I should have done this about 2 months ago at the halfway point of the year, but it's still worth checking in to see how I'm doing with my resolutions. In January, I made 5 resolutions for the year. Here's how I'm doing, and how I intend to steer myself in the right direction.
1. Dig deeper into After Effects.
I kind of have. I've taken more time on AE projects to go into new areas, work with cameras and lights more, etc. I haven't done much on my own time.
2. Kind of learn Motion.
Fail fail fail. I really need to focus on this.
3. Actually watch all the behind the scenes stuff on my DVDs.
I've caught up on many episodes of Doctor Who confidential, but I haven't taken the time to watch behind the scenes on DVDs. YET. I will.
4. Take time to refocus on my craft.
I've done OK with this, but fall will allow me a little more time to do this.
5. Do a few personal projects. Something new, just for fun.
I've done pretty well with this, but I'd like to get one more project in before the end of the year.
Not too bad. We'll see how I did in December.
Also, blog series post coming up for reals.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
48 Hour Film Project - Screening
The screening of our film at the IMA went really well. The theater ended up being sold out and we had a huge group of people there supporting us. When our title slide came up on the screen, I could feel an air of tension among my group members. It was extremely gratifying to be in a crowded theater watching your work on the big screen, hearing people reacting and laughing. I see the appeal. Our film was definitely a stand out among our group, technically and from a story-telling perspective. We had a great time sitting in the IMA's cafe drinking cocktails while we waited for the awards to be decided.
Our film won one award - best musical score. We were so happy to win it because it took a lot of our time, and plus it was our first year participating, so we were glad we were able to snatch up something.
We're going to meet up and go back through the film to make it stronger and submit it to a few other small short comedy festivals and see what happens. Here's the final product as it was at 7 PM on August 1st:
Our film won one award - best musical score. We were so happy to win it because it took a lot of our time, and plus it was our first year participating, so we were glad we were able to snatch up something.
We're going to meet up and go back through the film to make it stronger and submit it to a few other small short comedy festivals and see what happens. Here's the final product as it was at 7 PM on August 1st:
Saturday, August 7, 2010
More photography
I never posted any photos I took at my sister's graduation. I've been trying to do more with still photography and I think these turned out nicely as keepsakes for my parents. Here are two outside after the ceremony.
First installment of my awesome blog series coming soon.
First installment of my awesome blog series coming soon.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Things I Didn't Learn in School Blog Series
This series is something I've been thinking about for a while now. Since graduating from college, I've realized there is an awful lot of information I never learned that really would have been useful. And while I don't expect college to teach me everything I ever needed to know, I wish I had learned more technical details about how certain aspects of the video industry work. A lot of what you learn in school is based in theory. That's fine, but when you get into a real job, the technical becomes a much bigger part of what makes or breaks your work. With budgets and deadlines, there's no time to cuddle up with a tutorial and attempt to learn new things every single time. At some point, you have to know what's going on.
I've spent a lot of time in the last year and a half reading a lot of articles, tutorials, blogs, and books, mainly focusing on post-production. My desire to attaint fluency in post-production workflows has allowed me to get through projects quicker. While I'm not going to pretend I know everything - because I really really don't - I know what myself and my peers missed, and it's probably similar across various programs.
This past weekend, being within the school again, reminded me about how much is left out of the classroom and left up to individuals to fill in the blanks. So I decided to do a blog series - Things you didn't learn in school. There are tons of resources out there for a lot of these subjects already, but my intention is to write for entry-level/intermediate recent graduates and build from what they already know, or want to know. Too many articles are way too technical, and too many are too flimsy. So, here's my attempt. We'll start with these subjects:
- Aspect Ratio - why is my stuff all squished man?
- Exporting - The easiest and best way to export a FCP timeline and use Compressor to make it awesome!
- Rendering - What all those options under the Render menu mean, and how you can render your timeline in full to reduce exporting time. AKA What the hell is that orange line?
- H264 - The mystery of H264, why it takes no time sometimes and forever other times.
- Simple audio - How to roundtrip to Soundtrack Pro for basic audio fixes and use Scripts to make your quality of life better.
- Codecs - What the hell is ProRes and why are there different levels of it, what the hell is an editing codec, what the hell is going on?
- Setting up your FCP project correctly - Organizing and getting the settings correct on a project before it's too late.
- Basic color - Basic color balancing in FCP and how to set up a project for roundtripping to Color so you can be a bad ass.
- Basic DVD authoring - How to export your timeline to prepare for DVD and set up a basic DVD menu in DVD Studio Pro, when you might need more advanced options like overlays or scripting. Also, why DVD specs SUCK.
- FCP hints to make your life easier - Features of FCP that newer users don't get into, the 4 editing tools, useful shortcuts, three point editing, and other basic useful crap that nobody ever shows you.
-Why does my greenscreen look like #*^$? - How different formats capture color and how it ruins your life.
I'll start with these topics and see how it goes. Hopefully it's entertaining or useful to SOMEone.
I've spent a lot of time in the last year and a half reading a lot of articles, tutorials, blogs, and books, mainly focusing on post-production. My desire to attaint fluency in post-production workflows has allowed me to get through projects quicker. While I'm not going to pretend I know everything - because I really really don't - I know what myself and my peers missed, and it's probably similar across various programs.
This past weekend, being within the school again, reminded me about how much is left out of the classroom and left up to individuals to fill in the blanks. So I decided to do a blog series - Things you didn't learn in school. There are tons of resources out there for a lot of these subjects already, but my intention is to write for entry-level/intermediate recent graduates and build from what they already know, or want to know. Too many articles are way too technical, and too many are too flimsy. So, here's my attempt. We'll start with these subjects:
- Aspect Ratio - why is my stuff all squished man?
- Exporting - The easiest and best way to export a FCP timeline and use Compressor to make it awesome!
- Rendering - What all those options under the Render menu mean, and how you can render your timeline in full to reduce exporting time. AKA What the hell is that orange line?
- H264 - The mystery of H264, why it takes no time sometimes and forever other times.
- Simple audio - How to roundtrip to Soundtrack Pro for basic audio fixes and use Scripts to make your quality of life better.
- Codecs - What the hell is ProRes and why are there different levels of it, what the hell is an editing codec, what the hell is going on?
- Setting up your FCP project correctly - Organizing and getting the settings correct on a project before it's too late.
- Basic color - Basic color balancing in FCP and how to set up a project for roundtripping to Color so you can be a bad ass.
- Basic DVD authoring - How to export your timeline to prepare for DVD and set up a basic DVD menu in DVD Studio Pro, when you might need more advanced options like overlays or scripting. Also, why DVD specs SUCK.
- FCP hints to make your life easier - Features of FCP that newer users don't get into, the 4 editing tools, useful shortcuts, three point editing, and other basic useful crap that nobody ever shows you.
-Why does my greenscreen look like #*^$? - How different formats capture color and how it ruins your life.
I'll start with these topics and see how it goes. Hopefully it's entertaining or useful to SOMEone.
Monday, August 2, 2010
48 Hour Film Project Recap
Well, we did it.
We completed the 48 Hour Film Project - on time.
Now I've been obsessing over little details I wish we had caught. It's so easy to let yourself get caught up in your mistakes. Overall, we put together a pretty solid little film for what we had at our disposal within the constraints of the competition. I kept it together pretty well this weekend and now that I'm sitting still, I can feel that my brain is a little tired. Here's a recap of the weekend as best I can remember it.
On Friday night, we met up at Starbucks and headed to the Kickoff. We were told to get there BY 6 PM which was lame since we didn't need to actually be there until 6:45 PM. So we waited and waited until the genre draw at 6:45. When our time came, Aaron stepped up and drew "fantasy" for us. We were so happy that we didn't grab film de femme because none of us can write strong female characters and we were seriously considering going for a wild card.
We rushed back to Starbucks where we camped out outside for the rest of the evening. As soon as we sat down I presented an idea I had and we went with it, scripting and creating a shot list until about midnight.
We met back at IUPUI at 8 am, followed shortly after by our crew. Except for our main character actor. We went to work setting up, getting everyone ready, trying to reach him, but every call went to voicemail and Facebook was quiet. We were more than a little worried at this point, because 10 AM was our targeted time to start shooting. Luckily, Josh managed to dig up a friend of his that was willing to come help us and he ended up being perfect - even more perfect than our original actor that flaked.
Our filming started off slow and sped up throughout the day. Most productions end up like that, which drives me insane. My favorite shot was a long tracking shot with the main character walking through a crowd of people. I got to direct this part and coordinate 10 different actors/extras at the same time, which was fun :D I was so thrilled by all the people that turned out to help us. Josh managed to convince 3 hair/makeup people to come and they were fantastic. A couple of my friends from high school showed up, one to be an extra, and one to be our fabulous still photographer for the morning part of the shoot. She did such an great job. The black and white stills in this blog entry were shot by her. You can see her work at mecampbellphotography.blogspot.com.
My mom and her friend brought us lunch around noon - fruit, chips, and subway platters, which was exactly what we needed. Nobody ever got moody from lack of food while we were shooting, which is a big achievement. We continued to shoot until about 8PM.
Katie and I set up to edit at around 2 and realized that we didn't have the appropriate capture cable. The new MacBook Pros don't have firewire 400 anymore. T____T A few phone calls later, we were on the road allll the way up to Fry's Electronics to purchase a firewire 800 to iLink cable. Luckily it didn't really hurt us at all in post production. It just added a few grey hairs to our heads.
There was a brief period where we thought we didn't have enough footage, which I now have an ulcer from, but we then realized were fine and moved forward, completing the rough cut just before midnight. My husband brought us pizza and wings to keep us going, which was also effing amazing. We basically finished the fine cut by 2 AM before getting kicked off campus by security.
We met again the next morning at noon and got to work on the music since that's the earliest we could meet up with the sound mixer/recordist who was absolutely amazing. He was with us for the entirety of our shoot, and I think he just might win VIP for our group. While the sound was mixed, Katie and I color balanced and graded the edit with Magic Bullet Looks, and rendered the timeline in full.
Once the sound and music was complete, we took the exported sound file and slapped it on my rendered timeline. We had some aspect ratio troubles on Saturday I soon found out, so we ended up with a 720x480 letterboxed file. Whatever, it was done at 6:45 PM. We left and drove to the drop off, and breathed a sigh of relief in completion of our work. There are minor fixes I'm going to make to the master copy of our work (like putting it back into 720p), but really the story is pretty strong and succinct, the color looks good, and it was turned in at 7:14 PM which means it was on time.
In the future, I will strongly advocate having multiple eyes looking at every step of the way. While you all trust each other, at the same time you have to consider the extreme circumstances. It's so much easier if multiple people are putting their collective observation skills in play when no one is operating on all cylinders.
Overall, it was a really good experience for us. I am really happy to have a core group of talented peers that are passionate about the same things I am. We had a lot of fun together, and if we don't win any awards, it's ok with me. Of course it'd be really nice to win something, but the experience, the memories, the photos, and then the screening will have been worth all the stress of putting the film together.
That being said, I'm really glad the next 48 Hour Film Project isn't for a year. HA.
If you're interested in coming to the screening on August 7th, our film will be in Group B at 7PM at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Toby Theatre. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased online. We would really appreciate all the support of people coming to our screening (and voting for us for the audience award!), and seeing Pants Cannon Media's big-screen debut.
I'll be updating again after the screening with a copy of the finished film embedded and some more production stills. I re-exported in the correct aspect ratio with higher quality and asked if we could swap it out, but alas we cannot. At least we have a high resolution 720p file for ourselves, and to submit in other festivals.
We completed the 48 Hour Film Project - on time.
Now I've been obsessing over little details I wish we had caught. It's so easy to let yourself get caught up in your mistakes. Overall, we put together a pretty solid little film for what we had at our disposal within the constraints of the competition. I kept it together pretty well this weekend and now that I'm sitting still, I can feel that my brain is a little tired. Here's a recap of the weekend as best I can remember it.
On Friday night, we met up at Starbucks and headed to the Kickoff. We were told to get there BY 6 PM which was lame since we didn't need to actually be there until 6:45 PM. So we waited and waited until the genre draw at 6:45. When our time came, Aaron stepped up and drew "fantasy" for us. We were so happy that we didn't grab film de femme because none of us can write strong female characters and we were seriously considering going for a wild card.
We rushed back to Starbucks where we camped out outside for the rest of the evening. As soon as we sat down I presented an idea I had and we went with it, scripting and creating a shot list until about midnight.
We met back at IUPUI at 8 am, followed shortly after by our crew. Except for our main character actor. We went to work setting up, getting everyone ready, trying to reach him, but every call went to voicemail and Facebook was quiet. We were more than a little worried at this point, because 10 AM was our targeted time to start shooting. Luckily, Josh managed to dig up a friend of his that was willing to come help us and he ended up being perfect - even more perfect than our original actor that flaked.
Our filming started off slow and sped up throughout the day. Most productions end up like that, which drives me insane. My favorite shot was a long tracking shot with the main character walking through a crowd of people. I got to direct this part and coordinate 10 different actors/extras at the same time, which was fun :D I was so thrilled by all the people that turned out to help us. Josh managed to convince 3 hair/makeup people to come and they were fantastic. A couple of my friends from high school showed up, one to be an extra, and one to be our fabulous still photographer for the morning part of the shoot. She did such an great job. The black and white stills in this blog entry were shot by her. You can see her work at mecampbellphotography.blogspot.com.
My mom and her friend brought us lunch around noon - fruit, chips, and subway platters, which was exactly what we needed. Nobody ever got moody from lack of food while we were shooting, which is a big achievement. We continued to shoot until about 8PM.
Katie and I set up to edit at around 2 and realized that we didn't have the appropriate capture cable. The new MacBook Pros don't have firewire 400 anymore. T____T A few phone calls later, we were on the road allll the way up to Fry's Electronics to purchase a firewire 800 to iLink cable. Luckily it didn't really hurt us at all in post production. It just added a few grey hairs to our heads.
There was a brief period where we thought we didn't have enough footage, which I now have an ulcer from, but we then realized were fine and moved forward, completing the rough cut just before midnight. My husband brought us pizza and wings to keep us going, which was also effing amazing. We basically finished the fine cut by 2 AM before getting kicked off campus by security.
We met again the next morning at noon and got to work on the music since that's the earliest we could meet up with the sound mixer/recordist who was absolutely amazing. He was with us for the entirety of our shoot, and I think he just might win VIP for our group. While the sound was mixed, Katie and I color balanced and graded the edit with Magic Bullet Looks, and rendered the timeline in full.
Once the sound and music was complete, we took the exported sound file and slapped it on my rendered timeline. We had some aspect ratio troubles on Saturday I soon found out, so we ended up with a 720x480 letterboxed file. Whatever, it was done at 6:45 PM. We left and drove to the drop off, and breathed a sigh of relief in completion of our work. There are minor fixes I'm going to make to the master copy of our work (like putting it back into 720p), but really the story is pretty strong and succinct, the color looks good, and it was turned in at 7:14 PM which means it was on time.
In the future, I will strongly advocate having multiple eyes looking at every step of the way. While you all trust each other, at the same time you have to consider the extreme circumstances. It's so much easier if multiple people are putting their collective observation skills in play when no one is operating on all cylinders.
Overall, it was a really good experience for us. I am really happy to have a core group of talented peers that are passionate about the same things I am. We had a lot of fun together, and if we don't win any awards, it's ok with me. Of course it'd be really nice to win something, but the experience, the memories, the photos, and then the screening will have been worth all the stress of putting the film together.
That being said, I'm really glad the next 48 Hour Film Project isn't for a year. HA.
If you're interested in coming to the screening on August 7th, our film will be in Group B at 7PM at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Toby Theatre. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased online. We would really appreciate all the support of people coming to our screening (and voting for us for the audience award!), and seeing Pants Cannon Media's big-screen debut.
I'll be updating again after the screening with a copy of the finished film embedded and some more production stills. I re-exported in the correct aspect ratio with higher quality and asked if we could swap it out, but alas we cannot. At least we have a high resolution 720p file for ourselves, and to submit in other festivals.
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