Roboticide

I've been killing a lot of androids lately. I know that's going to come back to me.

Yes, Mother, you can export ProRes out of AfterEffects in Windows. It requires this free plugin from the company DuBon. And you can only export files, not compositions, so you have to pre-render first. But it can be done. It can. Be done. H/T Ian Hubert.

First Aid Kit

As far as I know we've only had one serious injury from someone on-set. And it was during a take in a scene where an actor sat down but because she was measuring the distance behind her she ended up wrenching her thumb. Badly.
Ow!

We have first aid kits on set but I've never really put a lot of deliberate thought into what should be in a first aid kit. Like a decent, real, first aid kit.
For twelve hundred bucks you can buy a defibrillator. But in most of the places I'm in EMS will get there by the time you remember where it is and get someone to get it while you're giving compressions and rescue breaths. So they don't seem terribly practical for actual first aid kits.

A Pocket Mask, however, seems like a super useful thing to have in a first aid kit.

Honestly, I'm a bit surprised they don't come standard in more kits.
But most of what one needs in a first aid kit that gets opened and used on a daily basis is much more pedestrian. I find it hard to locate a pre-stocked kit with exactly what I think we'll need in it. In no particular order, and with some items as definites and others as somebody's gonna want this:

• Eyewash kit
• Saline solution
• Tampons with applicator
• Feminine pads
• Ibuprofen
• Anti-diarrheal medicine
• Hand sanitizer
• Antacid
• Bandaids -- more bandaids is always a good thing. Everyone needs bandaids
• 3-in-1 ointment or Bacitracin or whatever
• alcohol wipes 
• Examination gloves
• Trauma shears
• Forceps
• Instant cold packs

I may update this list. But these are the sorts of things I think I want to have just, you know, around.

You put the Kiss in Masochistic

Dig Dave Campfield's article The Masochistic Existence of a Microbudget Filmmaker.

I know nothing about which he speaks. Nothing. Shh...

Color Correction and You

I know nothing about color correction other than watching Stu Maschwitz' Lightroom Iron Chef.
He's working in Lightroom, which doesn't have a direct analogy to the programs we tend to use for video (and we certainly aren't shooting in RAW) but it's very helpful -- even where I don't exactly agree with his decisions on the final correction it's nice to see how he makes those decisions and experiencing his (very sophisticated) sense of color. 

The video it entirely worth the hour-and-a-half to see the process. Note that the changing the aspect ratio is not something that's really a thing that's possible in the world of movies. But the way he approaches the skin tones and using gradients is really interesting to me.
Honestly I just use his Magic Bullet Looks, maybe adjust the exposure, maybe fade the effect back a bit, and then move on. I'm not saying it's a good idea, it's just what I do.

See Why I Like This?

The book Dialog Editing for Motion Pictures by John Purcell.

Dialog editing

Actually begins a chapter this way:

"Picture plays a huge role in cinematic storytelling--almost rivaling sound in importance."

I am tremendously amused by that sentiment.

Helix

Every product I've owned from Letus has been really cool. By that I mean the 35mm adapters I've had from them have made things look nice. In an indescribable yet cinematic way. There's just a little bit of magic and art in everything they make it seems.
And now they've made their own stabilizer system called the Helix.

I can't even.

This stabilizer looks awesome. It's around $5000.

Tutorials

If AfterEffects is your bag, this Video Copilot tutorial on volumetric light effects is amazing. I mean it's freakin' amazing.
Volumetric light.
In AfterEffects.

This tutorial on color-correction by Stu Maschwitz is very cool. I know I've linked to it before but I just re-watched it and so there.

Strange Works

Strangewerks Films movie Lifeform has quite a bit of crossover to Pandora Machine movies. Indeed the star of Lifeform, Virginia Logan, is the star of our new movie Dead Residents.
Brian Schiavo talks about animating the creature. Our own Nathan Taylor worked on the rigging of the monster.

Maduka Steady as the evil robot Argus in 1202 (stills for key art).

Production Based on Post-Production

I got the pleasure yesterday of hearing two actors talking about how great the script was. The script we're shooing, presently titled Dead Residents, was writ by the muse who directs the hand of Steven J Niles.
The script moves. And the characters are all specific and different. It's pretty awesome. And I'm digging how it looks.

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I've also been really enjoying the 4-hour shoot days. I would like to keep us down to 4-hour shoot days. What does that mean? Well it means I'm lazy. But also:
We have to increase the number of shoot days.
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The other thing is that we have some very hard deadlines for this picture.
But if we shoot the movie based on our post-production bottlenecks, we can do production and post at the same time. For practical purposes this means we shoot in such a way that entire acts in post can be edited. Which means we need to be sure to unload series of scenes which all go together.
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I think this means we should immediately shoot:

• all the scenes which have composites
• all the scenes for the first act

So that's what I'm going to schedule.  A shooting schedule based on post-production needs, making sure post has the footage they need in order to work concurrently on the movie. This means we can actually be shooting picture right up until we need to make delivery. I mean, not right up until we need to make delivery. But, or our purposes, pretty darn close.

Bite Celtx Mouse

Makeup FX: bite marks.

You know what I wish Celtx would do?

• Merge characters (because you frequently get "duplicates" of characters, some of whom show up in some scenes and not others)
• Print a day's sides based on the schedule (because, you know, that would make life easier).

Right now we are in fact using Celtx to schedule feature films. I'm sure we're the only ones out there doing that. We scheduled our last movie (and I think we didn't miss any scenes) and we're scheduling our next picture too. We. Shall. See.

New York Sea Gypsies, not the world's most politically-correct name for a dive organization, do dives through the winter off of New Jersey.

Are you aware that the Tyrannosaurus Mouse album is out now? You'll be able to buy it on Amazon.


Wait, no. You can buy it on Amazon now.

Transitions

So I'll admit I've been watching a lot of Spaced lately, which I hadn't seen before. Stylistically it's really streets ahead of even stuff like Community. Virtually every shot is some sort of genre-inspired transition. That's not actually factual but it feels like it's true.

Back in the olden days we would get yelled at by distributors and trailer editors for not having a moving camera. So by the time we shot Alien Insurrection we'd decided to do as much of the movie handheld as possible. This was a real bear with the HVX2000 and the Letus adapter with a 35mm lens on the front.
Since then I've had a tendency to go for a more "immediate" sort of "you are there" look with shooting handheld. The Firefly TV series might have had a hand in encouraging that tendency in me.
But the thing I realized from watching Spaced is that I never shoot transition shots. 
This is mostly because I have no idea how we'll want to edit a scene when we shoot it. This may in fact be a fairly large whole in my filmmaking methodology. Maybe I should know how we're getting from one scene to the next.
Of course, as a technique it way pull attention to itself. "Ooh! Look how smart we are doing this dolly move which is picked up by the next shot." So yeah, there's that. But I think I'm still in the Firefly style rather than the very formal style with glacially slow camera moves. I think
Our next movie is clearly a handheld and security camera extravaganza. But after that? Do we use a dolly more?

New Workflow

Neoscene is dead. Also, it's just not really working for me. Following the post here I'm trying FCP and compressor.

It took two days to get this still of Julia Rae Maldonado without interlacing.

What's going on is that I'm having hellatious problems with interlacing. Which, seeing as how we're shooting in a progressive format, just shouldn't be happening.
I can't figure out why Neoscene is being such a problem with interlacing. For years Neoscene worked for us. Then suddenly it stopped working. I had to download a new version (and Cineform quickly got me a new serial number for which I am thankful) and I had trouble seemingly with the checkbox to filter 420 to 422.
But now even that doesn't work.
So the new way of bringing in footage from the GH1 is to

1. Log and Transfer into Final Cut Pro. (We use ProRes SQ). And then:
2. Set the footage to 23.976 using JES. Because, you know, why use one step when you can use two?

Final Cut Pro is terrible when it comes to data management. Why you would put final actual camera footage in a folder called "capture scratch" is completely beyond me. I mean seriously. Right?
Then with JES -- I can't actually find any instructions on the Internet which reflect the transcoding program with its most recent interface. So, uh, you kind of have to guess how to do a "reverse telecine" with it. If you click through all the menus and do what you think you should it seems to work out all right.

EDIT: it has not escaped my attention that perhaps this all means that we should be going to Red Giant's BulletProof.

La Roux

I'm not 100% sure that Red Giant's "Bulletproof" will really do the thing for us. It may be that it's a better tool for making ProRes files from the ridiculous .mts files we're shooting right now.
I think that one thingy about Bulletproof is that the philosophy behind it is that you want to save all your decisions about color correction until the very end of the post process.
I'm a big fan of making decisions early. If I could set the color of highlights and shadows right there on the floor while we're shooting, I would totally do that.
Bulletproof lets you import a LUT and do a bunch of things with your original footage. I can imagine there's a world where working with that kind of workflow makes sense, but that's not how we do things in our shop. I expect this is partly/mostly because I am lazy we have a fairly short period of time to get movies completed and we have no money or time to re-think details of color-correction which haven't basically been made when we were shooting.
In other words, we don't shoot "flat". I try to have some 100% video and some 0% in every shot. We try to go ahead and make the picture look like something and do minimal CC in post.
If we were shooting commercials or even movies with budgets exceeding $250K, we might think about staving off our color decisions to post. But maybe not.

There's a whole thing about mixing in the audio world where you keep telling your new recordists not to EQ things, not to compress or add reverb, because you'll deal with all that in the mix. It's hard to "un"-EQ things and virtually impossible to un-compress and un-reverb sounds. So dry, dynamic, and unmodified is the go-to wisdom on the subject.
And a journeyman sound person won't EQ recorded signals (except perhaps some high-pass to get out some rumble). But as my old buddy Alan Douches says "commit!" Alan is no journeyman. And up there in the lofty heights of the master level yes, you want to make some decisions about sounds and commit them to tape. No waiting. Make decisions now. As long as they're the correct decisions everything will go faster and the mix will be easier.
I'm not a master in audio. And I'm certainly less a master as a DP. Yet still recklessly I'd rather go in and get close to being finished at the acquisition stage.

Must Needs Be Done

It's funny, completing a feature film is a monumental effort -- thousands of man hours of work and the willingness to see the movie through the end of its process no matter how you're feeling about the movie on a given day. 
But the actual delivery requirements can be... daunting. You think you're all done with color-correcting, with eliminating matte lines and cleaning up dialog tracks and then --
-- And then you have to deal with a LOT of paperwork.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. In fact there's a Federal injunction against me complaining about anything because, after all, I'm allowed to direct feature films for (a poor) living.
But I thought it would be amusing to post the sorts of delivery items one must produce in order to get North American distribution.
Note that all deals are unique and different. And this one particular distributor is more picky. Ironically the requirements for North America have become more legally detailed for low-budget indy pictures in the last few years due to the heady deep-pockets liability inherent in the big VOD services -- they're sticklers for every "i" being crossed and "t" being dotted.

Documentation

1. ☑ Screenplay
2. ☐ Composers Agreement
3. ☐Sync & Master Use License agreement
4. ☐Paid Ads statement  ( On your letter head, detailing which actors/above the line crew get what credit, in what order, etc )
5. ☐Dubbing Restriction ( On your letterhead, detailing if there are any dubbing restrictions.)
6. ☐Director & Producer agreements  ( - similar to the writer's agreement)
7. ☐Title Search report .  ( You can use someone like  http://www.suzyvaughan.com/  who is half price of Thomson Compumark )
8. ☐Copyright report (it's possible this may not be required)
9. ☐Stock Footage statement ( On you letter head, detailing if there is any stock footage in the movie and if so, where it comes from and legal rights to use it. )
10. Chain of title document
11. Trailer Usage.  ( A statement on your letter head that says there are no restrictions with actor usage in the trailer )
12. Copyright FORM PA  Script and Movie

"Cut" Means "Keep Acting"

Liquor
So, I haven't been drinking on this set. It's mostly because I'm afraid that it'll mess with my focus. Literally, my focus — I have to manually focus my lens on this picture. I am in love with my Canon SSC lenses. We didn't use them on the last two pictures but boy, they're just beautiful.
My depth-of-field is a quarter of the width of an actor's eye, but the picture is beautiful.

Footwear
I've made another determination: I will put a $100 line item for a new pair of sneakers on each movie I make. Running around on concrete floors all day will mess up my knees. No more of that. One new pair of sneakers for each movie. New Balance 840's are my shoe of choice right now.
They are not a good looking sneaker, mind you. Can I dye them? How about some black paint?

Camera
I do wish the camera I shot on did not have rolling shutter issues. Now to be clear, the only time I run into it where it's a problem is during compositing. So we lock down the camera for all composites (and add a bit of motion like it's handheld later).
Also: the time has come for us to get video tap. I honestly don't understand the need for HD video tap. SD is perfectly fine for seeing what's going on and for focusing.
Furthermore: I don't mind the amount of compression we get with the relatively low bitrate on the stock Panasonic GH1. Those things just aren't where the problems lie for us. Horizontal banding? Yup, that's an issue (and one which I simply cannot guess when will happen or not.) Rolling shutter? That also stinks. Blacks which are sunk forever? That could be an issue, but we shoot around it.*
We shot two features with a hacked GH1 and I've gone back to the unhacked stock version of the camera. First of all, it's more reliable. For those of you who have been on set when the camera has decided to cut and destroy a take, you know exactly what I mean. The camera works as advertised when it's "stock".**

Kermit
Watching takes I realize I sound like Kermit the Frog on a bender. I'm shouting things like "Stay in character!", "I'm bored with not making a movie!", and "Be more aggressive getting that microphone in there!".
At one point I actually said "The word "cut" means "keep acting"!

*The blacks being sunk actually saves us some time in post color-correction 'cause let's face it — you want to sink the shadows anyway. And with the amount of fog we typically have on set our contrast is pretty low anyway.
**I keep hearing horror stories of the RED going down in the middle of a shoot day. That must be incredibly demoralizing.

Beware Producers (Including Me)

How do you know when a producer is lying? His lips are moving. Ha! Yes. I love this joke.

The dudes at The Asylum are very savvy. And they're pretty straight-up honest dudes. Their BS level is quite low. Still, be then thou wary of any producer who actually gives numbers when talking about movies.

Producers lie for a couple reasons. The first is to make everyone think they're really poor so they don't have to pay anybody — either before or after making the movie. But they also lie about how expensive their movies are in order to make sure their distributors are not feeling ripped off by selling them a cheap movie. These two lies tend to make producers tell you they haven't brought in any revenue from a given picture and that they're spending a whole lot of money on a picture. Except when they're bringing in lots of money (they might say this to investors or their parents).
So never trust a producer when they're telling you numbers. I mean, unless they've decided to be candid with you. How can you tell? It's very hard. Maybe you can't. But like I said, the Asylum is relatively malarky-free, there are just a lot of political reasons for them to not give you the truth and the facts straight up. You'll note that I'm not judging anybody here. Why? Because I've been there, man, I've been there.
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Now that I've made that disclaimer, I'd like to point out that The Asylum's Paul Bales talks some numbers. And, honestly, I believe him. I mean, with the caveats that everybody in their production and sales chain doesn't want to hear real numbers.

"Our sexy comedies like "18 Year Old Virgin," and "#1 Cheerleader Camp," and our "found footage" films like "Paranormal Entity," have budgets around $100,000; our regular "mockbuster" and creature films are between $200-750K; and our network originals like "Zombie Apocalypse" are $1-2 million. In terms of gross, it varies widely. Our sexy comedies and found footage movies are usually the most profitable, with margins upward of 50%."

If they really are making those kinds of margins on their cheap pictures then they're getting $200K in sales from them. I would think they're really spending about $75K and making maybe $125K on the pictures.
Or: he's dead-on and those are all totally real numbers.
If so, their revenues are better than anybody's in the indy world. Which makes some sense because they're clearly more successful than anybody else in the indy world.

O! That we could make $125K on offworld sci-fi without name talent. 

Scripty!

John Bruno discusses the importance of the script supervisor.
Here in the Pandora Machine we gave up on script supervision awhile ago.
This is one of those movie making rules like "never mix drunk" -- we don't pay attention to it although it's not that it's a bad idea in and of itself.*.
For me the difficulty with script supervision is that most of the work they do goes unused. The picture editors don't really trust the script supervisors to give them everything they need to know so they tend to not even look in the script supervisor's book during post. The other thing is that I really don't care what anybody has to say on set if they're not an editor. Whether a DP or a fight director, if you haven't edited a feature then you really don't know what you're doing. You might know a whole bunch of rules, and it may tend to be that if you follow all the rules you know you'll tend to not get into trouble.
But we don't really have time for all that.**

We just have time to shoot all the action, all the dialog in closeup, details of anything anybody does in the scene (like light a cigarette), a clean of anything anyone refers to in the scene (like the dead body on the floor), and whatever amusing thing anybody in the room tells you to shoot (if there's time).
This is one reason we like having Maduka Steady with us on shoot days. And the end of a scene I can turn to him and say "Anything else we need to get?" And sure, there's a whole shtick made up about how he invariably says "Get feet, closeup, walking in and out." But I'll tell ya -- we use those shots more often than you'd think in the final picture edit.
Picture edit. It's where the movie is actually made. I mean, sure, you can argue it's the dialog edit where the picture is really made but... picture edit. It's where the movie is actually made.

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*Why on earth would I use that analogy? Oh. I see.
**The one think I do wish we'd do is write down the location of wild audio takes in the master script. Because knowing that is useful in post.

Avid or Premiere

Our sales rep uses Los Angeles Duplication and Broadcasting over there in Burbank California.
George Lucas remembers Ralph McQuarrie. (Via Chance.)
+++++

Not long from now comes the time when we have to move off of Final Cut Pro. We've got somewhere between 1 and 3 movies that we'll stay with FCP. But eventually we'll have to move to a new editor.
Now maybe, just maybe, Apple will decide to continue the Final Cut non-X series.
But I ain't banking on it.
I'll tell ya -- I'm very prejudiced toward Premiere. I've cut two features on Premiere. And the learning curve between Premiere and Final Cut Pro is virtually nothing.
Last time I used Premiere the biggest issue was that the editor brought hundreds of music files into the bin and Premiere wants to render out all the waveform displays for all those files. Normally (with Final Cut) bringing in hundreds of files into a bin wouldn't matter. FCP would just ignore those files until told otherwise. But in Premiere it made the whole project very data heavy which was a major pain for us.
There are a whole bunch of people who have moved over to Avid. I don't know if that's really the right direction for us. Especially because you can rent Premiere for a few months if you need to.
We won't make a decision for at least 6 months though.

Bring On The Noize

So, I got some masters kicked back from QC at me recently. My biggest fear is getting masters kicked back at me because the Music & Effects tracks don't sound exactly like the English Dialog Mix. So I go to a lot of trouble to make sure they sound identical (with the exception of the actual English dialog of course.)
But these masters weren't kicked back because the English and the M&E's sounded different. They just didn't like the way the mix sounded.

Pushkin was a very quiet cat. Never made any sound on set. Once he prevented the sound mixer from rolling because he was sitting in her lap. "I can't roll, cat is on my lap." At the time that seemed like a completely valid reason to not roll sound.

Let's go back a bit. The picture is a post-apocalypse picture. And we shot it in one of the noisiest cities in North America. That is, of course, New York. What this means is that something approaching 100% of the original dialog is unusable. There's just about nothing you can do about that. It doesn't matter how you mic the actors or how long you wait for the damned fire trucks five blocks away to turn off their sirens, the city is simply noisy. You're not going to get post-apocalypse silence in your tracks.
Let's back up for a minute. It's standard operating procedure on big-budget pictures for the composer to write score for the entire picture, the Foley artist to create sound effects for the entire picture, and the sound department to cut sound effects for the entire picture. From start to end, "spotting" the picture be damned! Everybody does 100% of the picture and on the mix stage they decide if/when they're going to use Foley, sound effects, and/or music.
Now at some point the idiot director decided that he just wanted to hear wind and music when we're outside. That director has been shot sedated. Oh wait. It was me. So yeah, "sedated".
So there are big swaths of the picture where the lead is walking around abandoned Gowanus and there's just music on the sound track. No footsteps.

Well that was a mistake.

I realize the visual effects look painted, but I kinda dug that about this shot. Heck, I still dig that about this shot. Daryl Boling at the spaceport in Millennium Crisis. 

"Oops", as it turns out, doesn't really cut it with distributors. "Fix it" is usually the response. That's what I'm doing now. Y'know, because I don't have anything better to be doing -- what with completing post-production on one movie and going into pre-pro on another and going into production on yet another. Sheesh.
Well. Lesson learned.
We don't have to do the movie 100%. But buyers will be annoyed if we don't do the standard job of Foley for most footsteps and suchly.

I felt the urge to add this picture to this extremely important blog post.

And seriously, I need a little Foley-stepping thing for our recording studio. You know -- a little box with different surfaces to walk on? Aw heck, that'll never happen -- we'll just go out into the hallway on weekends with our portable recorder.

This is a good time for me to plug Freesound.org again. They seriously have the most usable Foley effects of any library. The thing with Foley -- sometimes you don't want it to sound too good. It's gotta be a bit band-limited, with a bit of distance to it, just so it'll fit in with the dialog tracks.

I also need a Cedar DNS. Need. Not want.

Production

Production on a feature is simply "advanced pre-production". Many people (especially those who only do production) think that shooting the movie is making the movie. It ain't.
You make the movie in "post-production". You simply gather your materials for making the movie while you're "in production". And it is 100% counter-intuitive what you need to do on-set in order to get the stuff you need when you actually make the movie, months later. Also, your most expensive single days occur when you're in production. So it's understandable to think that shooting the movie is making the movie. It's just wrong.
So say I. So say we all.
But that's not what you're here for.

What you want to know is how you should photograph a person so they can be slapped onto a UV wrap of a human model in 3D. Here is Nathan Vegdahl's advice:

Photograph the person standing, feet apart, arms outstretched, palms toward camera, looking right intocamera. Long lens to reduce edge distortion. Use as diffuse and omni-directional lighting conditions as you can. Outside on an overcast day, for example. Basically, the less directional lighting the better. You don't want the lighting in the texture competing with the lighting in the 3d render.

Via.