Your Two Things for Today

As per comments below, PSA and Lindsay Stewart, some links:
[Edit: Ha! I had a link here to Wondershare. It apparently is/was a video conversion utility although it was based on a GPU - licensed application. Dorp! In any case, the company is apparently trying to turn themselves around or something and they actually asked me to remove the link. I have no idea why. Anyway, use JES Deinterlacer. It's great.]
Casper, from ThinkCrew is an excel call sheet generator.

Mind Bending

Brian blogged about his mind-transfer prop. The brain jacks look great. I'm very pleased with the Brazil-esque look of it.

Brain jacks. Jared Van Heel, master brain altering device, Tarantino Smith, Kimball Brown, and Julia Rae Maldonado.

Within minutes of making my last post on call sheets was

1. everything fine?
2. a fundamental error in what character was played by what actor made evident to me in an email by the screenwriter?

I'll let you guess.

Celtx Call Sheets

Getting call sheets out is the hardest part of filmmaking for me. Making them even remotely accurate is just a herculean task. Sheesh.

Up until now we've been using spreadsheets and manually filling in information on the call sheets. But on this movie I've been experimenting using Celtx.
Celtx will actually generate call sheets. One can "print" the call sheets to .pdf files (and then print the sheets). You do need to be careful that Celtx actually understands what character is in what scenes. 

• Disadvantages include no specific place to put the address of the closest hospital.
• Also, I'd like a place to put notes. 

But overall the Celtx call sheets look and work pretty well. We've only shot one day, of course, so who knows what other issues will come up? If a disaster happens I'll let you know.

420

Apparently for some people 4:2:0 is not a video sampling scheme or a code for smoking that Devil's Weed, but is a day for buying music at record stores.
My cousin Kim gives you tips on visiting your record store tomorrow in her Huffington Post article.

Kick Me

Kevin Kangas is doing a Kickstarter for his new movie Garden of Hedon. One big difference is that he's kickstarting a movie which has already been made.


That's an interesting way to go with a Kickstarter project.
Fund his project and make it a lot of money please.
+++++
Thing with me is that I adamantly refuse to enter the 21st Century and get a BluRay player. 

You don't see this every day

We played with TWO bass players last night. We couldn't really record both of them at the same time though.

Ethan Rosenblatt and Lily Kenner on basses.

Wild and crazy times. See?

Andrew Bellware, Greg Bartus, Ethan Rosenblatt.

 Rehearsals are a wild time don'tcha know?

Fortunately/Unfortunately

Fortunately, Red Giant's BulletProof looks like a nice solution to our problems ingesting footage from the unhacked GH1 into Final Cut Pro.
Unfortunately, BulletProof is not actually compatible with Panasonic cameras.
Fortunately, Adobe Premiere will, as pointed out by Kangas in the comments below, work with Panasonic's .mts files.
Unfortunately, Premiere will not read and interpret those .mts files shot at 23.98 but in a 29.97 container properly.

Fortunately, the most recent version of JES Deinterlacer will read .mts files, reverse-telecine them, and create ProRes Quicktimes which can be read by Final Cut directly.
Unfortunately those same files don't seem to be readable by Premiere.
Fortunately there is a thing called Adobe Media Encoder.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like Adobe Media Encoder naturally does reverse telecine.

So... right now it looks like the JES Deinterlacer and Final Cut Pro. Unless it's the JES Deinterlacer and Premiere. I don't know. I'm sticking to FCP just because it's "the devil you know". But... I dunno.

$32 over budget

So we had a shoot day and we needed 5 wireless mics and for some dumb reason I didn't bring one extra female XLR to male TRS for the fifth mic. Sheesh. It has to go in TRS. So I ran to Sam Ash in Edison, NJ of all places and asked for a cable. It actually took us a while and we found a 10-foot one. I really just wanted 18". So the dude looked some more and found, for five more dollars, a 3' (one meter) Monster Cable. He's all like "This is a much better cable."
I said "Meh. At least it has Neutrik connectors."
Him: "No really, it's special cable, the highs go down one pair of wires and the lows down another so they all end up getting there at the same time."
I actually said (and looking the whole time exactly like my Dad) "I don't believe any of that."

Monster cable nonsense. And I had a pair of perfectly serviceable Canare Star Quad cables sitting on the doorknob of the booth.

Tomorrow night we record some Samanas. I intend to record some stuff to use in The Imaginary Opera.

This setup is elegant and it sounds great.

The Bears of New York

Like half of the cast of Dragon Realm made this short film.


Chris Pope, Leslie Ann Chastain, and John Dillon.

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.

Every Pop Song

I'm totally going to do the gloves-come-off dance. Plus, also, too. Best Buy is closing out their instrument department. Cheap new guitars even though they're not set up in any way.

1301 Day 1 III

 Once everyone has their brains hooked up to Brian Schiavo's mind-melder, there's nothing you can't do. Stacey Raymond, Jared Van Heel, Tarantino Smith, Kimball Brown and Julia Rae Maldonado.

See? This is the kind of framing I was wanting. We shot all day on sticks 'till we got to the last scene and there I went handheld.

Jared Van Heel wearing the brain jack while Stacey Raymond turns it on.

 Between Brian's device and Caitlin's costumes we really had an easy time building this world.

We managed to shoot like this because we had wireless microphones on everyone. Although Tarantino's went "phulfhpatt" near the end of the shoot so he had to deliver his line's in to Kimball's microphone.

Tarantino Smith and Kimball Brown wait warily as their leader is locked in a virtual-cast.

It's a long hard day at the rebel headquarters.

Ew. Kissing.

My kisses are made of light.

Tarantino and Julia. I really dig these two-shots I like the bit of extra space they give us.

Julia Rae Maldonado, the girl of your dreams? Or your nightmares?

 Brian Schiavo build this brilliant brain jack.

Watching the prisoners get jacked in. Note that Julia is wearing her coat from home and has an ice pack in her hand. This is clearly just a rehearsal.

1301 Day 1 Part Deux

The overly sultry Tarantino Smith strikes a thoughtful pose.

Today ran really smoothly. I did underestimate by about an hour how long we'd be there. But we worked quickly and shot a hello amount of pages. And we got some fantastic performances with some beautiful actors in great costumes. What more could we possibly ask for?

Kimball Brown, Stacey Raymond, Jared Van Heel, Tarantino Smith, and Julia Rae Maldonado in a wide gang shot.

I'm amused by the sheer number of guns we had on set. Plus, we had Julia tied up for about half the day. Could Caitlin have chosen a more perfect wig for Julia? I mean Hello! No!

Alvarez menaces Avatar Barbara. The Martian Queen's lighting on these faces makes you want to reach out and touch them, doesn't it?

 We did in fact run through a lot of pages. One scene ran over five minutes long. And the warehouse was cold today which was hardest on Julia because everyone else had layers.

Julia Rae Maldonado has her wig fixed by Caitlin Cisek. Note that's my hoodie covering Julia up in-between takes.

Kimball Brown in a sort of "lucky" take -- she'd actually walked out of her own light but into this very interesting light to do a couple lines. Serendipity it is.

Right. Exactly. This is what we've come to expect.

1301 Day 1 Part 1

Today was the first day of shooting Android Masquerade.

Kimball Brown, Stacey Raymond, Jared Van Heel, Tarantino Smith, and Julia Rae Maldonado in the rebels' hideout.

Caitlin Cisek did an absolutely knock-out job with the costumes.

Kimball Brown, Stacey Raymond, and Jared Van Heel.

The day went a bit longer than I'd intended. We had an 11am call at the train station and were wrapped by 8pm still -- I was tired by the end of it.
One of the ideas we'd had was to shoot in these sort of medium two or three-shots. That, I think, mostly worked.

Stacey Raymond in her techno gear. She has an engine that she's working at. And her jumpsuit is just amazing.

Jared Van Heel interrogates the prisoner.

 The Queen of Mars did all the lighting. I love the way the faces all modeled in the light.

Julia Rae Maldonado looks very different from how she looked in Dragon Realm.

We really haven't seen this environment in any of our movies before. It's almost a set that's built of boxes which hold enormous sheets of glass. And some computer server cases. I think.

More Julia Rae Maldonado.

Caitlin could not have chosen a more perfect wig for Julia. (Poor Julia whumped her thumb really hard in the very first take.)