Update

Hi!

I've been pretty busy for the last 4 months, but hopefully I'll have my own stuff to share soon - or at least a kick arse showreel ;-)

Here's a sneak peak at some of the stuff I've been up to - and sorry I haven't elaborated on the process or shared much, I'm really not sure what the rules are on that sort of thing, so I'm keeping it brief.

Decortica - Macchina
I edited this clip, and co-onlined it


The Tutts - All Over town
I co-onlined this



Current projects on my plate:
Making a 4 min promo/doco

Editing a 10 min doco

Editing footage from an industry event

Edit some showreels, including mine

These are all about to be started, and are all due in about 12 days time...


Sidenote: I've tried to keep this semi-anonymous, but it really isn't. This is a shame, because I certainly could say a few things about the petty behavior from *some* tutors at my school. Don't think we (certain group of students) don't know.

Quick Rundown and Shots

Rundown:

Keeping busy with all the pre-production issues we've got going in our year 3 short film that we begin shooting in 2 weeks, I will be posting more on this hopefully later in the week once we've done our camera tests.

I've got a few little chores I'm working on through my internship, it's been a very valuable (and fun) experience so far.

Few small editing jobs happening outside school on the corporate video level, they certainly don't pay a student too badly.

Shots:

These are a few screens from one of the mock adverts shot this year at school, I wasn't part of this group but I did get to composite and grade it.

Original:

Result:

There was so much green spill, and the tracking dots were way off focus for a lot of the shots. It's also a shame our only 16mm work goes onto a DV tape, surely handing us a hard drive with HD media in some codec (even DVCPRO HD) doesn't cost anything more?

I've seen how fast an AutoDesk Flame artist is at work, and I've had a short play in Apple Color, both exciting, but neither available to me. I'm still using Adobe After Effects to grade, and I'm enjoying the (slow - my computer?) process. I think I'll do a rundown on how to achieve the grade I'll do for our DV 3rd year short film, but if you're reading this, and you're interested, I owe any theory I know to this guy.

Ok, I've got myself into a weird position where I'm helping location scout, so hooroo!

Time to Wash?

I'm getting bad thoughts about releasing a new version of a site I made and tried to run in 2006, Wash. The idea was a site where students could upload their films, comment on them, discuss film making in the forums, and submit film reviews. It actually worked, but it didn't last very long.

Throughout high school I ran a local gaming site - despite never playing video games, or owning a games console. I wanted to do it because I thought I could do better then what was currently available. After a few years my site had crushed the competition, and soon became a commercial website - although by this stage I was bored with it, disliked by my staff, and eventually kicked out by my staff. My only option was to sell the entire site to them.


Above: Wash.org.nz, July 2006 - December 2006.

The logo was done by my girlfriend at the time, I thought the cheapness and roughness made it brilliant (come on, it was done on MS Paint!), truly independent, and truly student. Using an old version of my gaming websites as a starting point, I coded and designed the website myself. This was my first attempt with php and databases, and it fucking worked! The Auckland Uni Film Production Group members used the site a little bit, and some of them then became the main contributors, article and film wise.



Above: Never released concept, 2006.


Obviously my '06 concept is dated now - the top half of the site is too disconnected from the blog style bottom, and the round borders eek of the early web 2.0 style craze. The site died before I had a chance to fully implement the new design onto the php code anyway. I had dropped out of Uni, and I decided that I was wasting too much time with the website - I mean I'd never done a course or anything to design and build websites, so building one took a lot of time.

Now half way through 2008 (and in my final year of school - a different school), part of me wants to give Wash another go. This time making connections with all the film schools in New Zealand, so that every student film produced is uploaded onto the site. This would make it the film community in New Zealand, where actual film making discussion would occur. We'd develop as film makers through the actual critiquing of each others films.

No, it's probably still too time consuming, and I need to make my own films first.

Next posts: My internship, and the year 3 short film I'll be working on.

Video Dance

Video dance is one of the projects we do in our final year at film and TV school, in collaboration with the year 2 contemporary dance students over at the dance school. There are 6 groups, each has a DOP, sound mixer, editor (me!), and 3 dancers. We have a few days prep work, 2 days to shoot, and 2 days to edit.

We explored ideas of energy as a sense: energy transfer, equilibrium, offset equilibrium, unsustainable energy. I think the edit, inter-cutting between the different dancers, following a flowing motion through out the different dancers, dances, and themes, at least makes the viewer consider at a base level: the transfer of a something, a clock, a pendulum, whatever! The reality is, is this was a hard one to work out, and it's pulled along by the royalty free music.

1 and a half minutes long

The stairs we used for our location were painted a hideous teal green, I singled out the colour and de-saturated it. I then applied a blueish tone to the darks, this was an attempt to really separate the dancers from the background. I think it also helps give it a modern look (colour-wise anyway, we've got the '80s smoke thing going on pretty hard), as the skin tones have been preserved despite the colour work.

Original:

Result:

That's it.

Edit & Script

The short film I helped make over the summer holidays should have been edited by now, it feels like I've almost abandoned it, and I'm sure most of the cast and crew aren't impressed they haven't seen it yet. The deadline for Auckland Uni Film Production Group's Auckland je’taime is also fast approaching, and I don't think we've got a film to enter atm (although I didn't hear about this project until I began editing this film, so it's a shame I didn't make some of my own work specifically for it).

Scene 5:

1 minute long

Scene 5 is the most complete, it's also the only one with a large amount of dialog. The trouble with this scene was having the 3rd character, Jane, come in and listen to the conversation between Will and The Manager. I'm not totally convinced it works yet, however this scene is the very least of my worries.

I could pass the film up as finished, after all it is cut together as the script intended, but editing a film is where you create the film's final script (as they say, a film is never completed, only abandoned), and so I wouldn't be doing what I consider my job on this project if I were to leave it as is. What's made it so hard for me this time around are these two little problems:

1. The film is in Chinese - This isn't too difficult to cut together, obviously I can match the sound of the shots in a sequence to the master shot (although that'd be easier if most of the dialog wasn't improvised!). It means however, as far as piecing together the final draft of the script from the elements filmed goes (you know, editing), I'm... fucked :-)

2. The script itself - I'm no script writer, I'm no writer, but I'm pretty sure in a scene something is supposed to happen, also I need a reason to leave a scene, something to let me move onto the next one. I'd say this ultimately comes down to there being no narrative, but I'm possibly being a little bit too cynical.

This has made me realise, when we get onto making our year 3 short films this year, I need raise any concerns I have with the script. If I feel there are parts that do nothing, or be it even just the inability to move to the next scene, I'm going to raise it with the director, and make sure he can either defend it, or get it adjusted. Looking back at the script for the year 2 short film, Poppet, I (and everyone else) should have seen those sorts of problems earlier.

Anyway, hopefully I'll be done with this film soon because I don't like it sitting at the back of my head when I've got other work I need to get on with.

Should I post my thoughts concerning Avid's "New Thinking"?



Nah.

Monitor Speakers

Didn't start cutting for that friend of a friend.

Crashed and wrote off my motorbike.

Spent $720NZ on 2 speakers.

The Yamaha HS50M at $399NZ each won me, because the reviews seemed somewhat decent, and the user reviews agreed. A bonus was the white cone that excretes so much wank factor - a marketing gimmick to tie in the heritage of the NS10.

My apologies to the following post production blogs:
This one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, I don't have an iPhone to put on my desk :P

In New Zealand these monitors are only available at Music Works stores, and I was happy to be buying from them. When I visited both Music Works and The Rock Shop stores, the staff I encountered at Music Works seemed so much more genuine, in that they new about the product and they were willing to help you.

Next post about editing please.

Avid Redux

Avid's running a pretty cool competition right now for students in the Asia Pacific region. Every two months until July students can upload a 1 minute clip they've made to the website, the winner receives a copy of Media Composer, a laptop, and camera.


1 minute long
Oh dear, oh dear.

This was conceived, shot, and cut in two days - I would have done it in one, but my second Macbook hard disk died, killing my project file in the process. Back in September I still hadn't tried After Effects, and almost ironically I cut this on Final Cut as that's what I own, and have on my laptop. The flashes were all keyframed in colour corrector 3-way. The black background was just a curtain, visible until I crushed the darks.
It didn't win, but it did make it onto an Avid promo, my name spelled incorrectly and all! I also entered another film that I made earlier this year, and it also had no luck - but it has made an appearance on posters ... somewhere.

Chip Sandwich 1 2 3

10 out of 10 editing compatibility.

That's a wrap!

This is the short film I helped out on last week. The director + writer was a friend of someone at my school, and this someone someone got a few of us to help him make his movie. While things picked up in the end, it was quite a hard and slow shoot because he'd never worked on a film before, or studied film making. I'm pretty happy to be a part of this, I'm just not so sure I'd be willing to help someone without experience get their film off the ground over mine/other film students next time.

We shot it on one of the school's year 2 cameras, a DVCPRO25 ENG camera (Panasonic 610) capable of shooting 16:9 anamorphic. The shit up was that even though we could borrow all sorts of gear two weeks after school had finished for the year, we weren't allowed to use one of their decks for capture. As the camera didn't have Firewire, I ended up taking the composite out from the camera, sending it to my flatmate's miniDV camera, and plugging the miniDV camera via Firewire into Media Composer. This means I'll be cutting an actual offline edit first. To do the online edit, I'll have to capture what I need and just match my sequence manually, as there's obviously no timecode because of the way I captured.

I'm happy to be back on an Avid system this time. I actually own Final Cut Pro 5.1 and have had far more experience with Final Cut (I got into some trouble for cutting the year 2 short film at home on Final Cut, rather then on the school's Xpress Pro), but I think I've always had a good time pushing buttons in Avid's trim mode. Although Final Cut allows you to trim in a number of ways, I find it takes me much longer trying to roll a frame or 2, because I'd have to click, drag the mouse, and wait.

Year 2 Short Film - Colour Grading

This wasn't part of the assessment or something we learn at school, but it's certainly something I want to know more about. We had 4 days to edit (that includes digitising), so I was only able to grade the last two scenes.

Stu's book arrived just days before I started on this project, this was my first attempt at colour grading with After Effects, and the first time I'd really ever used After Effects, so I found it a helpful introduction to the topic - and now I'm hopefully headed in the right direction. One of the most helpful things for me in the book was the work flow for getting footage in and out After Effects.

Original.








Primary colour is dark green.







Secondary colour is orange, done using a mask.







Result.








Original.








The mask around the door frame gives secondary colour.
The mask around the actress disappears when she walks through.

Result.









Original.








Result.

Year 2 Short Film - Editing

7 and a half minutes long

At my school there is 1 editing student too many, so someone always has to do the shadow cut, that is, a second cut of a film without the director. This time I put my hand up.

I saw the cut the director and other editor had made before I began to cut mine and I found it boring. It was over 14 minutes long and came from a script that was 6 or 7 pages long. Watching the film was like sitting on a park bench and watching one person's entire lunch break - you were watching it in real time.

When I cut the first few scenes I had been so concerned with shortening the film that I’d actually cut out everything the other cut had told the audience, and although my cut was half the length, it was actually far more boring! When I re-cut the first few scenes, they included the details that were important, but still left out her walking into the room, sitting down, getting the phone, etc. because these parts were not telling the audience anything, and I had decided that it was my job to cut out the things that didn’t help move the film along. Anyway, the re-cut worked, and it was because it only told the audience what they needed to know, and more importantly because it didn't repeat information they already knew.

The next time we do a short film at school, I'm going to raise any concerns I have with the script, because editing is directly related.

Feedback has been pretty positive, and I think because of this the directing students found that they can let go of their films a little more in the edit suite, and actually take the advice from their editors.