Revolutionary Robots Review

This review of our movie Robot Revolution by The Movie Guy on Amazon is a pretty good review. I mean, I think the review is thoughtful and reasoned and dude didn't even like the movie.

I'm taking this time to comment on a review to see what we can learn from it.

In this case it is best to read the DVD cover prior to watching the film so as to understand some of the background.

 Oof.  If that really is a consensus opinion then we did do too bad a job explaining the backstory. That's a rough line to toe because you can come off way too heavy-handed and "on the nose" if you over sell the backstory. But if you under-explain the backstory it'll irk a lot of people (interestingly, not all people).

There didn't seem to be a message or theme to the madness, possibly because the story was poorly developed.

 The whole idea is that the bad guys don't exist -- they're created by the government in order to keep people in line. Granted, that's explained very briefly at the end of the movie. So I don't know if that was a mistake on our part or if The Movie Guy just missed it.

The film wasn't half bad up onto the point they had 7 people in a room basically doing nothing for a far too long period of time. After this the film lost me as far as entertainment value and continued on a downward slide.

Dang. I felt that part worked in this movie. It's always a problem in low-budget pictures like this that you have a quiet part in the middle. But I thought we'd earned enough with these characters to have that 7 people in a room talking scene.

This is a somewhat low budget film, that used some decent effects, including a cleaner robot that didn't seem to be CG. The shooting was framed well, the sound was good, I never saw a microphone.

Somewhat low budget? I think we spent $8000 on the picture altogether. I'm glad he liked the sound and the framing. Ha! I painted out most of the boom mics but the dialog was almost entirely with wireless lapel mics. But saying the cleaner 'bot didn't look CG? That's quite a feather in my cap. It's a CG robot -- it's in the creative commons even -- made by Ian Hubert.

Overwrite

So. I've been working in Blender for a number of years now. And I just discovered something pretty basic.

See, we render frame sequences. This means that each frame is a new file -- typically a .png image. This is better than rendering out a movie in .mov or .avi format because if/when your computer crashes or otherwise stops the render it doesn't automatically destroy the whole render -- you can pick up the render at the last frame the computer was working on.
All this time, though, I was looking in Explorer or Finder for the last frame rendered, and then I would set the first frame to start rendering on that frame, and start up the render again. But it turns out, I don't have to do that!
If you don't check the "overwrite" box in the render panel the render will automatically skip the already rendered frames. The way I thought it worked was that it would render all those frames but put like a "_1" at the end. But no, instead it just does what you want it to do.

Does it make up for the fact that you can't render out shadows without making the thing the shadows are on visible in Cycles? No. No it does not. But it's something.

Under things I must do this weekend:

Render Robot Swarm B
Render Robot Swarm C

Shadows and you

Ugh. So it turns out you can't just do a shadow-pass on an otherwise invisible plane in Blender anymore using Cycles. This is apparently because Cycles only understands "light", not shadows.
If you enbiggen the image above you'll see that our little robot does cast a shadow. But that square thing is sits on does not belong there. So I'm gonna have to render out all this nonsense and then so a crazytime job of creating an alpha channel and blah-blah-blah. This is really annoying because that's a major bit of functionality which is gone from Blender.
The environmental lighting seems much better in Cycles. But I really wish there were an easier workaround with this dang shadow issue.

Z

Notes you really don't care about:

Act II in 1301 is ready for mix. OMF and reference .mov have been built.

In 1401:

• the merc ship ground and takeoff is rendering Blender rendering on the mac
• the 01 drone scope series is being Blender rendered on the PC

I seriously and fundamentally do not understand how to render an object with only z-transp in Blender Cycles. I'm going to need some emotional help with that.

Our neighbor Keith at decodermedia.com is leaving.

Seriously, why is rendering a shadow-only on an object so freaking difficult in Cycles?

Dark Side of the Moon

Making a Gas Giant is 57 steps. 57.
It's actually a very good tutorial.

I didn't follow all the steps exactly though. Firstwise, Adobe changed its scripting language somewhat since that tutorial. You need to put in a semicolon between all kinds of expression stuff and the time variables. ;*-1 and suchlike.
The other thing is that it's actually our moon -- just that in the intervening time it's managed to turn all the way around. So that's the far side of the moon. And now it has rings. And two satellite moons of its own.
In the future, the world is rough.

Motors on Boys Day

Camera-less rig -- motorized dolly and motorized pan and tilt head. Tony Travostino in the background.

My buddy Brian Dalthorp of PopStudios lent me his Revolve slider system (vastly more advanced than mine). The advanced e'en more portion is a used Bescor 101 remote pan/tilt head. Also, we can use a nice Manfrotto fluid head instead. Sometimes you want a motorized dolly and a manual head. Sometimes a motorized head and a motorized dolly, sometimes a motorized head and a manual dolly.
Could not get the slider system to work at all, we just got slipping on some of the gears, so we went back to skateboard wheels on a flat board.
Libby ran this system mostly. On a couple shots it took two operators. Man I wish we had like Bluetooth focus pulling as an option.
What else, what else? So many things. I write these blog posts as I'm practically passed out from a day of shooting so I have no idea what I'm saying 'till I read them (and don't edit them) in the morning.

And then.

I can't even remotely finish any shots these days. Do you know how many more elements belong here? Neither do I. There's a giant robot. Some evil drones. A force-field. And probably something else in the distant background. Do I have those things? No. No I do not.

Day 8

Amanda Sayle as Delta and Sarah Schoofs as Sagan

 Today's innovation was to have a real tripod head atop the skateboard dolly. It tood a bit of practice to work dolly and pan&tilt at the same time. Once you added pulling focus there was too much for Libby to do and someone had to pitch in. But it totally looks like a Fisher dolly, just not with a Worral head.We did two scenes in single shots which moved around very nicely.

Joe Chapman looking sexy with the slate.

It's all about having lights in the deep distance.

The set painter made some beautiful "rusty" walls.

Sarah Schoofs in a pensive moment.

The robot rests.

Things

Eric Ian Steele writes a gorgeous guide to writing a logline. Part I. And Part II.

I'm still working on this.

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A secret to boom operating is to:

"...[Y]ell out “Stand by for speed,” in [your] most professional voice, to let people know that [you are] not ready, and speed has not been called."

It's a secret. Don't tell anyone. Although personally I'm a fan of saying "Flying in!" and then proceeding safely and apace with whatever you were doing when someone calls for something on set. Just don't say "Wait". Drives everyone nuts.

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Andrew Kramer's 40-minute tutorial on making a blown-up city in Aftereffects (in 2D yet) is... amazing. Amazing I say.

What I like

Things I like better about Adobe Premiere than Apple's Final Cut Pro

• The ability to import frame sequences as footage. Good grief that's annoying in FCP
• The fact that if you make a mistake in your sequence settings it doesn't mess up the size of all the footage inside it, you can just fix the settings and all the footage doesn't need to be manually resized
• A single button to export a frame grab (this has irritated me about FCP for years)
• Not having to transcode every bit of footage before bringing into the project

An advantage FCP had was that the playback cursor would snap to objects just like objects snap to objects when, you know, snapping is on. But the deep dark secret is that Premiere works that when when you hold the shift key. Premiere actually has the advantage there as it means one doesn't need to keep flipping from snap-on to snap-off as much.

Like this picture, I have no idea what's going on here. That's Amanda Sayle; and Laura, Queen of Mars (and two hikers in the background). But it's a frame grab and that's fun.

The Lumetri Looks in Premiere? I find them disturbingly helpful. Like "I don't even use Magic Bullet anymore" useful. And when I figure out how the tracking works on mattes in color-correction, it'll be all over but the crying.
Now I did set the hot keys in Premiere to be much like the ones in FCP. So "a" is the selector tool instead of "v" for instance.

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The human eye. ISO of 800 (will auto-set to as low as 1 ISO during daylight). Resolution of about 75 megapixels. F-stop of 3.5. Focal length of 22mm.

A Day to Murder Chester Poon

Chester seemed like he came back to life though. That happens.

We shot the big fight scene today. Actually, I think three characters died today. We used cushions to break a fall!
First thing in the morning what did I do? Drop the camera. In the hallway of my apartment building. Shockingly, all it seemed to do was to pop a little clip inside the strap holder on the right side. Whew.
We shot three scenes but we took a while to do it. Tony insisted that we get three whole tubs of french fries (he was right to do so).
Huh. I coulda sworn I'd set the Tascam to record 6-track interleaved but I'm still getting multiple stereo tracks from it. Sigh. I'll look at it again next week.
Oh! And I broke the HDMI connector to the camera! Joyeaux! Whee! I have to order a new one.

Sarah Schoofs and Tony Travostino cower from the influence of the evil android.

We did some re-shoots and additional-shoots before lunch though. Queen of Mars had to do a Blade-Runner-y moving light gag.
Poor Bob Teague had to be dead all day. But he looked good doing it. And at least I had him be dead on the couch. ;-)

Just some notes for myself

Tomorrow we have the biggest gang on-set that we get on this movie. I think it's the biggest gang. Steve Niles, who wrote this picture, did a brilliant turn yet again where he keeps the ensemble down low, to a real small number of cast. In this case there are only six speaking roles. Many days only have two characters on set. But tomorrow is the big action scene at the end.
So I gotta pick up a minivan. Somebody remind me to make sure I bring my EZPass.

One shot. Two Ian Hubert models. 

You know what's really been working for me? Having a Kindle with the script and the call sheet(s) on it. I never make any notes in the actual set script so just having easy access to everything all at once in a compact form is really the way to go. Plus, you know, page turns are quiet and don't wreck sound takes.
I have in mind two reshoots. Three. Three reshoots. And one additional scene. Two. Two additional scenes.

1. There's a closeup of Warfield where we missed the focus.
2. An insert of the control panel which wasn't long or steady enough.
3. The part where Cameron and Sagan walk in needs another take for focus. 

• I want a pretty pan showing Sagan sitting in her place in the other hallway.
• I want to try go get a show of Sagan and Cameron coming in the actual front door. We may use the "elephant set" at Joe Chapman's. We'll see how that works for us. I'm worried about getting enough light on the green screen. 

Also, I'm going to spend a couple minutes actually setting up the Tascam 680 sound recorder. Because I really haven't done that on this movie and I feel kinda stupid about it. 

Oh, and we need mug shots and 3D readiment shots of the android just... to have.

What else? Lithium AA batteries are doing a bang-up job on both transmitters and receivers. The Lectrosonics transmitter has a reputation for eating batteries but it's been working pretty well. I do wish we had a Sanken COS 11 for that transmitter though. I'm getting a bit tired of the boxy sound of the PSC Millimics -- even if the PSC's are relatively immune to clothing rustle. 

Oh look, we're 5 days away from the Cannes Film Market.

Robot Messiah

Next up on the hit parade is 3rd Degree Silicone. This is to be a burned android look. Wish us luck.

Sarah Shoofs is the new prophet of the Robot Messiah. 

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I did two dumb sound things. Three. Three dumb sound things this weekend. But I don't think we're going to be punished for them.
The first thing is that I recorded the first two of three days at 44.1kHz. Well lucky for us it's the FUTURE and we have machines and software which can handle 44.1 and 48kHz on the same timeline. It doesn't seem to be bothering us.
Dumb thing number two is that I was recording three sets of stereo tracks for each take. Derp. Then I went and started recording mono tracks. Believe me, by next weekend I'll be down to one interleaved 6-channel broadcast wave file just like I'm supposed to. For now I'm just syncing the audio, then going and syncing more audio to the same take.
Lastwise we did exactly the thing you'd expect to do when you think to yourself "I'll shut off the transmitter and the record channel on the character we don't need to record." Then, of course, we got to the next scene and never even wired up that character. The irony is that character speaks all his lines directly into another, wired-up, character. So it's all good actually. Even though he wasn't wearing his transmitter, his receiver was turned off, and the channel he records to was deactivated.

§§§

Picture-wise we've been having some epic battles with autofocus. I have every reason to believe the haze has been tricking the focus and making it "pump". Which is spectacularly annoying. But we have figured out the better way to flop the focus into manual and to keep the pumping from happening. That just... took a while.

1401 Day Six

This is the movie we're making. Bob Teague. Amanda Sayle.

Day six puts us past the halfway point, doesn't it?
I actually already have about 7 minutes cut together. It really helps in post to be a bit fanatical about cutting in-camera.

Bob Teague at the chess board.

We've been using the Letus Helix the last few days. Yeah, you can get it to do what you want. It's still fiddly. And you can get it to do the dolly-move things you're looking for. It's not easy though. We did get some nice pushes with it.

Bob Teague being menaced by an android (Amanda Sayle).

We've had a number of failures with hazers. My nice Le Maitre hazer has decided to not work again. I bet it's the dang thermostat on the thing that's broke (again). Which is really obnoxious because it hasn't really worked since Prometheus Trap and we even sent it back to the factory for repairs.
The haze though, in general, does seem to mess with autofocus. But you know what my new favorite thing is with focus? Peaking on the monitor. I do so love how the monitor lights up with what's in focus. It makes pulling so so so much easier because it's dancing. If you've never seen it or used it you just gotta try it. Especially when I don't have my glasses and I'm looking at a monitor at the wrong distance or with a wrong diopter or what-have-you.