Overworld

It all started when my buddy Chance twittered the wrong opinion

Ten minutes into watching “Underworld” and I already hate it. Abysmal. 

Now, of course Chance was talking about a film that has one of the finest screenplays of the 21st century. So I had to call him up and explain that to him.

But that wasn't the real reason for this conversation.

No, the secret agenda I had in mind was to persuade Chance to make more movies. I mean, he made Hide and Creep and Interplanetary for crying out loud. He freakin' invented the zomedy.

You can just barely make out the part of our conversation where I downloaded the mind virus into his head. He'll be making a movie that's a cross between Escape From New York and Apocalypse Now.

(Which is also funny because The Imaginary Opera is also a cross between those two movies. To learn more about The Imaginary Opera you have to read my Tyrannosaurus Mouse blog.)

In any case, we created a directors' commentary about a movie neither of us had any involvement in. A movie that had a craft services budget which surpasses the total budget for all our movies to date. A movie called Underworld. Note that we do not stay on-topic.

The Audio
The machine transcript
The keywords the computer picked out:
michael sheen, science fiction movie, eighties action movie, commentary track, guitar player,bill nice character, trench coat, blade series, star wars, machine pistols, kate beckinsale,funny thing, vampire movie, blade runner, honestly felt, play guitar, forbidden planet, white clean, downtown birmingham, big crazy, music written, liberty island, arrange parts, comic con, star trek 

You Like Random Information

Verizon's high-speed DSL is $40/month. Their low-speed DSL is $25/month. They charge you $20 to install the thing. (We're having so much trouble with our Internet at the new office that I'm considering just bailing out and getting our own DSL line.)

+++++

Chance Shirley is a world of information about spacesuit helmets. The sphere's he used for his spacesuits came from Complex Plastics. I've written to get a price from them (I actually called but they said to email them -- go figure.)
Here is Chance on the helmet itself:

I believe we used 14" diameter spheres, and we had them cut a 10" holeat the base.

And I think that's a good size for space helmets. The trick, which Inever quite figured out, is how to make a collar to keep the helmetcomfortably/consistently attached to the actor's shoulders. Ourhelmets tended to lean forward, resting against the back of the actorshead. So we put a little strip of foam in the back to at least make it more comfy.

Because Things Chance Says should be on permanent record on the Internet, I include some of his advice (without his permission) right here. This is what he has to say about how the gasket was attached to the helmet:

We glued a wooden hoop (painted metallic) to the gasket, then gluedthe helmet to the wooden hoop. I'm surprised they stayed together aswell as they did. Probably would have been better to build some kindof working mount and attach to the helmet with screws.

I considered a back piece, a la "Alien," but couldn't figure out agood way to do it. If you let gravity keep the helmet in place, watchout for light leaks (which the back piece would help with, too) thatwould give away the fact the helmet isn't really airtight.

And definitely get some lights in there. I figured you could get somekind of cheap LEDs these days...

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All this time I've been whining about how expensive Cedar noise reduction systems are. But rather than buying one for five grand you can just rent one for eighty bucks a day. Considering the fact that we'd only need it about six or maybe eight days a year, that's just $640.

If you don't believe me here is a duck.

Dreamhire also rents Cedar but their ratecard is substantially higher than Audio Rents in CA.

Monster Camp

Monster Camp is a documentary our North American distributor is handling.
*****
"The interior of the coated oatmeal cookie shall be crisp and have the characteristic flavor of oatmeal." That's from the MILITARY SPECIFICATION
COOKIES, OATMEAL; AND BROWNIES; COCOLATE [sic] COVERED. Go ahead and read the whole 28-page .pdf.
*****

*****
From a conversation on IM with Chance Shirley, regarding the creation of materials for key art:
Drew:
I think the deal with key art is that graphically one or two people makes a more powerful image [than a big ensemble].So a monster, a big dude with a bigger gun, and a half-naked girl? That sounds like the making of key art to me.

Chance:
Yeah, that sounds like a plan.

CMIT

I've just had two identical conversations with other sound guys: talking about the difference between the $1800 Schoeps shotgun and the $800 Sanken CS-1. I contend that the re-recording mixer doesn't care about your source, whether it's a boom mic or wireless lav, as long as the tracks are clean. The Sanken probably records with a little more isolation than the Schoeps and probably makes slightly more usable tracks for the dialog editor to carve out in post production, but the Schoeps is so much nicer sounding to the sound crew on set. So the question is: which is more important, slightly better tracks in post, or being less irritated on set?

Everyone's answer: "Being less irritated on set."

Conversations with Chance Volume IV (Audio)

Drew: Make sure that no sound happens over dialog (because you'll have to replicate those sounds for the M&E so that the English dialog-free version sounds exactly like the full English mix). And make sure whomever's booming is "riding the line" just above the actor's heads.
And if for some reason neither of those techniques work, just do a wild take of the dialog - without actors moving around - immediately after the camera take.

Chance: Thanks for the audio advice. I'd already planned on getting all the lines "wild" after each take. And I'm not afraid of ADR anymore, which I should have done a lot more of on HIDE AND CREEP.

Drew: Please... maintain your [healthy] fear of ADR!

Conversations with Chance Volume III

Drew: I love whack colors. I love mixing fluorescent and tungsten's with different colors in the frame. The other thing I love is being able to shoot a reasonable amount of coverage. I'm way to dumb to know what we're going to need to shoot less than about 18:1.

Chance: I think 4:1 is reasonable. But I'm a lazy editor. I've been trying to keep my ratios to 4 or 5 to 1 for years now, just because I hate going through all that footage.

Drew: What are you transferring to? DV or HD or what?

Chance: I'm thinking about going straight to hard disk, DVCPro HD, 1080p, 24fps. Assuming that will work okay (I need to do a test with the lab at some point). If I can't make HD work, I'll go with good ol' DigiBeta.

Conversations with Chance Volume II

Drew: "Sharp" isn't really something I necessarily want in an image. That part of DV compression which is soft and dreamy I kinda like.

Chance: And maybe that's not the right word. "Flat?" "Too Clean?" There's something about video, even good video, that always bugs me, and it's hard to put my finger on what exactly that is.

Drew: Yeah, video has that video look. It's not just gamma, or the highlights (because honestly color reversal stock has similar problems), the framerate, or the latitude. That being said, one can make film look like crap (see: most indy films). But if you have even a somewhat well-lit scene, there's just a little o' that extra magic you can get out of film which is nice.

Chance: Exactly. It just seems like less work for a good image in the long run. Plus, there's so much latitude in the negative. It's amazing how much detail you can pull out of the shadows or the highlights if the need arises.

Drew: And I'm also a fan of infinite depth-of-field, the advantage there goes to DV/HD.

Chance: I tend to like less DOF. That way, it's harder to see the flaws in the background sets/props/etc. I'm half kidding. Plus, like it or not, less DOF is fashionable these days.

Drew: But the way highlights squish on film is nicer (although Panasonic has done a whole lot to make their highlights better.)

Chance: That's for sure. I really hate shooting video outside on a sunny day. Yuck.

Drew: As long as you're shooting naked people there are fewer complaints about the image.

Chance: No doubt. I'm going to call that "Andrew's rule!"


Drew: "Off with the clothes!" I say! "No gratuitious costuming!"

Conversations with Chance Volume I

Here's some of an email conversation with Chance Shirley over at Crewless. (Image courtesy Suicide Girls.)

Chance: Video and film both have their advantages and disadvantages. At the end of the day, you have to look at your budget and script and personal preferences and decide what's best for the project. So far, I've been making genre movies that I want to look kind of like a traditional 80s or 70s B-movie, and I own and am comfortable with a 16mm camera, so I go for Super 16. And I even write the scripts with Super 16 in mind.

Drew: Did you look at the Panasonic HVX200 camera when doing tests against super 16mm?

Chance: Yeah, it looks pretty sharp, but it's not film. The more I look at even higher-end HD (Varicam and Sony's AltaVista), the less I like it. I'm just a nerd that way, I guess.

Drew: To me, 16mm hasn't been nearly as helpful to the image as 35mm.

Chance: Sure. But I like a rawer, grainier look. And it's easier to pull focus on 16mm...

Drew: That's why I'm excited about shooting 2-perf...

Chance: Yes, yes, yes. THAT'S what I'm talking about. I heard Arri's going to add a 2-perf option to their 235 camera.

Drew: ... as soon as we can get our hands on cameras with 1000' magazines...

Chance: Even on 400' magazines, you should get 10 minutes to a roll shooting 2-perf... is that right? If you're shooting lean, 10 minutes of film goes a long way.

Drew: The thing which drives me nuts is having to tell the actors we have to stop to change mags. So don't get me started about what its like to shoot short ends!

Chance: Even disregarding the time issue, short ends can come out a little wonky sometimes. It seems like factory fresh stock is more consistent, as far as color and grain go.

Drew: I'm kinda into Fuji stock...

Chance: Kodak's a little sharper, but Fuji is significantly cheaper. I vote Fuji.

Drew: [W]ould you be shooting 500 ISO stuff?

Chance: For interiors, at least. Might go down to 250 ISO for outside/daytime.

Drew: I've been kinda interested in shooting daylight in tungsten...

Chance: I've never really got "golden" out of daylight stock and tungsten lights -- more "orangen." But playing with the color is half the fun.

Drew: ... [Y]ou [would] have to shift the color balance in post to get the colors to switch from orange to golden. We managed to do that in Millennium Crisis by using the wrong color balance on the DVX100. It looked kinda nice. I wonder if a bronze-color filter would do the trick?

Chance: I'm pretty sure somebody makes a general "warming" filter for that sort of thing, though I'm not sure what they'd call it.