Via Italia

Foist Send the lovely Jessica Laliberte on to Italy!
(There's supposed to be a widget here. I don't know why it doesn't work.

Not quite Italy, Croatia instead.

Wherein I finally weigh in on the Zack Braff thingy

I thought the most interesting thing Zack Braff said about wanting to do a Kickstarter campaign for his new movie was that it would enable him to have more artistic freedom than if he'd just gotten regular financiers to back the picture. I have to admit, that's a pretty compelling reason to go with Kickstarter. 
It's no secret that the filmmaking business is a difficult one. I mean, shooting a movie is physically and mentally taxing. But getting the money to make one + getting it distributed is an exercise in Promethean frustration.
The fact is the numbers don't work out. Right now in the "indy" film world the movies which are made for between $2 million and $12 million are getting $100,000 domestic distribution deals. And I'm actually being charitable, those are the best deals those guys are getting. Those are straight-to-DVD with maybe some cable VOD and Redbox.
So between 2 million dollars and 12 million dollars you're getting maybe a quarter-million dollars in return. Every few years one of those pictures gets a theatrical deal (and I'm not counting a deal with IFC because those deals are in the order of about two thousand dollars thank-but-no-thanks). But those theatrical deals are super unlikely to pay the producers any real money.

The thing with a Kickstarter campaign is that they're expensive. Because you have to offer something in exchange for someone putting money into the campaign you're looking at T-shirts and jackets and promotional DVD's and such. And suddenly with a successful Kickstarter campaign you're not in the movie business, you're in the T-shirt distribution business. Did you want to make T-shirts for a living? Because now you are.
Still, even with the relative "expensiveness" of the money from Kickstarter it is money with no additional strings attached. And if you're making a movie for several million dollars and are aware that at best you're only going to make a couple million dollars from it through distribution, it makes economic sense for the producer to go that way.
Because otherwise you have just a couple options. One option is to go after unsophisticated investors who want to be in the movie business and who have too much money on their hands from whatever legitimate or illegitimate businesses they may be in. They won't know that their two million dollars has about an equal chance of getting paid back as hitting the Powerball this weekend. And, they may not care.
The other way is that you go with a sophisticated investor. Those people will be a problem for you. They're going to look at a picture like Garden State and say "Look. This picture grossed $35 million. In some wild fantasy world it means the producers saw maybe $20 million with cable and DVD. Probably more like $10 or $12M. And it probably took upwards of 5 or 6 years to see that money. So lessee, getting out my financial calculator and running the numbers against my money-market account: you better make a straight-up romantic comedy. I wanna see some people falling down."
So yeah. The movie business. Right on.

Cat Empire

The Cat Empire. You know. On the Gogol Bordello tip.
And then there's this band what is called Leningrad. And the song below is called "Fish". And yeah, they're total crazy.

The best pictures of me are with Sky

Sky Chari, Andrew Bellware

I think her beauty somehow reflects onto me. That must be how it works.

Sapphire Road Tractors

Last night Lou Clark played drums with City Samanas. Slowly but surely I'm getting all the members of Tyrannosaurus Mouse into the City Samanas. Ha!

Now. Here are some things. We played "Blue Shadow" for a good 35 minutes. Also, the experiment that is "Toxic Fruit" did, in my opinion, fail. I asked that we come up with a half-dozen motifs and then play them in a loop and then I edited them together. It seems more like a medly than as a prog-rock piece I thought it would be. Still, there are some nice motifs in there.

Lily rocks out on Ethan's fretless Jazz bass.

 We have like a gazillion (that's an accurate, scientific, number) of new themes we created in Blue Shadow.

Lou has the most conservative playing style where it looks like he's not moving even if he's rocking out.

 I tried to get a picture of Greg but he was looking down the whole time I had the camera out.

3 of the 4 of the gang.

Oh. In other big news we plugged the bass directly into an Aphex tube mic preamp. It's Greg's preamp. I don't really know what I think about it. Does the bass have more, er, "girth"? I just don't know.
There are so many questions I don't have the answer for.
Before we'd been using a Countryman 85 direct box feeding a Lindell preamp. I dunno. What do we think? I felt the bass guitar in last night's recordings was easier to mix. Maybe?
Still, I could totally imagine that much of what we recorded last night could end up on a record.

Living in the Palace

Our own Rebecca Kush is in the feature Palace Living which is premiering at the 2013 Manhattan Film Festival, with a screening at Quad Cinemas (34 W. 13th St.) at 3:15 PM on Sunday, June 23.
PALACE LIVING trailer from Zack Ordynans on Vimeo.
Also, it's playing as part of the 13th VISIONFEST on Friday June 28th, at 7pm. Tickets will be available soon through their site www.visionfest.com

Click through on the above video to embiggen. 

Kevin Kangas Kickstarter

C'mon. This is hysterical.

It'll eventually have to happen

Right now we edit on Final Cut Pro 7.
But...
But soon. We will have to hop off the FCP train.
Where does that leave us? I think not Avid. The only other option is Adobe Premiere.
One new advantage that Adobe has is this Adobe Anywhere thingy. My nominal complaint about these kinds of technologies is that they're tested under very weak conditions; commercials, music videos, and other short projects. A feature film is another ball of rabbits -- even at the low shooting ratios we tend to use. But being able to have multiple editors working on stuff simultaneously is rather intriguing. That is, if I could get multiple editors to work at the same time! ;-)

So. Yeah. I dunno. I suspect we're going to finish off this movie in Final Cut Pro.

7-minute workout

If you like things that are hard, there's this 7-minute workout. Yeah. It uses science. Thing is, that it's scalable. So basically you're doing each thing as hard as you can do them. So if you're in great shape and doing 40 pushups in 30 seconds, or just doing 6, you still work out a whole bunch.

You may also need an interval timer.

Untitled Round Timer

Create your own interval timer or download our interval timer app

Party down.

Fatigue, Boxes, and Color

I find that I get hearing fatigue really easily when I'm mixing music. I lose all perspective on a mix within about 15 minutes of starting. Usually when I come back to a mix the next day I hear what's wrong with it. Well, usually. The big problem is that I'm typically too focused on some aspect of the mix like the drum sound or the bass sound. I've found from experience that my first mixes have little in the way of effects, then I do some mixes way over-compressed, and then... I just have no idea what's going on.

I find that I get fatigue from color-correcting too. I can really get lost looking at color-correction options in a movie. Then I look away for a few minutes and look back and... everything looks different.

Kate Britton, no color correction. Camera set to 10K.

Man, I cannot tell you how thankful I am that we do everything "in the box". If I couldn't instantly recall mixes and color-correction looks I would be completely lost. I just need a whole lot of time to figure out what's going on.

Same light, other side, color corrected GH2 footage 25mm lens.

But the most important thing to me is to be able to get notes from other people. Because, sheesh. You just need those extra eyes and ears. I find that the notes I get back frequently lead me to places where I figure out things even better than (what I did before)+(the notes I just got).
And mixing in the box makes taking notes a dream. Guitar is too loud after 2 minutes? Easy. Just turn it down at the 2 minute mark. Dude is way to blue through all of act 2? Just dial in a bit more warmth in the color correction and walk away.

If we upgraded our camera

So. If we had a new camera we'd need an HDMI transmitter for it, no?


(Only $99 refurbished.)
Which would, in turn, require a micro HDMI to HDMI cable.
 
Now, of course, we'd need a camera like the Panasonic GH3 (which performs better in low-light but has a bit more aliasing and moire in some conditions than the GH2).


And a really bad ass lens.
 
(You can actually save a couple hundred bucks by getting that lens used.) With, you know, a UV filter for the lens.
 
And spare batteries.
 
And a pair of SD cards.
 
And some sort of power supply for the transmitter.
 
Although honestly I don't know what the power draw on the transmitter is like. Surely this is overkill, no? And for that matter, how would we mount the battery and the transmitter? I'm inclined to just tape them to the handheld rig. I'm sure there's a more elegant solution.
Lastwise we need a monitor with HDMI inputs. I think I've bought three of these monitors so far. They work great:

Your three things for today

One can only hope that the general criticism of Prometheus will lead to a better sequel. Ironic, no?
Our own Eric Ian Steele's take on Prometheus.

So. Cannes is going on. Keep your fingers crossed.
+++++
The European standard for an automobile's first aid kit is DIN 13164. It's not an impressive first aid kit.
Via.

Two Draft

David Twohy can do no wrong. In fact, even if he ever did wrong I'd just say "no, he didn't do wrong, I don't believe it."


The Chronicles of Riddick has my favorite dark ending of any movie ever, with a veritable Shakesperian denouement. So say I. So say we all.

+++++
This writing tool called Draft is kinda neat. A new thing is that it allows you to embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo for transcription. As one of the things one must do when delivering a feature film is to deliver a transcription of all the dialog, it might be worth looking into.
+++++
Via Indifferent Cats and Amateur Porn.

Palace Living

A movie our Rebecca Kush is in, Palace Living, has a new poster.

Filmkritik!

Here's a video review of Android Insurrection in German.


The review is that the movie is both good and bad in that it's a good idea but cheaply made.That's fair.

Do Yourself a Favor

Press "play" on this video:

But watch this .gif:

 Repeat.

Measuring the Invisible

Last week's rehearsal's yield.

So. I did a thing. We're recording bass through a Countryman 85 DI and a Lindell preamp. In post I'm running the bass through an automatic level plugin but more importantly (and, er, starting on the second or third track here as of this writing) going through Samplitude's tube-warming plugin.
Yeah, I know. "Tube warming". It's the buzzword from about 5 years ago. But it does the extra thing I felt we want the bass to do. Makes me re-think the Aphex tube preamps that Greg has. Hmm... that might be worth trying actually...

GH2 or GH3

So I borrowed Libby's GH2 camera to shoot over the weekend. I thought that perhaps the video noise would be better on the GH2 over my GH1. I do think and sometimes believe that this is true. We've been careful about avoiding low-contrast low-light situations in the GH1 but I really never saw the horizontal banding on the GH2 that we'd see with the GH1.
So having done further research on the GH2 vs the GH3 it seems there's a bit of a notion that the GH2, yes the 2, is the better camera in many respects. Not exclusively though.
Which is interesting. It seems to me that the low-light performance of the GH3 is better than the GH2 (and therefore the GH1).
The only thing I really wished were different about the GH2 is that with the GH1 I can flip between manual and auto-focus with a fairly easy flip of a switch during a shot. This is not really the case with the GH2 as the switch is harder to flip whilst shooting.
Both the GH2 and the GH3 shoot natively in 24p. This means I'm not fighting with the deinterlacing/reverse-telecine issues I have with the GH1. That's super pleasant actually.
It's a tad annoying that Panasonic keeps changing the battery size with each camera. Here's a good comparison review.
I feel like we're going to need to get a Black Magic 4K camera just because we need something with a global shutter. That's $4000.
The GH3 is only $1200.


The killer app on it may in fact be that you can use the Wi-Fi feature to get a tablet to see through the lens. We haven't had video tap in ages. Everyone on set just trusts that I've somehow shot something worthwhile. And, you know, mostly they do trust. It's just nice to be able to see through the lens.
Maybe I'll have more thoughts on cameras. Maybe I won't.

Day 3 1301

You know, I totally put both days 2 and 3 onto one "reel". So when I look back at the footage we'll have one fewer days than there are call sheets.

Close focus test on the 25mm.

 I've not only been using Libby's GH2 camera, but also the very nice 25mm lens she has for it. It's a Leica-branded lens but I'm not entirely sure it's not just made by Panasonic in Japan. It's a very sweet lens. It opens up to a full f1.4 and even has autofocus. You can get pretty darn tight with the lens too.

The Queen of Mars sets up the brain-scanning device for Kate Britton.

Joe Chapman built our sets with Kevin Kirner and Libby Csulik. They have soft floors. Which my knees are forever thankful for.

Kate Britton and Brianna June Trillo as Barbara and Victoria Slade.

 Also on this picture we've given up on trying to boom things. There are a number of advantages to putting wireless mics on everyone and sending them to split tracks. One advantage is that on a set which is lit and set for 360-degrees means that only the cameraman (me) has to be on set with the actors. Plus I can walk around in and amongst the talent during the scenes which (I hope) will add some intimacy to things.

Our gaffer is tired of you. But she looks great everywhere she goes in this room, so that's all that matters.

Kate Britton and Jared Van Heel. This love scene is so incredibly gratuitous. And what are we shooting through? Why the virtual-cast device itself! How can that be??!!

Kate before all the lights in her apartment turn on automatically (and annoyingly).

You have to explain to me how this is not my next album cover. Or at least a Facebook cover photo.

Do you remember this band? They were like a pop/hard-core band out of Vancouver in the late 90's. She was the drummer and he played industrial sounds with truck wheels and things. They couldn't land a major label deal but all their videos were banned from MTV.

Day 2 1301

Checking the door. Kate Britton reflected as she looks at Brianna June Trillo.

I was too tired last night to post much.

A peita of Brianna.

Brianna June Trillo c'est morte.

I used Libby's GH2 today believing that the camera has less noise. We shot everything on a 25mm lens which would open up to something crazy like f1.4.

Steven J. Niles, Mark Marcarian, and Kate Britton.

Steve Niles interrogates Kate Britton.

Jared Van Heel and Kate Britton.

Mark Marcarian and Julia Rae Maldonado.

One thing I did NOT do correctly is that I ended up shooting stills in only RAW format. So to upload these pictures I had to use Silkypix to batch process them.

Kickstarts

Brian Schiavo shows you his tentacles.

David Gerrold has a Kickstarter for his Star Wolf TV-series.
I mean, yeah. A pilot episode for $650K? That's really not that much money. Kind of shows you how difficult off-world sci-fi is to get on TV.
Label-mate Neil Johnson has a kickstarter for a series called Nobility.

Driving Around Day

The day before shooting is always "drive around and pick stuff up" day. Today I got some costumes from Caitlin Cisek.

Barbara Slade street look.

Extremely happy with Caitlin don't you know. Her costumes have really built the world we're living in.

Karen "interrogation" look.

Here are some of Caitlin's notes:
-didn't know if you wanted her in the wig, but it's there-there are two shirt options if there opinions-and there is a tube bra included
The thing about Karen being outside the door of the interrogation room is that Steve Niles wrote the scene such that she's always "OS". I'm a tad paranoid the audience might be confused about who is speaking exactly. So, we'll have the option of seeing the Juliet-17 in her nice fascist uniform.

Viki look.

So yeah, this is all tres groovy. Plus we also have uniforms for the thugs. Much fun.

Your Thingues For Today

Enduring Mysteries is... a sci-fi musical. Hmm... I got one of those too! ;-)
Black Swan Theory.

The order of front-title credits.

Jack-o-Orange

Things You Need To Know

Econo-Car in Jersey City. Well, perhaps this is the sort of thing which I need to know. Or at least remember.

We have all but the last act of Dragon Reign cut picture-wise. The bottleneck right now is that I apparently have to actually mix the whole thing.
Wayne and Rob Hurry are composing the music. Nathan Vegdahl is animating the dragons. And our own Jeremy Crowson is handling both the sound effects and the dialog edit which... oh man, that makes my life easier that's for sure.

But I'm Suffering

Do I have to be an overweight middle-aged white guy? Really?


Hoo boy. I can't even begin to tell you how depressed this Zack Galifianakis fake ad for New Balance made me. Especially as I looked down at my New Balance sneakers.
Ugh.

Analogue

Things one needs to know in order to understand A/D and D/A conversion.
It's 25 minutes long but very well worth your time.

Defy This

So I'm actually enjoying the new SyFy series Defiance. Honestly there are parts of it which are cringe-worthy (alien '80's techno acts for instance.) But there are a lot of it which is quite good. It's weird when you go from a really dreadful soap-opera-y scene to one which is actually kind of good and Battlestar worthy. The visual effects do the same thing. Some of them are perfect. And some of them go right out the window.

Groove To

My pal Ernest Abuba's show, Dojoji, has a matching grant from the NEA. Donate here. It's like doubling your money!

My Dad's Inbox

31
Thousand
Emails
In. His. Inbox.

Walla

Here's my new walla. I recorded the audience after a RCCNY concert. I think that none of the voices are distinct. There's English and Russian being spoken.

Duck

Via.

Like a Dream

Jim at Little Dawg amps talks about his "less is more" philosophy regarding tone stacks. Honestly, I have no idea what he's talking about. I do know that if I don't have a good guitar sound within about 20 seconds I'm just not going to get a good guitar sound out of a guitar/amp combination.

Can I tell you what a dream it is to not have to put 2" tapes up on a machine, reset the mixer and re-patch all the outboard gear, hoping you wrote the settings down correctly, and make a pathetic attempt to get the same mix up from two weeks ago but this time with a little more bass guitar? Because it's true. Those days sucked.
And now, discussions regarding the relative volume level of said bass guitar become rather simple. The project is brought up. I make a change. Render out a new version of the song. Everyone listens. Makes new notes. It's like a dream.

Software review

Holy cow. Do you want an extensive review of screenwriting software? The Huffington Post can help you there. In our shop we use Celtx. It's free and makes scripts that look like scripts. That's pretty much all we used to need it for but it will also generate (with some caveats) call sheets. It might even generate them accurately.

Oblaviated

As your duly appointed Kinge I have but one Mandate which with my Sword I shall protect; it is this Thinge:

• Science fiction films may not contain or allude to classic rock songs

Braak over at Threat Quality Press is hysterical in his take on Oblivion. More than that though, he's pretty accurate.

One thing I find odd about these sorts of movies is that there's always a place where they run out of money for visual effects. The space-pod thing? Always looks great. I mean, it looks fantastic. It's photo-real in every darn shot it's in.
But every time we drive across the Brooklyn Bridge on a motorcycle everything just breaks down visually.

Sets Masquerade

Joe Chapman building the apartment set for Android Masquerade.

This is the basic design.

Parts of the set are already built.

Unfinished end-wall with Kevin Kirner.