Posts in the Film Making category

Been a while since I posted, but...

The Lazarus Papers now has a teaser/investor trailer up at http://www.myspace.com/thelazaruspapers. Check it out!

(Edit: Actually... I also just found out that there's another site you can go to - http://www.thelazaruspapers.com - which has the full trailer on it).

Add 'em as a friend on your Myspace account and show your support!

(Oh, and it has my good friend Joseph DeLorenzo acting in it. Directed by my other friend Jeremiah Hundley - who worked with both of us on The Good Samaritan short... and also shot by Scrapper (I helped out with Audio and slating on his last short, Finn's Last Dance)).

It's a small world after all :)

Looks like my friend Miah Hundley has finally got his project off the ground. He's currently in Bangkok, getting ready to shoot his film on 35mm.

Way to go! Holy crap I'm so excited for him. He has been working on the script for years, and it's finally coming to fruition.

Living the dream man, living the dream!

Recently I've been out on film sets again! Yay! The past three (four? five? I lose count... it started in October) weekends have been spent holding a microphone above my head, and tweaking a DAT recorder's sound levels on my friends Matt & Scrapper's film production. It's great to get back into the swing of things again. It also reminds me just what a superbly talented bunch of people I work with. I love 'em all to pieces. And the people I don't work with who are doing this are great too. Gosh, I'm getting all emotional.

Here's a photoblog of sorts of the film shoot so far. Stars Jerry Lloyd. And criminy, Jerry's last film (Bullets, Blood and a Fistful of Cash) just got picked up by a distributor. Woohoo!

By the way, if you're in the Seattle area, Jerry is part of Verotica143, which (and I know this is hard to believe, but please bear with me) is an erotic mime show. You can pick your jaw up from the floor now. Go check it out.

For some reason I'm always happiest when on a film set. You end up doing nothing for hours at a time. Nearly everything is just waiting. And in my case, I'm usually holding a microphone above my head at the end of a long pole (which magnifies the weight) for hours at a time. But I love it like nothing else. Why? Who frickin' knows. I don't care - I just love doing it.

However, next time I do sound for anyone, I want to pick the DAT package and the microphones we need for the shoot. I swear, if I do one thing in the future, it will be to rent a multitrack recorder of some kind, and rent a bunch of lavaliers for dialogue work. So much better than just using a shotgun if the conditions are awful.

Interesting. Since installing XP SP2, I've not had a single problem. Not, that is... until now.

For some odd reason, export to AVI or MPEG using Premiere Pro is now completely borked. It stops with "missing frame" errors or "out of memory" errors. There's no obviously apparent reason why this should happen though... after all, the rest of my stuff works fine. The only thing I can think of as being a potential culprit is the new NX support, but I'm using a CPU which doesn't support that.

Then again, my main machine has always been a little flaky, thanks to installing way too much experimental shiat on it... and then only partially uninstalling it. Rinse, repeat. Thing is, there are reports of other people having that problem.

Time to wipe and try again. Well, first I'll uninstall SP2. Then I'll wipe and try again. :)

Well, back to editing. I've been putting together more and more of the short we shot. It has taken me a lot longer than anticipated with moving house, work, and everything else in between (that, and fixing the computer problems... I'm still waiting for the Corsair guy to stop trying to debug my system and just give me a goddamn RMA number so I can ship the bad stick back to him... still, can't blame the guy too much - he's just doing his job).

So it's all coming together now. Getting the right export settings from Premiere Pro is a bit of a pain, but I'm finally starting to understand After Effects and its slightly clunky UI. (One thing I'd really like to be able to do is create a matte on the fly over the top of the footage I'm compositing into, and see the result at the same time - either in a preview window, or on the image itself - maybe something like the Photoshop Mask tool, with its slightly pinkish hue to indicate what's showing through where. That, and being able to zoom in on the image and scroll around it would be nice - at least that way I could do fine detail work using the mouse).

One rough cut coming right up. I'm over halfway through the film now. The scene that pushes our homeless guy over the edge, and the final scene that comes after it are all that are left to put together. Alas, I managed to misplace my firewire cable in the move, so I need to go out and get a new one to capture the last of the footage to my system.

I'm also discovering that video formats really need some standardization. It should be possible for me to input my source material, output it to the DVD creator and burn it to a DVD without worrying about what format it ends up in. All I should have to say is "This project is for 24 frames a second" or "This project is 60 fps interlaced" and everything should automagically make it so.

(Yes, I know, it's not all that simple... and some people will need finer control over the elements and how they're conformed to the specified video settings... but still, I can dream, can't I?)

On the plus side, I finally got my compositing done on one of two sfx shots in the piece. I also added in a possibly completely overkill hamming-it-up lens-flare style "starburst" effect to one of them... that may need to be cut out. Might want something a bit more subtle in there.

So, it's getting there at least. I just wish we'd recorded clean audio... as it stands, I can't use any of it, so it's either going to be a huge job foleying the audio back in, or we'll just go with a purely instrumental soundtrack. Sheesh.

New rule: always capture clean audio, even if everyone is saying "we won't need it!" unless the people saying "we won't need it" are seasoned professionals with years of experience under their belts. Well, that and have confidence enough to tell people when you think they're smoking crack - before it's too late.