Make Film Teach Film

Richard Walter's Beyond The Basics DVD Seminar

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 professor at UCLA and the head of their screenwriting program. He has been tutoring for years and many famous and successful writers have been through his classes. And it shows. He knows his stuff and he doesn ’t mince his words (he is pictured here with Steven de Souza, writer of Die Hard).

What I loved most about this seminar is how he manages to keep technique and instruction fully integrated with his own narrative of tales from the trenches of film making. For me this makes it a great exercise in storytelling in of itself. It makes for an entertaining and instructional experience. I found myself laughing out loud, nodding in agreement, wincing (when I remembered making the same mistakes) and taking notes on what I will do next to my screenplay.

One of the amazing things Richard offers is, he will read your script if you buy his DVD or attend a seminar. Given his immense experience and status, that is an incredible opportunity.

The disk is flag wavingly American, which personally, I respond to in a very favourably way (American in a West Wing sensibility sort of way, not George Bush). I also ripped the audio off the DVD and put it on my iPod so I can listen while travelling, making use of those long tube journeys back and forth from Soho for Gone Fishing.

The Screenwriters store in LA currently has a February Sale where the disk set is reduced from $79.95 to $59.95. You can get it here, though you will need to buy it today to get the discount. I thoroughly recommend it.

On their site, there is also a short but free interview with him here…

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

The Oscars and the BAFTA's 2008

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 is, by all accounts, a tight, engaging story that resonates. It’s long for a short film at over 30 minutes, but I guess the Academy warmed to that. This is all good news for Gone Fishing and our chances in the 2009 Academy Awards. If feels a long way off just now, but I know it will be here sooner than we think, and who knows what will happen between then and now… How exciting…

In fact looking down the list of nominees for the Oscars, it’s clear that the Academy favours films that entertain while delivering their message. For me this is in stark contrast to the BAFTA nominated shorts which I saw last week, where three out of the five (in the live action) steadfastly refused to Entertain while delivering their message, choosing hard hitting and gritty social realism instead. Don’t get me wrong, ‘Soft’, ‘Dog Altogether’ and ‘Hesitation’ were all extremely powerful films. It’s just after seeing any one of these films, I would feel depressed and shell shocked. And after seeing them all, one after the other, I felt positively suicidal. Friends will confirm the fact that for days I could hardly function I was so depressed. The fourth film, ‘The Stronger’, which was really a stage play committed to film (and a monologue at that) was simply not my cup of tea at all. I just didn't understand it.

The only shining star was the fifth film, an entertaining, if a little long (in fact most of the films were too long in my opinion) comedy short, and for me, the best film – ‘The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island’ - you guys should have won the award. Maybe it's just becuase I smiled for 20 minutes while watching 'Herb' - it was like giving my soul a breather.

It will be interesting to see how the BAFTA’s unfold in 2009 and I truly hope the very best film wins. If you get a chance to see any of these five BAFTA nominated shorts, I urge you to do so. It’s an education.
Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Scanning Gone Fishing on to 35mm

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 with Midnight Transfer before, and getting the 300gb of data between the two places is usually handled via FTP over a network. Once the data (that’s the whole of Gone Fishing saved as a DPX image stream) is at Cinesite, they shoot some tests to calibrate the system, and then scan the film onto neg.

Mitch is a refreshingly straight shooter, and we discussed all sorts of stuff. But two things really resonated with me.

First off, we discussed that many new film makers are very unreasonable and unprofessional, making it difficult for big players like Cinesite to help other film makers in the future. It’s just too much hassle. He told me of another company who had the worst experience in their entire company history while helping a new film maker! So guys, we owe it to each other, and those who follow after us, to be professional, organised, realistic, appreciative… Don’t burn other people’s bridges! Don’t you dare!

The other thing that was fascinating was his take on ‘film or digital?’ and how digital is not as cost effective as many producers, even experienced ones, sometimes believe. This is mainly to do with the huge amount of post production support that digital formats need, and on balance, there is rarely very much anything in it financially. So the choice of film or digital should always be made on creative or aesthetic merit, never on budget. Of course this is a different story if shooting on something like HDV, or another prosumer format. But at the top end - HDCam, Viper, Genesis, Red etc., there just isn’t much in it - think about it - making clone backups, managing terabytes of data, overshooting hugely as ‘tape’ or ‘disk space’ is perceived as cheap… Shoot digital if it suits the story. Shoot film if it suits the story.

Fascinating stuff!

Cinesite has a short PDF here about scanning out  to film and it  makes an interesting  read for anyone with a big propeller on their head.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Makining HDCam Downconvert tapes

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 easily.
Then I needed to make some new versions of the film on HDCam, that's not HDCamSR... HDCam is a lower spec format and much more accessible than its expensive big brother. So to make full HD digital screenings cost effective, we needed Gone Fishing on HDCam…. And that’s when the fun and games began.

Getting the film onto HDCam at 24P (24 frames a second) was fairly easy, BUT… 25P (25 fps) and 23.97P (which is slightly slower speed than 24fps, but converts very well to NTSC) were both a pain and after a lot of messing around, we had to abandon. So now I have to find a new way to achieve these two different versions. And as usual, with no money.

I felt haunted by spectre of the 24 / 24 fps debate…

One problem I have is that I need the HDCam tape to carry the full surround sound mix, and HDCam only has four audio tracks (not enough for the 6 tracks needed for uncompressed Dolby 5.1) – so you need to encode the audio into a dual track format called Dolby E (where a box takes six tracks and converst it in to a data stream, a little like how Dolby is delivered on DVD, but much less compressed)– and they guys who are doing that for me can only do it easily at 25P, not 24P…. And the tape I have is 24P! Typical!

I am sure there is a way around this, but again, I am reminded that while all this new technology is great, it also increases the amount of hoops you need to jump through, almost exponentially. And it’s all really new, so no-one is a real veteran of the format yet. Anyone with six months experience or so is considered a seasoned expert!

At the very least though, I now have two HDCamSR tapes, in full 4:4:4 colour sampling, with the full six track mix at 48khz and 24bit… And I also have a 24P HDCam tape that I can hopefully find a way to get the Dolby E mix transferred onto.

It’s never easy! It never ends!

I really do understand why people abandon projects in post, saying, ‘You know what, that will do…’ but I am nowhere near that point yet!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Translating Gone Fishing

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 the tin and is free (I believe a Beta of the new version is out too). Importing files into Adobe Encore has also got its foibles with it requiring text files saved in a particular way (UTF-8), but now I know how it all works, it’s fairly painless.

The best part is, I have been able to send of the text file of the English version and it’s translated by you guys – by just swapping out the English and dropping in the new language in this text file – I can then just check it over in Subtitle Workshop and drop it straight into Encore as all the timecodes are still in place. It’s really very easy once the first transcription into English is done and is all correctly timed. If you are interested in what this subtitle text file looks like, you can click here and read it.

I have decided to do as many languages as possible as Festivals are bound to be more favourable if the film has already been translated. I have also done an English track for the hearing impaired, something I try to do all the time now (a character in Rocketboy is Deaf and I have had some experience now in the deaf community and understand how much subs are appreciated in this larger (than you would expect) group.

Perhaps the biggest problem with translations has been the title, as ‘Gone Fishing’ is kind of a recognised phrase in English that in other languages may not work at all, or just sounds strange.

So for undertaking or checking a translation so far, I would like to thank Daniel Bones, Kerry Finlayson, Sylvie Bolioli, Marino Santirso Ruiz, Katja Gielnik, Steve Wilson, (and anyone else currently working on one too). It really has helped make the film international.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Subtitles for Festivals

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 today, I have been figuring out how to get subtitles onto a DVD. It’s actually not too hard.

I downloaded a super little freeware program called Subtitle Workshop, imported a video file and then just typed in the titles where needed. You can download it here if you want to do sub titles yourself.

Subtitle Workshop then generates a simple text file, much like an editors EDL, which has ‘in’ and ‘out’ timecodes and also the text to display between those two points. This file then imports simply into Adobe Encore.

It’s a little cryptic at times, but once I got it figured out, it was pretty simple.

Now the problem is that I need the script translating – I have a German translator, but I also need to find French, Italian and Spanish translators too. I am going to ask the Associate producers tonight if they know anyone – it’s less than an hours work for anyone who speaks that language as their first language.

There’s always something else to do!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Final DVD – death and resurrection!

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 it was one of the actors! How could this possibly happen? Well it does on low budget films. The problem is that it’s no-ones particular job to deal with making a credit list. During the shoot, a credit list is very low on the crisis management list. So this happens.

The good news is that as I am writing this, After Effects is rendering a new end roller which I will drop into the various edits later today, and then I will rebuild the DVD’s and BluRay disks. As for the HDCamSR master, I am doing some clones at the weekend and hope that I can drop them onto those tapes then. It should all be fine.

There is a hidden gem here too. After doing all the DVD’s yesterday, I was struck by an obvious idea which would have meant remaking all the DVD’s anyway. I was wrestling with ‘All that work to remake the DVD’s for this damn idea I should have had weeks ago…’ when I got the email about the missing credit and I am now obliged to rebuild the DVD’s. My good friend Johnny Newman made a film a few years ago which I edited for him, called ‘Foster’. It’s a touching tale about fostering young kids, and it won a few festivals. Last week, Johnny got a call from Walden Media (the guys who made among other things, ‘Bridge to Terabithia’) as they had a DVD of ‘Foster’ and liked it. It occurred to me that if this was gong to happen with ‘Gone Fishing’, I ought to have something on the DVD about Rocketboy. I already have a short promo made up of the concept art, so now I am going to include that as a button on the menu saying something like… The Next Project – ROCKETBOY…

So like everything in life, where you lose, you gain! Sure I have to remake all the DVD masters and stuff, but I also get a better crack at getting the message of Rocketboy out there.

You can view the short Rocketboy promo here…  (it's 5mb H264 encoded MOV, so give it a moment to load).

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

DIGITAL DISASTER!

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 to hold in your hand at the end of the shoot, it’s all stored as digital data on hard drives – and huge ones at that, roughly 5TB of data for this film. And we all know what can happen to hard drives. Yes, you guessed it, the post production facility accidentally deleted some of his master shots. That’s the original material. Gone. Forever. 

But what about backups? Well the data sizes are so huge on the Viper format, that making a backup becomes hard work for an indie film maker. It’s fine for Spiderman 3 or Zodiac, both sot on Viper, but not so good for cash strapped film makers. Sure you could do it with, say, five 1TB USB 2 drives from PC world, but it would take a whole weekend to backup using that cheaper but cost effective solution.

So what’s going to happen now? Johnny has no choice now but to get his cast and crew back and re-shoot. He is gutted. I just spoke to him and he said, ‘I was very excited about Viper, it was all working really well, but I was always nervous about possible data loss – and now it just gone, vanished, never to be seen again. I don’t think I will be shooting a tapeless or filmless format again in the future.’

Eddie Hamilton, editor, said ‘that’s why in Hollywood people still shoot film, it’s been around for 100 years and is very robust.’

On reflection, it reminded me of one of the commandments in The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook, ‘Thou shalt shoot every shot twice…’ (creating a backup). This commandment is fine for tape or film, where due to it’s linear format, if a problem does occur, it tends to only damage a few moments of material (like if a tape snags in the deck). It’s not that simple with data, as it tends to be whole lumps that disappear if deleted, or everything if a drive fails. Data loss tends to be catastrophic where tape or film damage tends to be smaller and more fixable. 

I think you just need to remember that shooting on an HD tapeless format is not like shooting HDV, that data files can just be so HUGE. This doesn’t bode well for the much anticipated Red Camera which also uses drives to store media.

I guess the other thing to consider is – be completely responsible for your own material. Even if they say, ‘don’t worry’, you should worry, and you should make sure you have a recovery plan. On Viper for instance, you could transfer to HDCamSR as a failsafe (which I believe should have happened on Meet The Finkels, but it didn’t).

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Archiving BetaSP tapes onto DVCam.... Problems

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 it.

I decided to transfer all the tapes onto around ten, 84 minute DVCam tapes with timecode. I could use a J30 DigiBeta deck which has a firewire port on the back, so it will convert BetaSP analogue to DVCam digital for me.

The first big shock is that the tapes are not in good shape. There is a lot of drop out and the heads of the player need cleaning every few tapes as I guess the tape is shedding particles as it plays. It’s literally falling apart! This really has been a wake up call about archiving old tapes and data. Nothing lasts forever, especially magnetic tape it seems! I have had to reconsider just how ‘secure’ all my other master tapes actually are. Archiving has always been a problem as film making tends to generate a lot of stuff, and I guess, we tend to think of it all being safe and secure in the loft or on a shelf. Maybe it’s not as secure as you think?

The good news though is that after this weekend of tape swapping, what was once three large boxes of tapes will be in a handful of DVCam tapes (and being new tapes they should last another ten years before I guess everything will be disk based anyway). About time too!

Onwards and upwards.

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

PAL DVD of Gone Fishing Complete

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 reigns on the DVD so it does not appear on YouTube and destroy our festival aspirations).

I have been working with Adobe Encore which I have found very good most of the time, but cryptic and flaky at other times.

I rendered the picture and sound separately – the picture part of the DVD was made from an HD uncompressed Avid project, so it took a few hours (the 10 min project was 150gb in total), but it looks stunning. On DVD, it will never look better.

After remixing the sound, I was able to do a new soundtrack for the DVD too. We shot at 24fps and DVD runs at 25fps, so I needed to do a speed up – which I did in Adobe Audition (by changing the length to 96% using the Stretch tool). Incidentally, I was also able to make a Polyphonic WAV in Audition too – that is, all six channels of sound in single WAV file, uncompressed – it’s pretty easy in Audition, which also has a surround sound mixer built in.

I have spoken to many sound engineers and everyone is saying basically what I already knew, which is ‘don’t bother with pitch correction when speeding up or slowing down, as it introduces new and unnecessary audio artefacts.’ There is such an enormous amount of misinformation floating around about 24fps and 25fps and as anyone who has done my Guerilla Film Makers Masterclass knows, I have plenty to say about it! Well now I have even more having just gone through the grinder of 24fps with no budget. Categorically stated now, if you live in PAL world and have little money, shooting 25fps is easier and cheaper and has no technical or presentational disadvantages at all. None.

So now I have a version of the sound at 25fps (converted in Audition), and I used an old Dolby Digital Software encoder to create an AC3 5.1 surround file (which is compressed heavily). Dolby Digital can handle up to 640k /second, but Encore would crash out with using anything above 448 k/ sec, which is annoying, but they way that it is. It still sounds very good though.

I also managed to encode a DTS track which is 1.5mb / sec, so three times as much data, and it sounds so much better. As we speak, the 24bit files are being encoded by Richard Osborne at Abbey Road Interactive into a DTS HD audio stream, which will deliver uncompressed 24 bit sound via BluRay – that is if Encore will play ball (the manual says it will but I am not so sure – and so the BluRay saga continues).

Also, in the next few days I will be encoding an NTSC disk for the USA.

I promise once we get through this technical stuff, I will disengage my propeller head and get on with fun stuff like film film festivals.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com