Finishing Beanz: diary 08

Rowan shoots a bit of footage to digital-8 tape on his single CCD Sony Handycam circa 2001. About 40% of Beanz was shot on this camera.

Hey guys,

Well its another christmas. We have finished up with work for the year which gives us a bit of time to get down and get some stuff done on the film.

In the last post i was writing about the very first viewing of the whole movie from beginning to end. Since then, Phil and I had another viewing session. Overall we felt pretty happy at least with the cut as it exists... and yes, that it is worth finishing! There were some minor changes that we made to a couple of scenes though. Mostly just shortening a bunch of shots by a few frames, even removing one or two shots themselves. So now we are working on adding in some missing sound and dialogue bits so the movie is fit for our peeps we have chosen to be test viewers. This is when we will cop the real critical heat!

The other thing we are working on is the batch conversion of all the video footage that makes up the movie, from standard definition interlaced video to high definition progressive scan video. There is over an hour and a half of footage to upscale and convert. To do this, we are using Apple's "Compressor" batch processing software which is shipped as part of Final Cut Studio. So in between christmas shopping, sitting in the sun, bbq'ing, drinking and decorating the christmas tree, we plan to get all this video converted and verified over the course of the next two weeks.... or so. And then, it's onto finishing and grading, as well as a bit of 2D paint work here and there, removing the occasional boom mic that popped into shot.

So thats where we are at Beanz-wise.

I thought i would also take a moment to talk about the cameras we have used to shoot Beanz with.

Back in 1999, a good friend of ours by the name of Rowan, (or Rowox as he is otherwise known) purchased a flashy digital Handycam video camera. It was pretty much the first digital video camera i had used. It basically recorded digital video onto the "video-8" sized tapes that Handycam's had used up to that point. It was a pretty damn simple camera, just the standard built in lens, as well as a little wide angle conversion lens that could be screwed on for wide shots. From that i remember it was actually a nice little camera to use, very small and balanced as it sat in the palm of your hand. Its small size was also advantageous as it allowed for the occasional dramatic or awkward angle that a larger regular "professional" camera at that time would have been unable to achieve, very important for the style of this project.
However as you would expect, it didn't have the resolution or image quality that you would get from a more professional camera at that time, but that didn't really bother us too much. After all, it was our first attempt at a feature film and its how you use the tools.. right? Its all about ideas, story and character... right? And besides, we didn't have much money to spend, so its either make this movie with this camera, orrrrr.... make no movie at all. So we decided to make the movie.

The Sony PD-150 (with added velcro, and a bent mic from a shoot involving people in gorilla suits - long story)

The second camera is the Sony 3CCD PD-150, which Phil and myself purchased sometime in 2002. This was a sweet camera, and we still use it today. And hey! David Lynch used it for his awesome interview project. But anyway, as a prosumer 3CCD camera shooting standard definition onto mini-dv tapes, it is about as good as cameras get. We have shot most of Beanz on the pd-150, around 60%.

One of the issues on the surface we had in shooting with effectively 2 different classes of cameras was how to get the scenes shot on one camera to fit in with the scenes shot on another? The answer here lies in how we approached the movie in terms of it's shooting style, which i guess you could say mixes planned/composed shots with shoot-from-the-hip-documentary action. Beanz is a film set in the late 90's in a largely modern urban environment. So while to the conscious eye the difference between scenes will be noticeable, the effect should not be too distracting because of the overal DIY low budget documentary feel of the film itself.

I hope to talk a little bit more about my approach to the shooting in a later post, when i have a couple of shots to show on the blog. So i will leave it at that for now. Merry christmas y'all!

Finishing Beanz: diary 07

Ok so for the first time i sat down and watched through the entire movie tonight, and i thought i'd blog a couple of quick thoughts about it.

This initial viewing wasn't really a review per say,  it was more like a test that all the temp movies (one for each scene) rendered out from Final Cut were working and playing together correctly. Yes they all rendered out ok, But however there are still a couple of minor glitches in the files that we still need to iron out, but the movie is fit for watching... albeit in a very rough and raw state. Mind you, only for Phil and myself at this point, as there are a few points in the film where sound effects need to be added that better describe what is actually happening in the scene. We can sit there and assume that these sounds exist as we watch. Would be a tad distracting for anyone else though.

Anyways, the shots are pretty much as they are straight from the camera tapes - raw as. The sound is rough and sometimes choppy, temp music tracks and some other sounds are slapped in just to get a sense of flow for editing purposes. Its rough and gnarly at times, but it plays and it now has a beginning, a middle and an end.

I have to admit i was always a little bit anxious about getting to this point, its the anticipation of sitting down on a couch in front of a big 46 inch screen, playing a nearly-finished edit of a movie that we shot the majority of around 5+ years ago, on standard definition camcorders. There is nowhere to hide now. Yes this has always been a side project. Yes you can leave this moment for a later time, and goodness knows we have. But this moment will come, and it has to be dealt with. Watch the damn movie. Deal with the inevitable!

And so, the inevitable thoughts and questions arise... Is this going to work? Will it flow? The quirky and experimental style, will this style/feel that we were toying with and trying to achieve come through? Will we stay in the scenes? Does the filmed and edited product sitting in front of us live up to what we were imagining when writing of the script? Will we be interested in what happens ...or is it going to suck?? And if it does not suck, will it feel like its worth the effort to carry it through in cleaning up the technical rough edges to make a presentable finished piece?

After the last scene concluded and i sat there, i thought.... well... that wasn't so bad.

The movie as it exists right now certainly needs a fair bit more work. There is still one more song that needs to be either written or acquired to serve it's role as a story piece as an example. There are a handful of shots that need paint work to remove things like the tips of boom mic's that momentarily dropped into the top of frame, amongst other things.

But as the whole, yes, i can see a movie in there.  Sitting there by myself watching it i am reminded that Beanz certainly has its oddities, but we always knew that. But it plays. There are one or two scenes in particular that still need some serious edit TLC to get to work and flow better. But we will find out in more detail when Phil and I sit down together to watch and critique it properly over the next couple of days.

Next post: Finishing Beanz: diary 08 >>

Finishing Beanz: diary 06

A shot of Phil editing on the laptop for prosperity - finishing up the last edits for sc25, the last scene in the movie to be edited!

So whats the status?

Well, it's been quite a few weeks since the last update - so here's just a quick update on the status of things. 

We have been mostly working on finishing the edit for a scene we shot earlier this year, which as it turns out is also the last scene to be cut. And now its done! yay! No rest for the wicked though, there is still heaps of tasks left to do.

The first of which involves working towards getting a final lockdown of all the edits for all the scenes, as well as how all the scenes work together as a whole. It is basically this point where we go over the film one more time, as an assembled whole, to try and work out what is working and what might not be, and to make the changes where appropriate. Once we have this, then we can get started on the proper sound mix. This will make up the meat of the post production and finishing work on this project. Beanz is a movie that has quite a reliance on its sound and music in order to convey its story and style properly, so its important that we take the time to get this as good as we can from within our resources.

The cut we have for the movie so far (pre-lockdown) is approx 1 hour, 20mins. So its not the length of most feature films, its more like a short feature. :)

Need a shave?: Here's me taking a tourist shot of myself for prosperity with Phil working on the edit in the background. In terms of the editing duties on Beanz, Phil and I usually sit down together to work on the cut. Phil tends to take the controls for scenes where dialogue is king, whereas i tend to be on button pressing duties for scenes where action takes prominence. But we always feed off each other for critiques and balance of opinion - from the outset we were always on the same page as to what the movie is and what its vibe should be.

Next post: Finishing Beanz: diary 07 >>

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 >

Finishing Beanz: diary 03

Ravers firing on all cylinders busting out the glow sticks + grooves. No narcotics were consumed in the shooting of this scene.

Back a couple of months ago, on the 2nd of May 2009, We finally completed shooting everything we needed to shoot to complete the edit. Here is a series of images by photographer Karim Sahai, who was there to document the action. Cheers Karim!

Now, while most of the "principal photography" of this project was completed a good 2 years ago, there were still a few little bits in pieces, or "pick-ups" that we felt we still needed to do in order to tie up the story a little bit better. So this was one of those shoots.

Hmm, well what else can i talk about on this post without giving away too much about the story and where this scene fits within it? Ok, i will state the obvious here that this scene takes place at a rave - In a nightclub, in the very early 2000's :). We learnt quite a bit about how to deal with doing a scene which involves working with a large group of extras. Directing was especially tricky, as i was shooting the action while Phil was performing as Angus. Normally when we were shooting the rest of the movie we could get away with not having someone acting as an assistant director, not so in this case. So we got the help of Sophia Elizabeth, who took on the juggling tasks of keeping the extras happy, dealing with misc production issues during the day as well as being an extra herself. Cheers Sophia!

!

Juggling tasks is the order of the day: Phil ques up a portable DAT tape recorder to record the audio feed from the Sandwiches mixing desk shortly before shooting the first take. The idea here is to actually use the audio from the microphone that Angus is MC'ing into for the dialogue in the actual scene. This will be incorporated into the sound mix later on.

An extra patiently waits between takes.

An extra applies some hair gel whilst others chill out before the shooting begins.

Phil looking happy as he gets ready for shooting the scene while Sophia is wettening his hair for a more hot and sweaty appearance.

Extras stand by for shooting to begin.

Home made: Rachel holds up our makeshift slate for the camera. For this scene we shot in a very "freestyle" manner, so yes, we were very loose with our slate naming conventions :)

Phil as Angus: Working the decks.

Ravers in full swing during shooting.

Girls on the dance floor.

Quickly discussing some notes between takes.

Crowd shoot complete.

James downloads and quickly reviews a couple of takes as Clare looks on - its in the can!

Chatting with Hamish (cowboy hat), Who plays the character "DJ Danny Reed". This scene was actually shot on a high def camera, a Panasonic HVX-202. The media will be down sampled to match with the rest of the standard def DV footage. The idea here was basically: "well we have one at our disposal, so might as well use it. Better to have more information to work with than not enough"

If you would like to see more of the brilliant photographic work by Karim Sahai, check out his website - where you can browse his portfolio and order prints.

http://www.karimsahai.com/

Sending out a BIG thanks to all who helped make this shoot happen, including: (and not limited to) The owners of Sandwiches, all of those who helped organize costumes, the lovely extras, Rocket Rentals for their sweet rental deal on the camera and microphone equipment, Grouse lighting and everyone else we may have missed writing here - thank you!

Next post: Finishing Beanz diary 04:

Finishing Beanz: diary 02

Yay! My adapter arrived today! geek blog alert!

So to some this may seem a little weird to be getting excited about a little piece of plastic & metal, but i'm stoked. The adapter in question is a MiniDisplayPort to HDMI adapter that i ordered from a company called Monoprice in the USA.




So whats so great about it then?

Well to provide the answer for that requires a bit of background info on the setup i am using for adjusting the color grade for the movie.
I am working on a 2009 model Apple Macbook Pro. Anyone who uses these computers are probably aware that if you want to be able to output an image from one of these babies to an external display, it has to be output via it's Mini Display Port.

The display i am using for grading is basically a Panasonic plasma television. These plasma screens are better than their LCD equivalents for this sort of thing because of their superior contrast ratios and wider colour gamut. The problem with it being a television screen and not a computer monitor is that it does not have the usual DVI style input/s you would expect from a modern computer monitor. It does have VGA input though, however thats an analogue connection and for the purposes of image accuracy i am aiming for a digital to digital signal connection.

So this is where the new adapter comes in. Previously i only had the option of using a combination of adapters that i purchased from Apple. One being MiniDisplay > DVI, then another cable that went from DVI to the HDMI input at the back of the Plasma. I found this not to work very well as all sorts of weird image artifacts would appear on the outputted signal. Upon research online i found that i was not the only one and others have encountered this issue.

So yea, top tip! If you need to connect your Macbook pro to a big screen TV using this method, avoid! Buy a proper MiniDisplayPort to HDMI adapter. :)

Now that we have a decent 1080 digital feed into an external display, i can now start on working to achieve a good colour calibration for the screen to allow the image grading to commence. Because Beanz is shot using (mostly) older footage shot on "standard-def" DV video, the aim here is to try and get as much as possible out of the lower resolution images so that they gracefully translate into the now ubiquitous high-definition format. I will cover this in a bit more detail in a later post.

Next post: finishing Beanz: diary03