A tech post for all you aspiring creative types with Vimeo Plus accounts. If you’ve got a smart phone try logging into Vimeo through www.vimeo.com/m. That should allow you to access mobile vimeo features like uploading video from your phone to Vimeo. For all you poor people like me with vintage cell phones you can now have your videos play on your rich friends phones. Log in to your account. Go to any of your videos. Click on Settings.
Click on Video File.
See where it says Alternate Versions? Check the box to the left of Make mobile versions of all my videos.
Can you figure out which box I mean?
From now on whenever you upload new video a mobile smart phone friendly version of the video will also be made. At least in theory. The email I received asked us not to spread this info around until they make sure they have it working. But what the heck. If I had a smart phone the first video on Vimeo I’d try to watch would be Ted Chung’s “A Thousand Words”. Best non-dialog short film I’ve seen in the past 6 months. Brilliant story telling.
In Film & Video Production I at American University the class was divided into several groups of 3 to 4 students each. Each group had to come up with a production company name. I liked Tick Tock Productions. It reminded me that we had a lot of work to do and the clock was ticking. Plus, it’s onomatopoeically like Alfred Hitchcock.
Director Yuri taking a look at the frame.
The Patriarch is the result of our Swap Project, which was one of two final projects due for the class. The Swap Project works like this: someone not in the group writes a 5 minute fictional script with no dialogue. Each group gets assigned a script and turns it into a film. Although The Patriarch is a dramatic piece we decided to go for a handheld look. My Canon HV20 is a GREAT lightweight camera and handles very well with my Panasonic wides angle lens adapter. Combined with the HV20’s cinematic shooting mode we were able to get a nice film look. It’s a great alternative to shelling out $800 for a Letus 35mm adapter.
Shallow depth of field.
I really enjoyed being cinematographer as this was my first time shooting a fiction piece. If I were able to go back in time I would have made sure we used bounce cards to even out the lighting on the actors faces. Speaking of the actors, they were great to work with. On the first day of our two day shoot we only had Gary DiNardo. He’s really pro and easy going. I highly recommend him for any indie/student filmmakers looking for a male lead.
Jessica Ross and Gary DiNardo have chemistry.
Jessica Ross played the woman and she was equally great to work with. She came through on extremely short notice when our original actress bailed at the last possible moment.
The post production was a bit difficult. It’s in post where you figure out “holy shit, we’re missing key shots”. We worked around it, improvised, and were able to cut the film without doing any reshoots. Big props to Yuri Ozeryan who directed and did sound design. Andrew Gay came through in a big way keeping us on time during the shoot and composing original music for the film!
Yuri and I discuss at least two ways The Patriarch could go.
Finally, it came down to color correction. I really want to get good at using Apple’s Color. I added basic primary correction of the blacks and highlights. Then in secondaries I tried to saturate the actors skin where possible. Plus, I upped the blue gain to give the whole thing a “cold” look. Finally, in the color fx room I added a vignette and film look, hence the graininess. Obviously, I’ve got a lot to learn about Color, but working on The Patriarch was great practice. I’ve got to hand it to my brother, Peter, who put together a great tutorial for anyone looking to hop right into Apple Color. Check it out here. Below is The Patriarch (same cut) pre color correction.
In film school you’re doing one of two things: making movies or not making movies. Don’t get me wrong, the writing course I took this semester was fantastic and I was able to apply what I learned to my production class. That’s kind of the point. But the point of this post is to share one of my movies. Or “an autobiography” as I put it in the title. From concept to completion this is the only film from class that was done without the help of classmates. Below is the autobiography. Below that you can read about the processes I went through to create, execute, and produce this short little film.
Salvia On Salvia: The Autobiography
Pre Production
The rules for making this film included (1) You must appear on camera in your current form, (2) You get to choose exactly what you share in your autobiography, (3) Total running time should be around 5 minutes. Right away I knew the look and style for the film- a run and gun documentary with a sit down interview anchoring the narrative. This doubled as practice for my final project, a documentary. My astrological birth sign is Gemini, the Twins. I thought it would be interesting to interview myself and employ my editing skills to make some movie magic happen. Special FX incoming! The interview would detail where I went to school. It was also essential to include footage of musicians performing at radio station WRNR FM. That was my first full time job out of college and the filming I did there is what inspired me to apply to film school in the first place. I wanted to include never before seen footage of Andrew Bird’s performance at RNR’s inauguration party for Barack Obama. That way I could use the live recording of one of Bird’s songs from the set as my soundtrack. Andrew thought that WRNR was, “…well curated.” That’s what Andrew said to me when I drove him around my car for a couple of days before and after his RNR gig. But that’s another blog post.
Production
I needed b-roll. It was simple enough to drive around Annapolis and shoot the grade schools I attended. The interview took place at a pet store – I have a theory that puppies make everything better – the owner of which I worked for back in the day and he helped me with the shoot. I purposefully did not write a script for the interview. I wanted to make it as loose and off the cuff as possible. This was another way of practicing for the interviews I would conduct in my documentary… and/or I’m lazy. The audio in the interview was recorded with a wireless lav mic. The footage I shot of WRNR performances comprised b-roll for the second half of the film.
Post Production
In the era of non-linear video editors, it’s in the edit room that your film gets told. Its the most important skill to learn as an up and coming filmmaker. My interview with myself served as the spine of the story. My story was brought to life through b-roll. For sound I added the live WRNR version of Andrew Bird’s “Fitz and the Dizzy Spells” as my soundtrack. Audio was made to peak around -12 dB. My professor Larry Engel says that making a film is like conducting music. It’s all about rhythm, tonality, and melody. Cutting to music in the edit room is where I got my start and it seemed like the logical way to go with my autobiography. The result is at least what I was going for, which is all you can ever hope for as a filmmaker.
The last 4 months have flown by and I’ve sorely neglected the DotP. My time has been split between free lance work and my first semester of film school at American University in DC! I finished up my last class of the semester last night and what a ride it has been. Expect some semi irregular posting during the Winter break including some examples of my work. Zacuto and company posted a perfectly timed meditation on the value of film school in today’s digital age, especially for those aspiring cinematographers.
Film Fellas Cast 6: “Cinematography” Webisode 26 ~ Going Viral
I’m celebrating today with a trip to the WRNR private artist showcase with St. Vincent. Sorry ma’am can’t say any more on that, top secret location and all… so I’ll let Annie Clark take the mic.
This Friday the Flaming Lips will be putting on the Summer’s most intergalactastic show at Merriweather in Columbia. Why should you go? The music is great, there’s confetti, a man in an inflatable ball walks across the heads of the audience, and Santas and Aliens dance on stage. That’s not enough? Fine. This is the first time they’ve toured as a headlining act in at least 4 years… reason being, they’ve got a new double album coming out in October called Embryonic. You’ll be able to listen to the new album in full at their merch table during the show.
Plus, when you buy tickets you get the code to download a 3 song digital EP and they’ve just added 3 more songs to that. As someone who’s seen the Lips several times, I’m really psyched that Star Death and White Dwarfs are opening. SDWD is fronted by Wayne Coyne’s nephew and nepotism or not these guys sound “like a sandwich of fun on ecstasy bread wrapped up in a big bag like disco fudge”, to paraphrase Tyres O’Flaherty. Their debut album, Birth, just came out. Listen and download a couple of the songs. Play your cards right and your concert experience will go something like this
In the process of updating my resume and looking for a full time gig I’ve been rewatching some of my independent video projects. Those include previously blogged about a) video blog for Annapolis’ best comic book shop Third Eye Comics & b) a 30 second commercial for Baltimore’s largest club Rams Head Live. So here’s something new for you- my first ever paying gig as a videographer/editor. Deco-Mags is a business owned by my friend and former colleague Alex Cortright’s wife Monica Benitz. Basically, she makes these huge magnets that can be cut up and put on any kind of metal appliance or fixture. Hopefully the video gives you a good idea of what Deco-Mags are.
I didn’t have room to include Deco-Mags on my resume, but I wanted to give my first project a shout out. It did have quite the audience as a pre-roll video ad on WRNR’s online radio stream for a month in late 2008. Plus, it’s a great excuse to post my resume (twice!).
Following up on promoting your film/video/what have you in the social media age, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention director Edgar Wright’s video blogs for his in production movie Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World. Wright is the co-creator of Spaced and good friends with Paul’s Simon Pegg & Nick Frost. Wright cross promotes Scott with Paul in this *bonus* blog
Paul’s video blog response:
The cross promotion helps to increase the awareness of both films to fans of Pegg, Frost, & Wright who are all usually one in the same. The *official* numbered episodic video blogs for Scott are usually much longer and more in depth than the *bonus* blog. They’re all quite engaging and interesting. Episode 10, Clash At Demonhead, features the band of the same name. It includes a look at the fictional branding & merchandise created for this fictional band. How meta for a blog meant to brand and promote the movie.
As I predicted 4 months ago, music taste maker Pitchfork finally monetized their video player sub site Pitchfork.TV. Their first customer, Fuse TV, is running a :30 second pre-roll ad that plays before every video on the site. I thought they’d go with an overlay ad for a trial run, but the forced video viewing route is where they wound up.
PFork.TV uses Delve Networks‘ video player, the same player used by my company TheSailingChannel.TV. Delve has been getting tons of goodpress lately. One of Delve’s unique features, that Pfork.TV is not utilizing, is semantic search within video content. This allows you to search inside the video itself and jump directly to the point in the video in which you are most interested. Far out man. Pfork should enable this feature asap, especially for their longer form content. There’s no reason not to now that they’re getting paid, right?
If you’ve not been living under a rock for the past several years you may have heard of the term “social media”. A lot of people claim to be “experts” in this ever growing field. I’ve blogged about it afewtimes. The below slideshare explains the 5 Ws of social media. Its useful for everyone from the casual user to professional marketer. And go figure, my obsession with the socially mediated QuakeLive led me to find it. Who says games are a big timewaster?
Steve Zacuto and company have been producing this really great webisodic series called “Film Fellas”. It features Steve and a cast of 3 rotating industry types talking about the future of film and video distribution. In this episode Steve and company discuss and debate the models for branding your film/video/what have you in the social media age.
The discussion centers on how important it is to “build a community” for your impending film release. Everyone agrees that Twitter, Facebook, Myspace are all important outlets to attract and build a fanbase, which translates into people watching your content when its released. So the question is, what kind of content do you offer the fanbase to pique their interest and “build that community”? The answer is: extra, interesting, and unique video content and the ability to interact. Behind the scenes footage, video blogs, sneak peeks, comment sections are all pure fried gold. I’m a huge fan of Simon Pegg (I know you know). He and frequent co-star/best friend Nick Frost are currently filming their new movie Paul. Whatisapaul.com is one of the coolest, easy to navigate online communities for an upcoming movie I’ve ever seen. It incorporates everything we’ve talked about for successful “community building”. Take a look at the first video blog from on set with Simon and Nick.
Building a web site like whatispaul.com isn’t cheap for independent filmmakers. But with the multitude of kids graduating from web design school these days I’m sure you can find someone willing to work with you to build their resume. Maybe you could even use one of those new fangled social media apps to network and find the right person for the job? Paul comes out in 2010, which is a year that’s getting my thumbs up so far.
@gavinmcgarry Very interesting. I'm working with my family on thesailingchannel.tv. As we gain more content we're considering a sub service. 4 days ago
@gavinmcgarry Great hearing your thoughts at 21st Century Factual. Any examples of the lowcost subscription fee for web video? #realscreen106 days ago
Discovery not looking to lead the way on New Media development. "Aiming for singles and doubles." #Realscreen106 days ago
Watch a music vid and you can decide whether to watch a doc on the band. Only online. B-Side from MTV shown off by David Gale #Realscreen106 days ago
