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Yesterday I:

1. Delivered the (new) hard drive to the lab for Alien Uprising
(I've delivered picture to labs for four different movies now and for some reason this dang movie was the most complicated to do.)
2. Agreed to make Bill Cunningham's next movie. We're gonna make a live action comic book!
3. Got the new Dominion script from Mozz.

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We're shooting Dominion in... um... March?

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2.22.02.22=2.26.01.01
The second timecode is the beginning of the "textless" portion of Alien Uprising which matches the "texted" portion at the first time code. This is important for me to know.

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I simply love the texture of the silk in this painting of Lamia.

Notes on a script

I was wondering what to do about Helen walking around and her nethers. Perhaps when she gets her gun she also takes a gun-belt and thigh holster. Possibly that could work in such a way that it just makes her topless for the rest of the pages? She is naked, from what I can tell, for about 44 pages...

I want her to kill her some robo biotches earlier. Can she kill the guy(s) who come into the barracks?

Nice saving the cat there with Nathan. I was thinking that perhaps he can recognize she's a 'droid and they fight, she cripples him and decides not to kill him. I realize that means she has to not weaponize every time she fights.

We need to establish that the people taking over the station are androids early on. Maybe someone just says "Androids!"

If they're all in black uniforms, doesn't Helen notice she's in a black uniform in the flashbacks?

Rather than "environmentals" maybe we just just say "the air compressors are off". That's why the station is quiet (too quiet). I know, I know, that makes an issue with the air shaft. Perhaps the androids kill the O2 to the whole facility except to the hostage room. Oh wait, does the air shaft thing really do anything ultimately with the plot? It's just a way to move people around, isn't it? That could be done by anything -- just automatically closing off sections of the station for instance.

Dude, the pejorative term androids use for humans -- "breather" -- is fantastic! And "shells" for androids!

My first thought is that she shouldn't be convinced by Hywel's lie about her so easily. I feel she should know she's a robot, or at least have an idea. She should maybe be a bit Hamletian about whom to kill and why. It would be nice if she saw humans treating robots badly too -- then she could have a real dilemma about which side to be on.

Remember, the idea is that a combat android wakes up on a space station that's under attack and doesn't know which side she's on! ;-)

More flashbacks in the 60 pages region.

I feel that activating Creation should be more of a Messianic mission for Tybalt. It's not so much that it'll make the androids "human" as it will serve Justice and bring the androids their Messiah. Perhaps Tybalt promises "freedom" rather than "humanity" with Creation. I know. What the androids in Blade Runner were looking for was immortality. Perhaps there's planned obsolescence with the androids and they burn out relatively young. Creation will make them immortal. What do you think?

How does the Weapon work? I thought there was a hint when there was only one vial of nanobots for Nathan. Perhaps the Hell End models are bio/nano-weapons because they can create the nanobots which replicate and destroy living things and machines. Is the Weapon also Creation? Is it simply Helen 2? Or does it take both Helens to make Creation?

Helen 2 should probably waste a couple androids when she first wakes up.

I think Helen 1 should be contemplating mass suicide/homicide with her weapon instead of stabbing herself in the tum.

Overall I want to simplify it a bit by making the ending a bit more clear and by reducing the number of speaking parts.

D90

Here is a great page which details the consensus of reviews of the Nikon D90 as a movie camera. You guys at Canon, I would totally be going in your direction if you'd provide a 24fps option on the 5D.

Conclusion: 16GB SDHC cards are under $30. Each one would have over 2 hours of record time on it (which is easily enough for a day of shooting) and you can plug the cards directly into virtually any computer.

How many lenses do I need? I think I can shoot most any movie with 2.1 lenses. We could grab virtually anything with a 35mm, an 85mm, and a macro adaptor (that's the ".1" lens). It would be amusing to have a long-ish 200mm lens (or possibly some sort of teleconverter 2x glass for the 85mm.)
I suspect that for practical reasons (cost) it might be best to go with a couple old Nikon f2.0 lenses but it sure would be fun to get a couple f1.4's wouldn't it?

I'll miss my S.S.C. lenses though... sniff...

Here's a depth of field calculator which has D90 settings available. You can save a lot of money by buying cheaper lenses which are f1.8 or f2.0 instead of f1.4. Ken Rockwell likes the Nikon 85mm f2.0. Apparently the "AI" and the "AI-s" version of that lens are the same.

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Noise Industries FXFactoryPro effects plugin for Final Cut et al. Might come in handy if we end up doing a super-stylized movie.

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Am listening to the M&E mix of Alien Uprising. Fearing hearing some actual dialog which ended up on an effects track by accident. Have heard a couple grunts but nothing in particular -- not any "dialog" by any means.

Whew. OK, so that's one QC check we passed...

24 Hours Later

How to set up a PC as a security web camera.

But it looks like our Mac is the computer which will be running all the time so Periscope is a $25 program for security cameras with OS X.

Here's Quicktime Broadcaster.

Blue Microphones Eyeball looks pretty cool.

So of course the main computer has decided that today is the day to crash like crazy. I just rebooted. We'll see how that goes.

It's been nigh on 24 hours since we found the errors in the files we sent to the lab. I'm hopefully rendering out the last of the corrected files right now. I desperately need some sleep...

Blowing It

I blew it. I made two major errors in my output to disc on Alien Uprising. I... I spelled someone's name wrong.

And also, the letterboxing did not reliably go all the way through the picture. And that royally sucks.

Plus I was unhappy with one of the images we chose (I chose) for the "curtain call" at the end of the picture.

Oh right -- and then the thing we discovered yesterday where I didn't really output the way the lab would have preferred.

So that's four. For major errors.

So we've "stopped the presses". I'm re-rendering now to output again. Luckily they'd only just transferred the data from my drive to theirs overnight -- they hadn't actually run the job onto tapes. If they had, I'd have to ask Tana Sarntinoranont if he wanted to change his name legally.*

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Olja Hrustic has a new web site.

It's a T-shirt. You can buy it. More unofficial Star Wars shirts.

*You know, normally his name would be the only name I'd guarantee I spelled correctly -- normally I'd have messed up something like "Smith" because I would be really careful about Tana's name and really sloppy with "Smith". I must have been getting cocky because I thought I'd learned to spell his name when making call sheets or something.

h264 versus DVCPro HD 720p

I made these .jpg files in Final Cut Pro from the viewer window.

We're comparing the rendered out highest-quality h264 files versus the DVCPro HD 720p files.

Note that the renders were all mostly in 8-bit because we were having a devil of a time with some of the composites and overwhites and gamma which simply would not go away until we set the sequence settings to render in 8-bit. What's super awesome about that is that you couldn't see the problems on the screen until we rendered out new files. They wouldn't show up even if you pre-rendered. And to that I say Hoo freakin Ray!

Although the drive is already at the lab, I'm going to experiment with putting the bit depth back to high. UPDATE: Actually, that particular shot with the banding has a lot of effects on it. And it's only a couple frames where it sucks that much. Much of the general yukkitude is part of the original footage, raising the bit depth doesn't/didn't help.

It's easy to tell which image is the DVCPro because they're somewhat skewed to the wrong aspect ratio. UPDATE. OK, I fixed that. So let's look at the pictures one by one shall we?

Here is Ryan and Warchild. Top picture is from the h264 Quicktime (exported, as all the 264's here, with keyframe set to "automatic" and the highest-quality, dual-pass). The lower picture is from the rendered out DVCPro HD 720p Quicktime. What do we learn? Well, one thing is I gotta decide upon whom to focus we gotta fire the focus puller.



This image with nobody in it shows the worst of the "banding" which I can find. Top is h264, bottom is DVCPro HD. Honestly, they both look really close to what is in the timeline.

I can't really see a difference between the h264 and the DVCPro HD.*






The last two are Dunn in the hallway. It's the same frame, two different renders.

Remember that these images were all acquired on a Panasonic HVX200 using a Letus35 adapter and Canon S.S.C. lenses. (My guess is that the top images are an 85mm, the middle a 50mm or... maybe an 85mm, and the bottom a 35mm.)

They were imported into Final Cut Pro and I really don't understand what it is that Final Cut does when it imports DVCPro HD 720p from the .mxf files on a P2 card -- is that another compression hit? Who knows?

Then the images were rendered out to h264 and DVCPro HD.

And THEN they were made into the .jpg images (using the highest quality settings in FCP and exporting as a still image from the viewer.)

Plus also too I nearly screwed up big-time with the files at the lab. They were going to take the flattened Quicktimes and bring them into their own project. Eek! That's totally not how I'd set it up. That could have gone very badly -- I'd made changes in a timeline which didn't need rendering -- but there were additional video files of those changes. So they would have made DigiBetas with the errors (which we'd already caught) in them.

Plus, I didn't realize that FCP will output multitrack Quicktimes. Apparently the number of tracks is dictated by the number of outputs you have. Sheesh! I could have avoided a lot of rendering that way (I think). Although I don't know how iDVD handles Quicktimes with more than two tracks. Does it just sum them? Does it just take the first two tracks?

*I'm not saying they're identical, I just can't really decide which is better.

Outperforming the Market

I was looking over cash flow charts and thinking today about how Pandora Machine has been able to eke out a tiny bit of money on each movie we make. Not enough to pay the actors. Just almost barely enough to live on in the greater New York metropolitan area. For one.

But not really.

And then I realized -- we're performing ahead of the market.

Way ahead.

Unfortunately that ain't sayin' much.

Sheesh. It makes me want to curl up in a ball with only one ear out. Sometimes.

The Internet is a Time Vampire

Update: How to avoid an attack. Self-defense video. Everyone should watch this.

I should be taking the day off -- just having delivered a movie and all -- but instead I'm working on another script.

It is yet another prison planet movie. I don't really remember having written it. The date on it is 2003. I had started it before we wrote Millennium Crisis and the thing I find odd about it is its similarities to the other two prison planet movies we've made.

We've got a cargo ship which is required to land on an automated prison facility in order to pick up prisoners. They find that most of the prisoners on the planet are dead and then they are taken hostage by a band of very bad prisoners but then the remaining crew and prisoners have to band together 'gainst a greater threat just to get back to their ship.

Hmm... That's the overall idea to Alien Uprising.

And the prisoners have bio-tags, just like Solar Vengeance. What's odd is that I remember that idea coming up when QOM wrote the original story to Solar Vengeance. Since we'd done another movie in-between perhaps I totally forgot about the original idea. I have no idea who came up with it.

The characters and the threat are completely different, of course, and the ending... well right now the ending is just weird. Weird with weird sauce actually. So the movie feels nothing like the previous two. Especially when the "Borg Queen" shows up. Oh just pretend I never mentioned that...

Last night we went over the story with the Save the Cat model and it holds up. So I'm going to bang away on it for a couple weeks and if we still like it we'll begin pre-pro.

That is if I can get off the dang Internet and do some work.



The Night of the Living Dead on Hulu.



Ronald Jenkees:



And a Ronald Jenkees cover:

Done with that?

Re: Alien Uprising. Well the drive is off to the lab. Did a QC last night and found three errors so I came in early and fixed them. Hopefully that's the end. Of this round of changes, I mean.

Yeah, we're going to do one more QC DVD. Leef. Hoping that what we sent to the lab doesn't have any issues which came up without my seeing/hearing them. Keeping fingers crossed.

Provided that's all good, we need to record the commentary track and scan a hundred pages of contracts and make .pdf files of 'em. And... uh... other things. I can't think of what they are right now...

Our lab is Duplication Specialists. They have some sort of relationship with Chromavision which means I can drop off the drive at Chromavision's Manhattan location.

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Actually, I always use the emoticon as the end parenthesis (because I think it looks better ;-)

The Art of the Novel Is Undead

For those of you who believed that the novel was dead as an art form we can now say that forensically you are simply wrong. Because the perfect novel has not arrived yet. It will come out soon.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

"...complete with ninja scenes in which the Bennet girls (trained by Mr. Darcy) fight back against their zombie attackers."

Ninjas, bitches. Freakin' ninjas!

Thanks Bloggess!

More Cats With Guns

What stuff cost in ancient Rome.

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Wow. I'm liking making our screener DVD's from HD masters rather than SD files. I don't know why -- the compression to Mpeg2 is a lot less sukkity from the HD masters.

I made another change -- I had been downmixing the 5.0 mixes to stereo by raising the volume of the center track by 6dB. Now I only raise it 3dB. (note that the center track is the only "mono" track as the other four tracks are left-and right front, and left and right rear.)

The stereo mix is vastly more even with the center track +3dB. Center goes to right and left of the stereo track. Left front and left surround both go to the left side, right front and right surround both go to the right side.

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On billable hours. From The Client Revolution. Same blogger as Gruntled Employees. Both blogs are an interesting look at employment law and HR. He writes as a lawyer but from an HR perspective. And for a lawyer, he's pretty good with grammar. ;-)

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How many pictures of cats with guns are there on the Internet?

Oh God. I think I just invoked Rule 34. You know what? I don't want to know.

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We could do a mockbuster sequel to Transformers... it should be called Robot Planet...

I'm looking at an old script I wrote in 2003. If we did this movie it would be our 3rd prison-planet picture in a row.

DI Contacts

I've seen two big-budget genre films recently -- one in the movies and one on HBO. They both have some story problems but that's not what I want to mark down. Contact lenses and DI. Those are my complaints.

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Now I believe that "Underworld 3" used more contact lenses than the previous pictures. It seemed to really affect the performances. Affect them by deadening them. Boy, this proves you really need to see someone's eyes to get their emotion. And one can certainly use contact lenses to achieve an effect -- usually the effect of making someone strong and distant.

So it feels like it should be used sparingly -- like just before the character gets so mad they're gonna kick the ass of the bad guy. Or use them for the android killing machine all the time. Go ahead. But dear Lord, keep them off of anyone who has to deliver any kind of real performance. Especially a classically trained British actor who can usually act their way out of a paper bag.

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AVP Requiem. The DI on this picture as shown on HBO on digital standard def from Comcast in Central Jersey was very "DI-y". I dunno. It became very tiresome to look at. I just wanted a bit more detail or... I dunno.

The gamma. I blame the gamma. I wish it were... flatter. I know I know, we spend all our days trying to make images with more depth. And the picture is shot very well. I think I'd just rather see a straight transfer from the camera negative in a lot of the shots.

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This baby shark accidentally nommed himself. I think he looks quite confused here. Apparently after this picture was taken he was fixed up and put back in the water and swam away.

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I really don't like the compression we get in digital cable. Bleh. Feh.

Today You Are the Winner

OK, so you look at this blog and you say to yourself "Drew, what in Hell are you going to bore me with today? Oh -- I know! Talk to me about frame rates or rendering out individual tracks in Final Cut Pro or something! What do you think of the DVCPro HD compression algorithm?"

No, my friends. Today I'm not going to bore you. In fact, I'm directing you to the most exciting thing on the Internet today.

President. Barack. Obama. Saying "mutherfucker".

Oh, just imagine him saying "I want this mutherfuckin' illegal prison system mutherfuckin' shut down... bitch."

You know you want your computer's closing down sound to be Obama saying "This shit's gettin' way too complicated for me."

Screening on the 21st

We're screening Alien Uprising on Saturday the 21st. At some bar... somewhere. In um... Williamsburg. I think. I hope to be there. 1pm. See you?

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Today is the day we deliver the hard drive to the lab. That is if we hadn't found stuff we needed to change last night. So I'm changing it now and we deliver on Monday. So there.

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OK, so this is totally deranged awesome:

Mommy is going to know:

1. What you’re on

2. How much you have done

3. Whether you are liking it or not

4. If you have any for mommy

Furthermore:

Like myself, Sarah Palin cannot tell the difference between Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes.

OK you got me. I can't tell the difference either. Can anybody?