Robot Wrangling

It's harder than herding cats!

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Mist on Flickr.

Halong Bay, Vietnam

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Street Photography 101 on Flickr.

Via Flickr: Take photo of people in cafe through glass. IMG_2405

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Sparks on Flickr.

Via Flickr: Using light and rain to create what looks like sparks. Taken in Launceston, Tasmania IMG_2376

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IMG_2357 on Flickr.

Harlem Photo take in Launceston, Tasmania

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IMG_2559 on Flickr.

Oncoming. Photo taken in Launceston, Tasmania

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In April we sponsored the Tasmanian Writers Festival by recording, editing podcasts of their seminars. It something we do for Supanova (www.supanova.com.au) and have done for other festivals and conferences around the country. This time we where asked to professionally record 21 short stories (3000 words or less) for the National Year of Reading 2012. 

I proposed that we use local actors to give each story a different voice and feel. Initially there was talk about getting some big name Australian actors in, but due to time and budget we where given free reign to cast within the budget I submitted for the job. Personally this was great as this project showcases both published and unpublished authors, so doing the same with actors was something that we really wanted to do.

Casting 21 actors was a challenge, add to the fact that most the stories where from a female perspective, the challenge increased. The age range of the actors ranges from 17 to somewhere mid 60's (we think without asking). We asked a lot of some of the actors, especially the ones that have never done this sort of recording before. 

The one story that made us stop and really think about how to do it was When English Made My Future Better by Faten Chendeb. This story is first person perspective with basic English which in the context of the story makes total sense but read incorrectly could come off a little insulting. Adding to that was the initial requirement that it should eb read in a Lebanese accent by a middle aged woman, this was almost an impossible task to cast in Tasmania. Almost three weeks went by trying to find the right person to read the story and we even thought about flying to Melbourne to get either the author or another person of Lebanese heritage to read it. In the end we asked if we could do the read straight, no accent, no acting and put a forward on the front of it explaining why the story is read the way it is. This is what we did in the end. It offseted may issues that foresaw and wanted to make sure that the story was included in the recordings.

Three and a half weeks of getting actors into our studio in between doing other jobs. The biggest issue in the end was the traffic noise. While our studio has a moderate amount of sound proofing, any car/bus/bike that was particularly loud would come through the recordings. So starts and stops happened and it is amazing to realise how many people have stupidly noisy vehicles. Buses we can understand, but all the bikes and cars is totally uncalled for.

The microphone we used for the recording was a Rode NTA-2. Amazing depth this mic gave to the preferences, but it also picked up some of the actors sibilances and other sounds. As most actors having been in the sort of recording situation before some got very self conscience of their breathing and other sounds their body made. In the future we will give a basic handout on preparing for recording to avoid some of these issues in the future. There is nothing like removing stomach rumbles and lip smacks from a recording to ruin your workflow.

In the end we think the project came out really well. It was on time and on budget. It gives more local actors a national presence and another piece for their resumes. It gave us an opportunity to give our new equipment a whirl and produce something that will be used in teach aids and enjoyment for years to come.

Stories - Actor List

The Beauline - Patsy Marshell

Camels in Morocco - Stephanie Briarwood

For Lucy - Carrie Maclean

Grandad's Garden - Elise Manian

Happy New Year - Daniel Speed

I is for You - Rebecca Nilsson

Letters - Cheyne Mitchell

Letters & Lufstories - Nicola Pett

The Miracle Canendar - Sophie Hart

My Neighbour's Screen Door - Ray Sangston

A Reason for Reading - Kieran Phillips

Refuting the White Rabbit - Michael Edgar

Road House - David Quinn

The Sleeping Beauty - Jane Johnson

Strangers in Fiction - Bec Reedman

Taking Leaves - Amanda Phillips

A Time For Many Words - Jennifer Lyons

Tin of Secrets - Stuart Loone

The War Gift - Chris Jackson

When English Made My Future Better - Jane Johnson

A Written History - Rachael Williams

All these stories are available to listen online or download as a free PDF at www.love2read.org.au/never-too-late.cfm

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Basic Maintenance .htaccess Redirect

Just a quick tutorial for something that I didn't find easily on the www. There are most likely easier ways of doing this, but this worked for me.

Basically I wanted to be able to put a file in my web server root directory that if detected turned off all my redirects in cakephp and served only that file. This means that when I am updating core cakephp files (you could probably use this for other frameworks too) then I have a nice maintenance page.

Create your nice html maintenance page (in this case called maintenance.html) and place it in your root directory of your website

Edit your .htaccess files to the following (based on cakephp).

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html -f RewriteRule (.*) /maintenance.html [L,R=302] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /maintenance.html RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html !-f RewriteRule (.*) / [L,R=302] RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html !-f RewriteRule ^$ webroot/ [L] RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html !-f RewriteRule (.*) webroot/$1 [L] </IfModule>

To break it down.

First rewriteconds look to see if we are not requesting the  maintenance.html file directly. Then it checks to see if the file exists. Then it rewrites the url to maintenance.html. (end of story)

Second, it check to see if maintenance.html was asked for directly and if the file doesn't exist. If so, then redirects back to root of the web server. This is use when you remove maintenance.html after updating, so people don't get a 404 error.

Third, we check for maintenance.html doesn't exist and set our normal rewrites for cakephp.

Now when maintenance.html exists, it gets served and I can update cakephp in the background on a live server.

If you know a better way of doing this, please comment below.

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Dark Empire

This video was inspired by a classic viral video called Dove Evolution that really was at the advent of online viral advertising. At some point when talking silly ideas for little star wars films this popped into my head.

Pre-Production

I needed to gather a few things to make this video work. A Makeup Artist, A Photoshop Aritst and the subject to get made up.

The subject wasn't hard as Nick from 501st is always up for something fun. I put a call out on facebook for a makeup artist and Kel offered to help out. I have never actually worked with a makeup artist before, so that was fun and different. Lastly I needed someone who was awesome at photoshop. I called my friend Marco who was an award winning matte painter and has worked on many films, tv shows and commercials and ask if he would do me the honor of doctoring the photo. He agreed and then I needed to do the shoot.

Production

So we all gathered at Photobat Natural Light Studio (aka my brothers studio) and set up some basic lights and a white background. Kel went to work and I set my camera to do a time-lapse. Once the makeup was finished I turned on the flash and took a heap of RAW photos which one would become our master for Marco to photoshop. 

I did a visualisation of the final video with the time-lapse and some plate stills to show marco sorta what I meant by the final product.

So I packed up the stills and sent a hard drive to Marco in Sydney (I am based in Tasmania). The next issue was shooting the stormtroopers plate (well they are actually scout-troopers in the video). The challenge was to find a background that could easily have a digital billboard placed on it. Since this was my first time of compositing in this style I wanted it to be simple as possible. I scouted around Launceston CBD and found the one I liked. I then arranged for our troopers to come and film for 30 minutes on a Sunday. 

This where I came undone a little. I chose a petrol station billboard thinking that the business was closed on a Sunday. I was wrong, but luckily only one block up from there was something which turned out to be better. So a quick move, shoot and some silliness and we had our skipping trooper plate.

At this point I got an email from Marco saying he couldn't record his photoshop as it slowed his computer down to much to work. This was a sticking point as I really needed the photoshop work to be a progression of video from Nick to Emperor. So not to be a pain as Marco was doing me a huge favor, I ask him to save out progression images. I would worry about how to make it look a time-lapse later.

Post- Production

So with all the assets in hand I opened up After Effects to start compositing. First thing to do was learn how to rotoscope. I took me two goes and learning how to use the matte tool effectively in conjuction with the roto tool to get it right. I knew that I was going to need to roto when I shot the plate, so I made sure that my shutter was very fast so no motion blur was present in the plate video. 

After I got that sorted I jumped into Photoshop and with a clean still from the plate above (no troopers), I took Marco's awesome final work and made a billboard. I then cropped it and dropped the final image into After Effects. I then did a tidy up of the rotoscoping and exported a ProRes version of the composition to Adobe Premiere.

Next was what to do about the Photoshop files. I had no time-lapse of the work being created but Marco did supply me 30 images of the final file being made up (plus the actually full layered Photoshop artwork). I hit on the idea of "fluffing" the time-lapse. I loaded each still into one Photoshop document and made a mask for each so apart from the bottom layer, nothing could be seen. I then recorded myself using the brush tool drawing on the masks to revel the layer underneath. If you watch the final video and know photoshop, just look at the bottom right hand corner at my layers. This seemed to work really well.

Now that I have my last two pieces of the vision. I dropped them into Premiere and edited it together. I then went looking for some creative commons music that fitted on SoundCloud, purchased a camera snap sound effect and finished off the audio.

The last thing to do was colour grade the video. I didn't want to change the first two sections of the video as I wanted it to look raw. The billboard reveal bit I did want to grade to make the billboard fit better and also so the scene felt a bit more sci-fi. So off to Red Giant's Colorista II, Mojo & Misfire Vignette.

Then Render, and post.

What I Learnt

If you like rotoscoping, you are mad.

I need to have a clear idea of what I want before I ask for something. Marco questioned me a fair bit about the final idea and I needed to have answers.

More general film making techniques.

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theawkwardgamer:

Console Wars // Artist: Gabs

Did this because of all the arguments on YouTube I see. If you belong in the purple section, you’re awesome. 

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The Dance Project

I was contacted about being the media director for a federally funded community dance project that spanned across Tasmania. I said yes and had to learn a lot quickly. This project is something like I have never done before. Filming dance is something totally new to me, add to that how abstract the descriptions where of the final product, the challenge was set. 

The big thing about this project is that is already underway. Stuff had been filmed before I came onboard and posted onto their website. My job was/is to film the next sections and edit them and deploy them onto the website but also have them in a board-cast format. Did I mention that I had less than 2 weeks from accepting to filming with a one week turn around time to have the filmed... 9 x 90 sec clips edited and deployed. 

The filming was a lesson on using every bit of equipment you have to make it interesting. We had 4 hours to shoot all 9 sequences with only three takes for each. On top of that, I didn't get to see the dances before we shot. Then add the we only had one location for most of it and you get the pressure to shoot something that can be usable. I opted to used not 2 but 4 camera.

Equipment

2xSony HDV cameras

Canon 7D with Sigma 30mm F1.4

GoPro

CobraCrane Jib

Monfrotto Monopod

Miller DS20

Zacuto Striker

Zacuto EVF

KesslerCrane Pocket Dolley

Tripod Dolley Mount (attaches to the base for free movement)

3 x Daylight1200 Fluoro Lamp 4

Not all the cameras where used every time but some takes did see all 4 running at one. The GoPro was extensively used on the Jib as I didn't have time to calibrate the weights of different cameras all the time.

We rushed through the shoot keeping to the strict time we where allocated for each sequence. At the end of the first 6 sequences we had to move to another room within the hall. These last 3 sequences where more awkward plus the last two where with different dancers than we had be working with all day.

Post-production

With technically only 7 days to edit, grade and upload the clips and somehow tell a story which I didn't get at all, it was a little stressing to say the least. Working on something that has a clear defined goal and isn't "artistically abstract" is much easier than this. I am more of a literal person, I work with logic and lateral thinking, makes this type of editing almost painful to start. So I reverted back to basics. Edit the sequences the best you can with the footage you have. Present that and ask for the next step which was to edit up audio clips from interviews done by someone else (I hate the audio quality, but not much I can do) to tell a story. So I ended up with roughly 5 minutes of audio. The next curveball was being asked to compose some music. This is sorta where I draw the line. I haven't composed music in 12 years. I did my best using loops and stuff, but in reality I wasn't happy with it or even being asked. Luckily it was dropped for something else when I sat down with the creative director and edited up the audio in something more useable. The footage we used for the interviews, Angie the creative director scrambled to get between having a sick child and getting ready to move house/city.

So I colour timed the footage to have a very warm feel to it. I wanted it to stand out from the other clips of the website and also make it a bit more visually interesting. Secondly, none of the clips apart from the interview sequence needed audio. The interview clip plays on page load and the audience get to hit play on other clips when and if they feel like it. That was the brief, not sure how effective it is though.

So with the first shoot done and dusted, I have two more to prepare for. Luckily I think I have a handle on it now and also got a LOT more pre-production, so fingers crossed I will be able to take what I have learnt from this and make something even better.

If you go over to www.thedanceproject.com.au and click on "North East" (see edit below) you will see my videos. Not my normal type of project and a lot of collaboration, but sometimes it is fun to learn when you are a director for hire.

EDIT: Ops, I published these clips as North East, but it was actually North West. So I have updated the website to put them into the correct category.

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POP YOUR ROLLER DERBY CHERRY

A while ago I shot a mini-doco on Roller Derby in Tasmania. It was a learning exercise and the final result people seem to really like. I got asked about cutting the footage for an advert but in the end I couldn't do it. Basically I felt I would end up making a cheap looking locally produced tv commercial and I didn't want that. 

When I got the draft artwork for the bout I was meant to be cutting my footage for, my head started to spin ideas of how to make the footage match the its look. Eventually I hestiantly emailed VDR and said I don't want to edit my footage, but happy to do something new and then laid out the idea. 

Here is part of my email:

I want to shoot something new using 2 girls. 1 from infectious and 1 from jam tarts. 30 sec promo. I think it all can be done up in my brothers studio. Shouldn't take more than an hour to shoot. The basic idea is lots of close up of the girls putting on their gear. Think head to head on a white background. Finally we shoot the girls coming up to some cherries on a table which they stomp with a pair of boots (or hands... not sure yet) which this jumps to the logo. Something fast and catchy. I know it doesn't have bout style footage so this might not be what you want.

So that was the pitch and they jumped at it. What was conceived for a basic 1 hour shoot took 2.5 hours. I need to work on my estimates when it comes to production. 

The Gear

Infinite white backdrop

A couple photography lights (not sure of model)

Canon 7D

Lenses: Canon 50mm 1.4f, Sigma EX 30mm 1.4f & Nikon 16mm 2.8f

Zacuto EVF

Kessler Crane Philip Boom Pocket Dolly

Miller DS20

Beer & Dip

Patient Roller Derby Gals.

The Production

This was my first time doing something planned in a studio setting video wise. While I have done sound on set before, never actually done everything from go to wow myself, so it was a little challenging. The biggest thing that became evident to me at the beginning was that my idea with movement of the camera didn't work as well as expected. I didn't think it through enough and realised that if the camera is moving on a white background then it does't actually look like much (weird statement I know). So as the shoot progressed from Nikki to Sam, I opened up the distant between myself and the girls to get more of them in shot so when I moved the camera you really noticed it.

The second thing that was worrying me was the cherries. I was actually considering making up a squib of some kind to push red liquid through the girls hands if the cherries didn't burst. I didn't get time to make it up and luckily the cherries burst really well. 

During this and other shoots I have come to realise that I need to be more direct and confident in my direction. I think this will come with experience as I don't get as nervous about asking people to do weird things on camera.

So two hours of filming made for some interesting and fun footage.

The Post

As I wasn't using any audio from set, I jumped around a heap of royalty free music sites to find some tracks that I could cut to. Initially I was thinking big epic score sound, but in the end I op'ed for something more heavy rock. Epic is good, but the footage didn't convey epic in the same way as I was feeling in the music.

With the track selected, I started from the end of the music and worked backwards in placing footage. The reason for this was I knew the end point but not the beginning. So dropping in clips and matching them to beat/edit timing marks got something rough and ready. Then it was a matter of rearranging and finding how I thought it fit together best (editing can be so subjective). Lastly I needed to get the look right.

The Look

When I first off-loaded to footage and transcoded it I grabbed one clip and dropped it into a test project. From there I went to town in Red Giant's Magic Bullet Looks & Colorista II. I love those plugins. The big thing was to push the background to be completely white and grund up the frame without losing the girls or some of the primary colours. The big issue was the cherries at the end. When pushed to hard they looked like black blobs and lost most of the "cherry red" look to them. Finally I settled on something I liked and saved it.

Back to Post

So with my pre-built look, I graded each clip using Colorista II like normal to get them looking consistant then dropped in my custom look. Tweaked the look using Colorista and BAM, job done.

What I learnt.

Need to get over my nervousness of asking people to do things in front of camera.

Nikon lenses are fun on a Canon camera.

A broadcast engineer will most likely kill me for what I have done to the footage but I don't care (to much).

I am happier making new things than revisiting old things.

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Tetris performed live by Lark

Lark are

Jack Quigley (Guitar/vocals)

Daniel Tedford (mandolin/Violin/vocals)

Claire Ransome (Violin)

Not in this video

Fabian Giacomelli (100% Italian Bass)

Dan Major (Drums/vocals)

facebook.com/larkband

Director | Camera | Editor | Colour | Audio

Bruce Moyle

Second Camera & Assistant

James Pemberton

Produced by Joffre Street Productions

www.joffrestreetproductions.com

About the Music Video

Myself and the Intern (James Pemberton) went to Melbourne in July to document the opening of the latest Manabar (www.manabar.com.au). Yug one of the owners of the Manabar knew that there would be a line to get in which would move slowly due to the venue having a licence of 50 people at any one time. Being smart, Yug asked street performers and other vendors to come entertain the crowd while they wait their turn in Manabar.

One of the acts that entertained and delighted the crowd was Lark. A gypsy band that recently started performing video game covers. The audience loved them and I really loved the sound they produced for such a small outfit. So I offered to shoot a quick music video with them in the back alley of the bar. 

The Song

While Lark generally perform Nintendo covers, I ask for something older and less likely to get a lawsuit (Nintendo are notorious for protecting their music). So the classic Tetris theme was chosen. 

The Audio

As this was a rush job and had to use only the tools at hand, I recorded the song in the back alley in the quietest position possible (the lowest background noise). I got Lark to stand in one place and perform in-front of my Zoom H4n with minimal movement. This would be the track that would be mastered later for the clip.

The Video

Since we had no playback the performers needed to try memorise the beat and the exact order of the song they preformed for the original recording. This is not how music videos are done as sync is nearly impossible but we had to do this with the tools we had in hand.

The cameras we used are the Canon 7D with 30mm f1.4 and Canon 550D with 50mm f1.4.

Firstly we did a wide with the 7D. The next play through both myself and James shot using both cameras with the idea of sticking to different musicians. The did this twice hoping that we got enough coverage (it's a bit uneven unfortunately). Once that was done we did pickups of feet dancing and jumps/landings.

It was a fast hour and Lark I think where well and truly sick of Tetris by the end of it.

The Post (Audio)

The recording was mastered and noise reduced using Isotope RX. I removed the background hum from AC units, foot taps of the performers and one bung note at the end of the song. First time really getting into the app and I see why it is the go to tool in remastering and dialogue editors. Truly amazing, I cannot express how brilliant this software is.

Listen to the unmastered audio

Mastered Version

The Post (Video)

The video took a bit more effort. I started editing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 as I wanted to learn the software (I am a Final Cut Pro man) and quickly realised that I wasn't happy with my approach with it. The workflow seemed extremely slow and I wasn't getting the results I wanted. So I transcoded to ProRes LT and moved back to Final Cut Pro 7. Then real life jobs happened at the edit fell to the background for a few weeks and I was constantly thinking about shooting more footage to tell a story within the video. In the end I op'ed to just straight cut the video as I didn't have the time to shoot extras and in reality I would prefer to do another clip with them much more planned out and produced. 

Once I got back to the edit and in FCP7 it was a much faster job. I got the basics done and tried to match up the footage to the music as best I could. Normally in a music video the performers have playback of the song there are filming so they can be in sync. Not possible with this and I just trusted that they where close enough. So somethings fit, others don't but hopefully most people don't notice it.

The next issue I came up with is colour timing. I did something silly during the break of editing, I upgraded to OSX Lion. While I love the new OS, it breaks somethings in my workflow, especially Red Giant's Magic Bullet Suite which used in FCP7. So I looked at using Apple Color but realised that I didn't have a good enough monitor to work with the app (I was editing on my Macbook Pro 15''). I bit the bullet and exported the edit as an XML and moved back to Premiere as MB Looks & Colorista II still worked there.

The next part was grading the footage using Colorista so that the cuts worked together colour wise. The next part was to use Looks to make it look pretty. I wanted to give the footage a contrast look with bright colours (like Tetris blocks) being more emphasised and the white background defused to give it a soft look. I think it came up fairly well but also required tweaking to the edit as the contrast jump between shots became much more blatant.

Lastly while I know after effects enough to get into trouble, I op'ed to do a basic title at the beginning using a still. Off to Photoshop to make up the titles after downloading a Tetris font. Compile and render out and Bob's your uncle (or aunty).

Lessons Learnt

Don't expect a master piece when things are done in under an hour unplanned. I constantly wanted to do more, but resigned to the fact that I really need to do something in the future (if Lark are willing) which is much more planned out.

Adobe Premiere CS5 is good but has some weird rendering issues and will take more time to get a workflow that is fast. It took 5 goes to get a render out that wasn't glitchy which was very annoying.

Don't upgrade to a new OS halfway though an edit if it could change your workflow up.

If an opportunity presents itself, take it. This was a happy accident from going to Melbourne and a good piece to put in my folio even if it's not perfect. I won't have met these guys if I didn't jump on a plane.

Isotope RX is the bomb and is now an addition to my digital toolbag.

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What is Supanova?

I am the technical director of Supanova Pop Culture Expo and figured it was the best place between running around like a headless chicken to practice shooting. Lots of fun happens at the shows and I got to shoot in 4 different cities over 3 months. My idea was to get more of a behind the scenes look at the show as every man and his dog shoots their take on Supanova and posts it on YouTube. While I have a lot of footage from behind the scenes, it wasn't till I actually got interviews in Perth that I realised I had some gold and a very different short that I intended to make.

I could cut a few different styles of video out of the hours of footage I had, but what hit me is that most people make videos about just the show they went to. So I decided to make a video which is more general but have people describe what they thought Supanova is. Add a heap of B-Roll and costumes and you have my end result.

The biggest issue I had with the edit was that the footage I took at the beginning of the tours isn't as well shot as the later parts. This is because I had made two other videos between tours (Tasmanian Roller Derby & Heart Kids Tasmania) which evolved my skills quite a lot. This is why there is much more footage from Sydney/Perth than Brisbane/Melbourne.

The interviewee include:

Tom Taylor

Amy Acker

Sean Maher

Neil Kaplan

David Nykl

John Robertson

Kieran Duke Burns

Gareth David-Lloyd

Corin Nemic

Julie White

+ Voxs Pops

I am fairly happy with the outcome. My color grading is better than my last attempts. The one thing I have learnt while editing/grading is that cutting from inside to outside shots are really hard to match up and look natural. I also realised that I really need to get a constant f-stop zoom before shooting at another Supanova. I also want to get a motion graphic created for Supanova for all our video assets. 

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Real Techno Magic! 

[filmrot-deactivated20190109]

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This is awesome and the way it should be everywhere!

filmrot:

So the Alamo Draft House kicked out a customer for texting during a movie, a policy the legendary film-house has been known to enforce vigilantly. Well one recent violator decided to call the theater’s office and leave an angry voice-mail message for the management.

In response the theater took the message and turned it into a typographical “Don’t Talk or Text” PSA to be played in-theater before every rated-R film the venue plays. Awesome.

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Amazing version of Trent Reznor's Hurt done by Johnny Cash.