happy Friday! it’s been a good week here in Los Angeles. Shriekfest has started! I’m excited to see some horror & sci-fi films and meet a bunch of other genre filmmakers. CERTIFIED screens Sunday at 2pm. details here.
a year or so ago the trailer of THE REAL LUKE: PURSUANCE OF JUSTICE had just been released. I had a very special guest blog written by the one and only The Real Luke. he details the Hollywood Adventure that led him to California to make his first epic, feature length motion picture. here is the trailer to refresh your memory:
when we were on set, we ended up shooting a LOT of extra material. specifically in the desert scene. I had the project pretty well story boarded and knew what shots were needed to make the trailer. but we were running ahead of schedule and our Director of Photography, John Matysiak had some ideas for additional shots… so we shot a bunch of material that didn’t make it into the cut.
while editing I realized that there was enough footage to make an entire OTHER project. but there were a few slight issues. we were missing a number of “connecting” shots. after all, we weren’t trying to make a cohesive scene – we were trying to make a trailer. we had a bunch of cool action, but the moments weren’t really tied together.
in order to show a story that made sense, we’d need to film these “connecting” shots. having reshoots wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, since I was the actor, owned all the props, and the locations were “free”…but there was a BIG problem.
I had shaved my beard.
so… how would we do it?
did I need to spend a few months regrowing my beard?
should we only shoot me from the back?
what were the simplest possible shots w/o showing my face that we could use?
together w/ my intern Kevin Allen-Bicknell we laid out the shots we had in the best possible order. then discussed what was missing story wise and how we could tell that story with INSERT shots.
we went outside the yetiesque offices and shot those inserts on my Canon Powershot. then cut them into the sequence with the HD material. it wasn’t pretty, but it did let us see if the story made sense. and it did. next we needed to film those insert in HD. so on one of the scouting days for CERTIFIED I brought my Mackinaw, camo, and hatchet to set. John and I walked down the road a bit and quickly filmed the few shots.
they cut in perfectly. our plan had worked!
I wanted to set up the project as a “sneak peak” into the post production of the film, so I added the timecode window burns that normally are found on footage during the editing process. there aren’t filters for these, so they we all made by hand. yes, that means EVERY frame is a different title. (I can talk about what all the numbers mean if anyone is interested…let me know)
here’s the finished project, THE REAL LUKE: PURSUANCE OF JUSTICE: JUST DESSERT.
hope you all are having a great week. this past couple weeks has been an interesting time for me. after much deliberation, I’ve decided to reenter the freelance world.
the past few years I’ve been a staff editor at a post production facility. it has been a good gig for me. I’ve gotten to work on many interesting projects, learned a lot about the technical side of post production, and made some good friends.
but, for about the last year I’ve been finding that I’m hitting a wall with the amount that I can accomplish outside of work. there is simple only SO much time in a day. and when working a full day for someone else, it eats into the amount of time that I have had for creative projects.
after working a full day, eating dinner, dealing with mail and the other chores and tasks that are part of being an adult – I felt good when I’d get an hour of solid creative work in. and folks, an hour a day isn’t that much.
being freelance will give me the extra time that I need to focus on my writing, directing, and other creative projects. it won’t be easy, but I think that it’s the right move now.
expect to hear more about this in the coming months…and of course, updates as they happen can be read at twitter.com/lukeguidici
next week I’ll post some pics and stories from Cannes…I promise=)
I’m happy to share with you my brand new “Director’s Reel.” this has been a work in progress for the last several months. does it take months to edit a director’s reel? no. then why, you may ask, has it taken this long?
well, the answer is pretty simple. the music. finding the right track takes time. there are a lot of things that I look for in music track.
1.) Do I like it?
it is after all, MY reel. I should enjoy listening to it.
2.) Is it too [BLANK] for the casual listener?
some of my music choices can be a little too eclectic for the average listener. the goal of a reel is to have people get excited about the pretty images, NOT to be distracted by their dislike of the song.
3.) Does the tone of the song match the tone of the reel?
it’s important to have the song reinforce the images. for my reel, I wanted to combine playful and quirky with serious and cinematic.
4.) Is the song editable? That is, can it be rearranged, shorted, and modified to provide not only the desired DURATION, but also the right EMOTIONAL beats for the reel?
there are 4 different parts of the song used in my new reel. can you figure out where I made the edits?
—-
once the song has been picked, the next step is to find the shots that best represent both the pieces they are from AND the overall needs of the reel.
since I’ve made a few demo reels, I already had the shots for some of the projects picked out. and the other projects weren’t that hard. because I the emotional beats of the song and plan for the impression I wanted the viewer to have, it was simply a matter of selecting the shots that best fit with those. this is sometimes referred to as “pulling selects.” back in the days of editing FILM, as assistant editor would literally PULL the best shots and hang them in a trim bin for an editor.
after I had my “selects” I began work on the order and timing of the piece. I knew that I wanted to start with “The Real Luke: Pursuance of Justice” and to end with “APT. 5″ and “Certified.” the other projects I moved around a bunch until I settled on the current order. a lot of the order has to do with the transitions in between the pieces. for example, “Updating Paige” ends with a person jumping through the air and the “Got A Nerve” segment starts with two people flying through the air.
any ideas on other devices I used to transition between projects?
About a month ago a representative for Nokia contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in participating in a promotion in conjunction with their new phone and TRON.
They would send me a phone, and I would use it to make a short film inspired by TRON. Then some of the films would screen at a sneak preview of TRON: LEGACY.
It sounded like a fun project, so I agreed. I even passed along the project to a few of my filmmaking friends. (Only one ended up doing it)
It took a bit longer to get the phone than they originally suggested.
We were supposed to have a week to make our films. We ended up having only 3 days.
This made things a little challenging for me as I had 2 full days of the day job, plus a day of rehearsal and editing “Updating Paige” already scheduled.
So I had three days in which to make a film…and I was already booked on all three days.
Luckily I anticipated it being a tight deadline and planned for something that could be shot very simply and with a very small crew.
Here’s the rough time table:
Wednesday
2:45pm – phone arrives from UK
8pm – build “rig” to attach camera to tripod
Thursday
Troy (the star) shoots Jack in the Box commercial / Luke outlines script
Friday
6:45am-9:45am – film NOKIA project.
10am-6pm – Luke goes to work, transfers & transcodes footage on laptop while doing day job.
8pm-9pm – log footage
Saturday
10am-11am – rough cut
11am-12pm – Martial Arts rehearsals
12pm-1pm – rough cut continues
2pm-5pm – supervised session with editor of Updating Paige.
6pm-11:59pm – fine cut, vfx
Sunday
12am-2am – vfx, color correction
2am-3am – sound design and mix
3am-3:30am – delivery.
A compressed schedule to say the least.
But let’s get down to brass tacks…
The phone/camera was an interesting device. After years of using the iPhone it was challenging to work with a less intuitive device. Especially when it didn’t come with much of a manual. For instance, there is a whole separate button on the phone for the “menu” and the keyboard for typing letters is a “T9″ keyboard. But it’s a touch screen, so it could just as easily be QWERTY… Maybe that’s an option to change, but I didn’t see how and didn’t have the time to spend figuring it out.
The camera functioned pretty well. It shot 1280x720i 25fps .mp4′s. These were easily converted 1920×1080 Apple ProRes422(HQ) files using MPEG Streamclip. I toyed with the idea of slowing the footage down to 24 fps in case the projection was going to be in a US format (25fps is used in Europe). But I never got the delivery specs.
The camera shot AMAZING video…for a phone. The colors were decent, it functioned alright in low-light. The controls were easy to use and made sense. In fact, the camera options were the most intuitive part of the device. You could easily change the recording quality, white balance preset, and switch to black & white, sepia, or “saturated” colors.
I left everything on auto.
The camera also had a pretty nice stereo recorder.
—
There were a few drawbacks to the camera.
1.) Jerky zoom. It’s impossible to zoom smoothly either using the on
screen option or the buttons.
2.) Lack of manual controls. No manual exposure or manual focus. This made VFX shots VERY hard as the exposure would change MID SHOT as things in the shot moved. (Like a car…or a person.)
3.) Sensor lag. This is actually kind of cool. In fact, if I’d gotten the camera sooner and had more time to conduct tests…I probably would have incorporated this into my film. check it out here:
—
Because of the difficulties with exposure and the way I shot some of the scenes, the VFX I had originally planned were going to be VERY difficult. I fact, I spent several hours on a few shots and didn’t make too much progress.
It wasn’t until this text message exchange with my friend Bruce that I saw “the light” and revamped my ideas.
I re-watched my cut and thought HOW can I tell this story “more simply?”
Even though it was late…and I was pretty tired, I still figured it out fairly quickly. It wasn’t as “flashy” as I originally planned, but that was ok.
K.I.S.S. – keep it simple, stupid. It’s a little base, but it’s often correct.
Get rid of the extras, include ONLY what you need to in order to tell the story.
In fact, making the VFX less obtrusive actually improved the piece. With a little sound design, and a couple well place shots – I was easily able to get the IDEA across. It wasn’t necessary to include flashy effects. Plus…it would have probably taken me ALL night.
And I like sleep.
—
In the end, I made a film that given the limitations of the schedule & the medium I’m pretty happy with.
Check it out here:
Anyone else shooting on mobile devices? What has your experience been?
[EDIT]
In the end, they didn’t show ANY cell films the bigscreen…why not? That was never explained to me. BUT they did show our film on several flat-screens in lobby.
I’ve just finished a new music video for Grand Vanity’s song “Got A Nerve.” the band is composed of Greg and Dani Jong, a husband and wife duo that I first met on the Procession’s “Major & Minor” video (watch it here.)
the video was a lot of fun to make, the Jong’s have a great attitude and since it was pretty low budget, I got to work with friends. that is, I had to convince people who like me to come work for free or cheap.
since we were going to be pushing the limits of our budget, I wanted to make sure the video was well planned. a month or so before the production, I went to Van Nuys with my Canon Powershot and shot some tests which I then cut into an animatic.
soon the week or the production was upon us…unfortunately the Jong’s came down with the flu. being a performance video it was kinda important that they were in good shape for filming, so we pushed the video. this is never a fun thing to do. once you change dates, the availability of crew and gear can change drastically. and the later we were going to shoot, the worse the weather would be.
yes, this is Southern California, but it does rain here. and the closer you get to the end of the year, the more likely it will rain. but this time, fortune smiled on us. between our initial shoot day and the day we shot it got cold. cold enough that the leaves changed.
leaves before
leaves on day of shoot
this isn’t something we could have planned, but it totally worked in our favor. the potential negative of delaying the shoot turned into a positive that enhanced the mise-en-scène of the video.
the shoot itself went smoothly. no one hassled us at all, which was great since we were shooting IN THE STREET without permits. this means that if anyone had a problem with us shooting they could report us to the police and the police would shut us down. thankfully, Saturday morning in Van Nuys is a pretty mellow place.
you can see a woman walking her dogs stopped to say “hi.”
this was my 2nd video with the director of photography Brett Pawlak he shot the “Come Around” video. it was good getting to work with him again. since we were shooting on a long lens, we were pretty far from the band and would often chat during the takes. listening to the audio tracks cracked me up. maybe someday I’ll cut together some choice lines. until then, you’ll have to be satisfied with a pic of our sweet kicks.
Tony Federico came on board to produce. this was also our 2nd project together, the 1st being the Rotten Apples video. many of these pics are ones he snapped on set. it’s pretty great working with someone who has an even more ridiculous mustache than me.
early morning Tony
the day consisted of much walking around Van Nuys, some stop motion shooting, a bit of green screen, and ended with a short narrative scene. this “house” was actually a small, detached guest room in the backyard that the Jong’s used as their recording studio. add a knocker and a coat rack and viola! another location. part of this scene we had to film after the sun went down. luckily the small lighting package we had did the trick.
to celebrate the shoot I treated a few of the guys to a pretty awesome meal at Umami Burger.
a big thanks to Ben Ceccerelli, Steve Romero, Andrew Drapkin and AJ Ullman for their help with the post production. these guys have all helped me with numerous projects and I couldn’t keep doing what I do without them.
p.s. the next day, Tony, Brett and I would be going on an adventure… we had the camera package for the entire weekend, so we decided to shoot a little short film. a couple posts on craigslist, many headshots, and a few phone calls later we had our talent…
more on that once it drops. until then, here’s a teaser pic from that shoot.
Some of you may be wondering why I’ve released a Christmas themed “The Real Luke” season at the beginning of summer. Well, I don’t have a very good reason other than that
1.) It was done.
2.) I didn’t want to wait.
3.) It just wouldn’t be right to deprive you, my loyal audience, of The Real Luke for any longer. It’d be like keeping a lollipop away from a child, or a string away from a kitteh, or a bottle of Canadian Mist away from a hobo…
But I digress, let me tell you a little about this project.
Last December, I was home in Washington State at the same time when a series of major winter storms aka SNOWPOCALYPSE hit the Puget Sound area. It was the biggest snow fall since 1997. Back then I was just a senior in high school…but I had a 4×4 truck. It was pretty awesome. I rallied all around town. Nothing could stop me.
This time there was no 4×4 in the household, so we were basically stuck at home. Some might even say we were “snow bound”…literally. But that gave us (by “us” I mean my sister Teal and myself) more time to cook, eat, and think up these episodes….
er I mean, for me to…to go and do what I do naturally, in the woods. Yeah….that’s it.
It was a lot of fun getting to work with Teal on the writing and shooting. She’s been a big part of The Real Luke since the beginning and this time she took a bigger role in the creation of the story. Plus since we’ve made a few of these, she knows more of what to look for behind the camera both in terms of framing and my performance.
Everything went pretty smoothly, except for my camera deciding it was going to eat about 10 minutes of footage. There’s definitely a moment of panic in the editing room when you are playing back a tape and it DOESN’T PLAY BACK. But I just left it rolling and eventually it started to play the footage correctly. Luckily we shot some intro & b-roll first. The meat of the story was later on the tape and thankfully, that part was undamaged. Since there was enough to cut all 3 episodes that meant I shot about 10 minutes too much footage.
The camera I’m using I’ve had since 1999. The amount of use I’ve got from it is really astounding. I’ve probably shot over 100 days with it. I’ve used it to edit 50+ projects. It’s been dropped a countless numbers of times. It’s been to more ski areas than most snowboarders. And it’s helped inspire a love of all things Canon.
Sadly though, I’m thinking it’s about time to put it out to pasture… Though the “old” video look has become part of The Real Luke aesthetic, I think the next season just might be…in…HD.
You heard it here first folks.
Anyhoo, I had lots of other help on this season also. My Mom and Teal performed the song on the Holiday Special.
Ben Ceccarelli did the VFX. Nic Routzen took the photos. They both do amazing work and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Steve Romero did a bang up job on the sound design as well.
See all of Season 3 plus the Holiday Greeting in glorious quicktime here!
And as a special treat for my blog readers & twitter followers, here are some exclusive photos from the fashion shoot…enjoy.
Oh, I’m also interested in collaborating with anyone who has an idea for The Real Luke…part of the fun of having an established character is seeing other people’s take on it.
Got somewhere you want him to go?
A mythical creature for him to best in a test of cunning and strength?
Something hallucinatory for him to eat?
Let’s make it happen!
-Luke
p.s. here are the embedded videos if you can’t play the quicktimes.
Now here’s a project that’s been a long time coming. I must have shot it in 2000 or 2001. Back then I was going to SFSU and working in the Design and Industry Department office. Contrary to its portrayal in the short, it was actually a really great job. I enjoyed working with the students, it was on the 1st floor of the same building as most of my classes, I could do homework in my downtime and I liked the people that I worked with. Plus we were the best, most helpful department office on campus. IN YOUR FACE CINEMA DEPARTMENT!!! haha. But that’s another story.
One day, I decided to bring my camera to school and film something while at work. The last year I had made “Splicer 14,” a short about the Edit Cage – in which I also worked. So perhaps this was my follow up? Or maybe I was just feeling creative that day…(to see another project inspired by my time there, click here). With the help of my coworker, Arturo I shot this little short that revolved around my favorite tool in that office – the giant stapler. For some reason I really got a kick out of all the things you could staple with it.
We shot it and then I forgot about it. Around 2004 I found the tape, digitized it, did a rough cut, and then stopped working on the project. Then last summer, 2008, after having a series of projects fall through, I started searching through my old sketch pads for ideas and unfinished projects. I came across a note that said “Luke & Arturo Short.” I embarked on a massive search through my miniDV tape collection, but I couldn’t find the footage! Shit. No tape. No quicktimes on my hard drives. Then I remembered that I used to move things from my external drives to DATA DVDs. I started going through these old backup disks. And lo and behold there is was, not only the footage but the version that I had cut back in ’04.
For the most part I was pretty happy with that cut, it just needed a couple little tweaks. First off, I needed a higher quality Atomic Blast for the end. Luckily, I knew were to find it. I used the site archive.org that had served me so well for the Rotten Apples video. With a “new,” higher quality, shot cut in, the next step was sound design. Now, I could have done this myself. I have sound effects. I’ve done sound design before. But I’m trying to move out of the “does everything oneself” mode of filmmaking. It’s not really a sustainable mode of operation, especially if I want to continue working as a director. Projects are going to become more and more complicated and I’m going to need higher quality work than I can provide for every department.
So I set out to find a sound designer. The work shouldn’t be that hard, it’s just a basic office environment and the short is only 59 seconds long. I estimated that it would take me 3 hours. And I’m not a sound designer, so it should be even quicker for someone who was.
Here’s a quick run down of how that plan worked out.
Sound Designer #1: Never started. Was asked multiple times. Said he’d get to it, but never did.
so I pulled it and sent it to
Sound Designer #2: Super excited about the project. Took a couple weeks to send me 1st mix. Honestly, it was a pretty awful mix. Missing foley, errant sounds left in, notes ignored. Supposedly had 2nd mix done. Couldn’t figure out how to upload to FTP. Wouldn’t answer my troubleshooting questions. Wouldn’t burn a disc or put it on a flash drive. Then his equipment broke. Then he flaked on a supervised session. Then he never responded to emails/texts about when he would finish.
so I pulled the job AGAIN and sent it to
Sound Designer #3: Now I was paying a small amount. Before it was just dinner and my gratitude. Sent him the video and notes. In a couple weeks he sent me the 1st version. Some notes were ignored, other things needed tweaking. Not a bad 1st mix though. Emailed, called, emailed again. No response for a month. So I fired him. It must really suck to get fired from a micro-budget job. And with that sort of work ethic and commitment, I’m sure it won’t be the only time he gets canned.
The job was put back on ice. A couple of weeks ago my friend Angel Vasquez came into town. We ended up hanging with a mutual friend from SF, Patrick Bowsher who had worked with Angel on several projects, recording, mixing, and composing.
Sound Designer #4: I doubled the cash and sent him an email. He was down. It took him about two weeks to take the project from start to finish. And this included 3 versions of the mix. He was quick, efficient, creative, and responded well to notes. What more could a director want? I finally had a version of the sound I was happy with.
Ironically, in the end, I spent more time managing and emailing Sound Designers #1-3 than I would have just DOING the sound design myself. But that would be missing the point of looking for a Sound Designer in the first place. I’m on a mission to find the best people I can to collaborate with. And although it was a long and frustrating process, in the end I found someone great to work with.
Why haven’t I posted? There must be a good reason, right?
Well….kinda, not really?
I’ve done a little traveling this summer:
San Francisco
Seattle
San Diego
Aside from that I’ve just been grinding away. It’s a constant hustle trying to get more projects off the ground and to keep things moving forward. What exactly does this mean? Well in the past couple months I’ve written multiple music video treatments, worked with a writer developing a script for her to act in & me to direct, met with a producer for my sci-fi short, prepared and submitted a grant proposal for said short film, written a narrative essay, met with a sound designer for a short I completed a while back, talked with numerous production companies regarding my reel, sent my reel out to multiple managers and bands, had a meeting with a website regarding creating original content for them, met with bands, gone and shot test footage until 3am, talked with musicians in Seattle, talked with musicians in San Francisco, edited a music video, supervised visual effects for said video, and enlisted my Dad to location scout for me. And this coming weekend I’m going location scouting in NorCal.
Keep in mind…this is all in addition to my 40+ hour a week “day” job.
One project that has been completed is the video for Sirens & Sailors “Like The Sun.” We shot some additional footage in Malibu ..>, Ann gave me some super 8 she’d shot in the Huntington Gardens, Lex gave me some rollouts (the cool effect when the film gets partial overexposed as the camera comes to a stop), and I hired Ben (who did the drawings for “The Real Luke“) to do some visual fx on a couple shots.
I really like working with Ben. He’s a great collaborator, has good ideas, and we communicate very well over IM. Which is really great since we both have “day jobs” and it’s much easier to type a few lines then pick up the phone. I don’t think we spoke on the phone or in person until he dropped off the disc w/ the completed shots. Basically I suggested to him that the video needed something extra…like a little additional visual kick. Something that could be seen almost as an aberration on the physical film. I wanted it to be slightly subtle, yet still psychedelic
I remembered that the first layer of film emulsion is the “blue” layer. Very briefly, film is a photo-chemical process, which means when exposed to light, a chemical reaction takes places, producing, in this case a picture. The actual piece of film contains different layers of emulsion. These are created using gelatin (that’s right, film is NOT vegan) and silver halide. The different layers react to different wave-lengths of light, which produce a color image. That’s why slight damages to film show up as blue or blue green. Heavy “trauma” to film – like “roll outs” happen in the red layer, which is the last layer before the backing.
So what does this knowledge mean in practical terms of the vfx?
Well generally like vfx, pacing, and intensity to increase in the course of my work. So it meant that at the beginning of the video the vfx would need to be in the blue spectrum. Then as the video progressed, they would move into reds and oranges. I told Ben and he worked his magic after effects skills to make it so.
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.
