You are here: Home » 2008 » February
Archive | February, 2008
Richard Walter's Beyond The Basics DVD Seminar

Richard Walter's Beyond The Basics DVD Seminar

By on February 28, 2008 in Training, Writing

I have been working my way through a DVD seminar by Richard Walter, called Beyond The Basics, a four disk set that is crammed with inspirational and exceptionally direct and concise advice on screenwriting. No, it’s more than that, it’s about storytelling, agents, managers, film editing and so much more. Richard Walter is an American [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
The Oscars and the BAFTA's 2008

The Oscars and the BAFTA's 2008

By on February 27, 2008 in Awards, Oscars

So the Oscars 2008 have come and gone, and while all eyes have been on the big players, I have been watching the shorts. I am delighted that a film that ENTERTAINS managed to walk away with the gold statue last Sunday night. It bodes well for Gone Fishing. French film, The Mozart of Pickpockets [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Scanning Gone Fishing on to 35mm

Scanning Gone Fishing on to 35mm

By on February 26, 2008 in Negative, Post Production

Today I went to Cinesite to meet with the legendary Mitch Mitchell, to discuss how we are going to get ‘Gone Fishing’ onto 35mm. Mitch is a very experienced digital post production guru, who has even written one of the best books on the subject – Visual Effects for Film and Television. Cinesite have worked [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Makining HDCam Downconvert tapes

Makining HDCam Downconvert tapes

By on February 25, 2008 in HD in post, Post Production

I spent most of yesterday working with an editor friend of mine, Laura Kettle, in a large post production facility in West London. We had a number of jobs to do on ‘Gone Fishing’, first of which, was re-laying the newly mixed soundtrack onto 2 HDCamSR tapes. After some messing around we managed this fairly [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Translating Gone Fishing

Translating Gone Fishing

By on February 23, 2008 in Sound

Translating Gone Fishing has turned into both a bigger job than expected, but at the same time, easier job than I feared, mainly due to the incredible help I have received. Subtitle Workshop has proved to be a great little free tool, a little clunky in places, but nonetheless, it does what it says on [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Subtitles for Festivals

Subtitles for Festivals

By on February 20, 2008 in DVD, Festivals, Premiere

I have been working on festival plans today, and specifically on the world premiere. Cannes is looming and it would be great to get into competition there and give them the world premiere. I have been reliably informed that if we have already done French subtitles, that will work in our favour – and so [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Final DVD – death and resurrection!

Final DVD – death and resurrection!

By on February 20, 2008 in DVD, Rocketboy, SFX

I had just about mastered the final DVD’s for Gone Fishing, in both PAL and NTSC, with both Dolby Digital and DTS sound, with perfect picture (even the NTSC thanks to a great system trascoder called Canopus Procoder 3)… And then I got the dreaded email. We had missed a person off the credits. And [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
DIGITAL DISASTER!

DIGITAL DISASTER!

By on February 18, 2008 in HD in post, Shooting

It’s a disaster… but not for us. My good friend and director, Johnny Newman, shot a film (At Home With The Finkels) late last year using the Viper Camera – a high end HD format that records data to drives and not to tape (or obviously film). That means there is no tape or film [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Archiving BetaSP tapes onto DVCam…. Problems

Archiving BetaSP tapes onto DVCam…. Problems

By on February 17, 2008 in Uncategorized

I am on an archiving bender this weekend. I made a movie ten years ago now, called Urban Ghost Story. It was shot on Super 16mm and telecinied ot BetaSP for offline editing. For the past ten years I have been carrying around the rushes on 50 BetaSP tapes. So it’s time to deal with [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
PAL DVD of Gone Fishing Complete

PAL DVD of Gone Fishing Complete

By on February 15, 2008 in DVD, Software, Sound

Yesterday I completed the PAL DVD for ‘Gone Fishing’. This DVD is for showing to festival co-ordinators and people who may be interested in the new features I am writing. For now, it won’t be available to anyone else, not even my family! (as I explained on the blog before, we need to keep tight [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
The mountain lies ahead and my feet feel heavy…

The mountain lies ahead and my feet feel heavy…

By on February 13, 2008 in Film Production, Pitching, Rocketboy

With dread in my heart, I approach now, the writing of the next project… And I take the first step… While I can write, I find it very hard. Much harder than I think many other writers do. I find it extremely draining, emotionally and physically. And there is a maximum of about three to [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Final Mix Tweaked and Complete!

Final Mix Tweaked and Complete!

By on February 12, 2008 in BluRay, Sound

Last night I went back to work on the final mix for Gone Fishing at Videosonics. There were two aspects to what we were doing. First off, there were three small creative changes to the sound mix, things I picked up while viewing the film outside of the studio environment. We changed two and left [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Dolby Licence is secured for 35mm prints

Dolby Licence is secured for 35mm prints

By on February 11, 2008 in Sound

We have just secured our Dolby Digital licence for the 35mm version of Gone Fishing. When we screened the film at BAFTA, it was presented on HDCamSR with full 24bit uncompressed six track sound. For 35mm prints, we need a Dolby encoded version, and for that, every short film needs a Dolby licence. So tonight [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Press Pack Draft 1

Press Pack Draft 1

By on February 10, 2008 in Publicity

Over the last few days, we have been thinking ahead about the press for Gone Fishing… And I have been compiling a press pack for journalists. A press pack is a document that has information about the film, how it was made, and who the key players were in its making. I have chosen to [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed
Planning the sound re-mix tweak

Planning the sound re-mix tweak

By on February 7, 2008 in Post Production, Sound

Since the premiere I have wanted to do a few very minor tweaks to the sound track. And I mean minor. When you see your film out in ‘the wild’ as it were, you always see something new that could be changed. This is the value of having the time to go back and make [...]

Read full story • Comments are closed