I’m trying something new this year: a weekly blog where I’ll talk about filmmaking, movies I’ve seen, art that has inspired me, music I’ve just got turned onto, etc…thoughts and comments always welcome.
Been doing a bunch of preproduction and research this week. Trying to shoot a music video and short film in NYC in the next month or so. If there are any production peeps in NYC, I’d love to meet you…friends of friends are great too.
I’ll talk more about these 2 projects as things firm up…
I’d really like to get another video finished before SXSW…it wouldn’t hurt to have another one in the bag in order to better hustle my wares.
Speaking of which, who all is going? Holla!
Other than that, tomorrow I’m mixing “The Real Luke: Season 2,” so expect those episodes to start dropping soon. And I finished “2 Friends,” the other “lost” film that my Dad shot in 1978. This one was never actually edited, so I did the first cut on it…once I get some credits on it that will be going online too.
Here’s a video I saw today that’s a great example of what creativity, time, and some tech knowledge can do.
A’ight here’s the back story for the ‘Rotten Apples’ video. Tony from Retone Records emailed me and said he had a new band that he wanted to make a video for. I heard their music and was pretty stoked. The band sent me an email about a little idea they had
“david on a toy horse you pay a quarter to ride on at the grocery store, but in front of a green screen and put him in different places”
I like this idea, it reminded me of a thought I’d had recently…I’d been checking out a bunch of commercial production companies’ websites and found this Rimmel ad that I really liked. It had Kate Moss “riding” a motorcycle in front of bad rear projection of old Paris.
I thought how cool would it be to use this technique in a music video…something that obviously didn’t look “real” but had it’s own kitschy aesthetic.
So I suggested to the band that we put Dave in front of old black and white western movies. We could make a sort of chase and mix elements we’d shoot in front of a green screen and from old movies. They dug this idea, but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t seem like a “country” band…I assured them it would be way too weird for anyone to think that. Think ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ meets ‘Knights of Cedonia’ meets ‘Alice in Wonderland.’
Here’s the shot that I showed them to illustrate what I meant by the Western Footage.
They next step was to find all the old western footage…and figure out what the story was going to be. Where was I going to find all this old B&W footage? I could find movies that were in the public domain and then telecine all the material…but this could be really really expensive. Luckily, my producer Tony (a different Tony) found a site called www.archive.org. This site had literally thousands of pieces of media in the public domain. That meant the copy right had lapsed and people could do what ever they wanted with them.
“This collection is free and open for everyone to use.”
I searched for Western before 1950…and their were hundreds of hits…so much it was almost overwhelming and many of them weren’t even the sorts of films I was looking for, just things that had been tagged “western.” So I had my intern, Jessinah go thru the list and make a database of each one that was a real, old western movie. Then I began to download…for the next 3 weeks my computer was constantly downloading…hundreds of gigabytes of media.
Now I had another problem…I work 40 hours a week…I had over 60 movies…even if they were each only 1 hour long, that was 60 hours of viewing. How was I going to be able to review all this material? It could take months? So I enlisted a small army of assistant editors, interns, and friends to help me go thru the footage. Some I paid, some I traded FCP lessons for their time, some of them I just pleaded with…
First I had them look for “riding shots” and “anything interesting or weird.” Then I’d go thru and check their markers…I knew I needed the riding shots, but I wasn’t really sure what other footage I was going to use. As I looked at the movies I saw some real gems of old western filmmaking. heh. It got to be that I’d know WHERE in the film the riding shots would be…there was riding at the beginning where something happened, then a bunch of talking, courtrooms, town, cabin stuff, then the film would end with a big chase & shoot out. Even at double speed and no sound it was pretty easy to follow the plots of these movies.
As I found these shots I began to construct the narrative of the video…there was actually a lot of shots I really wanted to use, including this monkey. *sigh* maybe on another project. I just really loved the idea that there would be a monkey in the old west.
Next I broke up the song and begin to time things out. Using FCP and title cards I start to fill in the moments of the song where I want things to change. It helps me start to visualize the video and figure out the timing. Like “hey, wow. I was waaay to much time for that moment of the song. booooring.” heh. But it really helps me visualize things. I keep expanding on this, getting more and more specific. This time, since I was dealing with green screen, backgrounds, and props, I had to visualize even more.
For each section of the video I made what I’m calling “shot cards.” Then I filled in the props and backgrounds I wanted, what sort of costume, which band members and so one. We used these to: schedule, storyboard, make sure we had all props & wardrobe, and finally keep track of things on set. I really dug them.
Due to our budget restrictions, we decided to shoot at Phil’s (the bassist) loft. It was in downtown LA and it had just enough space for us to throw up a greenscreen. And outside there was a nice white wall which could hopefully pass for outside of a grocery store.
The morning of the shoot started out awesome. With torrential rains. Seriously it hadn’t rained at all this year…then on the morning of the shoot it poured like never before. Walking to the Uhaul, there was literally a river of water going down the stairs outside my apartment. I put on my gortex jacket and my gortex hiking boots. Even still, I ended up with mud on my pants halfway up to my knees. There was a brief let up in the rain when we got downtown.
The band was still asleep.
I started to pound on the large rollup metal door that connect their apartment to the alley. I looked down and there right in the middle of where we’d be walking and moving gear was a big pile of…
human feces.
Welcome to downtown LA.
I knew that this was for me to take care of. I wasn’t paying anyone enough…and the people that were working for free were all friends. This was my video, so it was my duty.
I grabbed a couple pieces of “clean” trash from the alley and scooped. Now I’m cleaned up a lot of poo in my day. I’ve worked as a janitor at a couple ski areas, and cleaned up a bunch when I was working at Safeway in highschool…but this was the nastiest shit I’ve ever had to deal with.
Oh, just a little note, when washing the reminders of poo from outside your loft…use cold water. Hot water kind of um…cooks it. Yeah. Not pleasant.
With the poo out of the way we started to set up…originally we were going to shoot outside first. Since we didn’t have permits, I wanted to get that stuff taken care of before many people were out and about. But it started raining again. So we moved inside and began to shoot Dave on the horse. It was actually a really big horse…full on adult size. Shooting went smooth and soon we were ready to move outside.
But in view of where we wanted to shoot there was a cop. Clovis and I walked down the alley looking at other walls, trying to figure out if one of them would work. Nothing was really standing out to me. We settled on one and moved the horse out. We got a take…then it started to rain. This happened a couple times. Each time we’d come back outside it was a little later in the day…we had a little less light and the chance that’d we’d be able to come back out again diminished. I cut down the number of shots I wanted and we moved quick. We got what we needed just as it started to rain again. Back inside…
Normally in this sort of situation I’d shoot as late as I could…we had the location locked down, we had food, everyone was in good spirits. One slight problem…the band had booked a show that night. In Glendale. So we had to be done by 9pm.
But my crew was up to the challenge. Everyone knew what they needed to do and got it down. I already knew what shots I could cut and I chopped them without mercy. heh.
We got everything we needed and it looked like the band was going to make their show without having to break any land speed records.
Then something happened with the roll up door. It rolled up…but it wouldn’t roll down. It was super jammed. I tried not to freak out about the possibility of having to pay for the door. Luckily I was too tired to really think about such things and it was easy to focus on other things…like signing checks. Kurt the drummer started helping Phil and my friend Troy with the door. He got it to move and BAM! there was a loud sound like a cross between the breaking of metal and an aluminum can popping. The door was free, but Kurt’s hand was in the way. He came down the ladder cursing and holding it. Great. I wasn’t going to have to pay for fixing a door, just the drummer’s hand.
Production insurance was looking better and better by the minute. Of course, I didn’t have any.
We took a look at his hand…all the fingers were still there, he could move it, it wasn’t gushing blood. I think we got pretty lucky.
I got home and promptly went out to a party. The next day I was pretty annihilated, but right now I was still riding a production high.
All in all it was a really fun project I got to shoot my first green screen project, play around with all sorts of post work flows, work with a fun band, and make a cool video.
Had a little bit of time off around the Holidays…now I’m running full steam again. And let me tell you, it feels good.
The good news is that several projects are nearing completion.
• The Real Luke: Season 2
-edit is done!
-sound design in progress
• Two Friends AKA My Dad’s Other Lost Film
-edit is done!
-waiting for song from composer
• Rotten Apples Music Video
-it’s done!
-waiting for a coordinated web attack.
I’m trying something new in this posting – any technical definition is getting a hyper-link. Let me know if you like it…
However…while we are all waiting for that to happen, I’ve decided to post a yet-unseen project, a spec animation commercial I directed last year. It’s was my first foray into animation… now I’ve edited a scad of Care Bears episodes at the j.o.b., but back when I started this, it was all new to me.
It was originally for the Converse Gallery – which was Converse’s on-going, online, user created commercial competitions. Now there are tons of these competitions, but I think this was one of the first.
I didn’t actually enter it…because…um…I didn’t actually finish it in time.
It isn’t really clear when the competition ended because Converse had kept the website online…with all the submission info AND NO message saying “hey, the competition is over…sorry.” So I sent all my many legal forms, tapes, split audio track CD’s, and so on in…only to have to mailed back to me about 2 months later because it was never collected from the still active PO Box.
anyhoo…the idea for the project came from two separate experiences.
The first was back at a RES screening where some filmmakers were talking about these ads that they did for Nike. Nike gave them all “key words” to base their projects on…and basically every group said they just ignored those and made what they wanted. And Nike love the spots.
When my art director and I were brainstorming for the Converse project, I recounted this story about Nike and the Filmmakers and she said “that’s what we should do.” So instead of trying to make what we thought the “client” would like – we decided to make what we knew we liked.
The other part of the idea originated back when I was a work study office worker at SFSU. I was really bored one day, so I took staplers, staple pullers and other office supplies and started photocopying them. Eventually I made a little 6 panel story. I mailed them home to my parent’s…who would randomly get unexplained packages of things I’d made, collected on the bus, done in class, and so on… the “staple chase” was one of these. They liked it and hung it up on the wall…it was there for a couple years and always in the back of my mind as something I wanted to try and animate (someday).
We decided this would make a good shoe ad.
I really wanted to keep the “look” of the photocopier, but I didn’t wanted to be limited by the 2D nature of photocopying things on the glass. You can only get so many angles on there and I thought it would be cool to have something that appeared to be make on a copier, but then would change and surprise the viewer. Here’s what it looks like right off the glass.
My first idea was to create a 3D box to photocopy the objects in. I built a box, open on the bottom and with the inside coated in reflective silver spray paint. Then I used string to hang the shoes down above the glass so I could get an image of the shoes at an off axis angle.
However…this didn’t work. The light of the copier wasn’t bright enough and all that would copy would be the part of the shoe closest to the glass. Also, now that I think about it, the lens on the copier (because it is a camera of sorts) probably has a really shallow depth of field: that is, the area that will be in focus is small.
The next plan was to take pictures and then treat them in photoshop to get the look we wanted. My art director handled this. She’s got the photoshop skillz.
Here’s a untreated photo…
and here’s what it looked like going to the animator…
The next task was storyboarding, I drew these up over a couple of nights.
If you want to see the animatic you can do so here.
Through a friend of a friend I found an animator. I sent him my animatic, the photoshop elements and let him go to work. After a few versions back and forth with the animator I had a locked pic. The animation was good. The edit was done.
Then it went to sounds design. My friend Steve did it for me…and brought in all sorts of cool ideas. For example: the karate chop noises – that was him. If you watch my animatic, I originally used “whipping noises” and this is soooo much cooler. Currently he’s working on TRL: Season 2.
Part of the submission to Converse was “split audio tracks.” Basically you put dialog, sfx, and music different tracks. That way, if they don’t like your music, or need to change the language of the dialog, you can do it. I didn’t think I had any music…but when I was doing this I realized I did have a music cue.
My animator had found it for me and I asked him where he got it.
The Da Vinci Code Video Game.
Awesome. I’m sure no one as played that. Or heard this musical cue.
And I can totally use it for a national broadcast without paying anyone or clearing it.
oye.
I was so close to finishing…but now I had to find a composer. A couple emails, a couple phone calls and I had a track that sounds very close to the one I used…but it was now mine.
So by the time all these steps were finally done…the competition was over.
