Pandora Machine Blog

New Helmets

2012-01-28T11:03:00.000-05:00

This model is larger than a ping-pong ball, smaller than a tennis ball.

Anthony Jones is building our helmets for us. They're a fairly ingenious design. First of all, the visor is vacu-formed which makes it cheaper and lighter than buying a Lexan sphere.
He's also come up with a unique answer to the whole connect-the-helmet-to-the-body issue by using the top of a 5-gallon bucket as a "collar".
Q. Is it going to be hot inside the helmet?
A. Hell yeah.
Q. How about breathing?
A. There will be downward-facing vents in the back of the helmet.
Q. Wearing those helmets will be a pain. Would you ever ask an actor to do something you wouldn't do?
A. I'm wearing one right now.
Q. Oh God. That's true. You are wearing one right now aren't you?
A. I like pretending I'm on a computer... in space.
Q. No girl will ever date you.
A. But I'm in space.

Celtx Hot Keys

2012-01-26T17:25:00.001-05:00

Over on the Celtx forums Steve lists the hotkeys for Celtx:

Script Elements:
Heading - ctrl + 1, or ctrl + return
Action - ctrl + 2
Character - ctrl + 3
Dialog - ctrl + 4
Parenthesis - ctrl + 5
Transition - ctrl + 6
Shot - ctrl + 7
Text - ctrl + 8

cut - ctrl + x
copy - ctrl + c
paste - ctrl + v

white space - shift + return

find & replace - ctrl + f
find next - ctrl + g
find previous - shift + ctrl + g

new project - ctrl +n
open project - ctrl + o
save - ctrl +s
print - ctrl + p

Mac users can substitute the 'cmd' key for the 'ctrl' key.

Today in the machine

2012-01-25T18:51:00.000-05:00

For our upcoming The Promethius Trap we have the awesome Dolf Veenvliet designing and building the spaceships.
Anthony Jones is making our helmets.

A basic tutorial on the Blender interface. This was put together by Michael Richards, via the New York City Blender meetup group.
These dudes have a replica of the International Space Station. They also have a bunch of space suits and space helmets for rent and for sale. Plus they'll make custom ones for you.
Did I already mention these things? I may have already mentioned them.
+++++
The dudes at Letus have a new camera "platform" called the Master Cinema Series. I've always dug the stuff they make at Letus. The electronic viewfinder is very very sexy.
++++
An interview with Ron Cobb on the design of the spaceships in Alien.

1201

2012-01-23T15:39:00.002-05:00

We're announcing a new picture today. We're going to go into production on The Prometheus Trap by Steven J. Niles.

Robin Kurtz in Earthkiller.

It's a fantastic original script. So even though we'll be making it as a "mockbuster" of the upcoming Prometheus, our "Prometheus" is a groovy original concept about a ghost ship in deep space. I can't wait to get to shooting.
Yes, this changes our schedule somewhat. We're pushing back Dragon Girl until the weather is warmer.

Helmets of Space

2012-01-18T22:51:00.001-05:00

Now, my buddy Chance Shirley already made the most awesome space movie, Interplanetary. So really I should just quit and get a real job. I'm just too stubborn.
The helmets for Interplanetary do a great job of solving one of the biggest inherent problems with space helmets: how to attach them to the body.

Now you'd think I was just posting pictures of topless women gratuitously. But, shockingly, I'm not. This picture just happens to have the clearest view of the way the gasket on the helmet works.

As it turns out, acrylic is much cheaper than Lexan.

The Pandora Machine Telephone

2012-01-18T18:18:00.000-05:00

This took a whole bunch of experimentation. But I think we're in the ballpark now. This is our telephone.

212.461.4887
It's an inexpensive handset hooked up to an iPod Touch. The Touch is hooked up to our Mac Mini (which serves mostly to just power the iPod.
We're running Skype. This way the telephone can be answered from wherever. In fact, you can pick up the handset and the iPod and walk to the conference area or anywhere you like.
Right now the only downside is that the ring is very quiet. But if we have enough computers also set up with Skype we'll have no trouble hearing them ring. The Mini is serving both as power and as a ringer.
The Skype account is unlimited minutes to US and Canada. So go crazy with it.

Objectivity

2012-01-17T17:53:00.000-05:00

It's not that I just like to think each movie we make is better than the last, they are actually better.
I think that the biggest issue is visual effects. Because, facing reality, the only thing our buyers really care about is the genre and the visual effects, right? I suspect that all the work we spend on getting scripts just right and nuanced performances and such are really just for us and have nothing to do with how well our pictures sell.
Which is no big deal. It's just nice to know that fact when we're racing to the finish line on getting a movie completed.
What surprises me though is how frequently I am able to just idiotically and without thinking blow things off -- really important parts of the story -- just because I'm too close to it. Last night our producer, the Queen of Mars, came by the studio and looked at footage. And what do you know? The first big decision our lead character makes, the decision which the second 2/3rds of the movie is based on, is absent from the cut. And yup, it's all because Mr. Derpitude over here didn't shoot the scene with it.
The decision.
Crimea if I don't know better than to miss those critical decisions. But knowing better and actually doing it right are two way different things. So I blew that one. I mean, it's simple enough to shoot. Get a closeup of your lead looking one way then another.
Lucky for us the Martian Queen found a bit of footage (just before the slate comes in, don't you know) which we cut into the edit of reel 3 which shows our lead making the decision to save the android.
You might be surprised (spoiler alert!) to discover that later on that android saves our lead's life. But that's another story. No, wait. It isn't.
If no off-world royalty ever came to give us notes, that very important story bit would have been missed. So although I might suck as a director, at least the people around me are really good. That helps mask my imperfections.

My new Skype picture

Notes on spacesuit helmets

2012-01-14T17:17:00.002-05:00

Generally speaking there are three basic kinds of face-readable spacesuit helmet designs.

1. There's the "bubble" helmet like the Apollo suits had, with variations like the helmets in Alien.

I do love the clunkiness of this particular suit design but I expect it's rather expensive because the Lexan dome is going to cost more than our budget.

2. The second main kind of design I do not like because it's very visually distorting and makes it hard to read the faces of the actors. I'll call this the "Firefly" design.

3. The third design is what we might call the "Outbreak" design. Three flat lexan panels instead of a curved piece of plastic for the visor is likely vastly less expensive to manufacture.

The big cost issue is the visor itself. I haven't been able to source reasonably-priced bubbles. Flat pieces are likely to be the cost-effective way to go.

The other big issue is the method by which the helmet will actually attach to the body. Typically a pair of rings are used (like in the Apollo design). Another way to go is to make the helmet attached to the carapace which would then have the suit itself pulled up over the carapace -- similar to the way dive suits sometimes are made.

We're very price-conscious. When we say the budget for all three is $500 it really is $500 for all three of them complete. ;-)

So those are our thoughts regarding spacesuit helmets right now.

Karma Pirates

2012-01-14T12:55:00.000-05:00

Here's a brilliant little piece of filmmaking. I'm not sure I have even the slightest idea what's going on. I am totally envious of the sound effects editing. Ian Hubert. Karma Pirates.

The photography is beautiful. The composites are amazing. The walled city is something I want to steal. And I love the party lights.
The inside and the outside of the ship are fabulous. I just don't know what else to say.
Hey Ian -- did you have a rain machine? ;-)

Into the Evil

2012-01-10T16:16:00.000-05:00

Here's a still from Android Insurrection. The landing ship approaches the facility.
We have a cut of almost the entire movie. Picture lock should occur in a few days.

Et More Spacesuits

2012-01-09T20:55:00.001-05:00

Brian Schiavo pointed out some good resources for spacesuits and space helmets. Groove to thus:
Global Effects has helmets and suits.

Global Effects armored spacesuit.

UPDATE: this is amusing. These suits rent for $3450 a week. Monthly... $6900.

Blender in Space

2012-01-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

A basic tutorial on the Blender interface. This was put together by Michael Richards, via the New York City Blender meetup group.
These dudes have a replica of the International Space Station. They also have a bunch of space suits and space helmets for rent and for sale. Plus they'll make custom ones for you.
Speaking of making spacesuit helmets, one way to go is to simply get a welding helmet, put clear plexiglass in it, and light it from the inside with LED's or florescent lights.

But the thing is that what you really want is one of these three-panel faceplates. That way you can actually see the actor inside, which is, you know, dramatically important.
I got a rich man's problems with a poor man's pocketbook. Distributor is screaming for us to finish this picture. So back to work for me...

The New Machine

2012-01-06T17:17:00.000-05:00

So, I'm getting a new computer. $2900 for a PC.
It's not an Earthkiller, but it's close. I'm ordering it from Titanuscomputers.com.

Basically it's an i7 Six-core Sandy Bridge computer with 32GB of RAM and a Quadro 4000 video card. That should give me the best of the two things I need the computer for: 3D work/compositing and audio editing/mixing. I'm getting Windows Professional 7. Apparently you need "Professional" because of something with memory and multi-core management. Or something.

I'm also getting the computer with liquid cooling in order to make it a quieter computer. We'll see how that works out.

Unfortunately the Sandy Bridge-E chip is not in right now so they're not going to be able to build 'till next week.
Which means I'm going to be on frame 14 of this render for another three and-a-half minutes.

So I figure this computer should last me a few years. And it could eventually be made into an editing machine if/when we move over to Adobe Premiere for editing picture, which might happen later this year.

I need a name for this computer. All my computers have classical-sounding names like Pygmalion or Athena. I need a name for the computer and a user-name. Hmm...

X195-Intel i7 Six Core Sandy Bridge-E Workstation Computer
Processor:Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core
Motherboard: MSI X79A-GD65 (8D) LGA 2011 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
Memory: 32GB (8 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000) Quad Channel
Case:NZXT Crafted Series Tempest 410 Elite Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower
Power: A-Power AK 680W 20+4-pin ATX PSU w/SATA & PCIe (Black) Power Supply
Video / GPU Card 1: NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCIe 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready
Sound Card: Onboard Premium level HD Audio (Note that I'll never use this even once.)
Hard Drive 1:Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 64MB Cache
CD/DVD:Black 2MB Cache 22X DVD Burner drive
NetWork:Onboard LAN 10/100/1000Mbps
USB/Firewire:VANTEC 4-Port USB 2.0 & 3-Port FireWire 400 PCI Combo Host Card
OS:Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Warranty:2 Yr Standard Parts & Labor Ltd Warranty, 2 Yr Business hour support
Fan Controller: none
CPU Fans: Intel BXRTS2011LC High Performance Liquid Cooler - 120mm Fan, 2200 RPM Max, 74 CMF, 35dBA Max, 150mm

Alien Treasure

2012-01-05T16:54:00.000-05:00

Steve Burg.

The Alien Revenge movie we're shooting this Summer -- I keep looking at this picture and thinking "Wouldn't it be cool if we could shoot on an empty steel-and-concrete planet, where it was raining all the time?"
Yes. Yes it would be cool.

Do you like feeling bad about yourself?

2012-01-05T09:51:00.000-05:00

Take this color hue test from colormunki.com.

This chart shows where my color has issues.
Now go color-correct that movie!

How do I record things?

2012-01-04T20:11:00.001-05:00

You're saying to yourself "How do I record stuff using the Tardis voiceover booth in The Forbidden Palace?"*

Well, how do I?
You start inside the booth. There are two blue cables which come in through the top port. They're each labeled: "Mic 1" and "Mic 2". Just plug a microphone into one of those two cables.

The cables in the booth are labeled. They come in from up top.

OK, so I've plugged in a microphone. Now what do I do?
The signal from those mics appears at our patchbay.
What does that look like?
It looks like this:

Closeup of the patchbay.

See where it says "Mic 1" and "Mic 2"?
Yeah.
That's where you plug an XLR into and record straight to the Sound Devices 702 or what-have-you.
What mics do we have?
We have different microphones. Do make sure you ask me about them as they might not all be around.
Where are they?
In a case marked "Input Transducers" on top of the booth.
You have to be kidding me.
I wasn't going to label the case "Microphones".
Oh. I see your point.

Left to right: SM 57, Black Oktava MC-012a, Silver Oktava MC-012a, Black Oktava MC-012, diagonally on top: AKG 460 (with CK-61 capsule.)

Of all our microphones, only the Shure SM 57 does not need phantom power.**
All the other mics do need phantom?
Yes. That's frequently just called "+48V".
What mics are used for what?
The SM 57 is very hearty. It's mostly used for big violent things like guitar amps and snare drums.
The Oktavas are what we use for recording dialog in the field.
The AKG 460's are nice for music-related stuff. I record the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York (sometimes) with them.
Which mics would I use for ADR?
Well, I've been using the Oktava's for ADR. I put it up high and pointing down at the actor. Because that's how we would have recorded on set.
How about voiceovers?
Try the Rode NT-1's. They'll be the best - sounding mic for most voices. Remember to use a pop/spit filter. And never blow into any microphone.

Rode NT-1 mics.

Really? Don't blow into a microphone? But I see people do that all the time.

It destroys them. Don't do it. The more expensive the microphone, the faster it'll destroy the mic.

What's the deal with the other mic in the booth?

That's an AKG C12A.

It's funny 'cause it looks like a little bitty AKG 414.

Don't say that. You'll hurt its feelings.

AKG C12A

What's it for?
Mostly my own vocals. I got it because it doesn't have the hyped high-end of an AKG C12.
And it's eight thousand dollars cheaper.
And that.
What if I want to use it?
You don't want to use that microphone.
That isn't the microphone I'm looking for.
Exactly.

*I call our new studio "The Forbidden Palace". You know, because I can.
**The C12A does not need phantom either, but that's because it has an external tube power supply.

Funny things about our new office

2012-01-04T19:21:00.000-05:00

There are two shoe-repair shops within a stone's throw.
You know we're in the same neighborhood as the World Trade Center? And near the infamous "Ground Zero Mosque" (which is neither at Ground Zero, nor is a Mosque, and I walked by it yesterday -- I should take a picture of how amusingly benign it is.)
The zombie apocalypse building across the street actually has a plaza built into it. With the weather this cold it's completely uninhabitable but come springtime...

Now I'm starting to think I should go with a speedy i7 rather than a dual-hexa-core Xeon. I used to bullseye womprats in my T16.

Videoguys has their Nvidia page here.

Computer convincerations

2012-01-03T23:06:00.000-05:00

VideoGuys publish a DIY computer guide and they're up to their 9th machine which is based on the i7 chip.
I'm persuaded to go with a dual xenon hexa - core machine. And 24GB of RAM.

And even though the videoguys specifically advise against it, I figure a GTX570/580 card is right what I want.
And I want the computer to be in a rack-mount case. See that rack behind me? The one with the headphones and Purell? I want to put the computer in the bottom of that rack. That means wireless mouse/keyboard in likelihood I should think. And a 10-foot DVI cable.

Girl with the Dragon

2012-01-03T18:50:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking that our Dragon Girl might have ended up painting her face like a fierce little dragon-fighting warrior girl. Then when she meets the witch the witch can try to wipe it off, which would amuse me greatly.

Vampire Buffalo

2012-01-03T12:03:00.000-05:00

I watched two episodes of The Vampire Diaries because of this blog post. Maybe I watched the two worst episodes of the show ever but it's just terrible. Every scene is just "data data data". There's no ticking clock, no problem which needs to be solved by the end of the episode, nothing. In fact there's no way to know how far along you are in the episode by anything that's happening on-screen.
The worst thing is that there are way too many dark-haired white boys in it. Practically every male character is indistinguishable from all the rest.
+++++
My friend Xavier Rodriguez made this movie, Dead Buffalo, a while back. I mixed it. Yes. The noise behind the dialog is my fault. And yes, the gun is not anachronistic, it's actually contemporary to the time the movie is set.

Wireless Conflict and Effects

2011-12-29T20:18:00.000-05:00

The Apple AirPort Extreme card has a couple strikes against it. Firstly, it costs about 2.8 gazillion dollars. Or at least forty dollars.
Second-like, it's a major-league pain-in-the-tuchus to install.

Draper's Lamia.

So I went and ordered a USB wireless for the Mac Pro (and for my PC desktop) because I thought at our new place we'd only have wireless. Turns out we have hard-wired right in the wall behind (my) computers. Maduka brought in our router, Blair's gonna bring in his wireless, and it'll all be super sweet.
William Martell on making sure there's conflict in every scene. Oh man I couldn't agree more. When you have a scene without conflict the movie just dies. I think horror movies are especially guilty of that because there's that opening set of scenes where the teenagers are headed into the woods and they're all laughing and happy because the filmmakers want to show us how things were good before they got very very bad because of the man with the ax.
The Stylizer plug in for Final Cut from Luca Visual FX looks kinda cool.

The Machine Churns Slowly

2011-12-28T20:30:00.004-05:00

I can't really stomach paying over four thousand dollars for a video card. I mean, what the what? Update: this is the link.

And other than that I'm not really getting a whole bunch of work done and I really haven't gotten much work done since we moved. But we will. We have to. I just have this stupid cold which won't go away.

Of course, moving in has been hard work. We only just got power over to that workstation (where the music keyboard is... for now) over my right shoulder.

You'll note the bottle of vodka waiting there in case of hard times.

Oh, but there's actually a story to that workstation. I was walking to work and there on the corner of Reade and Church someone was throwing away a lot of office furniture. Most of it was/is pretty unusable. But the desk looked pretty good so I went and got a cart and a tape measure and sure enough, it's pretty good. There's a couple little drawers and a keyboard/mouse tray.

Muslim DSLR's

2011-12-28T11:21:00.000-05:00

First Blair gets his arm chopped off, then a giant robot kills him, in Solar Vengeance.

Our main man Blair Johnson is DP on this groovy documentary "The Muslims are Coming".

Philip Bloom's camera shootout includes a hacked GH2. I believe the "correct" answer for the stills is:

1 5D
2 NEX5
3 AF100
4 C300
5 D7000
6 F3 AB
7 F3 S-Log
8 FS100
9 GH2
10 7D

Attack the Block

2011-12-27T20:53:00.000-05:00

And there be spoilers here. Although really if you're reading this blog and haven't already seen any movie I talk about then you're only here for the pictures of naked people and cats.
You're welcome.
+++++
I thought Attack the Block was almost really good. There were a number of very nice and awesome things about it, but I felt let down by the characters. Of course, the fact that they spoke with such heavy working - class London accents made it so I couldn't understand most of what they said, so that might have a bunch to do with it.
But after the first 30 seconds I had a list of who was going to die because, lets face it, they should die. And they didn't die.
That's the sort of thing which would drive my sister nuts.
Indeed the head - count for it being a horror movie was pretty darn low.

The creatures were spectacular in a low-budget way. First of all, they (mostly) weren't CG. They're guy-in-a-suit with hand extensions. And the idea of making them blind but with glow-in-the-dark teeth is quite awesome.
If I were to re-make it it'd either have to be about a drug dealer who refuses to mug some girl, or it would be about a drug dealer who's in trouble with another drug dealer from the very beginning (when there's a shoot-out natch.)

3

2011-12-26T18:24:00.000-05:00

I've probably made considerable noise of late considering on the fact that we absolutely must shoot and post a minimum of three pictures this year. Perhaps four. Well heck, if I'm dreamin' we should do five but them dreams ain't worth the hyper-paper they is written on.
What I have so far is Dragon Girl, then Joe Chapman's picture Alien Exorcism. After that we have picture called either "Alien Revenge" or "Alien Treasure" depending on the draft we're reading (written by Bruce Frigeri).

Before all that comes to pass, o'course, we must finish Android Insurrection. I have plans to do that in three weeks. Don't know if we'll make it. I expect we'll have a finished cut, tho' we'll want to clean up some visual effects before delivery.
++++
The first thing I won't be makin' a deciding on is what to do with this whole Apple Final Cut Pro debacleation. We'll edit at least one more picture in FCP (that'd be Dragon Girl). And if things ain't be worked out by comes summertime, we'll maybe find ourselves on the side of the fence where Premiere doth grow all pretty and gentle-like.
Yes, I've been re-watching all of Firefly.

New Desks Apocalypse

2011-12-25T14:13:00.001-05:00

Laiva desk from Ikea is only $20.
But it's a bit too tall, the HealthyComputing says that these are the ideal heights:

	Writing: 28-30 inches

	Mousing: 27-29 inches

	Typing: 26-28 inches

The Laiva could be cut down. That would be the cheapest way to get a couple new desks. I'm gonna guess we should be at 27 inches. I wish my parents had a tape measure. How can they not have a tape measure? Oh, I know -- my dad always keeps his in the car. Anyway, their desks are at a pretty cool height.

Tell me Law & Order: Baldur's Gate wouldn't be awesome.

Amateurmethius

2011-12-22T19:44:00.001-05:00

We should probably make a mockbuster of Prometheus. Oh wait, we are making one.

The trick is remaining friends with Joe Chapman as I hound him to finish his Alien Exorcism picture. Because I'm going to be one giant pain in the butt. Because that picture is going to be awesome and I want to see it. I want to see it now!
You know what we need? Spacesuits. And lots of 'em. I want helmets that fog up like crazy. Do we like spherical helmets? Or would we dig some that are like three plates of glass? Anybody?
We finally (mostly) assembled the Whisperroom (which we now simply call the Tardis). And I think everyone is in agreement that the desks we have are just exactly too large. When we get slightly smaller ones we'll be able to fit five people in our studio without feeling any more on top of one another than we ever did before.
Irony 1: I actually pay $25/month less at the new studio than I did at Theatresource.
Irony 2: The commute is so much shorter that I've blown through my stop going home twice now. I'm going to get a lot less reading done.

New Digs

2011-12-21T11:05:00.001-05:00

We've moved into our new place. We're renting office space from Michael Mailer Films. We found the space on Loose Cubes.
Here's a pretty appalling picture of Maduka and me waving at the camera. I look fairly deranged. Maduka is fairly blase.
Amazon sent me the wrong adapter for my phone. But I just discovered that J&R is only 4 blocks from our new office.
We need another desk. Like 4' x 4'. And we need a throw rug. Oh, and we need this movie we're working on to get finished.

Harlem Rage

2011-12-18T21:32:00.000-05:00

Our boy Tom Rowen wrote and directed this. Stars our own David Ian Lee (the man with America in his blood) and the continually more frightening each and every day Maduka Steady as the badass.
This picture looks nice boy.
Who shot it?
This should be a feature.

First of Us

2011-12-17T20:09:00.000-05:00

Peggy Archer says funny things about lighting instruments.
We have, on occasion, tried to build our own "chicken coops". I can't say they've been terribly successful. Honestly, a couple cheap scoops with 300W lamps in 'em seems to do a similar thing. Those florescent lights we call "chicklets" do a somewhat outstanding job of smacking a whole lot of pretty (and uncontrolled) light on people.
The fact that I don't even own a light kit is simply absurd. Luckily I'm partners and/or friends with people who do own light kits. But have I mentioned how absurd it is we don't own one of our own?

The Last of Us. Teenage girl. Zombie-esque.

Reminds me of Jim Mickel's Stakeland too.

To Do or Not To Do

2011-12-16T22:50:00.001-05:00

Here's a kind of neat video tutorial for lighting "talking head" - type videos. And it's exactly the opposite of what we do when we light.
Us? We start with the back light. Then we fill underneath. That's the Mitchell Riggs way.
If there are any lights left we might hit the face with some, maybe get some kick light in the eyes.
Lastly make sure something fun is happening in the background. If you did it right it's probably that rim light you set up at the very beginning.
I know. It's just the opposite of what everyone else does.
Speaking of what everyone else does, here's David Ian Lee on Funny or Die. Spectacularly not safe for work.

Christmas Rap - watch more funny videos

Skype

2011-12-16T00:05:00.001-05:00

So, we're going to have a regular Skype line in our office. Were's still waiting on the little interface-things for these handsets we have that have 4-conductor plugs on 3.5mm.

Please, for the love of all that's holy, don't call it and leave weird prank creepy messages on it at 7:30 in the morning. (+1 212 461 4887)

The cost was only $30 (half price for the year) plus a subscription -- $3/month unlimited to North America. And then there's some sort of discount on that. I think it was 15% if I paid for a year up front.

We're gonna need new business cards.

So that's how things are.

Interplanetary Free Locks

2011-12-13T14:31:00.000-05:00

Interplanetary is one of Steve's Top Ten favorites of the year.
Video Copilot is giving away free smoke stock footage.

We have locked picture on acts 1, 3, 4, and possibly 5. Although there is a whole lot of cleanup which needs to be done on composites in Android Insurrection.

New Space

2011-12-12T14:37:00.001-05:00

We have a new address.
81 Worth Street
New York, NY 10013

Sarah Doe Osborne as Yurra-1 in Android Insurrection.

We also have a new phone number, although I haven't tested it yet.
(718) 306-9696 [UPDATE: This is NOT our new phone number.]
It's Google phone. So supposedly it'll ring directly to my computer. I'm not 100% sure of that yet.
But we have a new home and we're very excited!

Libby Csulik at the End of the World

2011-12-12T01:09:00.000-05:00

The awesome Libby Csulik made this groovy matte. Post-apocalypse here we come.

Original plate.

Melissa Schlachtmeyer in The Brooklyn Rail

2011-12-10T19:19:00.000-05:00

Friend of the Pandora Machine Melissa Schlachtmeyer is interviewed in The Brooklyn Rail.

I think I want a sense of the world it physically inhabits, which is usually a discussion referencing some wheres and whens, either portraying a recognizable historical time and place or incorporating visual references to one or more, but could also just be pure visual invention

2011-12-10T17:54:00.000-05:00

For $80,000 I'd expect not only a whole lot of camera, but a general lack of abuse from the manufacturer. Philip Bloom's experience with the Red isn't entirely like that.
For $80K you can rent a whole lot of camera and lenses and hire a 1st AC to babysit it all for you.
I don't get what the whole cult is over 4K shooting. I'd much rather have higher ISO on the camera. Shooting in low-light is very groovy because the "painting" with smaller lights is so much easier (plus shooting night exteriors without lights is, let's face it, awesome.)

The Penelope wants to be a high resolution camera. I wonder if it'll still "purr". I sure hope so. Ooh look, it has a name, the "Delta". I sure wish it would do 1600 ISO.
Either that or we just slap one of those Canon 300's onto an Aaton XTR. Because c'mon. You know you want it.

Feng Shui

2011-12-10T15:16:00.000-05:00

So the Feng Shui of our new office has some issues. Yes, I know it's not actually "Feng Shui". And I also know that we have these 63" wide desks and we're moving into a room with these pillars and bases which make it hard to put things up against walls.
So this is my first plan. It's not pretty. But we have to get up and running within a day so it's the plan we've got. I have a month and 5 days from now to finish Android Insurrection so you know we're going to be rendering right away.
Joe, however, will have vastly better ideas for how we should use the space.

Shooting, then Scoring

2011-12-09T17:36:00.000-05:00

The outside of our door.

I need some decent percussion sounds -- orchestral big sounds for scoring with. So I'm thinking about True Strike. It's only $419.
I may also end up needing some decent orchestral strings. But the awesome thing about percussion is the way it stays out of the way of dialog.
In the meantime I still have my Roland JV1080 to get me through the day. I've got the orchestral expansion pack.
Do these posts belong here, because I'm talking about music for film? Nobody knows. I could put them in Pleasure for the Empire or Tyrannosaurus Mouse.
Have I mentioned lately how awesome the Creative Commons site for sound effects Freesound.org is? Because it's awesome.
Videoguys has DIY recommendations for a hex-core PC for AfterEffects etc.

Our New Home

2011-12-08T13:35:00.000-05:00

Across the street is the most amazing Fascist piece of architecture in NYC -- this AT&T building.

This is the door to our building. My skills as a photographer plummeted upon reaching TriBeCa. Maybe I'm just more committed to my art. Yeah, that's it. I'm making art now.

The building is concrete-chic. It makes us very cool.

When you first walk in -- the top foyer -- movie posters everywhere.

Go down the first set of stairs.

Then you come to this door.

And go down the second set of stairs.

Our office has two doors.

There's really only one right corner in the office. And there's a window there.

There are two brick pillars which are slightly inside the room.

Here you can see how the pillars terminate into concrete blocks.

Here's a closer picture. I guess those are granite blocks. We'll have to make our desks go around those.

The big question is why do I have this measuring tape clearly labeled with another theater companies name?

Don't Work Too Hard

2011-12-07T16:36:00.000-05:00

Peggy Archer complains about 14-hour-days and 6-day weeks.
I complain about them for different reasons.
If G&E is working a 14-hour day then the director and producers are working 18 hours. If G&E is doing 6-day weeks then the director and producers are doing 8-day weeks (you do the math).
Now, the exhaustion that happens is mostly felt to be physical -- dragging cable up and down hills and that sort of thing. But physical exhaustion is bad, mental exhaustion is dangerous. With G&E that means you can have accidents -- mis-patching feeder cable can actually kill you. With everyone else (especially in California) it means people are driving while tired -- and that can kill a lot of people.
But the strange thing (to me) is that there is simply zero advantage to the director and producers to working that hard.

After about 8 hours you just stop thinking. For a lot of departments it doesn't really matter "bring sandbag over there, hold microphone over head, press big red button on camera". But for the director and producers not thinking clearly means bad decisions.*
So all that shooting you're doing after hour 10? It's junk. You could have done it four hours ago and then the stuff that you're going to be shooting later in the week will be that much better to.
I can't tell you how many shoots I've been on in New York where they go to do an 18-day shoot and they start losing locations so that by the end of the shoot the entire crew is literally standing around waiting for the director, the 1st AD, and the producers to go scout locations for us to pick up the rest of the shots. Scouting. While the entire crew waits in some park or something. Maybe I shouldn't use the word "literally" there because as a sound mixer I would surely be sitting down by that point. But you know what I mean.

So don't work long days. Long days will actually cost you time. I realize that every once in a while there's going to be a day where (say) the camera breaks at 10am and you have to wait for 4 hours to get a new one.

But as a rule, don't work long hours every single day. And take breaks. So say I. So say we all.

*Yes, we're all aware that many directors and producers are going to make stupid decisions long before getting to set when they're well-rested, but it gets worse when they're tired.

The Takeover

2011-12-05T20:44:00.000-05:00

Juanita Arias, Jeff Wills, Joe Chapman, Tom Rowen, and Virginia Logan in Android Insurrection.

Via Stu there's this Russian-language short

I suppose I don't really understand the purpose of a trailer for a short, but the work by Big Lazy Robot looks nice.
The Underwater Realm is a Kickstarter project. They're shooting some dry-for-wet and a bunch actually underwater.
Don't tell Joe but I'm totally planning a takeover of his new feature film. The trick is getting onboard without anybody noticing that I'm directing it. Maybe I just won't tell anyone.

Scheduling

2011-12-03T19:54:00.000-05:00

So, in the coming year, it's going to be all about increasing revenue. We must increase revenue. It doesn't even matter if we increase debt at the same time, we must increase revenue.
I think that our costs are dragged about as far down as we can possibly make them. We shoot on a GH1 and I do all the post-production sound (and music) myself nowadays.
We need to shoot three scripts this year. Gee whiz I wish we had a disaster picture which was magically shootable. ;-)
I don't know if moving to another studio is going to end up costing me more or less than what I'm paying right now. I'm not sure where we're going to move to. There's this one space we've found which would be awesome but it may already be taken.

Juanita Arias, Virginia Logan, Tom Rowen, and Joe Chapman in Android Insurrection.

A quote about John Rodgers at John August:

John Rogers (@jonrog1) at Leverage is a productivity nerd, so he likes to use his writing staff to try out new processes. A lot of what we did there has stuck with me: working on a story for 48 minutes, then resting for 12. That one’s inviolable. You can’t fool around too much during a 48, you can’t discuss work on a 12. If caught, John would stop you — “Respect the 12!” — thus inculcating the idea of an earned rest period.

Productivity. 48 minutes on. 12 minutes off. Interesting.
This is one of the reasons I'm becoming a fan of the "cigarette break". That's the 12 minutes/hour you shouldn't be doing anything. I'm not suggesting you smoke, I'm suggesting you go stand outside for 12 minutes. Or maybe 9 minutes outside and 3 on Facebook. You get what I mean.

Lookit! More Real Numbers

2011-12-01T20:48:00.001-05:00

Over at John August there are some real numbers on the residuals for "Go".
I didn't really know which blog to put it on but I made a whole post on "synthestration" for film scores.

And Brian Schiavo says: "Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if our mutating heroine grows a giant bug arm and kills a hooker with it?"
This still is from a movie called, obviously, "The Drill". I can't figure out if the picture is complete, or if they're still in pre-pro or if they've gone to festivals or if it's a short or a feature. I wish they'd spent more time on the production dialog. But the mattes look pretty cool. (Via Joe Chapman.)

Now I want one

2011-11-30T06:59:00.000-05:00

Via Stu, the Canon 300

Canon EOS C300 = Awesome from Jonathan Yi on Vimeo.
No more jello-cam?
Gimme.
Gimme gimme gimme.

So This Is The Problem

2011-11-30T06:11:00.003-05:00

So the thing with making a disaster picture is: what is the plot. Let's take solar flares. The sun is jetting out 1.6AU flares that come and lay some cities to waste. The Internet, shockingly, is still up (because it was, after all, designed to withstand a nuclear attack).
But that's not a movie. Here's a movie: A guy (gal/robot/thoughtful rabbit) has a problem that's hard to solve (especially because the world is blowing up). He's gotta solve his problem, even during this catastrophe. But then things get worse. They meet someone and that person gives them some more problems but also a different world view. Then things get even worse.. And shockingly things suck so much that there's not plan at all to fix the first problem, let alone the second problem.
But then the guy/robot/girl at the beginning remembers something that the person they met on page 20 told them. So they figure a plan.
The plan goes swimmingly. Until it goes dreadfully badly. And then it's all lost and there's no way to any good to come out of this except for -- that person from page 20. Whatever they did or said or gave to our hero can be used right now.
And the whole world is saved.

So. How do we do this? What could be so important that our protagonist is put into action even though the world holocaust is going on right now? It better be compelling, that's for sure.

Today in the Machine (part many)

2011-11-28T14:53:00.000-05:00

We have a delivery date for Android Insurrection. Our sales rep has told us that our robots better look very good! ;-) I think they do. In any case, we're making delivery available by the 15th of January (that's an arbitrary date, and on a Sunday, but it's what I'm committing to.)
+++++
Today I visited a studio on East 19th Street as part of looking for a new home for Pandora Machine. It's listed here in this Craigslist ad. The ad, of course, will be gone if you're looking at this post after the beginning of 2012. ;-)
The space is very groovy and quiet. They have a little dining area and two "half" kitchens. Plus a small Pro-Tools-based recording studio, of course.
I'm not sure what we want to do about sound post-production. I could very well move all "sound" oriented things to my apartment (including the Whisperroom). That would include guitar amps and such. I just don't know. I'll have to ask my office-mates what they think.
++++
Sometimes I can get a color-key to just work, and sometimes (most of the time) I have to use the roto-brush to go crazy with rotoscoping frame-by-frame. It's very odd.

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Redneck Words of Wisdom has a nice list of things for your characters to say.
The top 10 Paradise Lost quotes.

Stu and Not Stu

2011-11-25T20:39:00.000-05:00

Stu Maschwitz is the dude who keeps the DSLR camera world honest when it comes to shooting movies. We even named a character after him in "Battle New York Day 2". He puts in a very well thought-out and researched post on using any of the various DSLR cameras in the "super 35" world.

A great, great deal of what we do here in the Pandora Machine is done because it's what Stu says to do. Essentially, I've built the world's smallest motion-picture production studio on the DVRebel's Guide.
We only do two things which go against Stu's teachings. Two. I think. It's just the two. Everything else is straight - up Stu.

The first thing we do is that we do not color - grade at the highest bit depth available. Why? Because we'll never ever finish a feature film that way. We simply don't have the processing time or machines available to do a 90-minute picture, and then because mistakes were invariably made, do it again, and then (oh, look) we made another freaking mistake so we have to render out the whole picture again.

We have enough trouble with Final Cut Pro failing to render using Beauty Box and Magic Bullet Looks. Usually those problems can be lessened by reducing the rendering bit depth down to 8 bits. Maybe with the extra RAM and the heavier-duty video card we have now we can move up to 10 bits. But we ain't gonna move color-correction duties out to AfterEffects, we just don't have the time.

The second thing we do is to not really get too frustrated either way with an APS-C sized sensor on our cameras. Which is ironic because in the DV Rebel's Guide Stu suggests that you not get one of those crazy 35mm adapters to slap on a "normal" video camera (this was before the DSLR's really started to be available for movie-making). And back in the day we did use a Letus 35mm adapter.

So it's a tad ironic now that we use the Panasonic GH-1 which has a smaller-than-APS-C sized sensor. It's not as small as one of the old video cameras (like the venerable HVX200) and it's actually a bit bigger than Super-16mm. But it ain't got the bokeh the bigger-sensor cameras have.
And it's true that I'm not that big on the limited depth-of-field. Citizen Kane is just alright with me. But for commercial purposes we haven't heard a peep from buyers or distributors about depth-of-field for years. Because this problem has been solved -- heck some of those Canon cameras have shallower depth-of-field than a regular old Panavision shooting Academy.
And that's interesting. If you want shallow, shoot shallow (and have a great time focusing there, champ. ;-) And if you want deep, you can go with deep. The buyers don't seem to care anymore.

The debonair Jeffrey Plunkett in Clonehunter. This is shot with an HVX200 with a Letus adapter and (probably) an 85mm Canon at f1.8.

Output and Intermediary Formats

2011-11-23T18:38:00.000-05:00

Did you know that AfterEffects will cycle mask colors? Why isn't this the default? Sheesh.

More conversation between me and Nathan Vegdahl regarding delivery formats.

Me: I worry about legacy issues. In 10 or 15 years, will a movie I make today still be in a readable format? I dunno!

Nathan: The more open the standard, the more likely it is to be readable in the future. h.264 and AAC in an mp4 container is good, because it has open-source implementations. Worst-case scenario: someone has to pull up old source code and use it to convert your movie to a new format.
OpenEXR is also open source, so same deal.
The formats you have to worry about are proprietary formats, because if the companies behind them stop supporting them, you're out of luck.

Me: The main trick for our lab is: will they be able to take the file we give them and make a DigiBeta tape out of it? Because we still need to deliver DigiBetas.

Nathan: [editor's note: TL;DR: use Handbrake and/or skip to*] Hmm... I don't know if ffmpeg can encode for digital beta. I'll look into it. I use currently use ffmpeg 0.8.5 on Linux for all of my final encoding. I do everything from the command-line, because it gives me more precise control over the encoding process, and I get to play with all kinds of weird settings. But for the most part I keep it simple.
If I want to encode to a nearly (but not quite) lossless H.264 file that is widely compatible with other software, I use this command-line:
ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -crf 1 output_file.mp4
Where "input_file" is the name of your input video file, and "output_file.mp4" is the name of the file you want to create. Ffmpeg auto-detects what container format you want from the output file extension. In this case, it knows that .mp4 means the mpeg4 container.

The "-vcodec libx264" tells it to encode the video as H.264. The "-vprofile baseline" tells it to only use the most widely supported H.264 features, for maximum compatibility. The "-crf 1" tells it to encode nearly lossless (0 would be lossless, but isn't supported in the baseline profile; higher numbers are more lossy).

Sometimes you also need to tell it what pixel format to use, especially if you're encoding from an image sequence (I'll get to image sequences in a moment). You can do that with the pix_fmt option:
ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -crf 1
-pix_fmt yuv420p output_file.mp4

For fully lossless encoding, we drop the profile specification and use crf 0 and 444 chroma:

ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx264 -crf 0 -pix_fmt yuv444p output_file.mp4

The resulting file, however, will not be widely supported, including by Apple's h.264 support.

You will also probably want to use AAC for your audio. Ffmpeg uses aac by default with the mp4 container, but we can specify it manually to be certain:

ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -crf 1 -acodec
libfaac output_file.mp4

And if we want to specify the bitrate of the audio (for example, 320kb/s):

ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -crf 1 -acodec
libfaac -b:a 320k output_file.mp4

If you have separate video and audio source files, you can specify them both, and ffmpeg well merge them:

ffmpeg -i input_video_file -i input_audio_file -vcodec libx264
-vprofile baseline -crf 1 output_file.mp4

When I render anything from a 3d application (for example, Blender) I always render to an image sequence. When I'm ready for final encoding of the animation, I render to png's, which are lossless, and then use
ffmpeg afterwards to manually encode them into a video file. To do this you need to tell ffmpeg where in the file names the frame number is. You do this with "%d" and some variants thereof.

If your files are named like this:
image_1.png
image_2.png
image_3.png
...
image_125.png

Then you specify the image sequence as "image_%d.png". The "%d" goes wherever the frame number is. Ffmpeg will then find all the files matching that pattern.

If your files are named like this:
image_0001.png
image_0002.png
image_0003.png
...
image_0125.png

Then you specify the image sequence as "image_%04d.png". The "04" (that's zero four) between the % and the d tells ffmpeg how many digits long the number is.

So, using this in an actual ffmpeg command-line:

ffmpeg -i image_%04d.png -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -crf 1
output_file.mp4

The problem with images sequences, though, is that they contain no information about frame-rate. So we need to tell ffmpeg what frame-rate they are supposed to be in. You must specify this _before_ the image sequence on the command-line. This, for example, would give the image sequence a frame-rate of 24fps:

ffmpeg -r 24 -i image_%04d.png -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -crf
1 output_file.mp4

You can also specify the frame rate with decimals and fractions:

ffmpeg -r 29.97 ...
ffmpeg -r 30/1.001

If you plan to use the file for video editing, make sure to set the GoP to 1, which means that every frame will be encoded on its own without reference to other frames in the video (such frames are called "intra frames" or "I-frames"). This makes the file size much larger, but it means that a video editor can pull frames out at random very easily, which is good for scrubbing etc. You do this by adding "-g 1" to the command-line:

ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -crf 1 -g 1 output_file.mp4

So there you go, that's a quick-and-dirty tutorial on how I do my video encoding. Although, internally I usually use Matroska (http://matroska.org) as my container format instead of mp4. But... then again, I use an open-source pipeline, where mastroska is well supported. I always use mp4 containers when sending material to other people.

If you don't want to use command-line ffmpeg, you can use Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr), which is a cross-platform GUI-ified version of ffmpeg. It exposes most of these options, though sometimes they can
be hard to find.

*Come to think of it, ffmpeg has an open-source ProResdecoder as well. So, for example, you could use ffmpeg to convert from pro-res to h.264 if you wanted to. I don't recall if it supports ProRes422 yet, though. But presumably it will in the future if it doesn't already.

Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?

2011-11-23T18:11:00.000-05:00

Apache Wave is an open-source Google Wave application. Briefly I thought Wave would be a good project management/project co-ordination application for us. But then they closed down Wave.
We're using DotProject right now. Of course, now that the Queen Herself hath spake to us regarding project management, I'm not entirely sure what to do with it.
Moo mini-cards are kind of sexy little business cards.
It's the day before Thanksgiving and we have to expedite a PAL copy of Battle: New York Day 2. That's OK, I'm hiding from traffic before making my way to my parents'.

Maduka Vs the Friendly Skies

2011-11-22T12:25:00.004-05:00

The all-too-sexy-for-you Mr. Maduka Steady plays a very dangerous man with a gun* in this clip from Pan Am.

*Which is just like the time we met in the jungles outside of Bogota -- remind me to tell you that story sometime.

Nathan Vegdahl's Demo Reel

2011-11-22T08:33:00.000-05:00

Groove to it. Nathan is helping us out on Dragon Girl. His animation and rigging is beautiful.
You want a full-res version? He's got that too.

Labor Laws and Social Media

2011-11-16T00:26:00.000-05:00

So here's a funny thing. As an employee in the US you do not have some sort of 1st Amendment right to free speech. You just don't.
Your employer can fire you for any stupid thing you say, Tweet, blog, etc.
I mean, unless it's especially protected speech. That is to say, speech which is protected by the National Labor Relations Act.
Posting a Facebook status where you say "My boss is an ass-monkey" can get you fired. But a post that says "My boss is an ass-monkey for not giving us better wages and working conditions" is protected.
"Candidly discussing wages, hours and working conditions" is something that's allowed under the NLRA. So get over it.

Plus, here's a fantasy ninja sword.

The Word From On High

2011-11-15T19:13:00.000-05:00

So, the word from the mountaintop, writ large upon some stone tablets is:

Make Disaster Films

Disaster kitty says "make disaster movies".

That's the word from on high. Disaster pictures.

Project Management

2011-11-15T15:28:00.000-05:00

Do you know what's really exciting? Project management.
Trello isn't working for me. Basecamp doesn't allow for dependencies.

This picture from Android Insurrection amuses me greatly. That's David Ian Lee and Jeff Wills.

I'm also putting together information about where we might move. Nobody will come to Jersey City. It doesn't matter if it's actually easier for them to get to than other places. But frankly, for Rebecca and Maduka, Williamsburg and Greenpoint actually are closer for them.
Wix has a free space in Union Square. A free open-space office?
Greenpoint Coworking is $350/month.
Work At The Yard has private offices for $400/month
Missionfifty is in Hoboken. So except for the fact that not one of my editors will ever come there, it seems cool (they also have about zero information on their own website so I was looking here.)
Submerse.me has space in midtown.
Projective Space is worth visiting. They're in Soho.
Imrey Culbert also rents space.

Reports from the West

2011-11-14T23:34:00.000-05:00

The word from the front lines is that AFM was better this year than last. Of course, last year made for a low bar. ;-)

Just because it's kind of cool, dig Ironbound Studios in Newark, NJ.

Gabi's Video

2011-11-13T18:50:00.000-05:00

Our own Gabriella Willenz directed this beautiful music video.

I'm really digging the amber and emerald color palate.

Earthkiller Machine

2011-11-11T16:08:00.001-05:00

I'm neither an Apple nor a Microsoft partisan. Nor do I advocate Intel over ATI. Heck, I don't get spittin' mad over Neve versus SSL. Wait, what blog am I writing?
Anyway, as I sit and wait on renders, I think more upon having a simply earth-killing computer machine.
Macs have traditionally offered us the advantage of interoperability of their files with labs and other studios. But I'm deeply afraid of Apple's ability to be total buttheads and trashing professional support.

The dual hex-core from Apple is $5649 while the dual hex-core from Dell is, oddly, $5420. The big difference between the Apple and the Dell is the video card. But the "Apple tax" isn't terribly high on the very expensive machines.
But I have no way to compare video cards to one another because video cards are a dark science of occult which burns the souls of all ye who dare approach.
The other strange thing is that the Dell actually comes with no real operating system. FreeDOS is what it has. I don't know what that's all about.
An Apple dual quad-core is $4149. So it's .73 the price of the hex-core and (theoretically) .66 the number of cores. Right? Who knows? My math is fuzzy.

These Apple machines are both spec'ed with the better video card that Apple has.

Dell's dual hex-core with 12GB of RAM.

The last two facts here are that Apple makes a (generally) stable machine. And the 24 months 0% financing is like... well it depends on what you think of interest. A couple hundred bucks? A thousand bucks?
Who knows?

Cats, Tracks, and Hacks

2011-11-10T16:27:00.000-05:00

VooCAT is a motion-tracking package which works with Blender. I haven't tried it. It's only a hundred Euros.
The "non-commercial" version is Voodoo Camera Tracker. But to use it with a modern version of Blender you need this import script (the instructions for installing are here).
My goal with the above paragraph was to bore you until you cried. Did it work?

Do you find that sometimes you want to paste onto a specific track in Final Cut Pro? And FCP doesn't want you to do it the way you do? Here's how to tell FCP what track to paste into.
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Allan Mackey reminded us (in the comments below) about Trello. So I'm working in Trello to schedule. I'll tell you how that goes.

My Three Pandora Machineries

2011-11-09T15:31:00.000-05:00

Firstly.
So we doubled the amount of RAM in our Mac. It was, for some reason, only 4GB and that kind of sucked. I bought two more 2GB sticks and put them in.
For a while the computer was reading 10GB of RAM but that there were ECC errors on one of the old sticks. Then the computer decided it only has 8GB of RAM with no errors. Which is what I thought it would do. Still. Weird. But it renders a LOT faster now.
Firstwise Part II.
Then I quadrupled the amount of vRAM by installing a new video card.
That project has gone more weirdly. I do not, nor can I, understand video cards, what they do, and how they work. In the fantasy world of computers that my little mind lives in: one video card for each of two monitors should be better and faster. Right? That's how it works. Right?
Anyway, of the three video outputs on the new video card, only one is DVI. The other two are the tiny proprietary connector which costs another $100 I don't want to spend.
I have the old ATI Radeon HD 2600 the computer came with in slot three
I have the new fancier ATI Radeon HD 5700 in slot one
Right away everything seemed to work. But Final Cut Pro will not absolutely will not no way no how use the right-hand monitor (from the 2600) as a "Digital Cinema Display". FCP will gladly use both monitors otherwise though.
So I've set up a custom set of windows where the "Canvas" window is in the right-hand monitor. Which is essentially how we used to work with the "Digital Cinema Display" anyway.
And yeah, the "Digital Cinema Display" will work on the primary (center) monitor -- but when you do that you have no tools or anything because the display takes up the whole screen. This is, apparently, a known issue. But maybe I don't care about it because this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to work.

Editing in Final Cut Pro. That's Virginia Logan on the left/center and Jeff Wills on the right.

Groove to the sickly orange glow of the incandescent lights in my studio.

Thing number two.
I tried Manymoon for project management. It doesn't have task dependencies. I wanted to set up project management so that we could schedule, say, the mixing of an act to be dependent on it being edited first. But Manymoon doesn't work that way. So I'll be doing something... else.

Lastwise.
I'm considering formatting the camera drive for Dragon Girl using ExFAT. The advantage to exFAT is that both (modern) PC's and (modern) Macs can read and write to it using large file sizes. I'll tell you (you'll probably hear me screaming) how that goes.

Today in the Machine

2011-11-09T11:06:00.000-05:00

Today is "plot all the post-production out on a calendar" day for Android Insurrection. Which is kind of a pain because so much of the picture edit is dependent on visual effects. Which means we have to do one of two things:

Cut the picture and put a text-slug in that says "insert effect of [robots shooting] here" and hope that the timing is right or
Pre-build the visual effects so that the editor can cut them into the edit.

We end up doing both of those things and pre-building some effects which have to be changed and inserting effects the picture editor wanted and finding they change the timing of a whole sequence.
And all of that means we keep locking and unlocking the picture. Which is a hassle because it means we can't get started on the audio mix.

A Steve Burg painting. There's a link to his site in the sidebar, right?

One answer to all of this is to deliberately do some sloppy animation. Well, maybe not "deliberately" as much as "incompetently". Essentially that work in the big-budget world is called creating an "animatic". But we're doing animatics only because the least-capable animator (me) is doing the work. In any case, we do some crap-tastic animation and at least we can see how things time out. Then hopefully we can get Maduka in there to make the animations better.
I have a month and a week to finish this picture (by my own self-imposed deadline).
Also, today is the last day of the AFM. Which means that tomorrow I'm sending an email to our sales rep and saying "What kind of movie should we make?"

Rendery Sunday

2011-11-06T17:23:00.000-05:00

Automatic Duck. It's free now. We'll be using it... soon.
Looking at spaces, there's this place in Gowanus. I can't figure out anything about them. I guess I'll have to call.
The Brooklyn Artist's Gym and Room 58 all look very cool.
If we wanted to rock-out to really sexy post-production offices then Bitmap NYC would be the place to check out.

We need to vastly increase revenue. And we're in the independent film business. I can just say those two things over and over again and get the same response. So we're waiting for the response from the AFM. Not only about what sales we'll make, but what pictures we ought to make.
I've we're going to make more movies, and I believe we'll have to because that is the key to more revenue, we absolutely must get faster computers. Yup. That's a decision I just made in the last five minutes.
But as for money?
Meh. I'll go into detail over on the Pleasure for the Empire blag.
Dual-boot is not really a problem anymore. You can even build a PC that'll boot Mac OS. But I need a world-destroyer. I need 12 cores because I'd use them. Heck, I'd be getting so much work done I wouldn't be writing this blog post because my renders would be finished.
My one quibble about buying a world-destroying dual hex - core Mac over the same kind of PC is that the Macs for whatever reason top out at 1GB of vRAM on the video cards. I don't know that will make a difference to me. I don't. But it might. Even at only 32 seconds/frame.

Louyi Tang

2011-11-06T10:48:00.000-05:00

Louyi Tang is a filmmaker I met a while back and she's making this pretty amazing picture called "Martin, Our Teacher" in China. Dig the Kickstarter page.

Headless Arizona

2011-11-05T17:14:00.000-04:00

Project London releasing their beautiful models into Creative Commons is a huge thing for indy sci-fi filmmakers.
It's big. You can make movies with their CG models -- change the colors, even make structural changes.
We needed a secondary robot for Android Insurrection and Ian suggested using his Arizona model.
The robot we need is about human-sized. And the Arizona is over 20 feet tall. So I took off its head to make it scalable as a smaller robot.

More free stuff:
Gimei has free fire and explosion footage.
The first wave of Project London Blender 3D models.
The second wave of Project London Blender 3D CC models.

Nathan Vegdahl on Delivery and Intermediate Formats

2011-11-04T17:51:00.004-04:00

You know, if you make features and (bless your little heart) are actually able to sell them, you're going to run into these issues at some point. How the heck do you deliver your movie?

Here's Nathan Vegdahl's notes to me:

"Just read your blog entry here:
http://blog.pandoramachine.com/2011/10/openexr.html

"OpenEXR is great as an intermediate format but it's not really a delivery format. OpenEXR is intended for cases where you are still going to do further image processing on the content (e.g. compositing, color grading, etc.). But as a final delivery format it is quite excessive.

"A closer equivalent to ProRes would be h.264. In fact, if we look at the complete standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVCit supports everything ProRes does and more. If you use only
intra-frame encoding then h.264 is a fine choice even for video editing, and you can do not only 4:2:0 and 4:2:2, but even 4:4:4 (i.e. full color information). In fact, h.264 can even be completely lossless(!).

"Unfortunately, most software only supports subsets of the larger standard, and so advanced features like lossless compression and 4:4:4 chroma are not widely supported (e.g. Apple's h.264 support does not handle lossless compression or 4:4:4 chroma). But even with just the baseline profile (which is supported freakin' everywhere), it can still make a decent delivery format. You just have to know what you're doing with the encoding parameters.

"Anyway, food for thought. If you'd like to know more about my encoding workflow, I would be happy to go more in-depth. I use ffmpeg to do all of my final delivery encoding, because it gives me precise control over the encoding process."

Drew: Boy, I wish h264 supported alpha channels.

Nathan:
"Technically it can, through use of an "auxiliary color channel". But decoders are allowed to ignore it in all of the profiles, so for all intents and purposes it is indeed unsupported.

"But if you really needed to, you could always encode a second video in 4:0:0 (a.k.a. grey-scale, which is also supported by h.264) that represents the alpha channel. Then in any decent compositing app you could re-merge the two streams. However, that's precisely the kind of situation where you would want to use OpenEXR anyway.

"IMO, neither ProRes nor h.264 should be used as intermediary formats for compositing. So I don't think it's a biggie that they don't support alpha channels, since that's not the stage of production they should be used for anyway. ProRes is an NLE codec, h.264 is a delivery format."

Projection Londontown

2011-11-03T23:03:00.000-04:00

Project London has a new trailer.

And also, new Creative Commons models!

And Then This

2011-11-03T11:53:00.000-04:00

The American Film Market starts today.
Now, I blew it. I made a big mistake. I should have had something of Dragon Girl ready for the AFM. Bah. I really should be where we are now about two months ago. But we were late with the delivery of Earthkiller and that pushed everything back. Nerds.
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that my cash flow is going to somehow suck more because we don't have a new picture at AFM. Because we're not going to get sales of that new picture 'till Cannes anyway. And hopefully we'll get AFM sales of our titles Battle: New York Day 2 and Earthkiller.
But it's personally irking to me because I'd committed to myself to have a new picture for each market.
That being said, in the long-term (or longer-ish-term), we'll have Dragon Girl and Android Insurrection complete and out-the-door by Cannes 2012. Actually, Android Insurrection will be complete on December 15th. So maybe our cash flow won't be terribly impacted. But as it's our goal to do three pictures a year it ain't sayin' I'm doing what I want to be doing.
+++++
And, of course, while this is all happening, the Board of Directors at Theatresouce has given up and is closing the doors of the theater. Which means we have to move our operations.
What sort of options are out there? A whole bunch. Moving into another theater amuses me. But that might be like after breaking up trying to find someone who's just like your ex. Another option is real production offices like at Eastern Effects.
The only "noisy" part of our operation is sound mixing. We could move the booth and my mixing system to my apartment and just get a couple desks at one of the gazillion of funky arty office rental places.

There are merits to all of these ideas. The one thing we know for certain is that nobody but nobody will come and edit in New Jersey. Even if Gowanus is further away and takes longer to get to, they'd rather stay "in New York".
+++++
Lastly, we're re-delivering Earthkiller. I think this is the third time we're delivering it. There's this one shot which drove me nuts at the screening. The framing was terrible. Also, a giant dinobot is chasing after people -- where are the noises of its feet? Well, I at least figured out why I made that mistake -- there were no CG effects in the version of the movie I was looking at while mixing. Oops.
+++++
Also, I need a Cedar DNS 1000. Or I have to be much less lazy about mixing and editing dialog. I'll let you guess which is more likely. I need a Cedar DNS 1000.

With Extra Grooviness

2011-11-03T10:27:00.000-04:00

Brian Schiavo's Lifeform is featured in Fangoria. Dig it. Pictures. Everything.

That's Christine Russo with the lovely Virginia Logan and makeup artist Ciara Rose Griffin.

Fangoria, dude!

Where To Move To

2011-11-02T23:02:00.000-04:00

Shockingly, band rehearsal studios are cheap and (allegedly) quiet. I'm listing those places over there on the Tyrannosaurus Mouse blog.

http://easterneffects.com/main/officerentals.html
I'm just listing places we can look. A hundred square feet would be fine for us. I would like to see daylight just poking its head in somewhere. It would be nice if it were quiet enough to mix in.
New York City has scads of front-office small spaces and desks. Those tend to be more expensive than what we really need. We're strictly back office. Which is why a small and unusable office in a theater is kind of perfect for us.
It's likely there's going to be a couple months that Pandora Machine will be in my apartment in Jersey City. The editors will hate hate hate that. Unless I provide premium treats for them.
Another option is that we leave all of the sound gear and sound mixing in Jersey City and only do picture editing at an outside office. This idea has merit and is worth considering.

A New Place to Be

2011-11-02T11:29:00.002-04:00

The studio is a mess since we had to clear out of deep storage.

What with the Board of Directors of Theatresource deciding to close the place by the end of December, we need to find a new place for our studio.

Yeah, as a stop-gap I could move the studio to Jersey City. That sure would be the cheap option. But would anyone actually take the PATH to Jersey City in order to edit? Maybe once. Twice.

So I'm looking for either a theater or a post-production house to set up in.

Right now we're paying $500/month for a windowless back office without HVAC (it's November and we still have a 22" fan blowing air into the studio because it's so hot in there.)

We actually don't quite need the amount of room we have. We're in a (I think) 12' by 13' room. Later today I should double-check. (Update: it's 11' by 12' 6" -- and yeah, those are inside to inside measurements and the world of real estate measures outside to outside but it's not terribly practicable for me to measure that way. Anyway, it's about 120 square feet).

It would be nice if the place were quiet -- at least quiet during some schedulable part of the day in order to mix. Other than that we're all very used to working with headphones.

I think I'd prefer a theater because it's more fun. Of course Theatresource is/was special, so it was more fun.

Ram Me

2011-11-02T11:15:00.000-04:00

It is beyond my meagre ability to understand why on earth the RAM in your video card should make any difference to your renders. But it does. Big time. I've been getting the "The effect 'Looks' failed to render..." and so I've had to unplug one of the monitors and render in 8-bit.
It's also beyond my understanding how my dual-quad-core Mac has a paltry 256MB of vram in it. Or... wait a minute... why does this computer only have 4GB of regular RAM? Crap. That means something happened. There should be at least 8. I thought I bought 12...
Poopity.
I bet those problems are related.
Here's an article on upgrading the video card on a Mac.

My dual-quad-core Mac is serial number NQ83601AXYK
It has an ATI Radeon HD 2600 with only 256(!) MB of VRAM.
CoconutID says my Mac was built in 2008. But the model identifier says it's a Mac Pro 3,1 which this site claims will not work with the ATI Radeon HD 5870
So the ATI Radeon HD 5770 is it.

The Apple versions of that card are, of course, upwards of twice as expensive as the PC versions. But we can't render out movies in 10-bit with Magic Bullet Looks without a better card. So that's $250 right there.
The other major issue with this dang computer is that I've always had trouble with the RAM. System Scanner tells you what sort of RAM you need.
In my case it's DDR2 PC2-6400 • CL=5 • Fully Buffered • ECC • DDR2-800 • 1.8V • 512Meg x 72
That's another $250 for 8GB of RAM.

Today in the Machine

2011-11-02T10:31:00.000-04:00

Dig some still's from Brian Schiavo's Lifeform. Our man David Frey is DP on this feature. I'm digging the contacts.
Our man Will French here at the theater pointed out that you can't actually make a dual-socket computer with the Intel 970/980/990 computers. You have to use Xeon. Which explains the Mac's being built with Xeon processors, don't it?
Today's goal was to have another act of Android Insurrection ready for export so that we (I) could start mixing it. I don't know that I'm going to make my goal. I'll try though. Still have some visual effects to complete...
Also, looking for a new space to be in after the 1st of the year...

Chance Shirley Interview

2011-10-30T19:44:00.000-04:00

Chance has a big ol' interview.

Our Immediate Goals

2011-10-30T14:19:00.001-04:00

These are our immediate goals.

Finish and deliver Android Insurrection by December 15th.

That means we need to have all picture locked by November 15th. It means we need to have some picture locked before that! Then mix, color-correction, titles, etc.

Shoot, finish, and deliver Dragon Girl by May 1st.

That's going to be tight, especially if we have so much in the way of visual effects. But we gotta do what we gotta do. So that's that.

Render Bender

2011-10-29T21:22:00.000-04:00

Dual quad-core. Renders are taking more than five minutes per frame to render in Blender3D.
Closeups are hard.
Of course, after we render the 3D model we then render the composite in After Effects. Then we apply color-correction in Final Cut Pro. And then we render out the whole movie with DM&E mixes. ~~Then we dance on the graves of our enemies.~~ But it's the 3D that takes the most time per frame typically.
++++
Tomorrow we're having a screening of Earthkiller at noon at the Gibson in Williamsburg? Are you coming? Yes, of course, I thought so. And with the absurd pre-Halloween snow, this could very well be the second time my parents get snowed out of a screening.
++++
And, of course, I totally blew the nodes in the render and because I stupidly didn't check the frames as I was exporting the entire render is bad and I have to start again. Yay! Me!
++++

Via a comment by psa (below), Lightworks is free.
Whoa. Between that and Automatic Duck...

Pitches with Tom

2011-10-28T23:16:00.000-04:00

Here are the pitches Tom Rowen and I came up with. Don't make me show you a picture of Tom's butt to prove it!

36 Hours
Calvin Jones, an ex-marine and bodyguard must team up with a Russian coked-up stripper in order to find his ex-wife's daughter.

Tamara Medved, beautiful bleached blonde junkie, is the only witness who knows where the Russian mobsters have the girl. But Calvin only has 36 hours to get her straight and to get the bad guys before they kill the kid.

An ex-drug-dealing bartender is forced to do one last score to pay of his bar's debt to a loan shark.

Blood on the Streets

A newly-released ex-con is forced to rob an armored car to pay off his coke-addicted brother's gambling debt.

Keyton Daynes or "Y.Y." spent 15 years in the joint practicing Kung Fu and jujitsu. But when he gets out he gets dragged back into the life by two scumbag coke dealers to rob an armored car.

What he doesn't know is the armored car is carrying Chinese Triad mob money.

Now he has the Chinese mob, the FBI, and the drug dealers after him. And if he doesn't get his brother and his grandmother on a plane out of the country there's gonna be blood on the streets.

Bullets in El Barrio

Two brothers growing up in Spanish Harlem. One, Montserrat Mendez, becomes a DEA agent. The other, Tomas Mendez, pushes dope on the streets they grew up on.

Now Montserrat put on a task force to take down his brother's crew. At the same time, both brothers are in love with the same girl -- Juanita Arias.

All hell breaks out when the Russian mob decides to make a move to take control of Spanish Harlem.

Now both brothers have to fight the Russian mob -- and one another -- for love and their lives.

The Polo Grounds

Mac returns from the Iraq War with his best friend Banks. But they have no jobs and no future.

Pushed into a corner, Mac starts dealing drugs and then starts to murder his way to the top and rules with an iron fist over the Projects.

His beautiful girlfriend, Layla, helps him murder the local drug kingpin. And then convinces Mac to kill Banks.

Mac thinks he's invincible. No bullets can stop him. No knife can cut him. He runs a reign of terror over the Projects.

But eventually the community rises up. Layla commits suicide and Mac is machine-gunned by the son of one of the men he killed.

IMDB

2011-10-28T18:01:00.000-04:00

Somehow we're number 150 on IMDB. At least according to our distributor. Does anybody have IMDB pro? I love to know our ranking.

That's right, as of today if you type "batt" into the imdb search engine we're the first thing to come up. Even higher that Battle: LA and Battlestar Galactica.

Our reviews on imdb are about what you expect. Reviews on IMDB are about a half-step above the average YouTube comment. We in the genre movie world are fairly used to that.

Here's a review meme I've seen a lot of:

Give me a good laptop computer, an HD camera and a few students from the local primary school, and I can make a better movie than this.

Really? The thing standing between you and making a movie is that you don't have a $600 video camera? Someone should take up a collection for you? ;-)

OpenEXR

2011-10-28T09:15:00.000-04:00

Prologue
Richard Stallman makes a distinction between "free software" and "open source" that I don't really understand.
Act I
By and large I'm a proponent of open source and we release movie elements (like sound effects and digital models) into open source under a variety of Creative Commons licenses.
Act II
We do use a number of proprietary standards. One standard for delivering a motion picture is a 1920x1080 progressive scan image in a Quicktime format with ProRes422 compression. We use this format and compression in our shop a lot. Quicktime and ProRes422 are both owned by Apple. They make a reader for a PC but there's no way I know of for a PC to encode a ProRes422 with a Quicktime wrapper.
Why is this important? Because almost any lab we deliver a drive to can handle a quicktime movie encoded as ProRes422. It's a perfectly reasonable output codec. "Broadcast quality" -- whatever that means. And making the deliverable format a Quicktime movie means you can imbed a whole bunch of different audio tracks (stereo english, stereo M&E, 5.1 English, 5.1 M&E, stereo commentary...)
Every lab has Final Cut Pro 7 and can read these formats just fine.
Act III
So Apple is doing away with FCP 7 and gone right to FCP 10. Obviously a lot of houses are going over to other kinds of editing systems which aren't as favorable to ProRes422 as we've been up until now. What if your go to a lab and they're all like "We just have FCP X and a couple Digi-Beta decks. Oh, but we have an Avid and a Premiere system we do our serious work on, but those are both PC's."
Oof. Aaf. I don't know. Now this is getting harder. When Apple's FCP was the obvious go-to professional program, the codec that worked so well with it was perfectly fine to deliver in.

Tom Rowen, Joe Chapman, and Juanita Arias in Android Insurrection. Rebecca Kush calls this picture "Lord of the Quarry Dance".

So what do we do now? Will we be delivering picture as OpenEXR? Politically that's very appealing. And obviously if ILM is using it, there's some serious industry level backing for it.
Act IV
Are we going to abandon proprietary Quicktime format for OpenEXR image sequences? For many uses image sequences are pretty awesome. Not for everything though. Sometimes a Quicktime or an .avi is just nice, right? It's not a directory filled with a bunch of individual image files.
Act V
So I'm just wondering what we're going to end up with. Will Apple relinquish the high end of video delivery to Avids and Premiere systems? Will they work with OpenEXR? Blender does. AfterEffects sorta does.
Final Cut Pro certainly doesn't. It likes Quicktime movies* and really prefers one of a handful of codecs (including ProRes422). Premiere, on the other hand, will import image sequences directly but unfortunately does not support OpenEXR as far as I can tell.
Postscript
Yeah, I got no idea. We'll use FCP7 for the remainder of the year and probably through 2012. And we'll deliver in ProRes422. Other than that? I got no idea.

*It is possible, and not too big a pain the the butt, to import still image sequences inside Quicktime wrappers.

Pitch Waiver

2011-10-27T17:13:00.000-04:00

Below you'll see that the Asylum is accepting pitches. These are the legal terms of the agreement you make in order to give them a pitch.

This seems like a pretty good and well-written agreement.

WAIVER AND TERMS OF AGREEMENT - By submitting ("Pitch") your idea(s), stor(ies), concept(s), plot(s), treatment(s), suggestion(s), character(s), and the like, in either written or oral form (collectively, the "Material"), you are agreeing to the following terms:

1. The Material that I will Pitch is mine, I have exclusive rights to the material, and the material is original to me.
2. I understand and agree that the burden of securing copyright or WGA registration for my screenplay or idea lies entirely with me.
3. I agree to hold The Global Asylum, Inc., (the "Company") all executives, producers, managers, agents, production companies, their subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, representatives, employees, and volunteers, harmless from and defend them against all claims, demands, losses, costs, damages, judgments, liabilities, and expenses (including attorney's fees) arising out of or in connection with any and all claims of third parties, whether or not groundless, based on any screenplays, plots, characters, stories, concepts or ideas submitted during the Pitch or on any screenplay, film, or material developed out of those idea(s), stor(ies), concept(s), plot(s), treatment(s), suggestion(s), character(s), and the like.
4. I acknowledge that because of the Company’s position in the entertainment industry, that the Company receives numerous submissions of ideas, treatments, stories, suggestions and the like, and that many such submissions received by the Company may be similar to or identical to those developed by the Company’s employees or otherwise available to the Company.
5. I understand that I will not be entitled to any compensation because of the use by the Company of any such similar or identical material. I further understand that the Company would refuse to accept or otherwise evaluate my Material in the absence of my acceptance of each and all of the provisions of this Agreement. I shall retain all rights to submit this or similar Material to persons other than the Company. I acknowledge that no fiduciary or confidential relationship now exists between the Company and myself, and I further acknowledge that no such relationships are established between the Company and myself by reason of this agreement.
6. I agree to defend, indemnify and hold the Company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, and successors, as well as their officers, contractors, and employees harmless, with counsel of the Company’s choice, from and against any and all claims, expenses, losses, or liabilities (including, without limitation, reasonable attorneys' fees and punitive damages) that may be asserted against the Company or incurred by the Company at any time in connection with the Material, or any use thereof, including without limitation those arising from any breach or alleged breach of the warranties and promises given by me herein.
7. I agree that if, as a result of my Pitch, the Company is interested in engaging me to develop the Material into a screenplay and/or motion picture, I will negotiate with the Company in good faith for the terms, conditions and amount of the payment for such future services.
8. If the Material is submitted by more than one person, the word "I" or "Writer" shall be deemed changed to the plural, and this agreement will be binding jointly and severally upon all the persons so submitting the Material.

Accepting Pitches

2011-10-27T15:28:00.000-04:00

Hey check it out, The Asylum is accepting pitches for movies.
It is way not every day that a studio -- even a small studio -- accepts pitches. Go ahead, send 'em one.

They're looking for African-American and Latino - themed action pictures, comedies, and dramas (and martial - arts pictures.)

Last night Maduka and I came up with this:

Wrong Side of Justice

A cop gets framed for murder and is thrown off the force. His only way to exonerate himself and to put the bad guy down is to work with the same criminals he arrested during his career.

Billy Sin was a tough, no-nonsense cop. But when he busted the wrong guy, a CIA agent importing crack cocaine, he gets set up for a murder he didn't commit.

Billy gets thrown off the police force. While awaiting trial he has to prove his innocence. And the only people he can trust are the drug dealers, pimps, hustlers, and hookers he busted as a cop.

Focus on Animation

2011-10-26T16:49:00.000-04:00

Have I ever complained about pulling focus with still camera lenses? Why yes, yes I have.
For me, if one is going to use still-camera lenses, one should just grab the focus wheel and roll it back and forth. Pulling focus with a follow-focus jerry-rig is just not practical because the throw on still-camera lenses is too great. On cinema lenses the throw is less and it's much easier to use a follow-focus rig.
+++++
Hey -- what takes four minutes and twenty-two seconds?

Why a frame of this animation, that's what!

The Cigarette Break

2011-10-25T16:07:00.000-04:00

You know, if you can do a solid 40 minutes a day of actual concentrated work, you're probably ahead of the game compared to most people out there.
If you were to do three 40-minute sessions you'd be Productivity Royalty.
Really.
Pretend you're a writer. Or wait. OK. So you're a writer. If you really wrote for 40 minutes a day -- that's a good 20 pages a day. Right? But you know how freakin' hard that is. That's a feature-length screenplay every week. That's all-but-impossible. And everyone knows it. It's really really hard on your brain. Many writers give themselves fancy schedules and rituals in order to give their brains a break so they can do the work.
There are lots of ways to give your brain a break. Let me tell you, back in the olden days when I was doing audio for broadcast -- that was some very technical and involved work which I could delve my little brain into and it had nothing to do with the parts of my brain I use to make movies. Which is cool. And then when I was done doing a weeklong broadcast job, I was more than ready to work on movies.
Nowadays I flop between movie things and music things. That's kind of the best of both worlds actually.
But that's longer-term. Here I'm talking about what one does over the course of an hour:
I've become more and more a fan of the cigarette break.
I'm not a fan of cigarettes, or of smoking. But that break once and hour -- to walk around, do something (or nothing) -- now that's a good idea. Take a cigarette break but, you know, without actually smoking. Just a few minutes loitering outside your place of work. I think you'll find it works out for you.
When you're doing focussed work it seems to me your brain has to get a "relaxing time". Go chat around the equivalent of the water cooler. Even better, do all the things that smokers do for a break: walk outside, get a little sunshine, take a look around.
Back in the olden days if a smoker just sat at their desk while continuing to do the same work -- I think that didn't work out so great for their brains. But this thing where once an hour or two you get up and leave your office to go stand somewhere else? That's a good idea. I think. To me. Just do it, you know, without actually smoking.
Even the New York Times thinks you shouldn't just sit around. Not all day at least.
Now it doesn't seem that Facebooking and Twittering (and, for that matter, blogging) are bad for your productivity. But in addition to those things, you might think about just getting up and walking around for five minutes or maybe 10 minutes every hour.

Right now I'm rendering. So that's what I'm gonna do.

Goose Me

2011-10-24T20:55:00.000-04:00

Dolf Veenvliet's Goose as a test render.

Just experimenting with different 3D models. Should the gang ride in the Goose?

Creative Uncommons

2011-10-24T19:31:00.000-04:00

Ian Hubert and the Project London folks have released six Blender models under a Creative Commons license. This is, of course, exceptionally very cool.
Dolf Veenvliet created the "Goose". It's a rather nice looking ship. By that I mean good grief, it's a nice looking ship.

The HP Z800 is the Hewlett Packard dual hex-core machine.

Thinking about Thinking about Computing

2011-10-23T22:50:00.003-04:00

Mr. Kangas brings up some good points on my post on computing. Why get a world-dominating computer?
Is it necessary? Will it keep me from murdering my monitor in a fit of render-time pique?
He's right about editing certainly. We do not need an absolute top-of-the-line computer just to edit picture anymore.
Unfortunately I do three things which will, within five minutes, bring any computer you throw at me to its knees:

Sound mixing
3D rendering
Compositing

The gang in Android Insurrection.

Looking at these things backwardsly:

When doing a complicated composite with a lot of nesting of images and color-corrections and keying, it gets real irritating real fast when you can't see what you're doing. In fact, I accidentally rendered this particular shot at this size. How? I'd switched the quality setting in AfterEffects to "one quarter" just to have a prayer at retaining my sanity when doing a bit of rotoscoping.
I'm also tired of the render times involved in lighting 3D models (which is the step before compositing.) It makes re-lighting quite tedious to have to wait a couple minutes to see what, say, turning down the sun does.
Honestly sound mixing is the least critical thing. After all, I can pre-render or "freeze" tracks with a lot of effects on them and then easily go back and make changes and then re-freeze the tracks. But it is certainly nice to be able to play 24+ tracks with loads of effects and such without the computer hiccuping.

Here's a computer company recommended by Samplitude folks, Reyniers Audio.
I'm not entirely sure I care about having a computer that has an operating system specialized toward audio. With enough RAM and other horsepower I don't think that an image on the desktop is going to make that much difference really.
One thing my buddy Mitch suggests is to use one of those solid-state flash drives as your system drive. He says it speeds things up quite a bit. So yeah, I'm gonna look into that.
In any case, the big question is whether spending $5,000 or $6,000 on a system -- even if it's (and this is a liberal estimate) twice as fast as a dual-quad-core with 8GB of RAM -- will be worthwhile. Sure, I'd love to see multi-layer AfterEffects compositions play back in real time but I doubt that'll be coming down the pike for another 10 years or so.
Meh.

Computing

2011-10-21T19:40:00.000-04:00

Virginia Logan carries Sara-Doe Osborne back to the lander.

I need more computer. I've been saying this for about two years now I think. But it's really getting time.
Thing is, I don't want to spend the money.
For about five thousand bucks I can get a dual hex-core with about 12GB of RAM and a decent video card. Oddly, as I've said before, the high-end Macs are about the same price as the high-end PC's. They're certainly within a couple hundred dollars of one another.
Oh look. Apple has "zero percent" financing... sigh.

Dragon Tutorials

2011-10-21T19:12:00.004-04:00

For the upcoming Dragon Girl movie (1102) we're using the model from the open-source movie Sintel.
I wonder if this is the first "commercial" use of the Blender Foundation project? It's certainly the first feature that uses it.
In the interest of open-sourced-ness I feel like we should release various things, like our version of the model, into the wild. We won't be making the movie itself open source. Because we need to sell it in order to do mundane things like pay rent and, er, make more movies.
But, you know, we'll make some things open. Hey, I'm a huge supporter of Freesound.org and we upload our custom sound effects there for your dining and dancing pleasure. So why not release our Blender models?*
In any case, we're using this big ol' dragon. (~~UPDATE: I have no idea why I'm getting a 406 error when clicking on that link.~~ Update update: right-click and "save as". Then when you've downloaded the file rename it to ".zip" rather than ".txt". You should then be able to open it.) And Nathan Vegdahl is helping us! Nathan is one of the all-time greats in the Blender scene and he worked on Sintel as well as on Project London.
Here are some tutorials he made based on this modified version of the Adult Dragon (it is made to work with the pre-release version of Blender 2.60).
You may want to watch these tutorials on Vimeo just so the window is big enough.
The first tutorial is all about the dragon rig.

And here is a tutorial about linking animations:

And lastly there's this tutorial on re-using Blender animation:

Reusing Dragon Animation from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.
+++++
Hey, Blender programmers, I have one request. Can we get obvious names for the layers? Like a rollover window when you mouse over them or something? I know the layers have names (and they start with "0" because, well, because.) But you'll notice that Nathan has to point at each layer to describe which one he's talking about. Yes, I know there are scripts to name layers, I just want numbers -- so when someone says "turn off layer 6" we all know which layer that is! ;-)

*In my head I've toyed with the idea of making our screenplays open-source, which would be amusing. Of course, if we ever make a bit hit picture I'd hate if a big studio made a remake and didn't pay us. But if you're interested in shooting one of our screenplays... let's just say the idea amuses us. So hit me up and I'm sure we can work something out.

Why?

2011-10-20T16:58:00.000-04:00

Are you under the impression we weren't going to re-use Joe Chapman's awesome matte painting? This time it's with a background image from Flickr user Argenberg.

Also, don't think there won't be a shuttle flyby/flythrough this shot either. 'Cause there will be.

You Heard It Here

2011-10-20T12:05:00.000-04:00

Bill Cunningham has released his new indie comic, The Miracle Squad.
If you're doing stop-motion, Dragonframe is only $300.

I uploaded about an hour of rough-cut of Android Insurrection to our rep. I'm working on a schedule to be finished with the movie in December. That means we have to have it cut with all visual effects done by the middle of November.

Pulling your Chain

2011-10-18T16:59:00.001-04:00

Y'know, I see a lot of stuff on the Interwebs about the need for an HD monitor in order to make sure your image is in focus when shooting HD.
And I've been on a lot of shoots where everyone from the DP to the director believed that was true.
And.
It ain't true.
You can tell perfectly well if your image is in focus even if you're monitoring in SD. When your subject is in focus there's a pretty clear "ping" of being-in-focussed-ness. I've shot, er, (insert some number here) features in HD and if you ever watch them and say "hey, that shot is a bit out of focus" well you should realize that I know that and furthermore I knew that at the time (but for whatever reason we used the shot anyway.)
Certainly I've never seen a focus problem when looking at footage in HD that I didn't see when peering through the little SD monitor in the "viewfinder" of the camera. Hell, I can even focus without my glasses on (and without setting the diopter) although it is irritating as all get out.
And I'm one of the worst cameramen I know. So it's not me having some superhuman preternatural ability to pull my own focus. Of that we can be absolutely sure.
Are there good reasons to have HD tap on set? Sure. There are details you might have missed otherwise, etc. But don't be afraid of SD tap.
Standard Definition video tap is your friend.

Do you ever get confused by the different kinds of blurs in After Effects? Welcome to the club. Prolost is here to help. (Cheatsheet: use box blur.) UPDATE: that old ProLost is now a spam account so I've deleted the URL.

Can you tell I'm rendering and uploading today? You can? Oh, well then...

What I'm doing today

2011-10-18T14:42:00.000-04:00

David Frey is all out of gum. Virginia Logan is gonna shoot a robot.

I have to upload as much of Android Insurrection as we have. Which is actually a substantial amount although we don't have as many of the visual effects done as I'd like.
I wonder what sort of "gaaarrrrooouuuuughhht" sound Moony's gun makes. Motion tracking it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.

Project London

2011-10-18T14:17:00.000-04:00

The Project London trailer:

Trois Pommes Pandora

2011-10-17T22:39:00.000-04:00

Somehow I missed the review of StakeLand in the New York Times.

Bill Cunningham has released his new indie comic, The Miracle Squad.

And Steve Burg.

The Shuttle

2011-10-16T19:56:00.001-04:00

No motion blur.

This weekend we've been all about rendering dragons and shuttles.
The image without motion blur isn't moving. Yeah, we're just testing things before we put in the background plate.

With motion blur.

Cocoon

2011-10-14T12:31:00.002-04:00

Here's the cocoon from Brian Schiavo's Lifeforce.

Fun Facts

2011-10-12T22:03:00.000-04:00

.png files are lossless all the time. The "compression" you use on them is lossless compression.

I should make my way over to using Open EXR. Eventually I suppose we will.
Here's another render of the dragon

Eye See You

2011-10-12T10:48:00.000-04:00

Nathan Vegdahl made this dragon opening its eye for us.

Draggin My Heart Around

2011-10-11T16:06:00.000-04:00

Nathan Vegdahl is helping us out with animations on our Dragon Girl movie. The first step was to change up the rig on the dragon so that it worked with the latest version of Blender.
To which I say "tres cool"!

You Call This Work?

2011-10-10T22:51:00.000-04:00

Android with Whirleydoomer

Distributor actually asked if he could have this movie by next week. Oof. Man we do not have many of the composites done. Uh. I guess I'm going to have to get to work. ;-)

Ripping off the Rippers

2011-10-10T09:20:00.001-04:00

So there are all these sites with ripped versions of the Battle: New York Day 2 DVD on them. I have a Google Alert set up to send me everything with "Battle: New York" in it and I'm getting like 10 a day now.
Am I allowed to just think it's funny that rippers post stills from the movie

and then watermark the stills -- you know, so people don't rip them off?
Everyone gets the irony there, right? It's not just me then.
Also, are these stills arbitrary? Or are they really selects?
Another question I have is: who issues the takedown notices? I suspect that technically that's our distributor(s). I have no idea. Maybe they just want people to download the movie often so that the servers go down.