist. Films take a lot of money to make and distribute and whilst there are some niche markets, they just can't aim at the narrower audiences that authors of books can aim at and still make a living because of the lower production costs of writing and printing (or kindling? that's almost a pun because paper can be used as kindling and amazon's reading gadget is called a kindle, get it? anyway moving on). You can quite easily buy a book about a couple who use a clone of the baby jesus as a but plug (imaginatively titled The Baby Jesus But Plug), but I'm fairly certain it's unlikely to get optioned by Paramount. If you can publish to a smaller audience, you can take more risks. Filmmaking often falls victim of the committee. Now, I'm not suggesting that you should make films with a very narrow audience, because you won't get the money to make it. But taking inspiration from something specialist and niche and adapting it for a mass audience can be fruitful, interesting and (most importantly) fresh. Similarly, don't see this as an excuse to adapt every good novel into a film.

Subtext

A lot of people talk about making their films more cinematic, and this phrase is generally interchanged to mean a lot of different things. They could refer to using wider shots so that it suits projection, using a wider aspect ratio like 2.35:1, shooting at 24 or 25p etc etc. For now, I'm going to cast the technical stuff like 24/25p aside, not because it doesn't matter, but because too many indie filmmakers get bogged down waiting to make their film until they have the right camera or whatever when you could just make that film and then make a better one when the Red Scarlet, that will so drastically improve your film, is released. The way I think of cinematic is based on what defines cinema as a medium. For example, cinema differs from radio and books in that you can show things to your audience rather than describe them. And cinema differs from theatre in that you can put every member of the audience at the same distance from the actors and you have almost total control about how great that distance is. The first one of these leads good script writers to the realisation that cinema is most powerful when it shows us a story rather than tells us one. Which is why action films are generally considered more cinematic than, for example period dramas. Some people take this a step further and seem to think that dialogue heavy scripts simply can't be cinematic but this ignores the way that cinema can project just the face of person on a 40 foot screen. The medium shot and the close up give us the power to show more than just what the actor is saying. So, even a dialogue heavy film can (in my opinion) be cinematic, if the emotions and story developments are shown rather than explained through dialogue, as they would have to be with theatre. This (at last) leads me to books, because what you need to make a dialogue scene cinematic is subtext. You need things for the characters to think, to want to say but never say and to mean when they say something completely different. A novel is one of the few places where you find subtext explicitly written down. In a novel you can write 5 paragraphs about the thought processes a character is going through before he or she responds to a question they have just been asked, even though in real time (and usually in cinema) the conversation would have continued at a normal pace. A lot of good novels are mostly subtext, because like making your film cinematic, this takes advantages of the characteristics of the medium. By reading novels and being more exposed to subtext you can become better at integrating it into your films Now, in a film script you don't (and almost certainly should't) write the subtext of scene down. But by knowing the subtext of a scene, by knowing that a character means yes even though they are saying no, by understanding that people might talk about something not because its relevant but because it can distract them from what they should but perhaps don't want to say, you will almost certainly write better scrips. And applying the same ideas when dissecting an already written script will also almost certainly make you a better director, actor, director of photography etc. By making a scene about the subtext rather than what the characters are actually saying, you instantly make it cinematic because you are showing rather than telling your story to the audience and taking advantage of some of the key characteristics of cinema.

That is all.

Empathy

2011-05-28T23:21:00.003+01:00

I have just started teaching a new group of students the joys of Avid Media Composer, through a series of 3 hour evening classes. Whilst we follow the 101 course laid out by Avid, I always like to mix it up with discussions about editing in general, so that I'm not constantly teaching them to how to push the buttons. In the first lesson we looked at the history of editing, which is very much tied in with history of storytelling in film.

Edwin Porter's early films were some of the first to explore the cut and also some of the first to explore many of the ideas we see today in narrative cinema.

Recently in their 4th lesson, I started a discussion about what qualities a good dramatic editor needs to have to cut well (there are many other qualities which an editor needs to help him work well with clients and meet deadlines etc). There are some obvious ones such as creativity, imagination, attention to detail, focus and concentration. Knowledge of the editing software is also important but I was quick to point out that I consider this a base level for editors really and probably the least important thing in making you good at cutting. I see the software simply as a tool to help you make the decisions you need to make. Knowing the software inside out is not guarantee of success if the decisions you make with it are lousy. There are also plenty of excellent editors who can do very little with the software they use other than just simple editing, as they are used having everything else done for them. It is the the decisions they make about what to put in the sequence and in what order that makes them excellent. So in relation to different software packages, the only thing you really need to consider is whether it allows you to make the decisions you want to make, easily and accurately.

So this led to a discussion of what I consider to be the most important quality that makes you a good editor, empathy. Don't confuse this with sympathy. You can be a complete bastard and still be a good editor. Empathy isn't about feeling sorry for people, it is about being able to put yourself in their shoes and as an editor, it is a skill I am always trying to improve. There are many different types of empathy, and two in particular come into play every time you make an edit. The first is kinetic empathy. Being able to feel and understand the movement of the characters on screen is vital every time you try and cut on an action. Accurately matching an action across a cut is integral to making the kind of invisible cuts that will allow your audience to seamlessly enjoy the scene unfold before them. The second type is emotional empathy. If, for example, you are editing a shot:reverse shot sequence of two characters talking to each other, you usually have a great deal of control over the spaces between when one person finishes speaking and other starts. Getting the gaps to sound fluid a seamless is one of the most important things to get right. This is where emotional empathy comes into play. If you can feel and think the way the character is supposed to be feeling then you can start to make decisions based on the emotional subtext of the scene. When a character asks another character a question, the speed at which they reply says as much or more than what they actually say. Are they reluctant to answer, are they desperate to answer having been waiting for the question to be asked for a while. Perhaps they even interrupt before the question has been finished/ The possible connotations are almost endless. The difficulty with this kind of thing is that there is no correct answer to how long the pause should be. I think this is why as editors we often have a tendency to talk about technology and software when we talk shop. But these are the things we should be considering, discussing and analysing. They are what make a truly great editor and finding ways to be better at should be at the forefront of our efforts to be be better editors.

I also wanted to discuss the empathy you must have with your imaginary audience, but this post is getting a little long, so another time.

Dynamic Trimming

2011-04-25T12:52:00.001+01:00

I mentioned the other day that as my experience has grown as an editor I have strayed from the step by step way of crafting a scene and instead fluidly move between the different stages as I edit. That got me thinking about how else my editing style has changed since I first started. One significant thing I have noticed is that I use dynamic trimming (or trimming on the fly) more and more when refining a sequence. For anyone who doesn't know, trimming is a way of adding or removing footage to the beginning or end of clips in a sequence. So in a dialogue scene, it can be used to remove a word that shouldn't be there or add a word that should. But perhaps more importantly, it can be used to control the length of the gap between the lines of dialogue. For me, controlling these gaps is one of the most important part of making a scene feel natural and right. They can also add a layer of subtext to the dialogue itself. If someone takes a moment to think before answering a question, it can add a new layer of meaning to their response. Perhaps they are lying? Or maybe they just don't want to answer? When I was a teenager learning to play guitar, my dad would often say to me "It's not the notes that are important, its the spaces in between." I apply that logic to my editing today. So how does this link to dynamic editing? Well early on in order to control the length of the pauses between lines I would trim using numbers. I would preview the edit by looping it and then remove or add a set number of frames, then preview again. This gave a good degree of accuracy and I would always find the frame eventually, but there was a significant amount of trial and error. Dynamic trimming allows me to hit play on an edit point and wherever I hit pause, the edit will move there. Sounds simple enough, but this allows me to feel where an edit should be, rather than find where it should be through trial and error. I know that using this method has sped up my work, but I also think that it has improved it. Hopefully it has made my work more emotional and less mechanical which, in filmmaking, can never be a bad thing.

FCPX

2011-04-22T23:55:00.001+01:00

A quick aside from all the Turing Enigma stuff, to comment on the details that are floating around about the new version of Final Cut. A lot of people have been commenting on it after the NAB supermeet, and I have been putting off forming an opinion. Firstly, late me be clear that I am an Avid editor first and foremost but I do use FCP and I am soon to become an Apple certified trainer. I use FCP for corporate's and documentaries and find it works really well for fast editing where I am just simply assembling things on a timeline or where I want to create flashy sequences over music. I don't mind it for music videos and I also grade in Color, so I often use FCP to prep sequences for grading. But my ambition lies in editing feature films. And when I do that (as I am doing at the minute2) I want to do it in Avid because frankly, its perfect for it. I honestly can't understand how people craft dramatic scenes quickly in FCP. So my main reason for watching the sneak peak at FCPX was to determine whether this situation will be changing anytime soon. Short answer, no. FCPX looks like a great tool and will likely make what I use it for now, even easier, so I may even start using it more. But for editing features, it has moved further away from what I want. I'm sure there will be keyboard shortcuts but the focus is definitely on drag and drop editing, even more so than FCP7. And I don't want to drag and drop. I will race anybody, anytime, editing a rough cut of a dramatic scene if I can use the keyboard and they only have a mouse. There will also only be one window for viewing clips and sequences and it will alternate depending where your mouse is. Which sounds great, for when your editing a corporate on a laptop and screen space is minimal, but again, when I edit dramatic scenes I want to see the last frame of the sequence, when I'm finding the first frame of the next shot. Surely thats a must for any cut on action? The randomly appearing "magnetic" tracks also disconcert me because they will remove the idea of keeping the same stems of audio on the same track. That's important for me, when I build indivual scene sequences and then want to assemble them into a master sequence. Who knows, maybe I'll be proved wrong and by editing corporates on FCPX i'll be converted, but these are my initial thoughts. Anyone else?

Black & White

2011-04-20T12:34:00.003+01:00

So yesterday was day 4 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot and today we have the day off (so a chance to recuperate after going till 4am last night). Now we have changed tic-tacs (or tactics), we are keeping up with production pretty well. I have edited 11 scenes of the 12 they have shot (number 12 wasn't finished till 4 so I'll be editing that tomorrow) and there are some amazing looking scenes coming out. The longer scenes especially are seeming really slick. Some screenshots after the break.

The film has an usual style as all the scenes set in present day are black & white and all the scene's set in the past are in colour. As the Red shoots RAW and doesn't bake in any of the settings you set on camera, we have been able to turn the saturation down as we shoot so the monitor sees black & white and my rushes come out black & white but if we for any reason change our mind, we can always go back into the settings and raise the saturation in the grade. I doubt that will happen though, as the footage looks stunning. There has been a lot of talk recently from big filmmakers like Peter Jackson of 48fps 3D being the future for filmmaking for the heightened clarity it gives to the audience. I suppose shooting in black & white is a direct challenge to that idea. When I was doing my film studies degree, I was taught photography and film isn't seen as an art form by some because of its similarity to real life. But there are many differences, like the constraints of the frame that force you to choose what to show and what not to show, or the fact that there are only 2 dimensions to the picture. It is these differences that make photography and filmmaking an art form. The pursuit of realism through 3d and higher framerates is a slippery slope in my opinion. Personally, I'm voting for going back to black & white instead.

Crafting a Scene

2011-04-19T11:57:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was day 3 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. After spending the night before retranscoding the rushes from day 1, it occurred to me that we had been wasting a lot of our time on day 1 and 2, watching the blue transcoding bar creep across the screen. So we decided to leave leave transcoding unless there was time for it and focus on syncing so I could start editing. As it happens, the crew were working on some fairly complex scenes and so footage came in fairly slowly, but from now on, we will likely leave transcoding and just set it going after the day is over.

Anyway, the outcome of all this was that I actually got down to the task of editing and have finished all the scenes shot on day 1 and 2. Rough cutting a scene is undoubtably my favourite thing to do in the world. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of possibilities ahead of you when you look at a bin full of different shots. On my first short a couple of years ago, I was very methodical in my approach to crafting a scene and this helped stop me getting overwhelmed. First, I would create a radio edit, focusing on getting every line of dialogue into the timeline, from the camera angles I wanted to use. Then I would go through every edit in the sequence and listen to it, refining the in and out points to remove extraneous noises and make the gap between the lines sound natural by adding to or removing the gap between them. Only then would I start to focus on what the video was doing. Using split edits (or j/l cuts as some people call them) I would move the video edit points away from the audio edit points. Using this method you can fix continuity problems, show reactions by cutting before someone starts or after some one finishes speaking, and generally create a more fluid scene. Hearing the audio from one shot and seeing the video from another, can help the audience link the two spaces in their mind, creating a scene rather than a series of shots (which is basically our job?). Then I would pepper in some reaction shots and cutaways if needed, to break up a very long shot or show something to the audience that isn't in the frame.

Now this process is more fluid. I have more experience and I jump back and forth between the various tasks, but I am glad I started out like this as it gave me a really good grounding in how to craft a scene, and how to avoid getting overwhelmed by the infinite ways the footage could be put together.

Make Your Mistakes Early

2011-04-17T18:41:00.001+01:00

Day 2 on "The Turing Enigma" has just finished. At the beginning of the day we caught a mistake that has meant a little setback in the editorial dept. Inside Avid Media Composer 5 there is an option for how you want to deal with AMA linked files called "Reformat". Unfortunately this option does not come up when you first link to a folder of R3D clips. You have to add it in the Bin -> Columns setting. This fact, combined with some confusion over what Quicktime player was doing when we played back the proxies (cropping the top with the quicktime bar) led to us transcoding the first days footage in DNxHD with the left and right of the image severely cropped into a 2:1 aspect ratio instead of the 2.4:1 that we should have had. So everything has to be retranscoded correctly, with Reformat set to "Pillarbox/Letterbox". A lengthy process to say the least, but it will be done by tomorrow. If we had noticed the mistake later, then we would have pushed ourselves so far behind we would have been catching up all the way through the shoot. And I would likely not have got much actual editing done. So make mistakes, but make them early on. Some wisdom we should all be able to take something away from.

Keeping Up With Production

2011-04-16T14:54:00.001+01:00

Its Day 1 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. The morning started slowly but as production kicked into gear, we have had to work hard to keep up. We are holed up in our own room, backing up and transcoding footage as it is being shot. We have networked 2 macbook pro's together, one is reading the CF cards from the Red One, through an expresscard reader, the other is connected via eSATA to a GSpeed Q and it has become a juggling match between transferring data and transcoding inside Avid to DNxHD 36. The first scene (only 2 shots) is cut and the master of the next scene has been finished. As the medium shots and closeups come through, a third ball will enter our juggling trick. Should make for an interesting afternoon.

My Job as the Editor

2011-03-14T20:58:00.000Z

When I meet people in real world and tell them that I am an Editor, I am often met with a blank face. I have tried using Video Editor or Film Editor to clarify a little but still, the same blank face. Even film buffs who have a reasonable idea of how films work don't really tend to grasp the extent to which an Editor shapes the film they see so its hardly surprising that the public at large don't even seem to know what the hell we do. When you watch a film, you are hopefully experiencing a different world. Whether that world is similar to ours or in another galaxy is arbitrary, their has to be a space for the story to unfold in. The truth is that world doesn't exist. If its the bridge of a spaceship, that seems pretty obvious, but if its a bedroom inhabited by an old married couple, its existence is no more concrete. In an intimate moment, as the couple lie next to each other, perhaps after finding out that one of them is dying, the world of the film would have to you believe they are alone. But there is a camera there and a cameraman, a camera assistant (or two), a sound recordist, a boom op, a director, a producer, a few studio execs, a makeup artist, a script supervisor... well you get the point. Everyone working in post production has to trick you into believing they are alone. As an editor I choose not to show you the moment caught on film, where the AC marked the shot. I choose for you not to hear the moment where the studio exec choked on his donut. The other illusion is time. We have to make it seem as if the events you see are simply unfolding before you. When I cut from the old man to the old woman you have to perceive it as continuous. In reality it could have happened hours apart. The actors may have had lunch in-between shooting each shot, but I have to make you believe they are reacting to each other, organically and in the moment. This is the magic of editing and we underestimate it at our peril. With the onset of desktop editing is it becoming more and more common for directors/producers/executives' nephews to be the one tasked with editing. But just remember it is not being able to push the buttons that is important. It is knowing the order in which to press them.

On Set Post Produciton

2011-02-28T20:10:00.001Z

On set post is a major new development in the industry and whilst it's motives probably lie somewhere in the ever increasing complexity of digital acquisition, I think directors and producers will soon be wondering why they ever tried to make films without post staff on site. As an editor I have been constantly trying to push the point where I start working on a film forwards, to well before the film shoots and the guys I know in sound post do the same. It creates better work, its as simple as that. We are starting to see that shift now and we need to embrace that wholeheartedly. On the feature film I am editing at the moment, they have just finished doing 2 days of pickups and because I was already on board editing the footage from the first shoot, I can already tell that the new footage is going to be easier to edit, just because I was able to have some input. So you can imagine my excitement at having just been hired onto another feature nearly 2 months before it shoots. I will be onset, with an assistant, backing up, transcoding and editing the RED One footage on a MacbookPro hooked up to a G Speed drive. If I can establish that the new MBPs run Avid OK then I may even look into the possibility of utilising Thunderbolt. I doubt budgets will stretch to a Thunderbolt raid, but maybe a Thunderbolt to eSata or miniSAS going into a G Speed? Even that would produce mouthwatering speeds by Laptop standards. So why this obsession with speed? Well, because basically I need to be cutting, and if I'm constantly waiting for transcodes then there ain't much use in me being there. I would be a glorified DIT and not much else. The processor and disk speed are always your major bottlenecks. I'm already getting the fastest MPB processor available so it makes sense to maximise disk speed as well. Occasionally we will utilise native R3D access over AMA into Avid MC5 when we really need to know how a scene is cutting before we move on and hopefully getting our drives as fast as possible will at least remove one of the hurdles. What kind of performance we'll get on a laptop, I'm not sure but hopefully it will be enough to make some basic cuts if we ride the settings down all the way. Mostly we'll be using AMA to transcode to DNxHD36 and we'll stay in that for all of editorial. After that we'll be sending an EDL and the R3Ds for finishing, most likely on a DaVinci 2K, outputting a 2K DPX sequence for Digital and 35mm print. Oh what fun lies a head. I'll be testing this workflow in the coming weeks and will post results here.

Acting

2011-02-01T01:29:00.000Z

I have been thinking a lot about acting recently so I thought I would vent some of my thoughts at 1am on an outlet that nobody pays any attention too. We might as well start off with a bout of theatre bashing. I think a lot of people interested in acting would disagree but I wholeheartedly believe that the theatre is a crap medium for good acting. This seems kind of counter intuitive but I think if I can tell what your supposed to be thinking or feeling from the back of a theatre, then you can't possibly be acting well. Or at least not in a way that I would recognise as good acting. Let me elaborate. See, I'm a pretty rare breed of 20 something in that I watch the culture show on BBC2. If you aren't aware of it, it's generally full of self important wankers who toss off or criticise a bunch of pretentious bollocks, but they often mention good films that I might not otherwise hear of, so I watch it. And the thing is that every piece of theatre that they show on there looks rubbish, and this is supposed to the best of what's coming out. I really hope to meet someone who knows theatre and could show me where the hell I'm going wrong, cause I would hate to dismiss a whole art form off hand, but Jesus they're gonna have to be one persuasive bastard to get me to see how theatre isn't the most melodramatic waste of time in the world.

Anyway, back to acting. My limited knowledge on the subject has lead me to the following conclusions. I hope anyone reading this finds them useful.

1)You can never truly experience anything as someone other than yourself. The best you can hope for is a moment by moment emotionally honest performance based upon your own experiences.

2)Your character is defined more by what you do than by any intellectual notions of "who you are". Even psychopaths don't think of themselves as bad people, it is what they do which defines them. If you judge a character you will never be able to play him as anything other than a caricature.

3)You should avoid anything that will result in you monitoring yourself. You have to give yourself up to the events around you. Don't think about the effect you have on the audience or the results you are striving for. Don't tell us what you are thinking, just think it and we will see it.

4) Your costars are your most valuable resource, use them. Truly listen to the other actors and react to their energy. Fight for the ideal of staring your costar in the eye, even if they are ofscreen and the DOP says the eyeline doesn't look right.

5) Don't push. We don't have to see it when we are at the back of the room, we have to see it when your face fills a 40' screen. Subtlety is everything. In a theatre you need a soliloquy, in the cinema we can read your mind.

That is all.

Organisation and Director Envy

2010-12-29T14:05:00.000Z

Having just taken on my first feature film editing job I have had a lot of opportunity to think about the way that organisational skills impact filmmaking. A boring topic, I know, but having a pre-established system of organisation really is what separates a professional from an amateur. Without a definitive way of tracking your decisions throughout the whole filmmaking process something is always going to get lost. For any budding editor or assistant editor I would definitely recommend Make the Cut by Lori Jane Coleman and Diana Friedberg. It has a plethora of information on how to organise your work-flows and keep track of things. Just when I thought I was being too anal about my bin layout in Avid, this book showed me that I wasn't being nearly anal enough.

Before this film I had taken somewhat of a break from filmmaking as I focussed on teaching my various degree, diploma and short course students all the wonderful features of Avid and the intricacies of Music Video production. Coming back the world of filmmaking has stared to give me a fresh dose of Director Envy, which is a great way of motivating me to finish my short film script. Hopefully by the time I have finished this feature I will be ready to think about shooting it. I can hardly wait.

The Technical Details

2010-10-22T10:06:00.000+01:00

Its something I say often to anyone who has the misfortune of having to listen to me, but the most difficult thing about the world of TV and Film production is that it is simultaneously very technical and very creative. This is why so few people end up being masters in this field. It takes a very rare kind of brain to be both technical and creative.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I spend too much of my time and effort exercising the technical side of my brain and not quite enough on the creative side. And I think there are a lot of people like me. The technical side is more black and white, there are right and wrong answers and as a result its a little easier for me to navigate. The creative side is all subjective. You can pour all your effort into a script or an idea and still some people are not going to like it. I have a hard time being wrong and that probably why I spend more time trying to understand things that I can be right about, than I do creating things that people are either going to like or dislike. But I'm working on it. I've written scripts and am writing another now, I write this blog, I take arty stills images when I get hold of a camera. What has really been getting on my nerves recently though, is the lack of effort on the side of the creatives. Even people who claim to be technicians aren't delving deep enough into the technology behind the equipment we are useing to make a living. An example of this I heard yesterday on the Digital Convergence Podcast over at 16x9 cinema. Jeff Regan, who sounds like a pretty switched on guy, mentioned that the main reason we get Moire on a DSLR camera is not because of the line skipping, but because the optical low pass filter (OLPF) on the sensor is configured for high resolution stills rather than HD video. I thought this was pretty obvious and in fact had been teaching this to some students a few nights before. The other two guys on the show (supposedly pretty technical guys) suggested that this was something revelatory and no-one else was thinking about this in as much depth as Jeff. Now, this may seem like a pretty dull fact, but what it means in terms of digital convergence is that using present tech, we will not be getting a camera that works equally well for both high res stills and low res (relatively) video. So people waiting for the Canon 5d MKIII to come out and solve all the moire problems are going to be disappointed. What we need is a camera with a big sensor and an OLPF designed for video, and low and behold we have the Panasonic AF101 which has the 4/3rd inch chip from the GH1, with an OLPF designed for HD video. No you won't get the shallow DOF of the massive chips of the 5d or even the 7d, but you will say goodbye to moire and get a shallow enough DOF to control your audiences attention. So as we see, a very small technical detail will have a big impact on your images and this should concern you. Even if you are a creative.

The Storyteller's Flicker

2010-10-15T16:23:00.000+01:00

I've heard alot of different views expressed on the difference between progressive and interlaced video and the effect it can have on your audience. Phrases like "the eyes see in interlaced but the mind sees in progressive" and "24 frames a second synchronises with the pulses of the brain" come to mind. None of these have ever really struck a chord with me but recently someone I was doing some training for, Christopher Mann of Mannmade Productions, came out with something that made much more sense to me. He referred to the phenomenon as "the storyteller's flicker". His reasoning was as follows; way back when we were cavemen we would spend the day outside hunting and foraging etc. At night we would go back to our cave's, light the fire and tell stories to one another. People would draw on the walls and string narratives together as an effective way of passing the time and passing on information to others. In the day time there would be a lot of light and our eyes would be pretty responsive. This is the equivalent of interlaced video now. But at night the flicker of the fire would be only light to see the images on the wall by as the stories unfolded. Chris suggested that progressive footage, and particularly film, flickers in a way that reminds us on some genetic level of the flickering fire. It reminds us that these are only stories and not to be confused with the reality outside. This is why is makes so much sense that whilst the news looks right in 50i, films look right in 24p. It also explains why it feels weird watching a film with daylight pouring through the window.

I hope we remember this idea as filmmaking technology moves forward. Yes, more frames may be technically superior at capturing motion. Yes digital projection may be more cost effective for distribution. Yes 3D produces a more immersive environment. But we should think very carefully about weather these things are good for the medium. People don't go to the cinema for realism. They go to sit in the dark and see a story flicker into life. The shorcomings of cinema in representing reality are what makes it an artform. For every detail you fail to capture a million more are formed in mind of the audience. What so many filmmakers do not realise is that it is not you, but your audience that create the definitive version of your film. You can guide them, but the final result is always out of your hands. Scary, but true.

"This Time of Year" and Gear

2010-07-23T11:20:00.001+01:00

Not posted anything in a long time, mostly because I have had so much work to do. Have now finished David's Schofield's film, "This Time of Year" so I'll try and post it up soon. Am really happy with how the grade went, I've been quite subtle most of the way through and tried to help the story along more than anything., using the colours to show the progression of the day and indicate the main characters state of mind. I had a little trouble with a few shots that had a dodgy light that was spilling some magenta (my personal grading nemesis) onto the scene. Yet again the wonderful saturation curve tool came to the rescue on that one. I'll post some before and after stills this weekend. The only shot that I am not happy with features a view out of a window which is a bit blown out. I spent over an hour trying to pull that down and bring in some detail but in the end the way the light was wrapping round the character made it impossible. I wouldn't usually let it bother me, but the shot cuts to outside where it is supposed to be dusk. I think in the context of the story, we get away with it, but I would have liked to find a way to solve it.

Other than that I have been in charge of ordering a load of new gear for work. Some of the most exciting objects that will be coming our way include a 24inch FSI Grade 1 Monitor and a Euphonix MC Color control surface, both of which will hopefully improve and speed up my grading work. Honestly can't wait to try them out. Lots of other toys coming too, including some Kinoflo's, a Dolly, a small Jib arm, a few Canon DSLRs (which I've already talked about extensively on here) and a Panasonic HPX500. Think I'm gonna be a bit giddy when all this stuff arrives.

Pics as promised.

This comes from the shot I talked about with the magenta spill from a faulty light. Fleshtones were horrible and you can see the effect it is having on the boys vest and the wallpaper especially. I slightly desaturated the whole image, used a saturation curve to remove the magenta and then pushed the mids back into the bleak brown colours that the wrest of the scene occupies.

This shot comes from a slow motion sequence. The main character is drunk and disorientated and I tried to reflect that with a high contrast blown out look.

This scene in a cramped toilet was a little underexposed. I lifted the shot up and defined the characters face with some secondaries. It has also been heavily desaturated to give the environment a feeling of sterile hostility.

Digital Snow

2010-06-11T09:48:00.000+01:00

I'm currently working on some effects and the grade of a short film by David Schofield (see his last film The Most Important Things in Life in a previous blog). The majority of the effects work is adding some snow into a couple of scenes. This film is set at Christmas and whilst they were lucky enough to have snow on the ground on the days of shooting the exteriors, they're was no snow falling from the sky and David felt that it was integral to the mood of the film. Below is a preliminary test for the particle system I have created for the shots. I'm using Trapcode Particular inside of After Effects to generate the snow. I still have a little bit of work to do, to introduce some snow behind the character and make the snowflakes a little less uniform in shape. I'll keep you updated as to how its going.

Snow Test 1 from Renegade Films on Vimeo.

Avatar Days

2010-05-28T09:13:00.000+01:00

Just saw this video and thought it was really impressive. Not only are the VFX done really well, but they perfectly serve the purpose of film. I love these types of documentaries that actually explore the best way to visually represent a subject rather than sticking to the interview, cutaway, moco still, reconstruction formula.

Avatar Days from Piranha Bar on Vimeo.

Update on the Alexa and Avid

2010-04-25T11:37:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to update a couple of my recent posts. Having now seen footage from the Alexa I am even more convinces that it is going to be THE camera of the next few years. The DOF fall off looks better than the red to me, and the rolling shutter doesn't seem to be much of issue, and if the greater latitude is true then this would be my camera of choice if I was going to be shooting a feature or spot tomorrow.

ARRI Alexa World Cup from Stargate Studios on Vimeo.

Also, my recent post about Avid vs FCP needs a some new discussion now that Avid have announced Avid MC5.0 will have native RED support (and apparently can debayer to HD video in real time????) and also will be able to playback QT videos natively without transcoding to an Avid codec. The other interesting announcement is that you will be able to use a Matrox MXO2 Mini as an IN/OUT, which is unprecedented for Avid to say the least. Seems like an odd choice until you think about the fact that this box will only give you HDMI and Component sockets. So it gives a cheap (around £350) monitoring option for low level Avid users without really threatening the sales of any of Avid's own boxes which will give you HD-SDI etc.

RED KILLER!!!

2010-04-10T15:49:00.000+01:00

So I've been looking over the specs of the new Arri Alexa and its looking mightily impressive. It has a similar chip to the RED One and can record to a RAW format similar to R3D. But it can also record straight to 2k ProRes4444 files to SxS cards. And, it can also make create ARRIRAW and QT files simultaneously so you have you offline and online files ready from the get go with identical metadata. That could be a deal breaker. It also is likely to have more latitude than the RED and a native 800ASA rating.

Avid vs Final Cut

2010-04-10T14:46:00.000+01:00

I'm not gonna pretend this is a fair or unbiased contest. I learnt Avid first and I think it's brilliant, but for what its worth he're s a few why Avid is better than FCP and a few reasons why FCP is better than Avid. Here I am comparing only the systems I use, Avid Media Composer 4 (usually with an Adrenaline) and Final Cut Studio 3

AVID

Real Time
When Avid says real time it means it. Yes you have to use computer that's up to it, yes you have to use Avid codecs to edit in, but if you do that then you know without a shadow of a doubt that everything that has a little green dot will play back, without delay at a full frame rate and with full resolution. No rendering (except for the occasional complex effect), none of this Unlimited RT business (what kind of use is realtime playback if its not the full res and framerate??), it just works. And now that Avid accepts multiple resolutions and framerates within a sequence (and still manages realtime playback) there really are no arguments here.

Trimming
After using Final Cut for a while I rejoiced the first time I got back on an Avid and used trim mode. It just makes sense. Its fast, efficient and lets me analyse every cut with ease and make sure the pace is frame perfect, (which is and editors job yes?). FCP7 has brought in some features that are pretty similar to trim mode and I appreciate the effort on their part, but I still prefer the way Avid works. In terms of my editing workflow, going into trim mode after I have done my first assemble just makes sense to me.

Media Management
If you plan your media management well then FCP can be great. Certainly relinking to media when it goes offline is a hell of a lot easier. But I find that FCP allows you to be sloppy all too easily, and evidently people will be sloppy when they are allowed to be. Doing online work for independent films can feel like a military operation to get all the media you need. Avid is strict but that forces you to be neat. All your media is kept together and when you consolidate it works reliably.

FCP

Color
Without a doubt the main reason I use FCP. So much better and so much more intuitive than trying to use Media Composer to grade, this tool sets my work apart from others. No, its not as quick or accurate as a DaVinci or Pogle or anything, but chuck a Blackmagic or AJA card and a broadcast monitor on your MacPro and you have a viable broadcast finishing solution for a ridiculous fraction of the cost of the those other systems.

Red Codec Support
Can't argue with FCPs RED support. Alot of the projects I work on are shot on RED so its good to have a viable workflow that will allow you to at finish your project at a 2 or 4k resolution from the original R3D files (although this will eat your MacPro for breakfast). In defence of Media Composer, it has never claimed to be a finishing solution, it is a cutting machine. And it does offline RED footage well.

ProRes 4444
It was a close call in the codec wars until Apple released this. I only use this to transcode RED stuff too if I'm not going to have the time to go back to the R3D. If it's just HDV or XDCAM or something then 422HQ is good enough. Grading from it in colour is amazingly quick and painless and you can certainly push things further than you would dare with 422 or DNxHD.

The Light of Life

2010-03-12T09:26:00.000Z

The Light of Life from daihei shibata on Vimeo.

Thought I would share this stunning piece of animation. I am always in awe when I see these types of organic artistic pieces of CGI executed so well. To turn something that is completely digital and fabricated into something so beautiful is a talent I just don't possess (or at least not yet). My work is still very much grounded in the real world, but this is something else entirely and it blows me away. Check it out.

Beeple

2010-03-03T22:47:00.000Z

instrumental video nine from beeple on Vimeo.

Not the most original idea ever but extremely well executed. This guy is scarily talented. Not many people have such a great eye for design and composition and such a great ear for music and sound. He makes lots of VJ footage which he releases under creative commons for all to use, so get your fill.

Star Trek: The Wrath of the Lens Flare

2010-03-03T21:16:00.001Z

Just finally got round to watching JJ Abrams Star Trek. The visual effects were stunning, the story was as good as that kind of formulaic American blockbuster can be, the sound was amazing (especially the first space battle with Kirk's dad, the subjective sound focusing in on the baby crying over all the battle going on in the background) and even the performances were pretty decent considering the cliched characters the actors had to work with. But the lens flares. What the hell was going on?

Every single shot had an excessive amount of lens flare action going down. I liked them some of the time, they gave a really futuristic look to the scenes in space and inside the ship but when they're on alien planets and on earth and its still happening it just whitewashes the entire film making scenes less distinguishable from each other. Used sparingly, they would have been great but this was ridiculous. Apparently they were all done on set according to Abrams, using a very powerful flash light most of the time. But there presence on CGI sequences and the fact that Andrew Kramer (who did the title sequence to the film) released an After Effects plugin for creating lens flares not long after the films release, makes me curious as to what percentage were really added in post. Anyway, the films worth a watch so check it out.

Alvaro Posadas

2010-02-27T14:26:00.001Z

___ from Alvaro Posadas on Vimeo.

I don't know why I like this guys stuff but I do. Simple and complex and incredibly digital, check it out.

Zen and the Art of the Focus Puller

2010-02-27T11:24:00.000Z

I read about film and film production a LOT. Probably more than any sane person would want to read about anything. When I get onto a set or start working on a some post production I like to feel that I am prepared, that I know everything it is possible to know about what I am going to be doing. But this knowledge is only a crutch, something to fall back on if everything is going wrong.

If the only thing I based my decisions on was the writings of others, then my work would inevitably be unoriginal. With most of the jobs in film (both on and off set) what I base my decisions on is what feels right, what my instinct tells me. When I choose a camera angle, when I place a light, when I make a cut in the edit suite, all of the things that I have read about what you should do can be thrown out of the window if something entirely different feels like the right thing to do. Improving these instincts is not as easy as accumulating knowledge. It cannot be learnt, it can only be practiced. I am in no way saying that study is unnecessary. You need that knowledge to fall back on when your own instincts are failing you. But I am saying that if you only ever paint by the numbers and never trust your own inclinations, then your work will always be stale and unoriginal.

The job of the focus puller is certainly one of the most under-appreciated jobs on a film set. A good focus puller frees everyone to do so much more than they would otherwise be able to. Blocking can be more elaborate, camera moves can be more elaborate, depth of field can be used more effectively, actors can feel their way through movements instead of having to robotically move through the scene. This basically adds up to the difference between a amateur looking film and a professional looking film. And all this comes from the feelings and instincts of the focus puller. I have only done a couple of difficult focus pulls in my time. Whilst it may look like the most boring job on set, I actually found to be one of the most demanding. There are only a couple of principles to fall back on and although you will probably be finding marks and getting your actors to hit spots, the transition between those spots is all down to instinct. Putting that much pressure on my instincts has a pretty unusual effect on me. On a recent film shoot I found myself stood in the rain, desperately shielding the camera with an umbrella and simultaneously trying to pull focus on Nikon stills lens, entirely off the sound of someone's footsteps. There really was no room in my head for anything else.

Video and Audio

2010-02-13T11:18:00.000Z

I recently did a Pro Tools 101 course. Audio is a little outside my remit as a pixel wizard but I've been a musician for a while and have recorded my own music and obviously I have to deal with audio when editing so it wasn't a completely alien territory for me. What struck me is the amount of similarities between digital audio and video, both technically and in the way you work with it.

Sample Rate
This describes the number of times an analog signal (ie an audible noise or an analog synth) is sampled (or analysed) to produce the digital signal that is recorded. Analog audio is continuous and infinite in its amount of data, but digital audio has to have a finite amount of information and so it cannot be an continuous stream, instead it is a series of samples or records of what the analog signal was doing at a specific moment in time. Typical sample rates are 44.1Khz (or 44,100 samples a second) for music and 48Khz for sound for Film and TV. They can also be higher than this for specialist applications like sound design, but you'll find that these are the most common. Initially I equated sample rate to frame rate. Light is continuous and in order to capture it we take a frame at specific moments in time (interestingly you have to do this even with the "analog" medium of film). Compared to 48,000 times a second, 24/25/29.97 times a second looks pretty insignificant. But I don't think we can equate sample rate to frame rate. If you heard a sample, it wouldn't even register, and in order to recognise a sound you'd probably have to hear at least 10-20 thousand of them. To me this sounds more like a pixel. If you had a dead pixel on your monitor you probably wouldn't notice, and if you saw 10-20 thousand you may be able to make out what the picture was of. If we compare sample rate to pixel rate, then the shoe is definitely on the other foot in terms of numbers. 48,000 a second doesn't really compare to 414,720 (SD PAL Footage), 5,184,000 (1080p25 Footage) or a staggering 209,715,200 pixels per second (4k 25p Footage). So take that audio guys.

I'll talk a bit about bit depth in audio and video in my next post and tackle the mind boggling arena that is floating point as well. Stay tuned, if you're a massive geek like I am.

Low Poly Animation

2010-02-11T18:21:00.000Z

Here's a video for everyone who is thinking the photo-realistic Avatar approach to CG is the be all and end all of animation. This video chooses a low poly aesthetic that looks really cool and gave the filmmakers the chance to focus on what's important in any film, the story. They give you like 10 seconds to start caring for the character (which you do), and then plunge him into danger, and then they tip the whole thing on its head. Excellent piece of cinema, check it out.

Pivot from Pivot on Vimeo.

4 Days with the Canon 7d

2010-02-11T12:17:00.000Z

Following on from my last post about VDSLRs I thought I'd talk a little bit about "From the Former Republic of Czechoslovakia with Love", a short film I was DOP for.

We shot everything on the Canon 7d which is very similar to the Canon 5d I talked about in the last post. It has a slightly smaller sensor, but has the advantage of shooting in some useful frame rates. We shot at 1080p25 throghout. I'll shar some of my experiences here as we really put this camera through its paces, shooting a 20 minute film in 4 days with crews up to 30 strong at some points and professional lighting gear throughout. Overall my impression is that this camera is fantastic, I would use it again in a heartbeat for a short or music video but I think I would look elsewhere for a feature because of the downsides I will go into and because I would expect to have a big enough budget to shoot RED or 35mm film if I was shooting a feature.

Downsides

There are two main gripes I had with this camera. The first has to be monitoring. On a film set having lots of eyes on the picture is a must and this camera just simply doesn't give you the option to do that. We couldn't find a rental company that had an HDMI field monitor, so we were using a consumer model which meant less viewing angle and no waveform monitor. For me a histogram isn't good enough to expose off. We made do but I can guarantee that the last short I shot was better exposed. There are other issues with the monitoring not being full raster in live view that were annoying but worst of all was that outputting to the monitor leaves the operator blind which just isn't good enough, especially when focus is so critical. The lcd is actually pretty good to focus off, especially with something like a Z finder, but if the operator can't see it then whats the use? The other issue we had was aliasing. I'm sure you've seen this before in videos and you can see it in the still below. Mostly it wasnt a problem but alot of the film was set in a strip club so there were alot of tights and neglegee's around and the aliasing became a massive problem. We reduced it with diffusion filters but did not manage to get rid of it completely. Rolling shutter and some of the other problems I've heard of were'nt a major issue for us but we were wise enough to keep the shutter on 1/50th and not put too many moving shots in the film.

Upsides

The images were stunning. Resolution wise I couldnt care less if its actually 1080p because the images we captured looked amazing. I can't imagine getting a better image without spending 10-50 times as much. Sensitivity wise it shone, especially shooting scenes outdoors at night it was nice being able to ride the ISO to 640/800 and not be too concerned about noise. I dont think I would have been happy pushing any further than that though so its luckt we had a 2.5k light and some fast lenses. Ill post some grabs when I get chance.

VDSLR

2010-02-11T11:24:00.000Z

No this isn't a post about some new STD, I am of course taking about Video DSLR Cameras, or to be more specific, DSLRs that can shoot HD video.

Still's cameras have been able to shoot video for a while but it has always been atrocious quality and certainly not anything you would think of using for making a film but since the mad scientists at Canon decided it would be possible to pump out 30 frames of 1920x1080 video every second from their giant full frame sensor, everything has changed.

So the puzzle is, why would a filmmaker be interested in using a stills camera to make his film. It is that massive sensor that is at the centre of this puzzle. The Canon 5d literally has the biggest sensor of any digital HD video camera (and that includes such pricey items as the Red One and the Sony F35). This gives the 5D two main advantages, firstly it gives it an obscenely shallow depth of field, secondly it makes the camera fairly sensitive to light which means you can shot with less light (possibly even streetlights at night) than would be needed with other cameras.

Depth of field (DOF) refers to the distance between the nearest and the furthest point from the camera that will be in focus. A major criticism of HD cameras is that they have too deep a DOF, in other words too much is in focus, and this stops them from looking "filmic" like the image above. DOF is dependent on 3 factors, the focal distance of the lens, the openness of the aperture (called the F-stop) and the size of imagining plane. In the case of focal length a wide angle lens will have a very deep DOF (see the deep focus cinematography in classic films like Citizen Kane) whilst telephoto lenses will have a shallow depth of field. With the aperture or iris, the more you open it (make the F-stop lower) the shallower the DOF so if you are going for a shallow DOF then its a good idea to use ND filters to limit the amount of light entering the camera before you close the aperture any. Lastly the imaging plane affects DOF. Imaging plane means the plane that the image is being projected onto by the lens. In a film camera this would be the film itself. In a digital camera, this would be the sensor.

Codehunters and Complementary Colours

2010-02-06T17:04:00.001Z

Codehunters from axisanimation on Vimeo.

I just saw this short animation film and thought it was worth sharing.

It's directed by Ben Hibon and the excellent CGI is by axis animation, based here in the UK. They specialise in spots and cinematics but this has a filmic and heavily sylised feel to it thats quite different to their previous work, with a pallette consisting almost entirely of blue and various shades of beige and gray. It seems films, animation in particular, are following complementary colour rules more and more. I like restricted palettes but I also think that if you restrict your selection of colours then you restrict your tools for creating emotional impact with colour. A short like this can get away with it because a short can still be good if it only has one mood, but there's nothing worse than watching a feature film sit on the the same 2 colours througout. Features and TV shows should go through different moods and emotions, and colour choices should reflect this, even if it does mean straying to green and magenta territory. For anyone unfamiliar with the theory of complimentary colours, read on.

The theory of complimentary colours is basically the idea that colours that are opposite each other on a colour wheel will complement each other better than colours that are next to each other.

With most color correction now being done digitally, it is easier to manipulate the colours in any shot either from a digital camera or scanned from film (the animation above is obviously CGI but the choice to use a very restricted pallete was still deliberate and a response to the same rules). So with tools like hue offset wheels and curves etc. it becomes simple to restrict the number of colours in a shot so that it better obeys the complementary colours rule. Because skin tone occupies the region of the wheel between red and yellow, most of the time this means pushing everything else in the shot towards blue or cyan. Two of the most blatant examples of this technique in recent years have been Micheal Bay's 2 Transformers, graded by Christopher Savides and Stefan Sonnenfeld (for the sequel).

As you can see in the picture above, this in not something that is only thought about after the fact. The set dressing choices also lend themselves to this colour scheme and makes the colourist's job easier.

I like this style a lot and it very easily creates pleasing images, but at the same time I avoid it like the plague so that I can differentiate myself from what anybody with a copy of After Effects is doing. Unless a scene is specifically calling for a very sexy look then I try to go down the much harder route of complimenting my skin tones with adjecent hue's (actually straying into the green and magenta hues, which pretty much nobody is using these days, making my choice by seeing what works for the scene and echoes its content in some way) or going for practically monochromatic looks, either cool with desaturated skin, or warm with everything in the scene occupying the territory between yellow and red.

Something I want to start doing more is getting involved with set design and imposing a colour palette before the fact, rather than reading off what has already been done in production and having to search around for a look that works for each scene. My friend and sound designer Enos Desjardins (check out his blog Sound and Motion) is talking all the time about a greater roll in pre-production for people who have traditionally been only post-production. He sees this as being the way forward for the film industry and I agree whole heartedly. I have heard people spout such nonsense as "It's nothing to do with a post-production person, what the Director and DOP choose to shoot". This assumes a level of authorship which I have never been glad to accept. Sure a Director makes a lot of the most important decisions in a film, but many hundreds of people do work which directly influences how effective that film is (I use effective as a broad way to describe how good a film is because no matter what the genre or style a film can be judged at how effectively it communicates what it wants to say). If one person doing a job differently can make someone's work more effective and hence make the film more effective, then it should be considered, even if that person is the director or DOP. The thing I love most about film is that it has to be collaborative and so it challenges you to find ways in which you can combine your own artistic vision with someone elses and create something entirely different than either of you had in mind.

Born of Hope and Lens Adapters

2010-02-04T10:12:00.000Z

Last year I graded my first feature, a Lord of Rings fan film called Born of Hope by Actors at Work Productions in London. It was an epic project (excuse the pun), that had me deal with every problem I'm likely to face as Online Editor or Colourist.

The biggest challenge was evening out all different formats that had been used on the project. Because it was shot on an incredibly low budget it had varied throughout its year in production between DVCPROHD and HDV, sometimes with a 35mm lens adapter, sometimes not. The first thing to learn was that HDV can't be pushed anyway near as far as DVCPROHD, there just isn't the information. I had worked with both formats before but having them side by side in the same colour project really hammered the point home. The other thing I learnt was that 35mm lens adapter's do more for you're "film look" than just give a shallower depth of field. I noticed early on when trying to balance a scene that had shots both with an adapter an without that the range of colours in the shot was dramatically less in the adapter shots. Essentially the adapter was doing my job for me, reducing the colour palette to just leave complementary colours, throwing away green and magenta so that the images were more pleasing. Obviously I had to a little more work to enhance this and correct for any contrast adjustments I had made but generally, lens adapter shots needed very little colour work. I presume this is because of the sheer amount of glass that the light is travelling through before it hits the sensor and the way the stills camera lenses interact with the adapter glass and the stock lens. Unfortunately this meant that I had to do heavy correction on the shots without adapters to get them looking as good. I used the technique of lowering overall saturation and pushing and pulling with the shadow and highlight wheels to add saturation in the way I wanted, but I also used the saturation curve quite a bit because I found it very effective at removing unwanted colours, especially the oversaturated greens in the forest scenes (of which there were many).

Check out the film here;
www.bornofhope.com

Invictus

2010-02-02T22:46:00.011Z

Visual Effects can easily be seen as something only ever used in Sci-Fi and Action films, but the art of Pixel Wizardry can be used in much more subtle ways than sending people into outer space or blowing stuff up. It can enhance any drama by giving the director the power to create or enhance things that he would otherwise have to spend huge amounts of his budget creating in production. Invictus, Clint Eastwood's latest staring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, used an immense amount of rotoscoping and crowd duplication to fill the rugby stadiums with the 10s of thousands of people that should be there and the audience doesn't even notice, which is exactly why it is so good.

It's easy to give praise to the obvious special effects (the scene in Avatar where the tree is falling down has to be one of the most visually stunning pieces of CGI I have ever scene) but I think its important to remember that at its heart film making should be an invisible art. It is at its most effective when the audience does not notice the techniques being used and the path between message and mind is unhindered.

The team behind Invictus chose to rotoscope rather than use a blue or greenscreen so that the Director and DOP were not hindered from working in the way to which they are accustomed. Heavy use of blue and green screen work can be a chore on a directors mind and if he is not used to the process, can impede his creative vision. Whilst roto can seem like a pointless and labour intensive task, it allows the cast and crew to work the same way they would on any film. On the first and only film I have taken the helm as director (a short student film done after a few months at Futureworks Media School) I had to tackle a VFX shot in which two actors had to walk towards a lathe. A greenscreen would have made more sense, but instead I chose to rotoscope. I left a table in the position of the lathe which I had to digitally remove aswell. All this led to much more work in post but it meant that I could focus on getting the lighting and the acting right, which is worth the extra hours sat rotoscoping.

The Most Important Things in Life

2010-01-30T17:13:00.001Z

Last year I graded a short film shot on a Red One by director David Schofield and DOP Doug Walshe, called "The Most Important Things in Life".

The project had been edited in FCP using ProRes422 transcodes based on the DOP's white balance and exposure settings. I had planned to try out the proper workflow to Color, conforming the edit back to R3D wrapped Quicktimes and sending to Color so that I could access the illustrious Red Tab. Unfortunately the edit ran over schedule and I had to do a quick job so that the film could be entered into a film festival, so I sent the ProRes files to Color and graded from them. I did some basic Color balancing and contrast evening work to all the shots and did some work in secondaries to remove a green spill from a faulty HMI. I ended up applying a saturation curve to remove green in most shots, even those without the spill because there were a lot of green elements in the location that weren't fitting in with the colour scheme I was going for. I then went into the secondaries room and mixed the original image with a blurred duotone version of its self using an add node. This added warmth and a little diffusion. Check out the final draft below.

I have a couple of Red grading jobs coming up in the next couple of months and I will definitely be going for the proper workflow so I will let you know how it goes.

Pixel Wizardry

2010-01-29T11:39:00.000Z

In this blog I will discuss all aspects of Pixel Wizardry in its many forms, including editing, compositing, CGI and grading. By Pixel Wizardry I am of course referring to digital post production for Film, TV, the Internet etc, which I have spent the last 3-4 years of my life learning. I will share tips and tricks, post examples of my work and talk about how I achieved them and generally just chat about the Film and TV industry as a whole. Stay tuned.