Update & Showcase

Holy wow. First off, it’s been a heck of a long time, and there are some big changes afoot that I’m going to get into in the near future. I promise. No really. I swear.

Secondly, I found this video today and thought “what better way to ‘re-begin’ the AV blog than by showcasing someone else’s work?” So here goes…

Having become a subscribed Geekologie reader recently, I was looking through my GReader feed and discovered this little goodie of a filmmaking post, and had to share it. The amount of work and effort and even time that went into that little piece is evident in just watching it, but what I thought about the most while watching (and laughing) is the fact that nothing they did made any kind of permanent mess. Typically, when you approach a filmmaking venture with the sort of storyline, you want fake blood, guts, drama, all kinds of serious acting and whatnot. But taking it the other way can often not only offer way more flexibility, simply because it’s an abstract from the real thing you’re portraying, and more freedom to interpret the typical war scene in your own way, using what you have available to you under the constraints you’re working with.

So, thoughts aside, it’s a great short film, and a funny five-or-so-minute watch. Take a break, watch a video. Laugh and daydream about it in your own cubicle. But please, oh please, don’t go nuts fo’ real (not really) as this guy.

Showcase: Thinning The Herd

Alright, I know this is by a fairly known actress and I know she may have had a budget to do it, but that doesn’t cancel out the fact that the same film could definitely be made with no money.  Just take a look at the film, there’s very little light, hardly any makeup, the film’s strong points are its intangible ones: the acting and the writing.  (The sound effects and the ending only raise the bar).  With some dedicated writing time, a few redrafts, and a day of shooting with some actor friends and you’ve got yourself set on the way to a film like this.

I recently saw Angel-A, which stars Rie Rasmussen, and I was surprised to discover it was her at the end of the film, since she looks nothing in that film like she does in Thinning The Herd.  That’s partly the costume and makeup, but the acting is definitely there in both parts, separating her characters immensely.  The main point I want to make in this post is that good acting, with or without dialog, is one of the key assets in any film.  As long as the writing’s good, the acting can pull it through with no budget at all.  If someone’s performance shines, it’ll shine out no matter the visual constraints.  (Obviously, you’ve got to do your best to help it shine, throw some oil on the flame and the like, make sure it can be seen to start with).

Essentially, the point is this: write a solid script with a basic storyline, a some characters that aren’t too simple (give them habits, dialects, things they like the most and play off those in the dialog or actions with the other characters), and then find someone who can portray that character in the way you like, with their own spin on it as well.  Always let the actors take the character to their own level, in addition to fulfilling your needs.  They need to be challenged, not typecast and factory-assembled into their characters.  That’s destructive to the very nature of acting.

Back to the point, after you’ve written your solid script, and found someone to act, find money if you can, and some kind of light, and something to bounce that light off of (you’ll rarely want the harsh light coming right from the work light you found).  Tin foil works great.  After that, let the light and the performance shine as your camera rolls and captures the whole thing from the angles you’ve pre-planned due to your careful thoughts on the project (do not leave that part out!)

Rie Rasmussen might have a name in the business; she might be known for doing a good job in her projects; she might even be known for being a sexy bitch; but you can make yourself known by making something with a solid base and the only frills being the talent that brings the idea to the screen.  Best of luck, check out the film and send in any of your work you want an article written about!

DIY Reflector – Wear a White T-Shirt

This was quite a useful little tidbit of information that I’m sure applies to videography just as much as it does to photography.  The idea is to wear a white t-shirt and position yourself at an angle from your light source and subject, so that the light bounces off your shirt and onto the subject, giving it a softly lit look on the opposite side of the light source.  This isn’t going to be super powerful, but sometimes all you need is that extra glow.  I did the same with a little piece of tinfoil I taped to a window opposite a work light in my last shoot about a week ago.  Have any experience with DIY reflectors or any other ides for on-the-fly methods of lighting?  Yap on about them in the comments.

The Waiting Room…in the can!

The Waiting Room is finally completely shot and locked! I’m super excited to finally have this done. We fiddled with lighting more than usual on this shoot, and I liked it quite a lot. Direct light from my work light was too harsh, so we simply bounced it off a tinfoil-covered piece of cardboard sitting on the desk on the opposite wall, which gave a perfect soft back light from behind me. Next, we taped a piece of tin foil on the window in front of me, pointing the two track lights on the ceiling toward it, bouncing that light off the tin foil and onto my face, giving a nice soft glow that looked almost like it was coming from the paper I was writing on. It was a very nice effect, and perfect for the scene. Michelle really helped out on this shoot, being the cameraperson, the lighting technician and whatnot. It was fun to play with the lighting and get the shots I wanted to get in a relaxed, small-scale environment. Unfortunately, I only had the chance to take four pictures while shooting this stuff, but at least it demonstrates the lighting configurations I had set up. Take a peek at all of them here.

I think an awesome thing about low- and no-budget filmmaking is the ability to just improvise with what’s there at the time, with what you’ve got and what you know. I knew I had two little tin foil reflector type pieces (actually I just knew metal is reflective and I had some at the time), and I could use those to light up the scene in the way I needed and wanted. I’m excited now to relax tonight, and I have all day tomorrow to cut the thing together, start figuring out music, and finish up my school violence piece I’ve been not-so-diligently working on since last Spring.

Micro-Budget Light Kit

Here’s an article written by Cinematographer Scott Spears about assembling a very thorough light kit with very little money, compared to a Hollywood or even some indie film budgets.  In the end it comes out to about 265 bucks, however, if you find deals and buy in a state where there’s little or no sales tax (like New Hampshire, as far as I know), then you’d cut down on some prices.  Light stands can be made (though I’d recommend having at least one professional one, used probably, since it’s much cheaper), and lots of diffusion and gels can be made or improvised for free as well.  I’d also like to point out that gels aren’t crucial anymore in this digital day and age where you can do almost anything with a computer and some decent software in post.  I’m not in anyway telling you to wait until post-production to think about your shots, that would be suicide, but plan out your production down to the last little snack break so you know everything about every shot and you can save time and money (if you’re paying cast or crew, heh) by not spending a lot of time on set fiddling with settings and angles of lights with gels and stuff.  While in one sense this can be useful, if you watch the extra feature on Robert Rodriguez’s DVD for Once Upon A Time In Mexico on working fast and cheaply but staying organized and in control, it’s most important to do just that – stay organized and in control so that you can move very quickly, cheaply and efficiently, but also get all the footage you need to the project before you wrap shooting.  It’s a bummer to have to go back and do reshoots, but it happens, and it’s best to be as organized as possible so you not only don’t have to, bu you can add easily and quickly to the shots you did get while in your super-productive phase of organized low-budget filmmaking.

Going back to the article, it describes quite a few different types of lights that can and should be used on sets and locations, many different ways of plugging things in, adapters, cables, diffusers and all types of stuff related to lights and getting you to light your stuff well so it looks good in the final edit.  It’s a very good read for anyone interested in lighting, or filmmaking at all, and it’s definitely a must read for those of you who are making a film or going to make a film soon.  Keep it all in mind for your next film and try to budget in a lot of the things on the list.  Search around for deals and tips for DIY solutions on the cheap or for free, since there are definitely some for some of the things on the list.

The thing that got me the most excited was the spirit of “We don’t have the money but we’ve got the creativity” that permeated this article.  It’s all over the place in independent filmmaking, since most indie films are low-budget, done quickly and with as much creativity as possible.  It’s not really a communal thing exactly, but it’s the fact that lack of money doesn’t stop people from doing what they love to do.  That’s the coolest part.  It’s so fun to read an article like this and watch low-budget indie movies because they represent, to me, what filmmaking should really be all about and what Hollywood’s been losing in the past years.  There are so many good low-profile movies coming out and so many huge-budget effects-driven trophies paraded around the marketing world that are just so obnoxious to me.  Spending as little money as possible, getting the utmost in results and solving any and all problems creatively is the best way to do things, I think.  This spirit is not completely lost in Hollywood, I know I’ve mentioned him before but I’ll do it again, Robert Rodriguez finished one of the Spy Kids movies in about six months, and can’t even keep track of the number of setups he does in a day.  That is cool, I think, because he’s working as quickly and efficiently as possible so he can get the most done in a short amount of time and still have fun and get some awesome movies out there when they’re done.  Typically, films take almost six months just to shoot, in Hollywood, but in the indie world, in my world, I took 4 months with cast and crew to make LATENT(CY), from concept to completion.  It was a hell of a ride, and incredibly stressful, but it was my first feature, and it was with a crew of five and cast of about four, with a lot of learning curves all going at once.  Next time, I’ll know a lot more about what I’m doing, and so will the rest of the people involved.  Hopefully that means a more productive, faster, better piece with high quality, low or no budget and some huge efforts on the parts of both cast and crew.

The spirit of do-it-yourself(-with-no-money) in my version of filmmaking I think is what makes it so exciting for me.  I spend as little money as possible making as good a product as possible, and when it’s you and your friends who all love to make a movie, that’s easy, and it’s even fun.  I don’t understand the Hollywood way of thinking they can solve problems by slapping money on the budget for some enhanced effects work in post or something when they could have just organized or done it right on set and not had to worry about it at all.  Also, one thing I think is kind of funny, and this is very unrelated, in the fact that a lot of indie actors are often, I’ve found, as good as or better then big-time Hollywood actors who get all the attention, and the indie actors don’t get anywhere near as many jobs.  Doesn’t really make sense to me but hey, it keeps them available to the small-timer who wants a good movie made with barely any money… like me.  Bruce Campbell said something once, comparing indie filmmaking to Hollywood filmmaking, “indies can always slow down with more money, but Hollywood can’t speed up with less money,” and I think that’s perfect that he said it, but really, really stupid that it’s true.  How sad is it that Hollywood can’t creatively solve their problems in production on a movie and save tons of money while indie filmmakers do it all the time, creating just as good of a final product, but they don’t get even half the distribution deal at the end.  I guess now it’s just name recognition, but that’s a pretty depressing world then.  If we depend on names to watch a movie, that’s pretty sad.  Sometimes it’s nice to see a familiar face in a new role, or even a sort of familiar role, since actors nowadays are becoming more and more typecasted, but I’d personally rather see someone I’ve never heard of before pull off the performance the character they’re playing deserves.  When that happens, it’s awesome to watch a film, even if I don’t know about anybody involved in the movie, it’s worth it.  I think it’s the talent and the effort that counts, the final film doesn’t matter if there’s no point, if there’s no value in the story or there’s just a lot of flashy effects with a really weak storyline to it.  If it’s got even the simplest of plots, like Cashback or The Big Bad Swim, it can be told in a way that makes you just love the entire thing, simply because of the obvious effort that went into the whole project.

As for the article, it’s definitely worth reading and thinking about and remembering on your next project, for all you filmmakers out there, definitely read it and keep it in mind.  Best of luck, and keep on making things nobody’s ever heard of, that’s when it gets cool.

Link: http://www.microfilmmaker.com/tipstrick/Issue1/lighting.html

DJTV: Blending Modes

DJTV came out with a very basic lesson on Blending Modes, that simply demystifies a few of the main blending modes and offers a clear, useful tip on color-correcting footage if you’ve got a little bit of time to fiddle around with settings and get a more stylized look for your project.  Essentially it’s three layers of footage, one that’s just got a boosted contrast ratio and saturation, the second is darkened enough to isolate the darks and set to “Multiply” and the third is also darkened but this time to isolate the whites enough to set it to “Screen” and offer some final-touch pop to the image.  It’s a useful technique and though won’t work in all occasions, I used it as a test on some footage I had from a past project and it looked quite nice, it actually gave the scene I was working on a sepia-toned aged film look, totally by accident.  Add a nice black vignette and some shaky frames and you’re set.  Of course, though, this wouldn’t happen for all scenes or all films.  But the technique is a nice way of selectively color-correcting your footage, similar to the way Andrew Kramer demonstrates in his selective color correction tutorial on VideoCopilot.  The shot they used in the tutorial had drastically different results than the shot I used for my test, probably because they’d used controlled lighting and slowed down the motion of the shot, whereas I was using natural lighting, regular motion, very amateur film stock from a short I did two years ago.  However, it’s a useful tip and as always, there’s some very technical and possibly interesting – to the right sort of mind – information in this episode about what the pixels are actually doing when you set a layer to have a blending mode.  One last note: no fear, you people without Final Cut, I used After Effects to do my test replacing the Color-Corrector 3-Way from FCP with some Curves and Levels adjustments as well as some Hue/Saturation tweaks to get the most similar settings to the tutorial.  Of course you could come up with your own methods or use the free color correcting preset available here (which is awesomely powerful and simple to use, by the way, and I’m sure the book will be too once it comes in the mail).  Enjoy the video and the resources, and sorry for not posting more regularly.  I’m hoping to put some short films on the blog once I get them compressed and make the page for my films to make them available for download, once that’s up, I’ll try to work on some promotion around the net, get more visitors, etc.  Enjoy and best of luck in your filmmaking ventures.

Link: http://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/segment_detail…

$30 DIY Flag (NOT the wavy kind)

Here’s a follow-up tutorial to the C-stand tutorial that I posted the other day.  This one’s for a Flag to control and block light on your shoot, which can also be turned into a diffuser by simply changing the fabric on the frame.  It’s made by the same guy as the C-stand, nice pictures, easy to read through, very basic set up and building instructions.  So now, for about $90-$120, you can have 1-2 lights and 2 flags to have a very effectively lit environment for your next shoot, and only have paid about half or even a quarter the cost of professional gear.  It’s pretty awesome to say the least.  Anyway, here’s the link, check it out and get building!

Link: http://sticktowhatyouknow.com/phpBB2/…

DIY C-Stand

I found this little tip in a forum I’ve been a member of for about 3 years now, and thought it was just awesome.  I’ve been trying to find cheap light stands for a little while now and couldn’t find anything that would fit the lights I have.  I only use one worklight whenever I use controlled lighting at all, but it sure is nice to be able to control the look more that way and for a shoot I need to do soon I’m going to need controlled light to shoot the scene.  Needless to say, when I stumbled upon this little forum post I was very excited.  I then read his intro, the tutorial it’s based on and his own article about his method of putting it together, and am going to sketch up my own design and try to make my own based on that.  Now, moving on from me, I’ll shed a little light on the forum post .  It’s all galvanized pipe, black preferably, since it’s cheaper, and you make a three-legged C-stand or Century stand typically used in photography and film and video shoots.  It’s a great tool for mounting lights and all kinds of other tools from diffusion cloths to flags and bounce cards on your one- or two-man (or woman) shoot.  The price comes to about $30-$40 which is, especially when compared to commercial C-stands available at around $60-$200, very appealing.  Building 3-4 of these for the price of one, sounds sweet to me.  There’s also an attachment he links to on the forum post to a little unit usually used for drumsets but can be used on this little rig to hold a boom arm for bounce cards, etc. mentioned above.  So with no more from me, the link’s below, check it out and enjoy the benefits of the DIY internet filmmaking community.

Link: http://sticktowhatyouknow.com/phpBB2/…

IzzyVideo: Channel Mixing

Here’s a very useful and very cool color-correction tip that I’ve seen applied to photographs in Photoshop but never to video.  I watched this video, tried it out on my most recent full-length film with some footage I had on my machine and then n the short I’ve been working on for about a year and decided I’m going to apply the technique to the short once the rough cut’s done.  It’s an awesome effect and very useful and effective in some cool lighting conditions, and ones that are commonly shot as well, nothing extra needs to be set up for this trick.  It’s a great tip, so at least watch the video.  Heh, you’ll like it too I bet.  Enjoy.

Link: http://www.izzyvideo.com/2007/09/25/izzy-video-64-channel-mixing/

IndyMogul’s New Videos

IndyMogul recently put out a few more videos, namely a new installment of their Q and Erik show, their BFX show and part one of a new Weekend Extra segment.  I’m looking forward to part two.  The BFX episode was especially cool, using about $20 to create a pretty realistic, in-the-spirit-of-the-original-Star-Wars-trilogy spaceship model and shooting it in front of a greenscreen for some space sequences.  The only tips I would have to enhance the effect is animating the star backgrounds, since the spaceship flies past the camera and then appears to keep flying, staying the same distance from the camera and the stars in the background aren’t moving.  It’s unnatural, but you get the idea.  I would also color-correct the footage a bit, maybe paint a little detail onto the ship, something like that.  It’s a chance to be creative with your creation, but I really like their method for the lights on the thrusters.  It’s realistic, totally feasible and a great tip for model-makers and people who can’t use 3D CG or don’t know how.  I definitely could have used this video for a project I did last year.  So check them out, the main site’s link is below and the shows are linked to above in this post.  Enjoy, and happy filmmaking.  Thanks IndyMogul!

Link: http://www.indymogul.com