Shot List with Celtx
Created a quick demo on how to create shot lists with Celtx to answer a question brought up on the Celtx forums.
Post Mortem with Dave S
I got around to doing an audio post mortem for The New Face of Security of myself. I recorded this almost a week ago. At that time my birthday hadn't come yet, nor had I really gotten in to editing too deeply.
I ramble on. Forewarned and all.
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Flat Tire
Flat Tire, a short film shoot I worked on last summer, has been posted on YouTube. I spent two days working on this shoot as the boom operator. The rig I was running with is very similar to the one that we have for use with HLI. I believe it was a Sennheiser MKH running in to a Samsung Zoom H4. We're running a Sennheiser ME66 (not as nice) and a Samsung Zoom H4n (slightly nicer).
It was a rough shoot for audio as it was never really considered when locations were being chosen. The vast majority of the shots were in high traffic areas around downtown Guelph. I'm sure there was a good percentage of the audio that simply wasn't usable at all. Luckily it's fairly light in actual audio recorded with the shoot.
Flat Tire @ YouTube
Built A Dolly
I should really be getting on the last minute details as we start shooting tomorrow. Instead I'm going to talk about the new dolly we built today. There are some tracking and push shots that I wanted to do on the reshoot for The New Face of Security. The last dolly that we used was flat out awful. It couldn't even move in a straight line and made so much noise that it was only useful if you didn't need audio from the take. Rather than rent something that wasn't going to work anyway or buy something expensive we went the other way.
$4 pair of rollerblades from the local thrift shop.
Tore those suckers apart and harvested the still well functioning wheels.
$6 in hardware - L brackets, nuts and bolts
Bent the L brackets from 90 degrees to about 120. Bolted the wheels on.
Free chunk of wood
I had a piece of MDF sitting around that was mostly square, sturdy, and flat. It's not technically free since I pair for it at some point but it didn't come out of this film's budget and therefore is free. Drilled some holes and using some machine screws and wings nuts fixed the wheels to the wood.
$12 ten foot lengths of pvc piping.
Since the tripod, camera, and wood with wheels is pretty light it actually just sits on top of the pvc. The piping doesn't need any support. It basically adjusts itself.
Ran some tests with and it's smooth as can be. There's still quite a bit that could be done to make it a bit more rugged and reliable but as is it's quite good and will get us through this shoot. And at $22 it's a damn fine price too.
Paradise Island
Cassie Padfield, who is joining us for our reshooting of The New Face of Security, is also smack in the middle of a stage production with K-W Little Theater.
Paradise Island opens this Thursday and runs for three weeks. If you are in the area and have the opportunity go see Cassie and support community theatre.
New Face Rehearsals
Cast and critical crew have been confirmed. We are very much rolling on toward actually shooting something again.
Last week our new camera operator / DP came by as we did some lighting and shot tests with the new lights on the new set. We have a basic lighting setup that looks pretty solid and is going to give us really good results with the new camera we'll be using. It's a flexible set up with nice contrast.
We have a rehearsal scheduled for next Tuesday. I have no doubt they're going to be fantastic for me.
With any luck we should have this shot in the next three weeks.
On a side note, I've been playing with Blender a lot lately. It's a 3D modeling/animation/game development program that is completely cross platform and free. I've been noodling with it to get my head around basic modeling and animation. While some silly thing in the back of my brain says, 'Wouldn't it be awesome to do an animation CG short?' the rest of my brain and is being a bit more pragmatic.
I have a really hard time doing storyboards. It's not that I can't see the shots that I want it's that I can't draw well enough to get the perspective and proportion I'm looking for and eeking out what I can takes forever. Modeling, on the other hand, I'm alright with. It's a whole lot easier to push vertices around to get an approximate equivalent to what I want, stage a scene, and then put a camera in to place.
Currently my modeling skills are still very raw. It takes me quite a bit to get anything worthwhile done. I watched a tutorial of someone model and rig an entire character in an hour. I've been working on a basic human character for almost a week now and there's still lots to do before I get to rigging. But that's okay. Once I have a library I can start pulling existing resources in to new storyboard projects.
I think it'll work out to be a very nice storyboarding tool once I suck a whole lot less.
Visuals and Storyboarding
Despite the pain of needing to reshoot The New Face of Security some good things have come out of it. The largest one being that I've had time to go back and focus on the visuals. I've spent considerably longer working through my visual treatment, blocking, and storyboarding this time around with good results.
The first of which is that I have a much better plan for lighting on the reshoot. It matches the thematic elements I'm going for in the story a bit more. The previous lighting, while solid, was more around getting decent overall light then lighting for effect.
The second is that I've paid more attention to blocking and action. This has made some minor but strong edits to the script itself. I've been able to shave off a few things that were largely unnecessary while sharpening the points I am hitting.
The last is that by taking a style, theme, and content approach to the storyboarding, by considering the cut film in my head, I've cut down the number of set ups. Originally I was more worried about ensuring that I had enough footage to get the project. While there is good material in those original storyboards there were also unnecessary coverage set ups that likely wouldn't have even been used in the final cut. They were there as insurance.
We went in to shooting with 40 set ups over two days and a lot of overlap. If we'd gone in with the 29 that I have now we'd have had more time to work through the individual shots and had a tighter over all film. I'll be sitting down with a potential new DP/camera operator to talk about the visuals shortly. If things go smoothly we should be pulling everything together to shoot very shortly.
It pays to do visualization work in advance. It will save you time and frustration on the set.
Progress Update
The New Face of Security is back on a track even if it's not on the track. The most important part is that progress is indeed taking place. A new location for the reshoot has been finalized, though the change of venue does change a few other things.
The new space is significantly smaller than the last. This has it's pros and it's cons. In the last space it was too big and too concrete. The dialogue was bouncing all over the place with all the echoes in the room. The new space we'll be shooting in should have very clean audio. Conversely, we're losing the space that we had which means some of the shots will need to be modified, others axed completely. Some of those nice long shots I had planned will definitely be cut.
It's also going to change how it's shot entirely. We have a bit more freedom at one end of the space over the other. This likely means that we'll be shooting all of our footage from one end first, flipping the entire set, and then shooting the remainder from the opposite end. Another interesting hurdle in a long list this project has endured.
Not dead. Just napping.
It's been awhile since anything has been posted and I wanted to take a minute to update as to what's going on.
THE NEW FACE OF SECURITY
I don't know if I posted this. I get the distinct feeling that I did not. We shot the footage for this late last year. Other projects were on my plate to be edited so this got pushed to the side for a few weeks. When I finally got back to the footage I found that we couldn't use it. I'm inclined to blame the equipment we were using.
We were using a Canon XH-A1 with a RedRock micro kit running out to an SD monitor. I was aware there were some focus issues during the start of the first day of shooting but I wasn't aware of how bad the focus was. It appeared to be in focus on the camera. It appeared to be in focus on the SD monitor. Going back over the footage it was definitely not in focus. This wasn't a camera operator issue. At some points three or four different people were verifying that appeared in focus on the camera.
I'm inclined to say equipment. The combination we had likely wasn't configured to work together. The same RedRock kit works just fine with a JVC camera Ed Video has in inventory and we're not the only crew who has faced this issue.
All that said we need to reshoot. With one of our actors in Saudi Arabia for several more months and our original location no longer a viable options we're working around those issues to try and pull together another shoot. It's coming along.
RENAISSANCE UNFAIRE
I'm slowly slugging my way through set design for this. It's a single set but I have a specific idea for how I want it to look so it's taking a bit of time to get everything together. Add the fact that I'm building it all in my spare time so it doesn't get as much attention as it should.
EVERYBODY'S DEAD
I started working on a new one act play earlier this month. A first draft has been completed and it just sitting to rest for a little bit while a couple sets of eyes look it over. It's also a good chance for me to get some distance from it. This way when I come back to edit it's fresher than if I just jumped in to editing right away.
SCRIPT FRENZY
Script Frenzy '10 is coming up. If you haven't heard of Script Frenzy it is a collective self challenge to write a 100 page screenplay in the month of April. I took part in '08 and '09 and jammed out a zombie script each year successfully. I'm considering, should my schedule permit, taking part again this year. If you're in to screenwriting and have some problems with completing a script this is an awesome chance to break that cycle. The point is not a script you can sell but filling the page count with the best content you can in a month.
BUTTERFLYBULLSEYE
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before but my personal site is at butterflybullseye.com. I tend to talk in a bit more depth and more informally about what I'm working on there. It also spans far beyond the confined of just heavyliftingindustries projects.
If you've already visited there and subscribed to the RSS feed you may want to pop over and grab the new link for the new feed. I've had to update it switching from blogger over to WordPress.
Three Tall Women
Sue Kluckow, who we adore, is already one week down out of three on stage for Three Tall Women through KWLT. Also in the show is Aleriel Lear who was in my stage production of A BRAND NEW HELL. I'm heading out to see the show myself this coming Friday.