A short film I made for a outreach at my old church. This is what happens when you are a youth Pastor and Media minister. The hole thing, from coming up with the initial idea, to editing, compositing, and adding the music was done in a month and a half. It is a silly video, so don't take it to seriously.

Here is a teaser trailer for our movie Vestige. It is almost complete and will be available shortly. Note the trailer was created before we did our color correction.

We've been hacked...

We'll as you may or may not know our site has been hacked. Someone attacked the server we had our site on and now our site is...well interesting. I am just glad it was not worse. I got an email from Michael and was expecting adult content. This would have been very bad because I hade just show a preview of the movie the night before at my old church.

WE will redirect the site here until things are worked out. So if you are wondering why you are at my blog when you typed in the web url, now you know.

Production Update 6-27-09

Hello all.

Things have been busy as of late. But it is now time for a production update.

Vestige is almost complete. I am finishing up some effects, and Michael is working on audio. I shot the last scene of the movie a few weeks ago. We have been holding off on shooting it until now so I could grow out my hair, and beard. The end is a few months after the rest off the story, and my character hasn't had any chances to shave. 

I was planning on shooting this scene in Columbia, A western town about an hour from where I used to live. I grabbed one of my old media students and we headed up there. On the way we came by an old dilapidated train. After a second of thought it donned on me that anyone can shoot in the hills, but a real train set would add much more production value. 

I will be speaking at Calvary Assembly of God, in Merced Sunday night on 7-12. I will also be screening the movie for the first time. The movie will probably not be 100% finished, but it will be close. If you’re in the area come by.

I have been getting back to my artistic roots lately. Getting back into drawing, though its mostly all digital now. Here’s a piece I made last night for a contest.



Also we have our podcast up and running. http://www.filmrealstudios.org/realcast/ Episode two will be up soon, and for those of you that know who he is I have an interview with Jeff Devoll for episode three. He talks about using media to reach this generation, and why he hates making media projects.

And lastly we have started pre production on our next film. If Vestige is a Sci Fi, then this one is a horror film. Should be fun. A friend of mine from the District Resource Center has come on bored as the Director of photography, and he is bringing a professional HD camera.

Well until next time, thank you for reading.

Dynamic link is broken pt II

OK. After some research I have found out that the problems I am having with DL, are because it only supports data flowing in a single direction. Basically it will let me send video to AE and work on a effect and update my changes in Premier. I guess I just had too many comps with data trying to flow back and forth, so DL didn’t know what to do and went crazy. It got to the point that I hade to open up task manager and force close dynamic link, before opining Premier, or AE. 

Turns out DL is more of a built in automatic duck to send files from one program to the other, rather than a full blown project manager like Gridiron software’s Flow, and Auto Duck combined? It would be cool if this where the case. I would love to send files back and forth between Premier, and AE an indefinite amount of times without causing a feedback like effect resulting in DL breaking. (It tecknicaly isn’t broken, but because it doesn’t work it might as well be.) I know I am not the only one who feels this way. Stu Maschwitz wrote about merging Premier, and AE into a Flame like program. Basically Premier Lack’s serious post and finishing tools and AE doesn’t have real time playback, and DL can’t move files between the two at a level I’m happy with. Maybe one day. Maybe one day.

Adobe Dynamic link is broken

So I am using Adobe’s dynamic link to replace shots in my Premier Pro timeline with After Effects compositions. I do all my effects in AE and when I hit save it updates the changes into Premier. 

The problem I am having is that as I get to the end of my timeline the AE shots in the beginning of my timeline go offline. This would be no more than a miner nuisance if I could right click in the project bin and click link media. But premier won’t let me click this. It’s grayed out. Ok so I will just nuke the timelines and reimport them. Well this is working for two of my four AE projects. One of them will import but the video clip premier copied over to AE is offline. Great, so I open the AE timeline and yes my video clip is offline, and none of my work is there. I had roto, and another comp in there as a matt painting. What the heck After Effects? 

Then things get even weirder. The last file I try to import will only let me select a comp from one of the other projects. Let me back up and make this a little clearer. When you import an AE comp into Premier it brings up an import window and lets you choose which of your compositions inside of AE you want. In this case I have two. The one I want is the final one with all of the elements. The other is just the layers of the matt painting. If I try and select my fifth comp, Premier is opening the sixth. I tried restarting Premier. Nope. Finally I tried changing the name of the comp and it worked. This is frustrating because it makes it hard to keep track of files. Why can’t Adobe make this work? Then again Dynamic link is still young, and already it lets me do amazing things. 

Working out a workflow

Well we have finished shooting our pick ups, so I am now preparing for the visual effects of our movie. While I work on the vfx Michael is starting to work on ADR (automatic dialogue replacement) and Adam is starting work on Foley effects.

I have been thinking about how to construct our workflow. Michael has all the production files on his desktop, but I need to be able to do all my VFX on my laptop, (I know) across town. And being a small start up company, we don’t have any networked storage, so there’s even issues of getting files to Adam in Fresno.

The file transfer was our easiest problem to solve. Adam and I do most of our communicating over Google talk, so he suggested we use its file transfer feature. We just had Michael create a Gmail account and download the Gtalk IM client. Now we can share files online. Very cool, and effective. 

The other problem is the final editing, vfx, and ADR/Foley are all being worked on, so we need a way to stay organized, and move updates back and forth between the three of us.

The easiest way of doing the project would be to completely edit the movie and lock it off, and then send it out for effects, and sound. As I finished vfx shots I could send my After Effects comps to Michael. He would then replace the footage in the master timeline with my comps. As he recorded the new dialogue with the actors he could through it into the master timeline and line it up with the footage. And as Adam sends his foley sound clips in, Michael can drop them on top of the temp audio we have from location.

The problem is of course time. We don’t have time to let Michael finish editing. We need the movie to be completely finished in the next four to six weeks. We have finished about half the editing, so those scenes have been locked off, and I am working on them. Michael can still add in my AE comps, but as he finishes new scenes I will copy the updated premier pro project file to my production Hard Drive, overwriting the old one. We will repeat this until finished. As you can see file management becomes extremely important.

Another workflow I considered using, and even walked through it with one scene, is to export out each clip as a Tiff sequence. This approach had to major problems that caused me to ditch it form the former solution. First it required me to set up separate exports for each clip. This meant I had to create all the folder structures first, then set each export in Adobe’s batch renderer, (Software added in CS4, that I both love, and hate) then let it render out all the frames. Basically too much set up, and time. Plus all the effects and color correction are permanently rendered in on export. To make a change I would have to re-render an entire shot. Multiply that by a few times and you’ll countless wasted hours.

The other problem is when I export each shot out of premier I am compressing them again, which causes me to loose color information I want for color correction, and the final color grade.

So I spent half the day going through my first scene creating slap comps for each shot that needs some effects work done. When I say slap comp I am talking about doing as little work as possible on a shot to get a sense of what the final will look like. Then I can go back and fines it until it looks good.

This way I can see the shots inside of premier pro’s timeline. Using this method I can watch the comps in context of the shot. If I thinks a shot is only 80% of the way done and plan of spending my weekend finishing, then see it cut into the movie and realize it is only up there for a very short time and looks fine, then I just saved myself a weekend. 

I learned this technique from Garth Edwards. He did this on a project for BBC about Attila the Hun. He then taught a class at fxphd.com

So begins the perilous journey of creating the effects of Vestige. (The new name of our movie) Even as I write this Adobe has found a wrench to throw into my planes. More about that Later.