Finishing Beanz: diary 05

Back in our first Beanz diary entry i mentioned that the origins of this project stemmed back from a little film we made as students called The Wrong Side of Bed. Todays diary entry casts a bit more light on that little movie we made all the way back then!

If i am to be utterly honest i can not really remember that much about the making of this film. However. I do remember around 1995-96 Phil making a little video (also) called Wrong side of Bed, which basically involved me filming him (and sometimes him filming himself because i had a hangover from the night before or something) playing a character where by chance, all these horrible and unfortunate things would happen to him. I recall in that original video we made we did some really really super crude digital effects on our Commodore Amiga 1200.

One such effect was taking an animated dinosaur loop from a Playstation 1 demo and superimposing it over some footage we filmed of Phil on the street outside the house. Thankfully because it was supposed to feel all depressing because of this characters horrible day, we filmed it all in black and white, making the effects relatively easy to do with our Amiga computer, "Vidi-Amiga" capture card and copy of Deluxe Paint.

Anyway, after having a bit of fun with that we thought we would redo it. From what i recall we wanted to make something that was quite simple to do, a pretty simple story that was made up of mostly visual gags and involved one person as the main character. Then we put in a series of secondary characters where we could just get whatever mates we had around at the time to come and play them. So one day, sometime around 1997, we made The Wrong Side of Bed.

We shot the movie on a standard, run of the mill Sony digital 8 camcorder, and used a Power Macintosh 8500 to capture the footage. We edited it with an early version of Adobe Premiere (5.0 i think) at a sub-broadcast quality resolution of 384x288 pixels (our computer didn't have enough memory for anything bigger). So this weekend I managed to dig up a copy of it, upscaled the resolution a little bit and uploaded it to ExposureRoom.com.

If the above clip is loading too slowly for your internet connection you can watch a smaller version here

So how does this little movie relate to Beanz?

Well basically, this film and Beanz have very little in common. When we set out to make Beanz all the way back in late 2000, we really liked the Angus, Bum and Yawie characters. Bum is the big scruffy guy and Yawie is the annoying guy who sneaks into Angus' house. So we took those characters and wrote a whole new story from scratch featuring them.

The music you hear in that film (except for the cheesy opening music haha) Was all written by Phil and the ending credits music with his band "GoFellas" that he was in at the time.

Next post: finishing Beanz diary 06 >>

Finishing Beanz: diary 04

(Warning - another overly geeky post!)

It was a pretty productive this last weekend gone, I managed to find some time to crack into my 2nd go at doing some colour correction. My first attempt went ok, it was mostly involving rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck into trying to work out how to use a software application called "Color" which is part of Apple's Final Cut Studio.


The newest version of Color has fixed a couple of issues that I encountered on my first attempt to import a Beanz scene into the application from Final Cut. Previously if you had an edited sequence which contained still images, such as overlaid type created in Photoshop for title credits, the imported sequence would appear all messed up in Colors timeline, making it almost impossible to select clips for adjustment. So with that fixed we are now cooking with gas!

Working on Beanz sc10. The colour correction process is particularly important for this project i think, Working with Color to help define the overall visual style, and to make the most of the available image data in a complementary way.

One of the things I should point out for any newbie colour graders working with this software for the first time is to bare in mind that Final Cut and Color display their Colours on screen quite differently. ...James says after image grading a whole scene only to bring it back into FCP with all the colours wrong - gah!

Basically, Color conforms to the Mac's system wide Gamma setting (which by default is 1.8) whereas Final Cut, apparently, overrides this and displays its colours at 2.2. However, FCP7 does assume that footage being imported into it is at gamma 1.8 by default. Confusing? yes, yes it is!

Long story short, I have found Color to be a pretty powerful grading tool when you have the will and give it the time to get to know it, and can look past its prehistoric caveman looking interface. I was able to write out a dvd-ready mpeg-4 file which looks correct when viewed on a standard Quicktime movie player, but it remains to be seen how it looks on an actual dvd playing on a random TV screen. I'm sure if I don't succeed I will moan about it here on a future post :)

Next post: Finishing Beanz diary 05 >