Shoot yesterday too a little longer than expected since we had only 4 small scenes to shoot we weren’t expecting it to last 4 hours but it is coming together nicely. Time flies I suppose. A crew of 4 this time around, we’ve had Hayret joining us to assist in make-up and set design. Thankfully the weather remained the same as it was two weeks ago which will help to keep up the consistency. Saying that, it will interesting to see how these new scenes will blend in with the earlier footage since Cethan shaved the beard off specifically for the shoot.
We used the jib again to shoot these scenes, which worked perfectly since we managed to shoot at some really good angles despite the fact that the crammed environment made the process difficult to manage. We’ve also had to wrestle with environmental lighting, given the time of day and the weather we were having, it was the background lighting that had the bad habit of silhouetting our actor . In the end this was fixed using a combination of carefully angled shots and a 100 Watt light bulb.
We hope to be finished filming this Tuesday, followed by the post production process and the insert shooting.
Happy to say the shoot went fairly well in Camden Palace, initially a crew of six, we were also joined by Keith O’Connell to lend us a helping hand. This time filming took place in a laboratory setting which devoured almost 2 hours of preparation before we were good to go. As well as cleaning the room we had booked we also had to make two round trips to my place to collect additional equipment and props. Camden’s owner, Bertrand, was nice enough to lend us some old lab equipment, as well as gave us permission to scavenge any other set of items we find. And plenty we did find and use.
Fabian Sweeney and Catherine Crowley put on a great performance for their part of power starved scientists, more impressively this would mark the first time I’ve worked on a short film where the actors knew their lines before filming their scenes, granted, previous productions only ever involved myself, Cethan, Aida and Hayret ( although this allowed plenty of room for improvisation ). The shoot lasted roughly 3 hours with very few breaks in between since we had to take into account we had somewhat of a limited time frame, I’m pretty sure the rest of the crew noticed my eagerness to shoot as soon as possible when I started recording before Fiona or Gemma ( co-directing ) could say ‘action’.
I’m currently loving the newly purchased dolly mount and jib arm we had to drag over to the location and take some time out to setup, you wouldn’t believe how much freedom they can provide when moving the camera around on set and also how much damage they can cause if you forget that the combined equipment only works well in spacious settings and not when people are standing close by. It won’t be long until someone bangs their head or knee against the jib arm, at least it will make the work environment just that bit more interesting.
Glancing over the recorded footage and suffice to say most of it turned out very well. Sadly however, the first few shots were recorded without sound, stupidly enough I had forgotten to turn on the audio device, so let that be a lesson for anyone else hooking up their only Shotgun Mic to their only camera, these things do need power. Since entire scenes required no colour in the end product it was nice to see what the footage looked like without it, by isolating the luminance ( Black and white ) channel you can easily spot small objects in the video footage in greater detail.
The final shoot will hopefully conclude this weekend, as it’s our final weekend before the deadline. We’ll be attending the Fastnet Film Festival the weekend after. The deadline is the 4th of June so editing the film over weekdays is going to be fun for sure.
Flipping Channels, which we hope to submit to Mutantspace’s second short film competition, has now begun principle photography. Filming took place largely at the apartment with myself as camera operator, Cethan as the male lead and Fiona as the director. We had spent more time getting adjusted to the new setup we began using today which included the new dolly mount, a camera jib and the laptop that displayed a live video feed coming from the camera and also was mounted to the tripod.
Although the amount of time we invested in the new equipment to function properly took up a large part of the 5 hour filming session, it was well worth it for the sake of producing some pretty cool panning shots . On the same day we also scouted some potential filming locations at the Camdem Palace in Patricks Quay, we hope to be shooting key elements of the film there next weeks. It will be busy few weeks but we hope to get the film done before the competition deadline on the 4th of June. Once it’s finished and shown at the Mutantspace screening night, I’ll post the film here afterwards. Now for some snaps:
If you’re good with observation you would have spotted the Christmas garland on the top left corner of that pic above.
Other news, we’ll be attending the screening of Hardly Fairest at the Fastnet Film Festival that is running in Schull by the end of the month. Should be fun.
Pre-production work is well underway for Milton 3, the script has entered into 2nd draft stage but I should have it finished by the end of this month. Hoping to start preparations for principle photography by mid June.
Anyone involved in the post production process is sure to be familiar with NLE’s such Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier and Avid. Great pieces of software that get the job done at a somewhat hefty price tag, provided they were obtained a legal way. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the majority of low budget filmmakers would bypass the pricing issue by taking the piracy route, especially how much they’re charged in different regions. For instance, an American film maker can purchase a legal copy of Premier CS5 for $799 and how much would I have to pay for it through the Irish store? €1027.89 ( currently $1,368.43 ), so that works out as almost 70% more than the American price tag. You can try your best to give a verbose explanation for the pricing difference but you’d be hard pressed to convince them to not look at other options. Especially when they could spend the additional $568 on a decent enough editing machine.
However alternative options don’t have to involve either purchasing or pirating NLE software. There are plenty of other NLEs in the market, some of them are reasonably cheap and others are free, and why shouldn’t you look into these ones? Decent video software has to meet the basic NLE requirments:
Stability
Multitrack editing
Support for importing/exporting most audio/video formats
Intuitive interface
A catchy name
If it doesn’t meet all these needs then throw it away. If it crashes often it will only test your patience, all NLEs crash regardless anyway but some do more than others. If you can’t have more than one video/audio track it’s too counter productive. If it doesn’t support most audio/video formats it’s only take up more time and effort to manage. If the interface isn’t intuitive you’re bound to make more mistakes than the film’s measured continuity. If it doesn’t have a catchy name, you’re not going to remember it and never be able to find it again on your machine again until a technician over the phone asks you kindly to uninstall it to make the backup software run properly again.
As a self confessed freetard, I’m more inclined to use free and open source video editing software. Not because it’s doesn’t require a financial transaction but largely because they mostly meet the NLE requirements I listed above. Granted they won’t have those nifty little features where you can fix an actor’s lazy eye or add ears to the moon, but as long you can manipulate a incoherent mess of a footage together to produce something watchable then there’s no reason why you can’t live without moon ears.
Most of the films I have edited with were largely done with Cinelerra and Kdenlive. Two of the best examples of free NLE software you can have on Linux, or at least I like to think that these are the only two. There are plenty of NLE’s on that specific platform thanks largely to the vast amount of software libraries that handle audio/visual content on that platform but most of these still need to mature to the same level as Cinelerra and KDEnlive.
Free NLEs are scarce on both Windows and Mac but the good news is that it won’t stay this way for long. First off the some of the developers of VLC have released early test versions of their NLE software, titled VLMC. It’s looking great so far, given how powerful VLC is, this one has a lot of potential. It’s early days so far but you can head straight onto their main website to check it out.
Interestingly, Lightworks will be open sourced, an NLE that has been used in the film industry for over 20 years ( you can see the list here ) will probably be freely available to the unsuspecting public by the end of the year. You can read the announcement here and sign up for free testing on the same page.
Pre-production work has started for two new Gifted Babies productions, one titled “Flipping Channels” written by Cethan specifically for Mutant Shorts: Mutant Rooms 2 competition where a film must be set in a living room. Quite a lot of work needs to be done to meet the requirements of the script which will hopefully be discussed in greater once production starts sometime next week. Fiona Riordan will be directing the up and coming short film, once again we will be shooting with the new 7D.
Cethan and Fiona at the Flipping Channels Pre-Production meeting
The other film is a new Miltonium adventure currently being written by myself and Cethan. The pieces are slowly being put together for the film but the need for extensive work to be done to the script has never been made more apparent by the presence of paragraphs significant to moving the story along that read out like this:
“They go to the kitchen to have a conversation. The dialogue uttered here is phenomenal. Later that day …”
Currently the production target is set to June. Hopefully it will be finished in 2012 the end of the summer. The following photo should give a hint as to what one should expect from this film …
... more puppets!
With regards to Hardly Fairest, there is no official confirmation that the film will be shown in the Fastnet Film Festival but since we got the invitation to the program launch they hosted in the Bodega last week, it’s probably enough to say that it has been accepted
And we’re done.The film has been burnt to DVD and is currently on it’s way to Schull where we hope to make it for this years Fastnet Film Festival again . It’s really a beautiful spot in West Cork and definitely worth going to even if you don’t necessarily want to watch the first showing of Hardly Fairest, unfortunately this does mean that the film will not be made available online for quite some time or at least soon after it’s shown in Fastnet. Work has already begun on the next film, without giving too much away I would urge anyone who is interested in knowing what it’s about to … stay tuned. ( I’ll probably change this last bit if we change our mind on what we’re going to do next )
Back to Hardly Fairest, this was our first foray into shooting and editing high-definition footage, and it has been quiet the bumpy experience from a technical standpoint. First off since the original footage was recorded from a DSLR camera, I was working with different ergonomics in mind, I would use my thumb to record the footage while the other fingers gripped to the camera’s side, the other hand would either adjust the focus during the shoot or have the camera held securely since their were no straps to secure the camera with. A bit awkward to work with at first but shooting with a Tripod makes the process substantially easier and it’s easily a deterrent in shooting with handheld, I’m not a fan of doing the latter anyway so it’s no big deal for me.
On the Post Production side of things working with Cinelerra 4.1 didn’t quiet work out so well as I had hoped, although I came across some strange artefacting in the project monitor but when it came to rendering the footage this was where I ran into a problem. Turned out that rendering the footage produced a different set of artefacts in the first five seconds of the rendered footage, the B-Frames ( or maybe it was the P-Frames … ) seemed to have ended up becoming corrupted, creating some very ugly features in the rendered footage. Also on several occasions when I was cutting a few seconds off the video I found that the audio portion had a greater portion removed than the video track itself and causing some sync issues. It was too difficult to come to terms with Cinelerra’s shortcomings, so I switched to Kdenlive instead.
I dabbled with this tool several times in the past and have found it to be quite unforgiving whenever I came across a bug in which case caused several hours of work go to waste. But it’s seemed to have matured since, currently on version 0.7.7.1, it has quickly become one of my favourite NLE applications despite some of it’s limitations, few unwelcome crashes and some niggling issues but on a whole it looks and it works just great. In comparison to some of the other free NLE’s available on Linux, this one trounces them in terms of ease of use and handling of different file types.
Introducing a film that adds another entry in Cethan Leahy’s list of screenwriting and directing credits, Hardly Fairest was shot on the 14th of March with the newly purchased Canon 7D and is currently well under way in Post Production. So far it’s looking pretty good. It took at least 4 hours to shoot the film, those who have seen First A Dream may notice an air of familiarity in the location used for this film. We’re aiming to get the film fully edited before the 28th and have it submitted shortly before the deadline of this years Fastnet Film Festival located in Schull, West Cork. It’s not known when exactly we’re going to post the film online however, since we’re planning on submitting the film to other festivals in the coming few months we’re going to take into consideration that they might not be willing to accept it if it’s already available online.
Production methods used for this film have changed somewhat over the previous films, not only are we working with a new camera but with a new PC with specifications that will remain pretty decent for at least 6 months until some mobile phone gets introduced into the market that will trounce the new PC in terms of performance. The majority of the editing is now carried out by Kdenlive for the time being since the current versions of Cinelerra ( 2.1 and 4.1 ) are proving to be quiet unreliable when working with the 7D footage. Also props created from scratch by Cethan were used in the making of this film and they look great, hopefully this will start some sort of trend in future productions.
