CAP Hollywood Reflection #3

Our film is almost done. Definitely going to have to do some last minute changes and stuff, but it's looking pretty good. One thing I need to do is make sure the shots are all exposed similarly so that I can grade them similarly. Currently, many of the shots are a bit off from each other so I think it'd look a bit strange.

This week, I finished the second rough cut. But I lack a flash drive because I lent it to someone and haven't got it back. So, unfortunately, I can't bring it in on time. I worked on the credits and polished them up quite nicely from what they were previously. Added in a sound effect or two, worked on audio levels. Re-exposing each shot in post.

What needs to be done next week? The film. That's what needs to be done. That means we need to finish mixing our audio/sound, finish grading out shots,  add in any minor details, and export and upload to youtube. Then we shall be done and waiting for CAP Hollywood.

CAP Hollywood Reflection #2

Currently, our film isn't a ton farther than it was last week. We still have a bit of filming to do, just reshooting some scenes I've now realized to be not quite as good as expected. That'll be happening on Thursday. Our rough cut looked decent considering half of it was finished in about an hours time around midnight. Definitely will be better for the final product though. It's turning out nicely though. Not much too say about it currently.

This past week, I finished the rough cut with awful credits. The weekend after, I decided to make awesome credits on After Effects rather than just lots of text thrown together on one slide. Prepare yourselves. Kidding. But they are cool. For the rough cut, I added the music and trimmed a few clips up. Then I exported. The file was huge (5 gb). I brought it into After Effects, re-exported with the horrendous h.264 codec that drives DSLR users and colorists insane. Brought it down to about 600 mb. Put that on a flash drive and brought it to school. Oh. And I shot the CAP Hollywood intro with M Becks.

This upcoming week? Well, I shall create a title. I shall finish reshooting. I shall convert those clips to DNxHD and import them into Premiere Pro and start to trim them up for our final product. Maybe denoise them some, start to grade, and resharpen? Who knows. That's a lot of work for now though. I'd be done too early if I did that this week. I'll continue to work on the CAP Hollywood intro at school on the school's foreign Final Cut Pro. Meh.

Yeah. That about sums it up.

CAP Hollywood Reflection

CAP Hollywood. It's pretty cool. Currently, in my group, we're almost done filming. We have to shoot a scene or two on a bus and then we're done filming. I've put the first act into Premiere to start the rough cut. I somewhat trimmed the shots to the parts we need and put a basic color grade on all of them. Unfortunately, I recently learned that the 8-bit color depth h.264 codec that Canon DSLRs record in is just bad. When you apply color grading, it lowers the quality a bit. So now I've gone and converted each clip to 10-bit color depth DNxHD, a free file format used by the Avid software. This is what people've said to be the best besides the highly recommended Apple ProRes 422. But, that's made by Apple, so not really usable on a PC. I think I'll end up re-editing each clip, or at least put in the new clips and just copy and paste the previous color grade on. I also used Adobe Dynamic Link to connect my Premiere Pro project to an After Effects composition. This allowed me to make live changes on After Effects to each clip that will directly show up in my Premiere project. I'm using After Effects for post lighting, possibly color grading, and some other plug-in effects. I might end up exporting my Premiere Pro composition to Davinci Resolve and color grade in that program, re-export, and bring it back into Premiere. But that's a hassle. Enough rambling. I'd say one of the biggest challenges is just keeping organized. Yes, we created preproduction folders with a list of shots and what not. But I'm still constant checking that a few times before each shot, thinking if there are any others I missed or could just do on the spot. It's also difficult to keep everybody organized, not just your own shots and what not, but the people involved. I'm not expecting much more because it's a group of teens, but, still a bit of a challenge. I think I like most of our shots so far, a few glidecam shots that are looking nice. After putting together the rough cut, I'll probably find myself wanting to redo a few or missing a few shots. In which case, I probably will. I just got a slider that I might wanna incorporate somehow. Most of our actors and group have a relatively flexible schedule, it shouldn't be too much trouble. I'm not concerned. Onward.

Um. What did I do. Well. I filmed everything last weekend. I started compiling the rough cut and color grading. I've been working on finding a song or two. I've started compiling the neccessary sound effects. Our short doesn't really have much dialogue or any real noise. I didn't even record audio half the time. I'll probably regret that. But we can easily work around it. We don't really need background ambient noise anyway. If so, I can record a few minutes of it and loop it or something, splice it into a few clips here and there.

Let's see. What needs to be done? I'd like to try and get all our shots done by the end of this week. I'd like to continue the rough cut for Act III if I don't have all of Act II finished. Maybe I'll reshoot a scene or two with a slider. I think we should start emailing various artists to see if there's any way we can use their music. Because I just don't feel like searching through hundreds of CC songs to find maybe one or two I like. Yeah. Lazy. Oh well. People are nice. You'd be surprised. I bet a few will say we can use their music because it's for educational purposes. I got a song with three million views used before so. I want to download some sound effects and put them into the project to see how they fit, etc. Oh. and the movie poster. We were practicing how we want it set up with lights and stuff last week. It looks nice. I promise.

That's about it. I'm noticing the importance of lights for sure though. I got a couple. I really want this to turn out excellent. I think I have way too high standard. That's probably a problem...

Documentary Update

Also. We posted our documentary that we entered a while ago into the C-SPAN Student documentary contest. Here it is. The winner and other prize-winners are being announced in March 6th.

Capture the Fall - Autumn Leaves

Let me start with exporting takes forever. And you have to do it nearly a dozen times before you figure out the right settings so you're video doesn't look like five pixels. Oh HD, how dearly I need you. Yeah, so. I've been trying to export this for about an hour now. Still working on finding the right format. Then comes uploading. And because I don't have FiOS Quantum, it'll be awhile. Because any video less than 100 mb is gonna look terrible. And upload speeds are extremely slow.

Finally, It's done. Free at last. Free of the terrors of all these dumb formats! Oh why can't it just be simple. .avi or .mov formats that aren't over 5 gigabytes, impossible.

Here it is. I did this one day with a friend and a neighbor (remember him from Senseless?)

Just some shots of us raking the yard, creatively.

Put in a awesomely pointless time-lapse. and voila.
(Yay for free intervalometers in hacked firmware that broke sister's $1000 camera. Woop woop. But it's all good. We got that insurance. #magiclantern)

Put on some color correction. Boom. Wonderful.

Next: Add a tilt-shift effect cause I felt like it, and who spends $2000 on a single-purpose lens anyway. Fools.

Next: Add some of that good music and titles. Yeah, they're cool. I guess.

Export. Reference first paragraph. and Upload. Oh, THE TERROR!

Official Dystopian Trailer - Senseless

This is my group's dystopian trailer, Senseless. It was a long and tedious process to release, but a new, fun experience. In the end, I'd say I'm satisfied with the outcome. I know certain parts could've been better, but for the first real project of the year, it's decent.

Process:
Pre-Production
- Create a dystopain premise and start to develop a plot
- Start writing a scipt for the movie
- Make a storyboard to visualize the shots
- Make production schedule, scout locations, find actors
Production
- Get to locations, set up shots
- Film shots
- Review shots to see if they need to be reshot
- Redo shots if need be
Post-Production
- Import shots into computer
- Edit shots into composition, in right order, not too long, etc.
- Color correct shots
- Add Effects
- Add titles and credits
- Export video
- Upload to YouTube

5x5 Video Project

1. A shot from an outlook of a town/village near El Salvador's capital, San Salvador
2. A shot of a fishing pier and market at a beach on the Pacific Ocean, south of the village Zaragoza
3. A shot of a wild, starving dog at the foot of "La Puerta del Diablo" translated to be "The Gate of the Devil"
4. A shot of some performers demonstrating traditional Salvadoran dances
5. A shot of a village on the way to the capital, San Salvador

For this video, I used the Canon EOS T2i with the 18-55mm kit lens. This was edited on Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. The edit was simply compiling the clips, no color correction or changing the audio. Everything went smoothly, without any problems.

Personally, this 5x5 is probably as good as I could get with the limitations, but there are a few things that I would've preferred. The video itself is a bit grainy, and shaky, but it's handheld, what can one expect. I also  obviously, would've preferred to be able to color correct, etc.

For our next independent video project, I think it'd be interesting to have everyone make a video that displays some parts of their life, similar to a day in the life video. It could be hobbies, school life, etc.