The importance of having engaging characters

I regard the two Star Wars trilogies like many other fans: great original films, disappointing prequels. Until this week I'd never thought much about why that is, beyond the obvious facts that Episode I's political story is tedious and the vast majority of its acting is wooden.

This time last year a comprehensive review of Episode I: The Phantom Menace appeared on YouTube courtesy of RedLetterMedia. It is delivered alongside crude comedy and regular swearing but it also (unexpectedly) offers sound film making advice.

Recent video experiments

A couple of new video clips of experiments I've been playing with recently:



'A Month of Rust' is a 30-day time-lapse shot in 1.5:1 scale macro; what you see in the frame is about 5mm across.



'Orbs' is my first attempt at combining CG animation and live action video.

Video file containers

Anyone who uses video on a computer, from editors to casual users, knows that sometimes different video formats can be incompatible with software. Luckily all the major video player applications that come with a computer (e.g. Windows Media Player, QuickTime Player) or are downloaded from the Internet (e.g. VLC, MPEG Streamclip and many others) can play almost any video we throw at them. But if you want to know more about formats and their peculiarities, read on.

New film: In Flight time-lapse

It's been a lengthy hiatus since my last post, and a while since I've edited and finished a film. Here is a brief compilation of time-lapse clips from a recent flight from Manchester to Shetland.



Music: "Interlude VII" by Ending Satellites (endingsatellites.com).

All footage is from stills shot on an iPhone 4S using the TimeLapse app. There is a free version which allows 50 shots to be taken at a time, which equates to about 2 seconds of video. Upgrade to the paid version to shoot unlimited images. The app works well, allowing you to choose image size and to lock the exposure and focus. The app recommends you switch on Airplane Mode to prevent any notifications or calls interrupting the shooting (and you'd have Airplane Mode on anyway during a flight); an interruption can stop a shot being taken or can rotate the image 90 degrees, but then shooting resumes thereafter. For one of the sequences I was shooting for about 20 minutes without a problem.

All shots were taken from behind windows. Sometimes I set the phone on the window ledge, or held it as solidly as I could against the glass for short periods. Later I found that my sat-nav suction mount could be used as a makeshift shelf on the window, and the phone would sit there happily with a bit more freedom for composing the angle. Luckily I didn't have many problems with reflections, even when the sun was shining in through the window.

Discs, media and encoding

Recently I've seen more folk try burning AVCHD discs as they've started using high definition camcorders and have balked at the cost of Blu-ray burners and blank BD-R discs. Unfortunately there's a bit of confusion about what an AVCHD disc is, which is not surprising since it is a strange hybrid of things, and (for most of us) arrived quite unexpectedly.

The key to it all is understanding the difference between what is disc media, and what is encoding ("encoding" is often informally referred to as the format of the disc).

New film: Burpee Mile

Recently I helped edit a film for a friend. Caroline Birkinshaw, a personal trainer from Leeds, decided to do the Burpee Mile, a full mile of one of the most gruelling exercises ever imagined. Dave Hackney was on hand to shoot the event, getting some great shots of the hard work and the struggle Carrie went through to complete her task. After a bit of a delay Dave and I sat down to review the footage and I put together an edit.



Going through the raw clips I could see there was plenty of great material to use, and seeing them chronologically there was a plot arc of sorts emerging. Caroline begins alone on the running track but is soon joined by her parents, more family and friends and by the end she had a small crowd cheering her on, jumping burpees alongside and celebrating when she made it over the one-mile mark. This slow build up of momentum was a key feature I wanted to preserve in the edited film. The latter shots of Caroline feeling the strain contributed to the film reaching the peak of tension before the relief at her achievement.

Originally it was discussed this film would be set to rousing music, but when I saw those raw clips I was certain that a documentary style would suit it better, lending more gravitas to Caroline's achievement. A little comedic relief is provided by interviews with Caroline's dad and some spectators who were impressed by her determination.

Fun with a variable ND filter

A little while ago I set out to do a bit of casual filming using my stabilised 18-55mm lens. I wanted to shoot wide open for narrow depth-of-field so I screwed on a ND8 filter (which blocks 8 stops of light), but at the maximum aperture of f/3.5 the picture was underexposed. The weather was a little overcast but mostly bright. So I swapped the lens for my 50mm f/1.8 and the picture was exposed enough, but I was shooting hand-held so the unstabilised 50mm wouldn't do.

Back on the computer, I ordered a variable ND filter. Comprising two polarisers that darken considerably when their orientations are crossed (see video at the bottom), these filters are great when you want fine control over exposure in bright environments. As soon as it arrived I tried some experiments in my back yard.

f/3.5 with variable ND filter

f/18 without filter

These two stills are grabs from video clips I shot with 1/50th shutter. In the first picture I set the aperture first, at the maximum of f/3.5, and then adjusted the filter so that the highlights were just below clipping. In the second picture the filter was removed, and then I adjusted the aperture to retain the highlights, which turned out to be at f/18. Quite a difference, which is demonstrated in the noticeably narrower depth-of-field in the first picture.

One other noticable difference is the colour tone. With the filter, the picture looks cooler with a blue tint, and possibly desaturated. I have found with cheap ND filters that the optical quality is not perfect and colour shifts can occur, usually pushing towards blue. The effect varies with the severity of the light loss, and the quality of materials used -- one time I tried a plastic filter and the effect was something akin to picture taken with a Lomo/Diana toy camera, or something tweaked with Instagram. In the case of this variable ND filter, the colour shift is not so bad that it can't be corrected during editing.

A short video to demonstrate:

After Effects CS3 performance comparison

A while back I had an After Effects project with 640 layers of footage. I've had to learn patience with my ancient Power Mac which struggles to render anything in real time, even simple comps, but I shouldn't have been surprised to find that 640 layers took about 40 seconds per frame. The entire 90-second animation took 23 hours.

Rapid film making

I've made an entry for a video competition run by Viking office supplies:



It was shot in about 30 minutes in our tiny office at the end of the day. Luckily my boss Gareth was willing to act in front of the camera, or it would have been just me!

Setting up the camera and leaving it to record takes a bit of practice, as can be seen in a few wonky shots. We didn't have time to re-shoot anything so a bit of clever editing hid the problems to some extent.

Jumping into a project and shooting it quick is incredibly liberating. Knowing that the project doesn't have to be your best work frees you to try things with little expectation. It's been the first time in a few months that I've just gone out and shot something; it was very satisfying and good skills practice. A while back I read a blog post explaining there's no speed limit to learning things, and it certainly applies here.

Time-lapse: what is it?

When we think of a time-lapse clip, we think of seeing action at high speed. Plants growing, clouds passing overhead, buildings being constructed, vegetables rotting. What we are seeing is a disparity of time; the rate of playback of the action is different to the rate it was shot. Action that really takes hours or days or months is being seen in a few seconds or minutes, and it can be captivating in a way unlike live action footage.

New film: Vintage Kino promo

For the past six weeks I've been working with organisers of the Kinofilm Festival based in Manchester. The festival has been in existence for many years but has recently been subject to a rejuvenation, with regular showings of local and international short films, feature films, and 16mm curiosities from the archives. (For news on upcoming events, see the Kinofilm page on Facebook).

This promotional film is for the Vintage Kino events where a programme of shorts are projected from the original 16mm celluloid. The films vary from documentaries such as We Are The Lambeth Boys, to public information films on the dangers of drug abuse, to short cartoons and comedies. Each event aims to focus on a particular year and includes Pathe news reels that summarise the year's events.

It is the first film I have produced under my new brand, aenimated films. It serves a basic function of giving my films a shared identity, and a website that collects all my various scattered media across the web into one place. It was chiefly motivated by working on the Vintage Kino promo, which may be seen by people interested in my other short films.

Post processing

All the shots in the film were heavily colour-corrected in After Effects, usually with Curves effects. The captured projections usually needed to be squared up and brightened; some needed work to remove a colour cast. The outdoor shots on Oldham Street had some 're-lighting' effects to draw attention to the murals and signage.

Camera settings

The film was shot using a Canon 600D (T3i). The material in the Three Minute Theatre we mostly shot using a 50mm f/1.8 lens (the brightest I have) and some were with a 10-24mm f/3.5. ISO was set to 800 except for the occasional shot where it needed to be pushed to 1600, along with 1/30th shutter. Interview sound was recorded separately using a Zoom H4n with a Rode VideoMic plugged into the mini-jack.

After Effects CS3 crashing on save

I recently found a bargain-priced copy of Adobe After Effects CS3 on eBay. It's the full professional version for my Mac so I didn't foresee any problems. I'd been using it for a few weeks before I ran into what seemed like a terminal issue...

BIAFF 2012

I'm pleased to report my two entries to the British International Amateur Film Festival (BIAFF) this year, Brew-hoo and The Wheels, were both awarded three stars! My short comedy Brew-hoo was screened on the Saturday.

New film: Lock Gates

This short video depicting the hand-construction of a pair of canal lock gates is a natty combination of time-lapse sequences and live action clips. I helped shoot the time-lapse for my work during the three week process, and went back to the workshop to shoot some extra live action video, up close to the materials and the craftsmen who work them.

A fix for Final Cut Studio crashes

One of the Macs in our office has just been updated to Snow Leopard (yeah, we're a bit behind the rest of the world) and we found that Motion 4 and Compressor 3.5, the versions in Final Cut Studio 2, were crashing. Compressor would hang or crash if you tried to change the output location from the default 'Source', and Motion was particularly frustrating because you couldn't even save a project, or export from an unsaved project, without it crashing and losing all your work.

After a bit of searching I eventually found a fix. It was tricky to find because it's not an issue specific to Motion or Compressor, but across all of Apple's Pro applications after Mac OS has been updated to 10.6 Snow Leopard. The fix is here:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3155576?start=0&tstart=0

It requires a bit of typing in Terminal which can be a bit scary due to using the superuser commands. Copy and paste the lines in the instructions if you're not a confident typist!

New film: Timelapse 2011

A compilation of all the little time-lapse clips I made last year.

Retrieving pictures from multiple folders

That there is 214 folders. You, Canon 350D sir, are an arse.

If you take a lot of photos (say, a couple of thousand while time-lapse shooting) one of those chief face-palm moments is when you pop the memory card into your computer, and find the camera has sorted your tidy sequence of photos into lots of folders. Hundreds of folders. Going back and forth copying a folder of images at a time is not my idea of being productive. Lucky, then, there's a standard application in Mac OS X that can do this for you.

Image Capture (found in the Applications folder, naturally) can be used to copy content from a memory card or a camera. It doesn't browse the folder structure like the Finder, instead it lists all the media files together (photos, video etc.), allowing you to select the batch you want and instruct it to copy to a destination of your choosing. No back-and-forthing required.

(Incidentally, iPhoto also does this in a roundabout way, but I find iPhoto to be a bit slow when loading up my entire photo library, which it insists on doing upon launching, whereas Image Capture is a relatively lightweight app and just gets on with it.)

Simply open Image Capture, tell it to Download Some, switch to list view, and tell it where to copy your images by way of the Download Folder setting. Voila, all your images in one folder by way of a few mouse clicks rather than millions and gabillions.

On the definition of film-making

We often use the term 'film' (especially here in the UK) in place of 'movie' or 'motion picture', despite the relative rarity of celluloid in modern movie production.

The word 'filmic' is banded about to describe a film as being film-like (despite how unneccessary that sounds); but it could mean that the film in question exhibits the gloss and elegance of a classic Hollywood production, or merely that the film maker has achieved the hallowed 'film look', otherwise known as disguising the consumer video origins of the footage.

And amongst all this are the film makers. This one term bridges the gulf between the hobbyist grabbing shots at an antique car rally, and the household name in a far-flung country managing a crane shot with equipment that costs more than our house. Both of those film makers each see something that pleases the eye, that describes the moment so succinctly that we must preserve it for others -- which could be the intense stare of an outlandish character that we've come to know so well in just 30 minutes, or it could be the evening sun glinting off the chrome bumper of an Austin Healey. Nevertheless, we film makers nod to that dividing gulf with qualifiers such as amateur, or novice, or hobbyist -- lest someone might suppose we claim to be in the same business as Kubrick or Minghella.

Film makers are often described as storytellers. I've found that only good film makers qualify as storytellers; only great ones can be called story makers -- so refined is the skill to make film tell a story without the anciliary aids that other media can employ. But all of us film makers possess the core ability to visualise a shot and translate it to the screen. To develop we have to show patience and diligence to hone those choices, one day go beyond the pleasant images, and say more with less.

Lessons from The Wheels: Auto WB

Back when I bought my Canon 600D specifically for film making, I had everything set to manual.  Most of the settings had to be locked anyway; 25fps, 1/50th shutter, ISO 100 unless you're indoors, and so on.  This bit me in the bum during a shoot for a friend's film when I realised my first half-dozen shots of the day were at the wrong white balance setting.

So white balance went back to Auto and this served me well for a while, until recently when I was shooting The Wheels.  Once again when I was reviewing footage (back home at the computer this time, far too late to do anything about it) I found it to be all wrong.

The cause this time was the mixture of light sources.  At the location I had mistakenly assumed that the outdoor light coming into the room from two sides would be sufficient, but we ended up using a couple of domestic incandescent lamps as well.  I knew the footage would look a bit orange, but what I didn't realise was that the Auto WB setting is taken from the brightest part of the picture, rather than the centre of the frame (as auto exposure is, when taking stills).

When Auto WB gets it wrong

The pictures above show Dave at the table, mostly lit by the incandescent lamps, but the brightest part of the picture is the outdoor scene beyond the patio doors.  The Auto WB has set itself to suit the bright outdoor scene, and as a result Dave and much of the interior is a red/orange hue.  This can be corrected in post but I found the shot above was so pushed to red it was tricky to bring it back to resemble something approaching normal without ruining the rest of the frame, especially when trying to brighten the noisy shadows. (My discoveries about noise in shadows is a whole other post.)

When Auto WB gets it right

This picture shows a different composition, which does not have an outdoor scene in the background; on this occasion the Auto WB has set itself to suit Dave and the interior rather than the outdoors.  As per my usual workflow, some colour balancing was made to match the shot with the others, but you can see it required far less work, and therefore the image wouldn't need to be 'pushed' so far and degraded so much to achieve this.

Learning a lesson
When you're on an important shoot (as opposed to grabbing some shots on a day out with the family), white balance should enter your consciousness as one of those things you just need to check, like adjusting ISO to get the histogram looking right.  Unfortunately white balance isn't something that's so visible on the camera, but luckily allowances can be made in post if the results aren't terrible.  Perhaps a reminder on the shot list / storyboard would do the trick.

New film: The Wheels

"Sometimes you don't realise you're working too much..."

A short film created specially for the fixed theme of "The wheels went round" for the Chairman's Challenge at Huddersfield Film Makers Club, October 2011.

Although the upcoming Chairman's Challenge had been known of for some months, it didn't feel like a proper challenge if we couldn't cram all the work into the final 10 days before the show.  It was at this point that I, and my semi-reluctant star Dave, realised we had just one weekend left.

I cobbled together the basic premise of the story and drew up a storyboard, only the second time I had bothered to do so.  I thought it would be useful to tick off shots once they were in the can* but it was also very handy to ensure shots followed-on from one another and didn't look too disjointed.  And of course I looked very professional, so much so that I left the beret at home.

We shot during Saturday and Sunday and I spent the next four evenings beavering away at the computer.  There was a lot of time consuming post-production effort for a modest project like this one but the deadline really helped to spur me on.  By this time Dave's work was done and he was relaxing in his trailer.**

Shot on a Canon 600D digital SLR with Rode VideoMic.  Raw footage was transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec using MPEG Streamclip.  Edited in Final Cut Pro, transferred to After Effects using BasicFCPtoAE, where graphics were composited and shots were colour graded.

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* I keep all my camera memory cards in a biscuit tin.

** Dave lives in a trailer.  The house in the film has been empty for months so we helped ourselves.  We call it 'being resourceful.'