Leaving the Bastian of Festivities

I got a side freelance gig this week, which was nice because our work has slowed some. Of course, inside of 12 hours, I have spent a great deal of this money already. I have been submitting the new short Accidental Art to several film festivals, even some big ones.

Here’s a big secret admission. I have never submitted one of my movies to the big festivals ever before. I think I submitted Bitter Old Man to Sundance in 2001, but that was it. As much as I like many of the movies I’ve made, I never thought they were good enough to be accepted to the top ten festivals (or even top twenty fests for that matter). Even the most recent material like Uncle Pete’s Playtime and Relationship Card, I didn’t think would warrant attention on the big film festival circuit. Now with Accidental Art, I have a little more faith. It looks like a real movie, not just because of the RED ONE camera, but Greg Sabo’s skill as a DP.

First, I made 30 DVD’s of Accidental Art Wednesday. Then I compiled a list of free film festivals, most of which have deadlines within the next 2 weeks. I weighed out the odds and decided to submit to several of the top ten film fests with this movie. It’s about time I at least tried. It cost money at a time where I have other things and future projects would be better spent, but there is a method to this thought process. I had to burn another 2 discs to meet all the submissions.



Getting accepted and even playing at the big festivals is an award in and of itself. I’m not into the competitions or winning awards, but I never dislike it when it does happen, but it is NOT a motivating factor. I drive myself with my own needs to improve and be a more effective filmmaker. Being allegedly “better” than someone else doesn’t do anything for me, nor does less experienced or subjectively more talented than me cause me to want to kick your ass metaphorically with a movie. These things seem so petty, small, and uninteresting to me. I can’t get motivated by that. Some people do and there’s nothing wrong in that… FOR THEM. If a driving force for making a movie is to cause envy in others, then I feel greatly sad for you. It’s somewhat pathetic and belies emotional and mental issues that need addressing.



I am motivated by telling stories. Most people who speak with me get that dull look in their eyes as I start to spin a story that goes on endlessly, BUT they know I love to tell stories. I make a trip to the grocery store seem like Lawrence of Arabia, even though no one else agrees with my belief in its epic nature. I enter film festivals and try to get press not to feed the ego, but because it’s business. In order to tell bigger, more ambitious movies, that takes $ Money. In order to warrant getting money, you have to play in the bureaucratic sandbox to work and play well with others (that have money).
I want to make movies, but I am anchored by a sense of honor in that I don’t want to lose someone else’s money to do so. So many filmmakers are selfish and want to make their movie so bad that they cut corners or solely want to make an artistic expression, which is fine if they are paying for it themselves. When you work with other people’s money, there is a moral and ethical obligation to do whatever you can to help get return on the investment.

That means a business state of mind. Making a movie is art. The creation is birth to a unique artistic expression. Once it’s done though, you have a product to sell. In this age of digital filmmaking, EVERYONE’s a filmmaker and there are millions, soon to be billions of movies out there. How do you make your movies stand out?



Film Festivals are a great way to show that unbiased 3rd parties selected your film and decided to put it in front of a paying audience. That means it is indicative of how some people believed enough in your vision to add a monetary value. The more festivals that accept and play it demonstrate a potential that you have a movie that crosses market places, and is potentially more suitable to audiences preferences. That’s not rocket science to figure out.

Massive Machiavellian Marketing

Finished Accidental Art’s 6 minute scene and it feels good to be done, although “done” can still be construed as subjective since I keep making these little adjustments. One of the last things done was a license plate replacement done digitally by TJ Cooley, but tweaking it takes hours and hours, then because of the proxies and HD editing setup, every file has to be re-rendered down the line. Each time I make a 1 frame tweak, it’s 30 minutes to render the 4K files, 30 minutes to render the 1080P, and 30 minutes to render the MPEG2 for DVD, and 30 minutes for the MP4 for the web, and so on. And yet, I cannot let this go without it being closer to perfection, at least my own definition therein.



I’m already set to send the 6 minute piece to over 16 festivals this week alone, not including my own Cowtown Film Series, which will mark its premiere screening. If I never get to make the rest of this feature film, I could be content with this as a singular piece. There is an ending to it, and you cannot really guess where it goes from there, but it does have a compelling story. In the mean time, I intend to get this seen. If it wins awards, so be it, as that is not my goal per se, but they certainly won’t hurt the fund raising efforts.

A fascinating technical tidbit, even though this is shot 4K and I’m creating 1080P masters, I’m particularly impressed with how this piece looks on the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube), older TV’s. When playing off DVD or via component video from the timeline, Jesus Marimba! This footage looks drop dead amazing. Part of it is obviously the down-sampling of picture information, but regardless, the look is staggeringly impressive.

I have made a markedly clear change in my methodology; quality over quantity. My own personal bar has been raised. I can’t look back much now. What was in my head isn’t as good as the movie I made, thanks to the entire crew, not the least of which was Greg Sabo’s camera and lighting work.





Johnny DiLoretto from Channel 6/Fox 28 and formerly from the Other Paper has agreed to host the Cowtown Film Series for the Thursday night show. Every time I do one of these shows, they get bigger and better. Getting the Alive to sponsor the event was a big score for me. I’ve never had that big of a sponsor before. Hopefully Time Warner will follow suit soon, if not then maybe next time.

So I just had several movies play at the MADLAB FILM FEST downtown. I wasn’t able to make it, but I was told it was a decent crowd, but that the DVD’s played kind of skippy. Apparently they didn’t read my MOVIEMAKER MAGAZINE article. It’s the whole reason I wrote it; to avoid presentations snafu’s like that. Oh well.

Peace to all the brothers and sisters suffering,
Peter John Ross

Arbitrarily Ascribing to Arrogation

Slowly but surely my movie gets closer to being finished. Sound mix is officially done. I did some interesting panning for voices and sound FX to match the on screen action. The toughest thing to do was to add some room tone noise to shots that were crystal clear. Since one angle of an actor was noisier than the reverse shots, that meant I had to add that basic sound to these shots too. I hate making something sound worse, but it’s a lot less distracting than hearing each cut go from a sound to no sound. It wasn’t particularly bad, but it was not my happiest moment. It happens on shoots.

Two title effects left to do. I did the scrolling credits last week along with some other titles, but the main title at the beginning and the one at the end needed some motion tracking and insertion, so that was something TJ finished off and emailed me the project files. Either tomorrow or Monday I’ll insert these shots, tweak them to fit the music score by Bill Wandel, and that will pretty much put this project to bed.

ACCIDENTAL ART

The title to my next movie is ACCIDENTAL ART. It will screen on December 3rd and December 6th as a part of the upcoming COWTOWN FILM SERIES. These 2 shows have come together so fast, my head is still spinning.

I got a call from the theater, and the owner wanted to know if I was going to do any Cowtown Film Series this year. I hadn’t thought about it, but I knew I wanted to screen ACCIDENTAL ART soon. Also, I had never done cast/crew screenings of REFRACTORY or RELATIONSHIP CARD. So I started to put feelers out for a few shorts I knew were out there and got a pretty immediate response.

Within 24 hours I had over 2 hours of short films to play. Not a one of these are 48 Hour Film Projects from Columbus 2008 or 2009. My sole purpose in avoiding those movies is because many of them have already played in movie theaters twice in the last couple months. I like to show material that most likely has not been played in a real movie theater. The real reason I make movies is to sit in a dark room with a bunch of strangers and watch a story unfold in pictures and sound.

Since many of these movies showing will be cast & crew screenings, we didn’t want to charge admission, so splitting the box office with the theater was not an option, so we’re splitting the costs of renting the theater, as well as getting sponsors, many of which are already on board.


The biggest difference for this year’s Cowtown Film Series will be projecting in HD. Last year was on DVCAM tape, although great, is still a letterboxed 4:3 image with 720x480 resolution. This year we’ll be in 1920x1080 from an HD deck. I want the best possible color and detail, especially for the movie shot in HD. The colors and details should really pop off the screen.



I’m going to work hard to make sure the projection and sound is top notch. For whatever reason, I guess it’s respect for all the filmmakers’ hard work, I don’t want any screw ups or poor presentation. Few things in filmmaking are more disrespectful than not making sure you’re giving the best possible presentation to EVERYONE’s movie, not just your own. I was partly responsible for a screw up in the past at a similar festival, and I’ll never allow that again. It’s all in who you choose to work with, and I prefer professionals or people who care enough to work to make everyone look good.

The Cowtown Film Series is about the community. The selections this year indicate that the quality of filmmaking in Ohio has increased dramatically. While some local filmmakers are content to remake the same movie over and over again, most are pushing the limits of what you can do with a minimal budget.

Share me

Share me

Posted using ShareThis

Aural Fixation

I tried to take this week off of my new project in a way. I’m a little burned out, at least creatively, so I wanted to take a break before delving into the sound mix, plus I needed a score and finding the right composer was eluding me.

Part of the problem for me is that this is the first project I have ever made that I did not already know what kind of music I wanted. I was completely and totally without a clue as to what I wanted for music.

I am a former musician. From the time I was 5 years old and began tinkering with the piano, and later saxophone, guitars, keyboards, drums, and virtually ever instrument on the planet (sans the harmonica that ultimately defeated me as the one instrument I could not even begin to get a real note out of), I only wanted to write film scores. The first 45RPM I owned was STAR WARS MAIN TITLE and a B-Side of CANTINA BAND. Until my late 20’s, this was the singular goal of my entire life to write music for movies. I gave it up when I started writing and directing and I do NOT miss it, not even a little.



Every movie I’ve ever made, I had some idea or notion as to what I wanted musically. Even if I gave up my preference for that of the composers, I at least had a starting point that could always fall back on. Now, this movie stumped me. The tone of the film is odd enough, but I was without even a single direction to go with. I tried several temp tracks, and nothing worked. I even screened the current cut at Indie Club Columbus this past Monday with temp music. That made it evident that I needed just the right music more than anything.

Since last week I started talking to Bill Wandel (www.billwandel.com) the composer who did the action music for HORRORS OF WAR. He’s a pro and does this as his sole income, so I generally don’t pester him for my low to no pay shorts, but this is the introduction to a new feature film. I need to pull out the stops and make this as good as I can. The music needs to match Greg Sabo’s cinematography and all the actors’ performances, all of which are top notch.



Bill got the chance to see the cut, placed ever so secretly online sans any temp music; don’t want to influence any compositions with outside music, plus I wasn’t 100% sold on the temp music (hence the term “temp”). That’s not to say the quality of the temp music isn’t good, but it wasn’t written to match the mood of MY movie.

I wrote out my spotting session in an email. That means I wrote down the time codes of where I felt the music should start and stop, and also places where I thought if Bill wanted to try something musically, to go ahead and try it. He said he only had 2 days to get this done, but he’d try.

Yesterday morning I got the email with a link to music files and that was a mere 16 hours later. What I wasn’t prepared for was the perfect score. The style was modern and familiar, and yet I never would have thought of it. The moods and melodies are perfect. Basically, he says with the music what I wanted to convey to the audience about how to feel about the movie I have. Because of how complex and strange my story is, Bill Wandel’s score set the tone right from the start and it will be hard for the audience NOT to be in the right frame of mind that I intended.

My aforementioned aspirations to be a composer aside; sometimes music still knocks me on my ass. If ever I needed proof that I never need pick up an instrument ever again, Bill Wandel’s music is my proof. We share a love of several film score cats, and his talents equal any one of them.



Sound is 50% of the experience of any movie. Music is 25-49% of that (variables on the scene, dialogue, and other sounds of any given moment of a movie). This is how important music is to a movie. This music has me so freakin’ jazzed; there will be no time off. I foresee some late nights and weekend hours working on audio mix and finishing this sucker off ASAP. Also, I have found many film festival submission deadlines that I intend to make this month.

It’s amazing to me how much this reinvigorates. The music has generated a lot of creative juices and now I have to change my underwear.

Too bad I also booked a shoot Friday for two new podcasts, one a general helpful film tip version, and another set of short film specific video podcasts featuring my shorts past and present. I have cast My Sexy Girlfriend Veronica ™ because let’s face it; people would rather look at her than me. I have to put my ego in check and think of the greater good.

Has anyone else noticed that I’m getting really good at using the semicolon in my blog?

- Peter John Ross

Quashing the Polemic Words

I’ve been reading a lot lately. Books that is. My normal modus operandi has been alternating between a film book, and then a fiction novel. The last three books have been great reads, so I wanted to share some thoughts on them. I prefer non-spoiler reviews, so have no fear of anything important being ruined by me.



I’ve been an unabashed fan of Nicholas Meyer for years, and as I get older, I appreciate his film work even more. Ever since seeing TIME AFTER TIME, then STAR TREK II THE WRATH OF KHAN and into the oft-overlooked movie VOLUNTEERS with Tom Hanks and John Candy, I have been a big fan.

As self diagnosed obsessive-compulsive, I look up a lot of the works of artist I like and try to do some homework. Nicholas Meyer wrote a Sherlock Holmes novel called THE SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION, a reference to the liquid form of cocaine the fictional character was addicted to. It was an amazing book to read, as I love Sherlock Holmes stories. The novel maintains the spirit and tone of the original novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and yet delved deeper into the characters psyche, quite literally since Sigmund Freud is a character in the story. I look forward to getting Nicholas Meyers 2nd Holmed novel soon.



I quickly tore through the pages of an autobiographical account of substance abuse and humor by the ever witty and amazingly insightful Carrie Fisher. Too many people know her solely as Princess Leia, but the reality is that she is the daughter of Hollywood royalty and her wit is unparalleled.

Carrie Fisher has written, especially uncredited many screenplays as a script doctor for Hollywood, and is a writer for the Academy Awards for over 10 years. Her life and her point of view have no equal, as the tenacity and self deprecation create a hilarious narrative and retains every ounce of femininity. I read this book in only 2-3 sessions because I couldn’t put it down. My sole example is describing how her father and mother were good friends with Elizabeth Taylor, and when one of her first husbands died, her father consoled her with his penis.



Because I couldn’t get enough, I had bought brand new, an incredible rarity for me, the Nicholas Meyer autobiography VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. Sadly, as his own forward mentions, the focus (and book cover) put an emphasis on his involvement in STAR TREK, but he has done so much more and has so many other facets, all that are equally (if not more) interesting. The book starts with his struggles to be a screenwriter and a director, something most filmmakers can relate to.

I’m not done with this book, but I don’t suspect it will take me long since I’m turning pages a lot with this one too.

Next up is a book on loan, another Sherlock Holmes adventure, this time by THE ALIENIST author Caleb Carr, whose other books I liked. I had no idea he wrote a Holmes story, so we’ll see how this one turns out.

The Virescence of an Art Room

Color correction is done, so the picture is pretty much locked on my newest movie. This introduces the next full length movie, as it’s just a 5 minute piece (down from 6 minutes a week ago). Greg Sabo came up and worked some magic on the RED footage. He likes some more extreme color palettes than I do. Also, in a 3.5” window on a computer screen, what looks radical ends up looking perfectly fine on a 32” HD monitor. I’m very happy with the tone and colors. Some shots differentiate, and that’s not poor cinematography, that’s a fact of life on most professional shoots. Some shots need tweaked to fit into the overall color scheme. The whole feel of the piece is coming together.



I learned another more efficient way to achieve the goal I was doing. I was making duplicate folders of the 1080 raw footage and the 720 footage. This was a waste of time. Now that we’ve color corrected the R3D 4K files in Premiere, I can export the edited piece to 720 and 1080. Duh. I still have to synch the unmixed audio, but now I can narrow it down to only the exact clips we’re using, which will save a ton of time on shots and takes we don’t use. All I have to do is then replace the audio on those shots only and I’ll have the correct audio to work with.

Now comes the music. I have a composer in mind, so we’ll see if we can work this out. Sound mixing is the end of the road for post production…then?

ARTICLE
The article I wrote for MOVIEMAKER is out on newsstands now. It’s in the 2010 GUIDE TO MAKING MOVIES issue, which is pricey. It has already caused two separate controversies in that John Whitney is mad because they lopped off his credit as co-director of HORRORS OF WAR in the side-bar where I talk about the screening at Two Boots Pioneer Theater in New York. It was in the submission word doc (I checked), and they still have his picture with a caption on the 3rd page of the article. Not good enough. Not much I can do about it.

The 2nd controversy comes from some guy named Justin Lewis, aka Frighty McGee aka J. Lew. This is a guy who has convinced himself that I am his nemesis, or some kind of Lex Luthor to his Spider-Man (analogy specifically done wrong to make a point). Okay, let me clarify a few things. The article was a culmination of SEVERAL bad screenings I have attended in the last 11 years of independent movies, not just a singular one. From some of the bigger named film festivals in Indiana, Ohio, and beyond, to local screenings of individual’s features, the article was written in a general sense and address a wide range of issues. Sorry Justin, it ain’t about you.




My new book is now on AMAZON.COM. I put together a collection of several of my screenplays of shorts and I’m doing something a little different with this. By buying the book, you are buying the royalty free right to re-produce the included scripts. I don’t know if anyone has ever done this before, but I have some of these scripts remain unproduced by me that someone could make as an exercise of making something written by someone else, or just director’s who aren’t writers looking for something to produce. Didn’t cost me anything to make it. Why not try something different?

Another weird side note on AMAZON.COM, there are people selling allegedly “collectible editions” of my books for $39.95…. What? Who is doing this and why? What makes them collectible? I surely hope no one anywhere pays for those. September was the best month ever for sales on AMAZON.COM for me. Adding the new products have helped, but IN THE TRENCHES is selling the most, with the new MOVIEMAKING TECHNIQUES DVD coming in 2nd. The book IN THE TRENCHES has always been a good steady seller for me.

Sentience Eschewed in Sound

I’m getting closer to the end of the creation of another piece. I love this part. The edit feels good to me. The tail end of the making of a movie tends to take the longest amount of time because you either rush it and it’s not as good as it could be and you re-do it, or you take your time and do it right the first time, but it takes a long time to nit-pick to truly make it better than good.

The sound is coming together nicely. I’ve done the basic sound editing too now. I haven’t gotten back to the DA master files, but editing is separate from mixing, so that’s okay for now. We recorded the audio with the BOOM mic separate from the wireless LAV miv on each actor favored in the scene. We had both tracks mixed on the left and right side for the RED footage. That gives me a very basic idea of the sound I’m using, so I can edit with that. Editing requires some times using different audio than appears on screen, especially with L-cuts, etc.



Some times to use a take, you create a space or moment that didn’t occur on set where you have the actor reacting to a line that is either removed or said at a different time. Also, you get total audio gaps in a take, either because of a line of dialogue being said off screen or a pop sound (which we had none of on this soundtrack thanks to Chauncey and Rusty). You still have to fill in the hole of sound because the ambience of the room tone just drops off, and sometimes it takes more than that.

Micah and I recorded a single foley track yesterday. I needed the sound of someone kicking a something specific, so that required something not really found in most sound effects libraries. Scott showed up and ceremoniously kicked the object. We set up and recorded straight to the editing computer’s hard drive from the mixer I have on my desk from the boom mic in the garage here at the studio.



Tomorrow is color correction day. Spending an hour or two to balance out the color and brightness will finalize the basic look of the movie. Two out of five FX shots are more or less done. Andrew Kramer of Video CoPilot.net saved the day with his site, tutorials, and products. A new lesson learned working not only with RED 4K footage, but seriously shallow depth of field: LENS BLUR is my friend for making any kind of effects work in context. Sometimes an actor’s face is in focus, but their ears are already blurred, so anything you’re doing to them digitally has to match that focus plane. I’m used to digital video EVERYTHING IS IN FOCUS style work.

Up next, SCORING. Finding the right composer, the right music, and “spotting” the movie, which is picking where music does and does not belong, is all on deck. This will slow the process down. I’m hoping to work with a composer I have never worked with before.
After that, the final sound mix and this piece will be ready to screen. In many ways, this movie represents a return “home” for me. Working in a dark comedy, something with teeth, and a darker skewed view of Americana, are staples of my earlier film work. It feels like the right fit for me.



I just got notified that RELATIONSHIP CARD just won “BEST MINI FILM” at the INDEPENDENT’S FILM FESTIVAL 2009 in Florida. I forgot that I submitted it to over a dozen festivals a few months ago. No one told me it got accepted, so that’s 2 festivals in a row I got in and didn’t know.

The weird part is that I feel like this movie is my past, even though it’s less than a year old. The new movie represents the direction I’ve been headed in for 3 years and it’s the first thing that LOOKS like it. I love RELATIONSHIP CARD very much, but it isn’t very cinematic. It has no depth of field, no significant camera movement, or anything that makes it stand out as a DIRECTOR. I knew that with the volume of visual FX work it would be a problematic to say the least if I did use any of those tools, but that doesn’t compensate for it. I love the performances and I even like the writing, which is rare for something I wrote. There was so much basic human truth in RELATIONSHIP CARD that I feel like anyone who has ever been in a long term relationship “gets it”.

At the same time, I’m immersed in this new project that I see my future in. What I’m doing now represents what will be my next feature film and the next 2-3 years of my life and I’m happily running towards that future. Why does it also feel like I’m running away from my past works too?

I bid you adieu,
Peter John Ross

A Ghastly Notion of Persistence

So Brant Jones edited my newest movie. Then we stitched together fragments of my edit into his cut and we made a “best of” edit. The cinematography is astounding, both due to the RED ONE camera, and mostly due to its operator/cinematographer, Greg Sabo. I am very happy with the results. There is still much to do. Color correction, sound mix, scoring, and various other technical details, but I can now watch a movie and foresee what it shall be.



Bryan Michael Block came up to the studio last night and looked at the cut with me and we made some minor tweaks here and there. I also realized I had not done a test on how to go from my 1280x720P proxy edit back to the 4K RED files. So I tested out the procedure of making an EDL from Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and then editing that file in NOTEPAD and changing the file names from *.AVI to *.R3D, then re-opening the EDL in Premiere. So far that is the single procedure and technical aspect that has worked without any kind of hitch.



I’ll screen this cut as is to a select few people to gather some opinions. It’s too fresh and I’m too close to it to arrogantly decide this is all the editing that needs to be. I want feedback from key personnel, as well as other people whose opinion I value.

Started some of the minor visual FX work on this today. More RED issues reveal themselves. Exporting to RED is not as easy. There are no settings for it. So exporting files with edits to an FX artist ain’t gonna be easy. So we’ll do it old school and send the whole clip and tell them the time code. Or export as an uncompressed file. I have options, but each one has potential downsides with color, etc.

Once finished, the next step is to use this to raise the rest of the budget to shoot an entire feature. I have a few ideas on what to do, some things I’ve never tried before. I view this as my last real attempt to make something out of what I’ve been doing for 10 years now. After this, might consign myself to a life of day job editing and working for other people in other capacities, but I don’t know if I could ever overcome the urge to make movies of my own. I have something to say and I like communicating it to people via moving pictures and sound.



In other news, I won some awards at the BEST OF UNDERNEATH CINCINNATI FILM FESTIVAL screening last weekend. I won BEST CONCEPT for Relationship Card, plus I got an HONORABLE MENTION for BEST SOUND (take that Tim Dutton with your professionalism and surround sound!). Relationship Card also got a half an award for BEST ACTOR with Amanda Howell, sharing with John Whitney’s Measured Sacrifice performance with her. We joked because the screen said John’s movie, but the award had a picture from my movie. The official statements credit it to both movies now. It’s like 2.5 awards for Relationship Card.



Speaking of Relationship Card, that and How to Deal With Telemarketers were official selections to the TROMADANCE FILM FESTIVAL, run from Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Studios. I wish someone had let me know. I got the rare experience of finding out my movies were playing from someone unrelated to the festival who was going. Weird. I could have gone too.



Now Sonnyboo productions has 5 movies in the TIME WARNER ON DEMAND FILM FESTIVAL/VIEWERS CHOICE competition thingy on channel 1111 or 411 (depending on where you are at with Time Warner). The most views win s $500. I hope someone else wins this. I don’t need the $$$ that bad right now. Although, 2 out of the 5 Sonnyboo movies were not directed by me, so GRUDGE MATCH (The Derek) and REFRACTORY (Joanne Fromes) could win and I wouldn’t mind helping out the others. I even got mentioned in the COLUMBUS ALIVE for this.



I’m also working on another book thingy as a quickie. Royalty free screenplays if you buy the book, then you have the legal write to make a movie based on the scripts therein. They are all short screenplays, some that I’ve made and some that are unproduced at this time.

That’s all I got for now. Peace out and Respect,
Peter John Ross

The Supposition of Steven’s Vernacular

Post production was delayed on my newest endeavor. Paid work, especially work that pays well, takes precedence. It’s the way of life. I’m no communist, and I prioritize the work regardless of how soul crushing it is to deny the muse her attentions. The hardest part is that I love my job. I get paid to edit and do graphics work. Who can really complain about getting money to do what they love in some form? Therein lays the conundrum. I don’t hate the day job work, yet it keeps me from focusing on the artistic work that I strive to improve and expound upon.



After some preliminary tinkering with the footage, I’ve decided to bring in another editor other than me to work on the cut. I’m too close to it. I want to select the takes, but the actual cutting is more difficult for me on this project. I have the luxury of every single take looking great and the performances were very good. The curse is that I have too many options and making decisions get a lot harder.

I may have spoken too soon about my writing. Why is it that the dialogue sounded so good in rehearsal, and now I kinda hate what I wrote? I’m thinking of stripping a lot of the dialogue down to its essentials, and telling the story more visually.

HEALTH
I had another health scare last week. Much pain in my ankle and walking became very difficult. Luckily, Dino Tripodis came to the rescue with a HOUSE M.D. promo item for the series, a cane. I have only recently discovered and fell in love with this show, mostly because of the ties to Sherlock Holmes. When I first got the cane, I was more or less retarded in my usage since I’ve never had or used a cane before. Amazingly, with pain the proper use of the cane came to me in milliseconds.

Evolution - 1
Creationism - 0

So I’ve been limping everywhere and nicknamed GIMPY by several people. All those Special Olympics jokes are coming back to haunt me.

Karma - 5,763
Ross - 6,399

I’m still ahead.

I’ve been collecting HD-DVD’s now from AMAZON.COM. I’m getting titles for $1-$3 each, so I’m even getting movies I have never seen and quite possibly will hate (I.E. THE FAST & THE FURIOUS, and the ubiquitous sequel 2FAST, 2FURIOUS). I love that if I order $25 worth, shipping is free, and so costs stay low. I love my HD-DVD/BLU RAY combo player. I took my old HD-DVD only player into work for the 32” TV there and an old surround sound setup. It’s like having a home theater at home and at work.

Later my friends.

- PJR

Post Production Hold Up

This blog will be very technical and very few people will enjoy the minutiae of computer and video editing detail, so I apologize in advance for boring the pants off of several readers.

I just finished a shoot for my next feature and we shot on the RED ONE camera, a video camera that shoots incredibly film like images. It has a 35mm sensor, so the depth of field and lenses are exactly the same are shooting on 35mm film. Combine that with the frames being 4096x2160 at 24 frames per second, and we have a diverse camera.



Greg Sabo owns a RED camera now and wanted to have some more freedom than the TV spots are affording him, and I traded some website work for the chance to use it on my project. He shot some test footage over a month ago so I could test the most basic workflow for how I would edit footage from the camera.

I tested this pipeline on my basic PC at home. Luckily Adobe had a link to a 47 minute instructional video on how to use CS4 and the RED because it showed several cool tricks. The coolest of these was how to turn the source and timeline monitor resolutions down to ½, ¼, or 1/8 resolution so that editing was manageable, even on this computer.



I am on a PC and I use Adobe Premiere Pro and the Creative Suite (CS) packages. I’m on CS3, but in order to edit RED, I needed to upgrade to CS4 and Premiere Pro CS4. I hadn’t wanted to spend the $$$ on that yet, but it was a necessity. Now the RED plug in for Premiere Pro CS4 requires a 4.1 upgrade, and they are on version 1.7 of the RED plug in.

At work, I have a much faster, better computer with the Matrox RTx2 video editing card in it. This allows me to monitor my timelines, including 1280x720 HD and 1920x1080 HD, on a TV or an HD monitor. We just got a 32” HDTV here at work, but it’s a 720P, so I can’t view 1920x1080 timelines on it.

I’ve made the decision to downres the 4K footage to both 1920x1080 HD and 1280x720 HD. I will edit with the 720P files so I can see them on the 32” monitor. I learned a lesson on my earlier short RELATIONSHIP CARD that seeing things on a high resolution monitor makes a significant difference if people will see it that way. Being able to see and correct mistakes, or details that you want to affect, the bigger the better, and that means resolution too.



I do want to have a full 1080P version of this project too. So I have 2 folders, one for the 720P Matrox AVI files and another for the 1080P. All of the files names exactly match the R3D files in the other folder. This will allow me to later conform the 4K files to match the HD edit I do. I can create the EDL (Edit Decision List) and just change the *.avi to *.R3d and I’ll have my exact edit done in the original RED raw files.

As we’ve started to export the HD files, I discovered that it takes a really long time. About 45 minutes per 1 minute of RED. That means the first 3rd of my raw footage will take approximately 36 hours to render. I setup a sequence as a 4K RED sequence, then export to the Matrox HD files.

The hypothesis I’m working with is that the RED color correction I’m using is adding to this render time. Right now, I’m still waiting on this first 3rd, all the exterior shots with no sync sound, to finish rendering before using any of the interior footage and sound and exporting those already synched.



Because the images from the RED camera are “raw”, as in it’s the raw data straight off the chip; you have a much more broad range of control over the image (like a film negative in the telecine). This also means you pretty much HAVE to affect the images a little to get a balanced look. For the exteriors, shot at high noon on a sunny August day, I had to bring the levels down since they appeared blown out, but really weren’t. I changed it from the RED COLOR SPACE/CONTRAST to the REC.709 and that seemed to match what we were seeing on the monitor during the shoot pretty close by itself.

Adobe Premiere has a plug in with the RED software that acts the same as the REDCINE software that is separate. This acts as a filter within Premiere. Once you affect the colors using this, it treats the file everywhere in Premiere as if it is natively that color/contrast without affecting the source file or creating a temporary file or needing rendering.



Something's funky in that I have a message that clearly states "No Matrox Acceleration", which means the extra GPU chip on the Matrox card is NOT being used at all, when it should/could.

As soon as this next file finishes rendering, I'm going to upgrade the drivers for my video card and the Matrox (with a slight 4.0.1 to 4.1 version upgrade) that may solve a lot of the render time issues.

I solved the long time render issues. If I make the timeline a Matrox 720 or 1080, then scale the footage down in Premiere BEFORE the render, instead of IN the render, it went from a 45 minute render down to 3.75 minutes. And it will still BATCH process. The only difference is I have to make 2 separate timelines, one for 1080 and one for 720P, which is only a few seconds longer to cut & paste with 2 clicks of Ye Olde Mouse.

All this techie talk means is that I can edit as early as Saturday instead of next Wednesday...The Rossman is happy.

The Past Crimes of Paul and Christopher

So this new piece has been rolling around in my head for a long time, about 5 years. I was going to follow up HORRORS OF WAR with this in
2006 if I could manage it. I had 4-5 drafts of the screenplay, and it just didn t come together. The stars were not aligned at the time. The past few months have been much more about waking up, like from a terrible dream (ever see Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom and the whole takes a fire to burn you out of the trance?).



I made the first couple shorts this year to get my legs back. Making movies is like playing guitar (something I used to do). If you don t practice, you can lose the skills a bit and get rusty, so the shorts acted as my trial run. Both pieces (Refractory and Relationship Card , alliteration unintentional) I am proud of. I have improved on some of my old skills and ideas. I have not only retained some, but I tried new and better things with telling a story with the camera.

This past Saturday, we shot a 5 page script. It was my first real chance to work with Greg Sabo since a 1 day pickup shoot on HORRORS OF WAR and he wanted to play some with his RED ONE camera. We ve talked about working together for a while and this was great. He’s an artisan with the camera and Greg has a lot of big toys.



Now I remember why I wanted 8 weeks of rehearsals with the actors. There was barely any time on the shoot to focus on performance a lot as it takes hours to setup lights (to make it look like you didn t light anything). When the sand starts to drain out of the hourglass, you have to rely on the actors to know what it is they are doing and what you did in rehearsal. There wasn’t a lot of gray area about what the scenes were about and what I wanted, so we had it all smooth as glass. I will definitely rehearse like this again. The worry is that you over-rehearse and kill the spontaneity, but it didn’t since we saved the bigger performances for camera.

Max and Ruth filled in for art department, and they did an incredible job. It helps when you have department heads that take their jobs seriously and really think about the purpose and meaning, as well as how color reflects mood and character.




Shane Howard stepped up to bat for a couple FX shots, especially the bullet hole in a head. He delivered on time, and fast. That helped. Max “Bruce Willis” Groah delivered on a promise that blood splatters would easily wash off walls and carpet and it did.

I brought on the Derek as a producer to help me not have to deal with every tiny detail that wasn’t related to directing. I often short change myself as a director because I produce my own stuff a lot. On HORRORS OF WAR, I had that same opportunity and I squandered it some as I wasn’t as prepared to actually Direct. I don’t want to NOT appreciate things like this, so Derek is da’ man for covering, and also ADing the shoot.

Sound was done well, and I start to wonder how much of Chauncey s rep is undeserved. Having a full crew of about 20 helped the day not take forever. We lost time in a company move from the house exterior to a different house 3 miles away for interiors, but it was worth it to get the depth.



The RED footage is staggeringly impressive. It has latitude much more akin to film and that s not even taking into account the 4000+ pixel size of each frame. We started at the exterior shoot around 11AM and ended that portion after Noon. The sun baked us but the footage looked great on the monitors. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw the digital files after the footage dump, but Greg showed me how much latitude the footage had. REDCINE software and even a version of it within Adobe Premiere Pro 4.1 (with Red 1.7 updates) allows you to put the equivalent of a filter over the footage or an entire telecine colorist in front of the raw R3D files before you use them to edit.

I downloaded all the footage to my internal drive of my computer at home, more as a backup, but I figured I could peruse the footage, albeit slowly since the specs are nowhere near RED minimum. After a 4 hour transfer whilst I slept, I got up at 8:30AM to sneak a peek. The footage set to play at 1/8th quality played surprisingly well. In fact, all my plans to create HD proxies to edit from might be put on hold since the machine at work is a lot faster and more filled with RAM.



If I thought the footage looked great on the monitor, that wasn’t nothing compared to what I looked at today. The detail was staggering. The RED ONE is the most filmic video camera ever manufactured. The depth of field, the lens options, the latitude, contrast, and quality of image all rival actual 35mm film. I can clearly see now what so many TV shows are switching over this fall. It makes sense on many levels. For TV, there is no film print being made (anymore), and the look matches well and it makes everything easier in post production for editing and finishing. The only significant difference now seems to be archival. It s a tapeless workflow and it s all data on drives of various sorts and if something gets corrupted or lost, it s gone as opposed to a tape or a roll of film negative.

Just as I had hoped, this will be the best thing I‘ve ever made. I rehearsed the way I wanted to, played with depth of field for cinematic reasons, and worked with a good crew to meet my goals and everyone exceeded them. Whatever my hopes were for a “look” greatly passed my expectations. By luck, serendipity, inspiration or whatever it was, the color of costuming, paint on walls, randomly selected paintings and lights all coalesced into a perfect image on virtually every frame.



I wanted to thank the entire cast and crew for helping to make something special to me. I hope I put together something that deserves the talent that was involved. I m just trying to make fun of some aspect of humanity that annoys me and I got A-List creative types from our area. I soooooo don t deserve this.

I’ve already started going through all the footage and making my mental edits. I promised myself NO EDITING the first two days after the shoot. Get some distance and maybe even get another editor to take a crack at it. This is akin to the promise I made to myself about NO MORE COCA COLA CLASSIC and GOING TO THE GYM. At this rate I’ll have a rough cut done by Tuesday morning when I promised myself I’d start looking at footage.



Good day Acolytes of Boo!