Carbon Copy Second Day of Second Reshoots Wrap

These directions for building your own Pip Boy are a little vague, but he does excellent work. The key is really the weathering isn't it?
I do feel my next movie needs a Pip-Boy of some kind.
Oh. We wrapped on Carbon Copy.

The beautifully feral Kate Britton going all Ghost in the Shell on us.

Reshoot 2/1

Julia Rae Maldonado looking quite noir today.

 This is the first day of the second round of reshoots on Carbon Copy.
I thought we would shoot most of everything on a 200mm lens. No no no. That lens was way too close. So I rout around in my bag (is that supposed to be "root"?) and I can't find the regular Panasonic lens. So...
Let me start again. I have a small collection of Canon S.S.C. lenses. They're really quite nice. And before I left for set this morning I was like "I should remember to bring those S.S.C. primes as well as the regular Panasonic lens because right now I just have this 200mm mounted on the camera."
Guess what I did not do? If you guessed "bring any lenses" then you are today's winner.
Joe Chapman, however, (unknown to me) has a phenomenal collection of very fast S.S.C. lenses. I had the FD to Micro 4/3rds adapter on the camera so it all went swimmingly. All of these images were taken with a 20mm... f2.8? Maybe?

Joe Chapman lends and literal and figurative helping hand.

 A family emergency left us down one actor for this MOS sequence. So we re-wrote it last night that it could be played sans that one actor.

Not the first time we've killed Willow Csulik.

Post Stuff

Kate Britton with androids in background. Also a post-apocalyptic refinery.

 Ian Hubert has been fixing my lousy camera work. And boy. Has he fixed it.

The Philadelphia Desert is a harsh environment. Luckily these androids (I believe this is Kathleen Fletcher) have facemasks made by Brian Schiavo.

This is dangerous because it encourages us to think we can just do any nonsense at all when shooting because the plates will be cleaned up and background elements will be added so beautifully.

Graphic

The Blender Foundation seems to have done a good job making their Cycles renderer work really well with GPU on an Nvidia card. It doesn't work so great on AMD cards (which sort of eliminates Apple machines from the running). But objects set up with Cycles materials can party with fairly fast renders (on Nvidia cards).

Weirdly, Adobe seems to also favor Nvidia over AMD graphics. In my experience this means their Mercury playback engine works better on Nvidia which again means that Premiere and After Effects work better on PC's than on Macs.

Some ridiculous human (me) is having some old Blender models (which do look beautiful) fly by in a couple scenes and man, they take longer to render than I expect them to.

The thing I do desire with all my heart is that there be an easy way to render out a ground plane that is invisible but otherwise accepts shadows in Cycles. There is a kludgey way to do it by rendering out a separate ground plane which is mostly alpha channel with a shadow on it but it involves setting up multiple outputs and you have to composite them back together again in After Effects. And although that's not a nightmare because at least you get to fiddle with the amount of shadow, it's well... it's a kludge.

"Kludge" is a word according to my browser's dictionary apparently.

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Huh. It never occurred to me that Ripley has a watch in Alien. She has one in Aliens. But the one in Alien was not that big a deal. Somebody sells the one from the videogame Alien Isolation. But in the original Alien it was apparently a couple Casio F100's put together on the same band.

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So much rendering to do. 0 to 536, and then 936 to 1361.

Carbon Copy Key

The key art at this year's AFM for Carbon Copy (formerly Android Masquerade).

Ian Hubert = Genius

Arielle Hope, Sarah Schoofs, Ashley Mundy. Uh. Twice.

Day for night is flipping hard. It's just obnoxious because lights don't work the same way. The sun, it turns out, is really really bright.
On the other hand, without really huge lights at night it's impossible to really get exposure.
So you need to do about ten million tricks just to get things to look like they're night. You have to make flashes of firearms light up around them, which is a fancy bit of compositing. Lens flare, sky replacement, they all come into play.
I'm really glad I didn't have to do it! ;-)
Ian Hubert. The man is a genius. Check out Karma Pirates.

Sunrise, Sunset

Remind me why daylight savings time exists again?
Well, we're out of light by 5pm once it ends, that's for sure. The last day (ha!) of shooting additional photography on Carbon Copy is on Sunday the 1st.

End of July

Felicia Hudson, Chester Poon, Sarah Schoofs. Everyone has at least one "o" in their last name. Most have "oo". Which sounds like they're really excited about something. Ooh! Or in Sarah's case, "Oof!"

Would you believe I never got around to syncing these scenes?
Lesee. I'm waiting on a robot and a spaceship from Ian. I've been mixing Carbon Copy but there are still three (new) scenes we need to shoot. Which means we need a rock quarry and an abandoned city.

Puppets and Something

I've totally forgotten what this sign says.

I'm supposed to be done with this movie in exactly one week. I'm not really confident I'm going to achieve that end. But I'm well on my way.
Honestly, we've got a day of additional photography to do. And we can't do that until a day before the whole picture is due. So yeah. We're not going to quite make it.
Otherwise I'm mixing. Mixing mixing mixing.

Score!

I'm about 1/3 of the way through the mix on Carbon Copy. Well, maybe more like 1/4 the way. There are a whole lot of little details to be dealt with.

This is, however, a relatively easy scene with only two characters so the extra 4 tracks were deleted in the picture edit and never got dragged over to the audio edit in Samplitude.

Since we moved to recording 6-tracks of audio for all dialog, it's a bit more of a pain in the tuchus to deal with big dialog scenes. At the same time we're more likely to have good dialog in those scenes.
I cannot tell if I'm doing the right thing with music.
In my mind the whole thing, meaning the whole movie, is in the mind of the lead character. So what is the soundtrack of her mind? I have no idea. Well, I mean I have an idea. Is it too much? I really don't know.
This is one of those thing where, as the director, I really should have a clue. I'm going for an electronic kind of sound with pulses and grooves mostly. I really dug the James Newton Howard score to The Bourne Legacy. So I'm trying to cop some of those feels (uh, phrasing Drew?) in the Carbon Copy score.

After the Embargo

Now that the AFM has happened, we're after the embargo!

That's Maduka Steady with robots by Ian Hubert on all sides.

Note that if you look around this isn't the actual final art on this title. They changed the head. This is because by coincidence another filmmaker with the same sales rep used the same armor.

Shower Scene

Although principal photography on Android Masquerade is complete we knew we had to get this one shot of Kate coming out of the shower.

First I had to prep the gun. It looks roughly the way it did when Joe put his red-dot scope on it. But the caps had to be taped in the "up" position (which they don't really do). This closeup makes the contraption look awfully ersatz, but we didn't photograph it such that you should really notice or care. I think.

Yes. It's not in the script. I just thought it would be amusing if her character were hiding in the shower -- with the shower on -- fully dressed and carrying a gun.

I want credit here. Hottest day of the year so far and the lead actor gets to stand in a shower where she can control the temperature. It seems like every other time we're shooting on hot days we get the "Oh for continuity you have to wear this winter coat/be slathered in body paint".

Because it amused me. It still amuses me.

I'm glad that you can't see my reflection in this shot. But you can see the mask hanging on the wall.

I also got some very gratuitous closeups at high-speed of water dripping off the muzzle of the gun. Click through to embiggen a little selection of that. I am enjoying my ability to shoot high-speed again now that we're using a GH3.

Wrap on Principal Photography

Yep. We wrapped. A guerrilla style shoot.

At the Android Masquerade Jared Van Heel (as Tanner), Kate Britton (as Barbara Slade), and Ruby Thomas (as Janice 213).

 The white balance was set to 7000 Kelvin. Other than that there was no lighting done specifically for these shots. The only trouble I got into was the camera didn't always want to autofocus on Ruby. So I threw it into manual a couple times.

The thing is that the spa attached to our office is supposed to go home at 7:30pm. Tonight they never left. Which mean that the lights stayed on. Which meant that there was no playing with the lighting. We were expecting to bring in some extension cords and light the whole thing. But it was already lit. So. Uh. Who knows?

It would have been nice if we could have gotten the music turned off but instead we just had the actors play like they were in a loud store and we'll put some loud music in later.

We wanted the role of Janice to be as inappropriately touchy-feely as we could go.

We also went in a general way for "weird". I actually started using the word "creepy" as a direction.

We used a thigh rig on a mini Lectro transmitter on Ruby with the transmitter hidden as high as it could go. Luckily those transmitters are the smallest there are.

We did no dressing. We didn't exactly ask if we could use this location. But it's the place we have to walk through to get to our bathrooms. And we were very well behaved.

The crew was one. Me. I became quite shvitzig.

Wherein I find costumes

Here's Ruby Thomas trying on her new costume.

The Queen of Mars found those shoes for only 8 dollars. But the dress came out of my personal collection I ordered online.

Six of Seven

On our penultimate day of principal photography we went out into the deep wilds of the Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania.

Kate Britton lines up a shot.

 Specifically we shot in the Hickory Run Boulder Field, which is this crazy field of (you guess it!) boulders.

Queen of Mars, Kevin Kirner, Joe Chapman. Those aren't extras behind them, nor are they alien robots (as far as we know). A surprising number of people were in this park on a Monday.

Thing one: it was hot. I mean like frying eggs on the rocks hot. I was practically burned out after being in the direct sun for 20 minutes. Good grief. It was hot out there.

Why does everyone think "Mad Max" when they see Kate's uniform? Is there like an Australian poster for the movie where he's wearing a similar helmet?

Thing two: the boulder field, while it looked cool, was impossible to walk on. You couldn't just move a few feet one way or the other without really taking your time not to break an ankle.

I cannot even begin to tell you how important ice cream break was.

The third thing about the boulder field is that we really didn't have the right kind of horizon. So the ground looked very cool. But the horizon was just green Pennsylvania trees.

The helmet makes it VERY difficult to sight through.

Lastly I almost had a coronary when the Panasonic GH3 decided it simply wouldn't play back any of the footage we'd shot in the latter part of the day. I just looked at it on my laptop -- it seems to all be there (in fact there are some stills above). But why did it do that? I have zero idea.

1301 Day 5 (which is reel 4)

This is a British riot helmet. Probably used to put down a miners strike. In any case, it has much better use here as a helmet of the Terran Defense Force.

 I have not gotten the reel number to actually match the day number in several movies now. I really have to work on it.

 

 

 

 

 

Maduka Steady cops his best rock-star pose as Linus in Android Masquerade.

Kate Britton is suited up and ready to fight some robots.

Here's Kate geared up (but in front of a grey background.)

Over-the-shoulder I found this great reflection in the red-dot scope which Joe had put on our 11mm paintgun.

Jared Van Heel smiles knowing this was the martini of the day.

I've been experimenting with changing the color temperature of the white balance scene to scene. This, to me, is a bit interesting. We can swing to blue (I think the bulk of the day was shot at about 3300K) or very bronze (when making the color temperature more like 10,000K).
Man, the GH3 at the highest bit rate sure does use up hard drive space. I do hope it's worthwhile to shoot at a high bit rate. Hopefully that means the lowest couple of stops will be boostable cleanly. We'll find out.
I have to figure out if we want to edit on Premiere or Final Cut. One huge advantage for Premiere is that it'll edit the h264 files without becoming cranky. With Final Cut we'd have to transcode all the footage.
The GH3 does a weird thing -- the picture doesn't seem to come into focus until I go into record. I don't know what's up with that.

Day 4 (which is only the third reel) A

The Queen of Mars hangs her beautiful Martian artwork.

Shooting at a very high bitrate with the GH3. Trying to use the Wi-Fi as video tap did not work so well for us.

Kate Britton as Barbara.

Brianna June Tillo as Vicky.

Kate Britton.

Brianna and Julia Rae Maldonado as the android version of Barbara.

The Queen of Mars looks on as Julia and Brianna look to the mirror.

Barbara's squalid apartment gets messier every day.

Eating strawberries and popcorn beneath the alien art.

Aesthetic Inspiration

Mayan relief in a Chipotle Downtown NYC.

So we're looking for some sort of thing above "Barbara's" bed. I'm imagining some sculpty and Mayan-maze-like thing.

More Costumes

Caitlin set us up with moar costumes!

"Android outside wear". Surely this is Vicky's outside wear, no? Because the android costume already exists. Right?

Barbara's "hospital" wear.

Doctor Lake's uniform.

Linus' uniform. Nice long coat.

Ryan Tanner's medical uniform.

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.