Looming Deadlines

Back at the keyboard, this time working on another short script, there's another competition based around a theme of 'power cuts' and I had an idea involving an aircraft losing power (always going for the easy themes... as usual) but I created a cgi sequence of a low flying plane, composited with a quickly grabbed 550d shot of the street outside.

The sequence turned out pretty good, but now I have to actually shoot the rest of it, and also write the script. Might bea easier to just leave it as a nice little effects shot, rather than go to all the trouble of creating an entire short around it.

So I've put out a call to a local group of actors, and if they agree to get involved, then it'll be a frantic weekend of shooting and editing next weekend to get everything ready in time.

In the meantime, I'm also prepping my 'modern cupid' project, with an eye to shooting it next month.

Stockholm Syndrome

I spent a couple of days at the Swedish office last week, negotiating with the team that will be taking over the physical asset creation on our current project. It was fun to be back in Stockholm again, and I feel like I pretty much ate the whole time I was there. At least I managed to stick to fairly authentic cuisene, venison meatballs, and goulash. Such a great city.

Predictably, the HD-DSLR bug has bitten, and I did end up splashing out on a new Canon 550d, which was pretty exciting. I've had a a play with it, and I did some test shooting in and around the house which really seem to point to this being an excellent camera. The low-light shooting is really impressive, and other than the lack of zoom or decent sound recording, it's a great camera.

I'm going to sell my Shrigg-Rig and 35mm adaptor as the 550d will be far easier to use for any DOF shooting, and this will free up my HV30 to become a run-and-gun camera.

I just discovered www.cinema5d.com which is a great resource forum for anyone shooting video with these Canon DSLR cameras, and it really feels like this new type of camera is an area which is really hot right now.

The ASC magazine had yet another article on DSLR shooting in the latest issue, and it seems like everyone is talking about these cameras.

Of course it's not all great, there are some pretty obvious rolling shutter issues for one thing, and the fast SD-Cards needed for video are certainly not cheap.

Tomorrow I'll be heading up to the Ultimate Dubs car show at Telford, so the 550d will be along for the ride, it'l be my first real test with this camera and I've got high hopes for some great footage.

Camera Envy

So here we are, the end of february already, just past the submission date for the local film festival.

A few weeks ago my company was all set to send me to Sweden for two months, which should have meant I would be typing this from Stockholm. But at the last minute the plans changed, which meant two things...

1. No two months of fully comped fun in the north.

2. No film festival entry from me because I thought I didn't have time to shoot anything before going.

So I missed the deadline for the festival, and I had a great project worked out for it too. So I'm going to go ahead and shoot anyway, but it'll just be a 'for fun' project instead of a contender.

In other news, the new Canon 550D (Rebel T2i) HD-DSLR has been released, and I am sorely tempted. It's looking like a great little camera, and it would offer the option to shoot for 35mm style DOF without needing to use my home-built adaptor, which means it'll be much, much easier to do run-and-gun work on the move.

The iso settings are pretty impressive too, especially the low-light shooting range.

I had told myself I didn't need any new gear, and that I should simply shoot with what I have, the HV30 and the XH-A1 should be more than good enough to shoot anything, especially with the option to use the 35mm adaptor. Obviously I was wrong.

It's strange, the more I read about the 550D, the more I find myself cruising past Dabs.com or even Jessops 'just to look'. I reckon I may have ordered one of these beauties before the weekend is over!

Of course my wife is the voice of reason, pointing out that I don't need another camera, and that we don't need the expense of a new toy. Especially when the house could do with some more renovation.

Still, I'm thinking if I forgo my morning Costa purchase, I could easily scratch up the £80 per month I'd need to pay for a basic 550D kit with stock lens.

Of course, I would then need to really get moving on the next project. Especially if I had a new camera to play with.

Decisions, decisions.

Living in the future!

2010 is here and still no flying cars, although plenty of areas in the city look grim enough to stand in for the citadels of almost any cinematic dystopia of the last fifty years.

One of this years projects will be an update of a student project I made almost twenty years ago (doesn't seem that long, but it is). I plan to try and reference some of the locations used in films like 'Clockwork Orange' which was shot in several local landmarks and public buildings.

Right now I am working on my next project. Final submission for the local film festival is at the end of February, so I'm working towards having at least one submission ready for that. The theme of the festival is 'Passion' and I've come up with an idea that should fit nicely with that. I always find it difficult to get ideas, and having a theme actually made it a lot easier for me to come up with an idea. The only question is whether my idea fits wholly into the 'Passion' theme and doesn't overlap too much into 'Love' or 'Lust' which are closely linked. Time will tell if I have chosen well!

The other project would be entered in the mobile-phones category, where all the entries have to be short (1min or less) films and they need to be filmed on mobile. I loved the old Pixel-Vision film 'Another Girl, Another Planet' and this could be an opportunity to do something similar, deliberately using a really bad quality video camera to shoot a film. I would plan to shoot it as if on a high quality camera, lights, tripods, tracks and all the rest, just with a tiny and deliberately poor quality mobile phone as the camera.

Should be an interesting few weeks ahead as I get the shoot organised.

Despite the weather...

I just scraped my entry for the 60 second film contest in at the 11th hour. I was much more organised this time, but I still found myself pulling an all-night session trying to get the last tweaks done in time to submit the film.

The contest ran for a month and I got organised pretty quickly, I had a short script prepared and I even used an ancient version of John Badhams FrameForge program to put together some 3d storyboards which I edited together in premiere to create an animatic version of the film. So I knew exactly which shots I needed and from what angles, and all I needed to do on the day was set them up and hit record.

I wanted to have a location that looked like a main road, so I used a section of narrow road out near the M25, it's beside a bridge over the motorway, and the road is a narrow single lane track which opens out to two lane highway for a short distance over the bridge before becoming single track again. By staging the shots carefully, I was able to make it look like the scene was taking place at the side of a main road.

The main problem was finding actors, I had planned to use the same actor as in my previous short, but he is rehearsing a play and was only available on a single sunday morning, and on that weekend it was forecast for gale force winds and rain!

So in the end I managed to find two friends who would come out early last weekend, only a week before the submission date, to help me shoot the film. Of course it rained heavily that day too.

But, despite heavy rain and hail, and the attentions of a passing policecar, we managed to get pretty much all of the shots, and just about enough audio to edit with.

I needed to produce several effects shots for the film, to show a car bursting into flames from various angles, and I had these pretty much done ahead of the actual shoot, using stills from my location recce as plate footage. The two shots I completed looked great, but unfortunately I couldn't match the angles exactly on the real shoot, and the difference in weather also made the shots difficult to use, which meant I had to do all of the effects shots and edit and grade and lay the sound all in five days, plus I was working long hours in the office all last week too.

The sound was the biggest problem area, the wind was blowing hard on the day, and even with a hairy dog on the mic it picked up a lot of wind noise. The final film has really patchy audio, and this really hurts the end result. The levels and background noise changes really lower the quality of the piece, and there are also a couple of soft shots and some grain issues caused by the gloomy weather conditions and the lack of light.

But, perfectionism aside. I got it done, and the film made the deadline just in time. Now it's time to see how it compares to the rest of the entries, and it'll be interesting to see what kind of feedback I get this time.

Next project should be the two-men-in-a-room interview film I have been writing.

Mattebox Time

So my prize from the short film competition finally arrived. My first ever follow-focus, and very cool it is too. This particular model is the latest version of a budget gear set designed by a one man outfit over in the States.

I got it up and running pretty quick, fitted to my shrigg-rig and it certainly makes my HV outfit look a lot more complicated and impressive!

Now all I need is a mattebox to complete the set-up. Probably an indirails product as their rails turned out to be pretty good, although I do see a lot of cheaper matteboxes coming out of India and China on ebay. Might be worth taking a chance on one of those.

My Cokin filters are smaller than the standard 4x4 filter size used in most matteboxes, so I will also need to upgrade to their pro series filters, which will be a bit more expensive and will mean fewer filters in the short term as I'm not about to go replacing all of them in one go.

In the meantime, my follow-focus should get it's first outing soon as I am shooting an entry for a 60 second film contest, and I plan to use the HV for that.

Revised Script Ahoy!

I've spent every morning this week working on reducing the script down from 15 pages towards 10, but it's been tough going. I still have two pages to go, and that will mean dropping a lot of good stuff. I'm far too attached to my dialogue.

In the meantime I have a couple of writer friends both taking a look at reducing the script, and one of them has just sent me his draft. It's really pared back, and loses some of my favourite lines of dialogue, but its 10 pages, and he came up with some really great ideas, including altering the opening sequence (which has no dialogue) to have the dialogue from the next scen playing as voiceover, so an entire page worth of dialogue is condensed without losing any of the mood setting opening montage.

Great stuff.

I'm really excited about the way the script is coming together, it's been so long since I have really been working to something I can actually make, too many feature script projects have kept me busy despite being too ambitious to actually shoot on a shoestring budget.

So, this project continues to gather momentum. This weekend I have to shoot at least a couple of stills out in the street as a VFX test for the flash-cut footage. This is something I have been planning to do for the past couple of weeks, but now I have set a deadline for the middle of next week, and I will need to get moving if i'm going to hit the date.

I will be using After Effects to comp in the high-production cost elements, such as bullet damaged windows and multiple police cars. I want to have the flash-cut sequences really heavily stylised, with short depth of field and rack focus effects, but I plan to add these in post.

So first port of call, is to take a few still images out in the street. Then comes the hard work of making the rack focus effect actually work.