For the cop pulling over Kip scene we only used a camera and a tripod. Since I know that audio on prior shoots had been neglected I volunteered to attempt to do audio on the camera. This was the first time I ever did audio for a production and I now know why some audio people can be such high maintenance. The microphones can pick up sound really far away, and when shooting outside there are a lot of things that you don't necessarily want in your scene, like the sound of the T-cat.
Last semester I did a shoot where cars were constantly driving by and that left me with a short fuse with cars. The scene I am referring to turned what should have been a forty minute shoot into a two hour shoot. Ever since then I actively try to avoid shooting near roads unless audio doesn't matter, or it is absolutely necessary. Also shooting outdoors is something I like to avoid now as well.
Audio is not a job I prefer, but I feel like I did a solid job. We'll see how it turns out in the final cut.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
1st time Acting
I had to act as a PA that was getting arrested. This was both easy and difficult at the same time. I was dedicated to trying to do it over and over again, but I don't have that much skill when it comes to acting. What I needed to focus on was hitting a mark, speaking clearly enough and making it a funny line or two. I was able to finally get it done, but it took a while. If you're not trained it is difficult to take direction and when there are more than two people telling you what to do it becomes more confusing. It also was painful since the handcuffs were on tight every single time.
I applaud everyone that was outside in the rain for those takes. Being inside for those takes was probably the only fun part about acting, but it needed to get done. What was the main take away today? Probably that I shouldn't act unless it's a last resort.
I applaud everyone that was outside in the rain for those takes. Being inside for those takes was probably the only fun part about acting, but it needed to get done. What was the main take away today? Probably that I shouldn't act unless it's a last resort.
1st time Directing
Directing for the first time on this project.
It was a little bit weird not working with the same talent that I had been used to last semester. By the end of production on Life and Death I had a shorthand for speaking with my actor as well as him having a strong sense of the character and what he should do for each scene.
Nick Janney definitely helped with what would work since he wrote the script, but I feel like I did a good job at getting different types of reactions out of the talent. My favorite take that I directed was when I told Brandon to laugh similarly to a mad scientist and it got a lot of energy out of him. That was also the fifth take I believe. Each time I had him do something a little bit more ridiculous, so by the time we got there he was very loosened up.
It was challenging directing the interview scenes because you need to think about where the scene plays into the story more than with full scenes. The interview needs to either be the set up or the punchline in a joke, so getting the performance just right for either an extreme reaction or an extreme juxtaposition.
It was pretty fun working with the talent though, since they brought so much to the table and were very professional.
It was a little bit weird not working with the same talent that I had been used to last semester. By the end of production on Life and Death I had a shorthand for speaking with my actor as well as him having a strong sense of the character and what he should do for each scene.
Nick Janney definitely helped with what would work since he wrote the script, but I feel like I did a good job at getting different types of reactions out of the talent. My favorite take that I directed was when I told Brandon to laugh similarly to a mad scientist and it got a lot of energy out of him. That was also the fifth take I believe. Each time I had him do something a little bit more ridiculous, so by the time we got there he was very loosened up.
It was challenging directing the interview scenes because you need to think about where the scene plays into the story more than with full scenes. The interview needs to either be the set up or the punchline in a joke, so getting the performance just right for either an extreme reaction or an extreme juxtaposition.
It was pretty fun working with the talent though, since they brought so much to the table and were very professional.
Day one shoot
4-7
-Production Design
-Helping DP
-Helping Director
-Helping Audio
-Editing coverage decisions
-Watch continuity
-Room tone
-Laugh tone
-Breakdown
-Planning for future
The writer's room was full of surprises and wonder.
For our production design i was working on filling out a bunch of ideas on note cards to have in the room. Since they would not be the focus of the scene it was fine for me to write whatever I wanted on the cards. I decided to write either a combination of what people were saying in the room, or lyrics to songs that I had on my phone. This worked well and I was able to efficiently write down different words on the cards, that way enough attention is away from them.
With our DP and Director I was being conscious of the shots that we were taking. There were a few times where I asked Alec if he like the framing of a shot and then we readjusted it. With the DP I voice a few concerns of mine. One was with panning/tilting while the tripod is locked. It can damage the locks and if we were to do any movements it would not look pretty. Luckily all the shots were static today, but he did not take my advice.
Once Dave left I did my best to make sure that we had all of the audio coverage we need, ranging from laughs to room tone. The reason I placed emphasis on this is because I know that bad audio is what separates a bad production from an amazing one. People get turned off from bad audio quicker than they do bad visuals.
I was watching everything thinking from an editing standpoint if things would be easy to cut together, this was very nice and I hope that it will pay off once editing starts.
We got everything shot that we needed to today, which was good and while I had my doubts about the project before hand I think could actually be really funny. Anyway, we then had to clean up the spot and transfer all of the files to my hardrive.
-Production Design
-Helping DP
-Helping Director
-Helping Audio
-Editing coverage decisions
-Watch continuity
-Room tone
-Laugh tone
-Breakdown
-Planning for future
The writer's room was full of surprises and wonder.
For our production design i was working on filling out a bunch of ideas on note cards to have in the room. Since they would not be the focus of the scene it was fine for me to write whatever I wanted on the cards. I decided to write either a combination of what people were saying in the room, or lyrics to songs that I had on my phone. This worked well and I was able to efficiently write down different words on the cards, that way enough attention is away from them.
With our DP and Director I was being conscious of the shots that we were taking. There were a few times where I asked Alec if he like the framing of a shot and then we readjusted it. With the DP I voice a few concerns of mine. One was with panning/tilting while the tripod is locked. It can damage the locks and if we were to do any movements it would not look pretty. Luckily all the shots were static today, but he did not take my advice.
Once Dave left I did my best to make sure that we had all of the audio coverage we need, ranging from laughs to room tone. The reason I placed emphasis on this is because I know that bad audio is what separates a bad production from an amazing one. People get turned off from bad audio quicker than they do bad visuals.
I was watching everything thinking from an editing standpoint if things would be easy to cut together, this was very nice and I hope that it will pay off once editing starts.
We got everything shot that we needed to today, which was good and while I had my doubts about the project before hand I think could actually be really funny. Anyway, we then had to clean up the spot and transfer all of the files to my hardrive.
More pre-prod
Planning!
Locations (due to transitions)
Schedule (actors) MW for writer's room
My idea of green screen a backlot outside a window. These will be for the interviews.
Matching/cheating rooms and locations concern. One of the toughest things with this film might be matching locations for the very simple reason that Ithaca is not very uniform and almost nothing is similar to another thing on campus. I think having the interviews break up sequences will be helpful and potentially hide it if we plan on shooting across campus.
In a perfect world there should only be five shoot days. I'm expecting this to turn into nine shoot days with maybe two reshoots. I expect the need for a reshoot for one of two reasons. The first, transitions might not work in post production. The second, is that sound might be a problem as well, knowing how difficult it can be.
I also put a picture of what I believe a writing room should look like for our film in the group.
I gave Charlie a great idea for printing out the posters for the writers rooms in a cheap way that it still effective. They final result of the prints would look like this and it would save probably about $10 per poster.
Storyboard (interrupts) Shot-listing
3/24/14 - Shot-listing:
Last class I was sick and missed out on quite a bit apparently. I found out that people in class got assignments to do by Monday and was confused as to what I was to do for a while. I had been doing work for other classes until Sunday when I asked Chris what I had to do. He was in the middle of posting in the group so I let him finish up and then clarify for me anything I was hazy on.
Since so many people are going to be directing this and I want this piece to be as cohesive as possible, I tried to take as similar scenes as possible to do. I took quite a bit of the interviews as well as short scenes that are flashbacks. So none of my scenes were realtime because I felt that if they get crossed over between directors, the different style will show and the story wont be believable enough.
While I know that some people work really well with storyboards, I do not. I find them to be a waste of time as I have much quicker and more efficient ways of getting my thoughts across. I am a fan of a combination of using a shot-list and a look book. Shot-lists should be easy enough for a Director of Photography to understand and try to interoperate it in their own way. If their idea is no where near what I like then adjustments will be made, but sometimes they make better decisions than what I had in my head. Also I use a shot lister application which can have storyboards integrated if need be. It also has a live view to where on shoot days I can check off shots we have done and it will let us know if we are in the green (ahead of schedule) or in the red (behind schedule) for the day. It also allows to put in storyboards from photos taken on your phone or wherever as well as drawn. A look book as I have used it is a book that a director makes with different looks in it to show his cast and crew. Among these images can be photos from magazines, TV shows, films, real life, anything really. It is really good at conveying thoughts about lighting, emotions, framing, and depth of field. It is a great tool for directors that are fans of visual explanation and it can give a solid reference for the cast and crew to abide by.
So that explains why I went about shot-listing as opposed to storyboarding.
Editing + Wrap Up
The editing process for this project has been less than ideal. There were numerous problems that occurred and hopefully I can remember to log all of them here.
The first was with the actual clips themselves. The way that Sony cameras work, which I forgot about until I was about to start editing, is by having a specific folder structure with data outside the main footage files that contain important information. Without these folder structures and files with data on them it makes it impossible to log and transfer on FinalCut or any other program. Throughout the whole production of Puppet Playtime the video files only were copied.
The next problem comes with the video files themselves, MTS files are very temperamental. They need to be converted if they are to be edited. Normally a log and transfer would accomplish this, but since that could not work, another method needed to be done. There are components out there that allow you to edit MTS files directly, but that bogs down your computer and makes editing take at least thirty times longer to edit and the more complex the edit, the more difficult it will be as the editing program will get bogged down. So I needed to convert all the footage through After Effects into edit friendly proxy files. This process took about thirty minutes to set up, I started converting and a short 42 hours later I was able to start editing.
The next problem came with the organization. All of the video and the audio from the first four shoot days were organized with regards to the days they were shot on. The video for the next four shoots were able to be organized as well since it has the date it was created in the metadata. The audio on the other hand did not. They were in two different folders and since the date was not set on the audio device, it was difficult to figure out which audio went to which day.
Third problem, scene numbers. Not only were a lot of scenes not slated with the scene number in it, but the most updated version of the script I had was lacking scene numbers. This in combination of changing scenes on the fly at shoots I was unable to attend made it tricky to piece the whole thing together. Was it really difficult? No, but it did not make editing simple.
Forth problem, slatting, or not slating. Almost none of the scenes were slated with an actual slate, just the first three I believe. It's really good the first and third scene were actually slated because there was no camera audio. Had there been no slate it would have been damn near impossible to sync the audio to video. On other days they just slated by snapping their fingers, which is fine since I prefer syncing audio to audio, but it was only on camera a few times. With regards to being able to use the high quality audio, or any at all we were really close to experiencing the full effect of Murphy's Law. Another thing that was annoying is when they were slating the slate would be out of focus and sometimes they did not actually wait for the camera to start recording before slating.
One specific problem that occurred was the green screen scenes that had Canon in them had audio from where the background footage was taken. Since those files came to us right before the deadline, there was nothing we could do to save them, so for this version we had to leave them out of the video.
Cinematography, was another issue for me. There were times where shots were rendered useless just because of the shot choice. One that comes to mind is in the dressing room and the mirror reflected the microphone pretty much the whole time. That ruined that side and made the other angle less appealing to cut back from. Other times one angle of dialogue was completely ignored and there were only two different angles of dialogue, a straight on wide/two shot and then a medium closeup on one of them. Another thing that was a hugh peeve to me and made it difficult to choose the best take was anytime the camera panned or tilted because it was jerky. On the first day of shooting I addressed my concern to the DP about panning with the tripod locked and how not only will it look like crap, but it will damage the locks on the tripod. Knowing that this tripod is similar to mine and that it has a fluid drag system that allows for smooth shots and can almost even lock the tripod just by increasing the friction, I spoke up. This clearly was disregarded in future shoots.
I cannot remember if I brought this up in a previous entry or not, but the time was not too kind to the editors either. Since there was such a late start to production this means less time for editing at the end, which is where "save jobs" flourish. Save jobs are when the technical skill in production is lacking and it can still come out looking pretty good, as I'm sure you know. Since we are all full time students, and I specifically had another editing class, it made finding time to edit hard. This was the last project I had for the semester of all of my classes as far as deadlines are concerned, so it had to be saved for last. This added even more stress to the already stressful job of a quick turn around.
That being said I think this project turned out pretty well, and will be better once we fix the interview problems. The writer scene is really funny and I'm glad the final product was pretty funny. I would say I deserve an A-/A for a few reasons. The biggest one is that I am probably one of two/maybe three people that would have been able to get the project edited since there were so many hoops to jump through. When I was on set, especially for the writing room scene, I tried to make sure things would be well for editing down the line, but things still slipped through the cracks. I took turns at different parts of production from casting, to storyboards, to production design, to directing, audio, and a lot of editing. I had my hands in a lot of parts of production and the only part I didn't really do was writing the script and planning the shoot dates.
The first was with the actual clips themselves. The way that Sony cameras work, which I forgot about until I was about to start editing, is by having a specific folder structure with data outside the main footage files that contain important information. Without these folder structures and files with data on them it makes it impossible to log and transfer on FinalCut or any other program. Throughout the whole production of Puppet Playtime the video files only were copied.
The next problem comes with the video files themselves, MTS files are very temperamental. They need to be converted if they are to be edited. Normally a log and transfer would accomplish this, but since that could not work, another method needed to be done. There are components out there that allow you to edit MTS files directly, but that bogs down your computer and makes editing take at least thirty times longer to edit and the more complex the edit, the more difficult it will be as the editing program will get bogged down. So I needed to convert all the footage through After Effects into edit friendly proxy files. This process took about thirty minutes to set up, I started converting and a short 42 hours later I was able to start editing.
The next problem came with the organization. All of the video and the audio from the first four shoot days were organized with regards to the days they were shot on. The video for the next four shoots were able to be organized as well since it has the date it was created in the metadata. The audio on the other hand did not. They were in two different folders and since the date was not set on the audio device, it was difficult to figure out which audio went to which day.
Third problem, scene numbers. Not only were a lot of scenes not slated with the scene number in it, but the most updated version of the script I had was lacking scene numbers. This in combination of changing scenes on the fly at shoots I was unable to attend made it tricky to piece the whole thing together. Was it really difficult? No, but it did not make editing simple.
Forth problem, slatting, or not slating. Almost none of the scenes were slated with an actual slate, just the first three I believe. It's really good the first and third scene were actually slated because there was no camera audio. Had there been no slate it would have been damn near impossible to sync the audio to video. On other days they just slated by snapping their fingers, which is fine since I prefer syncing audio to audio, but it was only on camera a few times. With regards to being able to use the high quality audio, or any at all we were really close to experiencing the full effect of Murphy's Law. Another thing that was annoying is when they were slating the slate would be out of focus and sometimes they did not actually wait for the camera to start recording before slating.
One specific problem that occurred was the green screen scenes that had Canon in them had audio from where the background footage was taken. Since those files came to us right before the deadline, there was nothing we could do to save them, so for this version we had to leave them out of the video.
Cinematography, was another issue for me. There were times where shots were rendered useless just because of the shot choice. One that comes to mind is in the dressing room and the mirror reflected the microphone pretty much the whole time. That ruined that side and made the other angle less appealing to cut back from. Other times one angle of dialogue was completely ignored and there were only two different angles of dialogue, a straight on wide/two shot and then a medium closeup on one of them. Another thing that was a hugh peeve to me and made it difficult to choose the best take was anytime the camera panned or tilted because it was jerky. On the first day of shooting I addressed my concern to the DP about panning with the tripod locked and how not only will it look like crap, but it will damage the locks on the tripod. Knowing that this tripod is similar to mine and that it has a fluid drag system that allows for smooth shots and can almost even lock the tripod just by increasing the friction, I spoke up. This clearly was disregarded in future shoots.
I cannot remember if I brought this up in a previous entry or not, but the time was not too kind to the editors either. Since there was such a late start to production this means less time for editing at the end, which is where "save jobs" flourish. Save jobs are when the technical skill in production is lacking and it can still come out looking pretty good, as I'm sure you know. Since we are all full time students, and I specifically had another editing class, it made finding time to edit hard. This was the last project I had for the semester of all of my classes as far as deadlines are concerned, so it had to be saved for last. This added even more stress to the already stressful job of a quick turn around.
That being said I think this project turned out pretty well, and will be better once we fix the interview problems. The writer scene is really funny and I'm glad the final product was pretty funny. I would say I deserve an A-/A for a few reasons. The biggest one is that I am probably one of two/maybe three people that would have been able to get the project edited since there were so many hoops to jump through. When I was on set, especially for the writing room scene, I tried to make sure things would be well for editing down the line, but things still slipped through the cracks. I took turns at different parts of production from casting, to storyboards, to production design, to directing, audio, and a lot of editing. I had my hands in a lot of parts of production and the only part I didn't really do was writing the script and planning the shoot dates.
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