If yesterday was about making a list, today is about checking it twice. Today is about charging the batteries, testing the mixer and microphones, going over the plan with my DP (I wish we could be on set with a couple of stand-ins but that ain’t gonna happen).
Also, it’s about listening to those tiny, nagging voices. It is because of one of those voices that I sent one of my actors a little bit of background homework and this video:
F**k the Queen, God grant me a good night sleep.
List, list, list. A film’s prep, no matter how long or short, is dominated by lists. Today I made a couple.
First, I made a shot list from my crude storyboards. It breaks down like this: each actor gets 4 shots pointed in their direction, plus there’s the wide and at least 2 inserts. Total number of shots = eleven.
Second, I made a schedule (which is just a list arranged by time). I call us at 8 a.m. and wrap us by 2 p.m., taillights by 3p.m. I give us two hours from call to unload gear, walk through the scene with the cast & crew, light the set, dress the set and rehearse.
I then have roughly 90 minutes to shoot out each actor. Following the math, that gives us 22.5 minutes per shot on an actor. That’s 22.5 minutes to set up the camera, adjust lights, rehearse the shot, shoot a take, give an adjustment, tweak the lights, shoot, and so on.
I then leave 45 minutes to shoot the wide and inserts; this is also a buffer in case we’re running late (it shouldn’t take that long to shoot a wide and two inserts).
I feel confident that this is a doable schedule. We’ll hustle but it won’t be insanity.
So here’s the question of the day: is it better to shoot the wide at the start of the day or at the end? If we shoot at the start, it can lock us into a particular blocking, blocking we might grow out of. If we shoot at the end, we adjust the wide to the blocking we like but then we have to recall which takes we like. I know, it’s sorta a “chicken, egg” question when all you care about is eating your chicken omelet but these are the things you agonize about during prep.
Thoughts?
Today was all about preliminary visuals.
First, the shooting style. It’s all about long lenses either hand-held or very lose on the tripod. I don’t think we’ll be snapping the zoom ala BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. I think that’s just too edgy for this scene.
Also, we’re using the Sony DSR-450WSL. We’ll be shooting anamorphic DVCAM 24p. 24pA, with it’s 2:3:3:2 cadence, seems like one unnecessary hoop for the editor to jump through if this is ending up on 1) the web and 2) DVD.
But I’m willing to hear arguments otherwise.
I also started storyboarding and of course there are too many shots, at least a dozen if not more. While we are in one location and I know where to put the 180 degree line, that’s a lot to shoot in 3-4 hours when the scene is acting intensive and the client wants as much coverage as possible. One solution is to shoot long takes (2-3 beats per shot) with coverage that evolves. I’m talking about an OTS that becomes a stacked 2-shot and then a close-up. That should help the actors organically build their performance while cutting down on the number of times we have to stop and adjust the camera.
Still, I wish I could have an hour on set with my actors the day before the shoot so I could walk through all the camera positions but I have a feeling that won’t be possible. So it goes.
Today was our first (and only) rehearsal before shooting. We got the script into good shape but didn’t fine tune the beats; I find it’s best to save that for when we’re on set, especially since we have half a day to shoot a 2-page scene.
So how do I prep and run a rehearsal? I’ll answer the second part first.
In this instance I knew I’d first want to read the script and fix any dialog that sounds good in my head but doesn’t work when spoken. After a second table read, I like to get a scene up on its feet and start physicalizing. I’ll run through a scene once, starting and stopping at each beat so the actors and I can discuss motivations, actions and physicalization. We’ll then go over that beat again to see if our choices work dramatically. Once we feel that we understand a particular beat, we move on to the next one.
I think it took us over an hour before we got to the end of the scene. We then ran the whole scene from start to finish to see if the collection of beats added up to a unified dramatic whole. It didn’t; it never does. So then we repeat this process to refine our understanding of the work. The second time took less than 40 minutes.
As for prep, it’s best if I point you towards some very good books.
All three are great but I must mention that Delia was my directing instructor and I once saw her make Alexander Payne sweat for misquoting her so she holds a special place in my heart.
I was recently asked to direct a scene for an actor’s reel. I thought I’d take this opportunity to document my process.
Some facts about the gig:
There are still a few variable left, the biggest one being this: do I shoot standard definition or in HD? Now, before all of you swarm to the HD corner, let me explain a few things.
First, I have two cameras at my disposal. One is the Sony A1U.
It shoot 1080 HDV but only 29.97 interlaced. It does have one of those fake “Cineframe” modes that can mimic 24 fps and 30 fps. From previous shoots, I found that the “Cineframe 24″ looks awful but the “Cineframe 30″ isn’t too bad. Lastly, the camera has a 1/3″ CMOS sensor with a single free floating ring that serves as both zoom and focus (i.e., blah!).
The second camera is a Sony 450WSL.
It shoots DVCAM at 24p. Also, it has a very nice Canon zoom lens with professional focus, zoom and iris controls and a 2/3″ CCD so it’s much easier to get that very desirable film-like depth of field which will help deliver the “look” the client wants.
Lastly, I should mention that the final product will be viewed on either DVD or on the web.
So, which do you think I should shoot with?
Now, at this stage I’d also be prepping my scene/directorial work but as I spent the first half of the day returning equipment from my vlog shoot and the second half will be spent working a double shift at my D-Cinema second job, that’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning (and did I mention that I have a 3 p.m. rehearsal?).
Over and out.
I’m directing a series of vlogs this weekend that serve as part of a larger multi-narrative, multi-medium project. I love the overall idea but when I think of a narrative vlog, the one that comes rushing to mind is this:
FYI, this is the most watched episode from the first season (in fact they’re on their 4th season and this one episode was watched over 3.2 million times).
As the director, I’m in uncharted waters. This is my first time working in this format (a sort of improvised monolog, if I were classifying) so I’m very excited but also a bit nervous? Nervous about directing? Only as much as I always am. No, I’m more nervous that I’m doing this with no crew. The shoot is textbook simple so not only am I directing but I’m also the cinematographer, the gaffer, the sound mixer and whatever else I can’t delegate to the actors that are just standing around. I suppose it’s a good exercise, it’ll keep me mentally on my toes, but after 2 14-hour days my mental toes will be barking like crazy. Then again, if Robert Rodriguez could do it (go read his book), so can I.
Wish me luck.
So while I wait for August 24th to roll around (that’s when Amazon announces the 5 finalist for the audience award and the jury prize winner), here is my promised debrief. Warning, it is very tech heavy.
First, my 30-second spec combined live action and stop-motion animation. I’ve done one other film like this (check out CONVERSING). For that short, I shot both the live action and stop-motion animation with a Panasonic DVX100; I used iStopMotion to record the stop-motion animation to my laptop. The digital video was shot 30p and the animation 15 fps. I used a Sennheiser ME66 and ProTools 6.4 to record the voice talent. I edited the film with Final Cut Pro and mixed in ProTools. I was going to use the same setup for this project but I really wanted a higher resolution final so I thought I’d put the final cut through Instant HD and viola, I’m done.
Just one problem: the test I put through Instant HD didn’t look as good as I hoped. I don’t blame the plugin, I just didn’t know how to punch up the optimum settings for export. Plus I was haunted by this post.
I also had access to both a Sony A1U HDV camcorder and a Nikon D100 plus I was looking for a good excuse to learn After Effects so why not take the plunge with this project? Who doesn’t love a challenge, right?
So, first I recorded my four actors (big thanks to Curtiss, Dan, Karina & Michael for lending their talent) using the above mentioned setup. I quickly cut and mixed the dialog so I could sync it up to my “proof of concept” cut. I then shot the live action (an extra thanks to Dan) as 59.94 HDV with the Sony “fake” Cineframe 30 mode turned on. After shooting I immediatly transcoded all the footage to ProRes for the rest of post. All of that went according to plan. The animation, not so much.
I thought about shooting RAW files with the D100 but I’d heard from my photographer friends that it’s a whole other beast so I chose large RGB TIFF files (3000 x 2000) instead. Unfortunately, the camera came with one 512MB CompactFlash (CF) card. That card coulldn’t hold more than 17 shots so if I had any animation longer than 1s4f (1 second, 4 frames), I’d have to download the card, wipe it clean and pray I hadn’t bumped the camera in the process. Um, no thanks. I looked in the manual and it said the camera could handle the “promised” 1GB card but nothing bigger. Guess what? Today it’s hard to find a CF card smaller than 4GB. Thank the lord the 4GB card worked. Unfortuantely, that was just the start of my troubles.
After shooting my first stop-motion shot I immediately ran head first into another problem. Although I put the camera in full manual, including the iris, the camera still adjusted the f-stop by 1/3 to 1/2 a stop according to the built in spot meter. That meant that the brightness of some frames in a single shot would be different than the others. I’d have to correct brightness frame by frame. Tedious? Yes. Doable? Yes. But that wasn’t the biggest pain in my neck.
No, it was the camera and the CF card that almost killed me. The camera could shoot 6 shots before it needed time to write the images from the internal memory buffer to the CF card. It could take 2-5 minutes to write one image to the CF. But the bigger problem was downloading from the camera into iPhoto. This took around 20 minutes per download and once took almost an hour. This forced my one-day shoot to take twice as long. Ugh.
Once in iPhoto, I renamed and exported the TIFF files to an external drive. It was then time for some After Effects magic. I was glad AFX allowed me to import a folder of still images as a contiguous video clip. Once in a timeline, I corrected the gamma to fix for the iris adjustment. Damn, that took a long time and boy did I grind my teeth. After that I created JPEG proxy files for the TIFF clips (a very good idea that saved me a ton of time). I then created another AFX project where I would lay in the animated clips end to end to get a sense of editing and pace. And, as I had 3000×2000 images but knew my final output would be a 1920×1080 HD Quicktime, I decided to create camera moves in post. Oh boy, the results looked so good I couldn’t have been happier.
Also, at this point, I could fix any image problems while still in the highest possible resolution; the Clone tool became one of my most trusted tools and Keylight is awesome for green-screen work. Once that was done, I took each shot and output it as a 1920×1080 ProRes Quciktime so that I could combine my live action and stop motion in a single AFX comp where I could color correct with Colorista which is a GPU based plugin; As you’d know from a previous post, the TIFF files were too big for this.
Once I laid out all the clips, it was time to apply Colorista. I took the Stu Maschwitz method and used Adjustment Layers instead of loading effects onto the master clip. This came in handy when I wanted to swap out clips (which happened more than a few times). Each clip had one color correction layer and all the live action clips had a secondary correction layer so I could bring my actor’s eyes up out of the darkness. Lastly, I applied a final “looks” layer over the whole project.
On the sound side, I tried Soundtrack Pro but grew frustrated so quickly I fell back to ProTools for the sound edit, design and mix. I did have to add a bit of music and I used GarageBand to create the cues and then exported them to ProTools.
Lastly, FYI, it took 14 minutes to render out a 30-second clip in After Effects but I’m incredibly happy with the results.
Here’s hoping you get to see the fruit of my labors as a finalist.
Apologies for the blogging blackout but I’ve been furiously working on my Amazon spec and I can now declare it uploaded. My entry is in. It’s done. It’s out of my hands.
Here’s where I would give my debriefing but I’ve only slept 9-12 hours in the last 3 days so I’m not exactly coherent; I promise to blog about the production experience tomorrow.
Right now I just want to go home, shower, crank some Appetite for Destruction, drink heroic amounts of vodka and flirt with reckless abandon.
Hey, you, with the really big…eyes… how you doin’?
Today is my shoot day. That splash of panic has washed over me. Now I’m but resolve and a few random to-do’s (I sure hope Rite Aid sells a 1GB CF card).
24 shots in one day, most of them involving stop-motion animation. This will be a long day.
Wish me luck.
Tomorrow: on my way to Comic-Con
A quick what-I’ve-been-up-to-and-will-be-up-to:
And so ends today’s update. FYI, I’ll try to blog more consistently from Comic-Con. Over and out.
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