BackPage Update

Posted on March 30, 2009

Our film, BackPage, is submitted to about 20 festivals (already rejected by five.)

We’re constructing a site dedicated to promoting it. Mosy on over to:

www.backpagemovie.com

for most of this content repeated.

The Big Red One

Posted on March 9, 2009

I remember, six years ago, getting an opportunity to shoot with the SONY 700. For the previous five years, we had heard an infinite amount of hyperbolic buzz about HD. Color, contrast ratios, depth of field, signal to noise ratio, and of course the resolution, progressive, aspect, blah-blah-blah…

I used to second, pull, and load for an AC who claimed to have had extensive DP experience in HD. This was back in 2000, so we all knew he was full of shit. No one in our market had made the transition yet. The stupidest thing he ever said was when he claimed that he was going to an HD workshop the following week. When we pressed him for details, he refused to give up a name or location. “You wouldn’t know her. She lives up in Canada.”

So, a few years later, I got to spend a couple of days with the metachlorian camera. In the end, it wasn’t anything special. This was after waiting four agonizing years to get our hands on an HD camera. The most unbearable insult was having to endure the hype of it being used in a scene from The Phantom Menace. I was so disappointed to find out that it was just a regular ENG camera. Not much significant difference from the ten year old Beta SP Ikegami I had used the day before.

Four months later, I worked with the Panasonic equivalent. I don’t recall the model, but I remember the difference: frame rates from 6 to 120 and advanced image engineering control. One was for news, the other for art. Guess which.

The irony is that it was another four years until the software and processor speeds were universally ubiquitous enough to confidently edit HD.

Nowadays you can get an HD camera for a little over $100 at Walmart. Nothing special until the next big revolution.

That brings us to the Big Red One. There’s a lot of buzz. I started hearing it two years ago. And now that it’s here, all of it’s earned. It works. It’s affordable. It’s small. It’s almost film. Close enough, maybe (I haven’t heard much detailed discussion about latitude in post, but, I guess that would require enormous redundant hidden data.) I have colleagues who’ve invested in it. I’ve been impressed with the articles I’ve read. (As for the price, you can get it, plus lens kit, batts, storage, and lens support kit for what just the body of an HD “cine” camera costs.) 

And they tell me that the data rate is no problem for today’s computers (even with the layers, transitions, effects, and corrections.) So, the industry has the fever again. You’re the cool guy if you’ve been near one (and that red t-shirt!)

But… and I’m surprised it took me over ten years to realize this: the gear doesn’t make the film.

The French had HD back in the late 40’s, Japan had a working HD standard in the late 70’s.  Ten years later, Japan’s HD projects and potential started invading the national consciousness. Ten years after that, American broadcasters began incorporating it into their infrastructures and the FCC set a deadline for complete standard conversion.

But for the next ten years, the future of media was found in low definition. Blair Witch was shot on hi8 and 16mm, 28 Days Later was shot on PAL DV. But, your post and distribution considerations must be considered. Youtube, porn, comedy central, funny or die, college humor, ifilm, vimeo… The majority of web content is still acquired on standard definition cameras and distributed at even less quality resolution. For a popup or banner video, it can be argued that it still doesn’t serve much point to be shooting in a resolution higher than 240×360. Why burden the budget of your project with HD when your distribution will be DVD? Even if you could output to Blu-ray, most of the monitors sold are less than 47″. Your consumer audience won’t be able to tell the difference. You’ll get engineers in fist fights taking the Pepsi challenge (no pause, no slo-mo allowed.) Well lit, well exposed, well composed; you won’t be able to tell the difference between VHS, 35mm, HD, or RED (granted, it’s limited to just a talking head interview with a diffusion element and pro-mist.)

Thus, the two issues that dominate market logistics that exceed image quality: content, and on-demand. The immediate, non-linear service, the questions answered now, the punchline delivered immediately. Is it funny, dramatic, informative, compelling? No? Then you can’t get me to watch it, no matter how many pixels you stab me in the eye with. Do I have to wait for it?  Then screw you, my DVR’s full and waiting for me. (Since you still have to trade off the option of immediacy for image quality if you’re wanting extended content, that brings me to the most interesting point: the two minute barrier. Audiences sitting at a desk will not pay attention to you for more than two minutes. If you’re a movie trailer starring Tom Cruise or Megan Fox, sure. If you’re a Christmas greeting from a grandchild, sure, grandma will endure for several more minutes.  Efficiency of time is of utmost importance in your program. Get to the point. Start busting heads. Move that thing, Honey. You want me to call, don’t you?) Sure, vimeo, netflix, and apple are breaking the bandwidth/quality ratio barrier. But, you still have to wait for it, especially long format. It looks good, comparably, but, I can still see them cheating in the compression: motion stutters and blurs, mosquitoes, pixelation, low bit depth contrast ratio. Once we get fibre optic saturation of the market (the capacity rests at over 100 gB ps, but averages 10 to 40), or the new RF frequencies redistributed, then a good looking home theatre environment won’t be seamless. Thus, extended definition, it’s only truly applicable to your production if you have theatrical distribution. Ha!

Thirteen years ago I wasted the monetary equivalent of a fully loaded economy car on a Hi8 A-B roll editing system (with two 3-chip cameras.) That was the year that DV was released. I learned my lesson. Sure, just like HD, a format similar to the RED will be everywhere within two years. The old adage will have been proven again: talent over technology. Its not the batter, its the baker.

Sound Advice

Posted on March 5, 2009

Not advice about audio, but lessons learned from costly mistakes.

The last Executive Producer I worked for took me to lunch one day. As we walked back to the studio he told me in the most earnest way that one should never bring a pornographic film to the station or studio for which one works. Even if its locked in a safe in your car out in the parking lot, even if its in a format your company doesn’t even support, it will find its way onto the air and into your duplications. After these many years, I know for a fact that the most strongly learned lessons are those we glean from disastrous mistakes. Mistakes, Billy Joel said that they’re the only thing that you can truly call your own. People don’t change because they’ve seen the light, they learn because they feel the heat. I saw that on a t-shirt once. My old boss, he neglected to tell me how he had learned that particular lesson. The one about the porno.

What have I learned? That is, what mistakes have I made?

Never take your phone off vibrate. Don’t wear a watch that makes any noise at all. My first day on the job, the DP’s phone rang, interrupting the president’s speech we were taping. Twenty minutes later, my watched beeped the hour. Ten years later, I haven’t worn a watch since.

When I would grip, the old-timers would bitch about actors and management. They claimed that you should never assume that they thought of you as equal. Never assume you’re one of the gang with the talent or creative or the money they would say. No matter how much advice they ask of you, no matter how much they flirt with you. “They see you as a carny with teeth!” Is what he exactly said. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s stuck in my memory.

I’ve had some spectacular disasters that were entirely my fault. When I was an AC, I exposed the feed-side of a 16mm magazine, twice on two separate shoots separated by six months. Sure, one of the magazines had a busted latch, and the other had been out of my control during transport from location to location. But that doesn’t excuse me. There were several best practices, industry standards, I hadn’t employed that would have prevented those errors. That’s where I learned to tape the hell out of the magazine.

My first time as DP for a film shoot, I shot a sequence two stops under-exposed. I didn’t watch my forearm against the exposure ring. I was steadying the camera with my right hand. As I reached across the lens to trigger the camera with my left hand, I just rolled it against the iris ring. That’s where I learned to tape down the ring after metering and setting F-stop. 

My first time working in Hollywood, I was AC, audio, video DP, grip, loader, and Associate Producer/Director, and PA for a project (actually, we were there to shoot several projects simulteneuosly for numerous clients.) There was a very long list of things that went wrong. (The story of how I nearly got fired because I pissed of the talent, three famous personalities, I’ll save for another post.) My two favorite things that went wrong involve audio. I was riding the mobile DAT and shotgun boom as the producer shot 16mm. It was a perfect Universal City day, but I was terrified of wind noise polluting my recording. So, I put the neoprene foam windscreen on the shotgun mic. Then I put it in a blimp. Then I put the cat on the blimp.  Thus, the last two inches of the neoprene foam windscreen was compressed between the end of the shotgun mic and the inside of the blimp. It might as well have been a concrete wall, it was so dense. I don’t know how our post audio guy back home pulled it out of that swamp.

When it was time to interview the big star, there was no handler, MUA, costumer, or anyone to negotiate placing a microphone on him. There was no way I was going to ask his permission to cop a feel as I threaded a lavaliere wire up anddown his shirt. I also knew full well the possible political ramifications of even having the appearance of messing up his costume before his next take (as we only has him for five minutes before his next setup was ready.) So, I draped the mic from behind him, over his shoulder and clipped it to his collarless shirt. It looked terrible, thins wrinkled wire snaking across his neck and shoulder. I at least tried to put it on the upstage shoulder to minimize the impact.

It gets worse. Sure, I had erected the previously mentioned muffled shotgun/boom armed over at him on a c-stand as a secondary audio source. The deal was, I was shooting as well on that project. We had rented a very sweet Sony ENG Beta camera (Model 40, or something.) The engineering menu allowed for me to paint the image such that it seriously rivaled the 16mm footage. So, I was shooting with the Beta camera as a backup/camera B. I knew that the other projects I was shooting for would kill me if I returned with this important interview and it had weak audio (and they had to go crawling to the other producer for his material.) Thus, I wanted good audio for my camera. So, I sent the signal from the DAT outputs into my Beta camera inputs. You may be asking, what the other guy, the producer, was doing while I was grip, gaffer *, audio, 1st/2nd ac, loader, slate, PA**, and DP? He was schmoozing with the talent. So, what got overlooked this time? When the interview was over, I looked down at the DAT. It wasn’t rolling. I hadn’t pushed the record button. I grayed out a bit. Lost the feeling in my hands. I absolutely did not tell him. It was a few minutes before I realized that, fortunately, I had the audio I had rolled on from the beta camera that was usable. (Now I’ve got the audio engineers who may read this ready to kill me over the the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz sampling rates between the two formats.) That’s where I learned that free run time code should only be used in very specific applications. Like when you need to sync to the event’s time of day, etc. I know it’s another piece of equipment to keep up with and feed batteries to, but the timecode transceiver kit to slave the slate is worth the rental price: rolling numbers=rolling decks.

*I had setup this ridiculous 20X silk overhead for him to sit under in order to soften the backlight from the sun. When that was too flat, I setup 4x reflectors to bounce in sunlight for a backlight. So, I was constantly running over to the reflectors to chase the sun back on him to create and effect that looked exactly like he was sitting in the sunlight.

**That was the shoot I spent all day (on the Producer’s orders) getting our graphics guys back home to stop what they were doing in order to make mic flag logos. We never used handheld mics on that shoot.

Three years ago, when I first began my transition into HD, my favorite style was to soften the image slightly in order to reduce the crisp digital quality that some saw as jarring. I accidentally left this feature on one time as a shot a green screen interview. Thankfully, the editor had some great software andwas somehow able to get the shot to key, even with such soft edges. But, my mistake was nothing compared to the other camera operator on that shoot. She kept performing pans, tilts, zooms, all sorts of aggressive artistic movement that was useless against a static 2d non-virtual background. This was after she had beat me down before the shoot (arguing with me about aesthetic choices, technical standards, even a big pissing contest over our careers.) I felt no small amount of schadenfreude watching her shoot herself.

What else? My first two documentaries I shot in grad school had no B-roll. I was so tense over the drama and action, I shot in an incredibly conservative style. I did not want to interfere for fear of them stopping their performances. There were also minimal amounts of reverse shots, close ups, and establishing wide shots.

I shot a concert last summer. Considering my work in theatre, music videos, etc., I felt pretty confident about my ability. Christ, what a disaster! I had very little choreography that corresponded to the music. It was almost as conservative as my grad-school docs from eleven years earlier. I had previously reequested the song list ahead of time so that I could learn the songs and be able to move to the music. The producer let this slip his mind, but that didn’t excuse my rigid performance. My mistake was that I was shooting for the edit (in a journalism style), not the event which called for the cameras to act as dance partner to the musicians. What’s worse is that I had done the exact same thing two years earlier shooting a documentary for the music department at the university I was working at. It seemed to make sense, after a decade of shooting anthropologically, to record the entire event, I had finally learned to shoot for the edit. I had anticipated only using the video with an audio bed from the interview of the performer, not realizing the value of the audio from the concert performance in editing transitions, segues, introductions, and conclusions. Shooting for the edit is  necessity, but with music, it’s different. You have to move to the beat. The editing will require you to get at least an entire chorus or lyric in the take.

I once drove to Austin for a film shoot. We had all intended on using my jib and dolly. I forgot jib’s yolk at at home.

I once blocked cameras into spaghetti during live broadcast. We had over a dozen setups in the large studio. As floor manager, my job was to choreograph the cameras positions to the order of the corespondents. About three quarters of the way through, the cameras had crossed so many times that their triax cables were twisted and knotted so bad that the next camera up didn’t have enough hose to reach the next performer. Sure, we zoomed in and got the shot. But, that did nothing to solve the speaker’s problem: the teleprompter on the camera was now too far away to read. Fortunately, I thought fast: unplug the program monitor in the studio (it was on a cart with plenty of BNC RJ6 composite cable and power extension cord length) and use the teleprompter monitor’s BNC output jack to feed it content. We rolled that monitor close enough to him to read just out of frame for him, using it as a line-of-sight prompter.

I was shooting in a forest once in Texas (overcast winter in a river valley) where there was, of course, only one color in the scene: grey. I didn’t want to chase color balance all day as the sun shot different color temperatures at us each hour. So, I used the camera’s engineering menu to boost the red channel up about five percent. It didn’t give me everything I wanted to warm up the scene. But, it did add a bit to the mid-tones and flesh. I had had plenty of previous experience working with color processes in production and post. Between gaffing choices, choosing unique color balances and camera settings, and finally correcting certain channels in post I had created some very artistic pallets. That was my intention here. But, even though I had explained it to them numerous times, management freaked about it when they saw it in post. They absolutelydid not understand the process. Furthermore, they could not believe that  it was the easiest fix to normalize. That was why I chose it: if they didn’t want a second or third process to finish the look (even though it would have turned out great), it was easily dumped and corrected (I’d done it lots of times.) That was one of  the most important lessons I had on the importance of client education.

I’ve worked with several squirrely consumer grade cameras. I won’t mention the brand that’s been my constant nemesis for 13 years. But, if you know me, you know who they are. My attempts to paint the image with these cameras meets with inconsistent results as the ergonomic design of the cameras fails to meet professional demands. If it’s not the onscreen interface not giving conclusive data about the programming I’m attempting to run, its a lack of features needed to technically or artistically operate the camera. Then, they place the most important button for the look you’ve designed right under the main handle so that when you pick up the camera, your fingers brush this button. Thus, every time you go near that part of the camera, you’re unconsciously and unintentionally either turning on or off these engineering paint presents. I’ve learned the hard way which brands to trust.

Back at that river valley in Texas winter, I had about ten minutes one morning to shoot all the B-roll of the location (for intra-scene seque montages) before the cast and crew invaded it. The increasing light from rising sun was warm (being a cool color temperature), but the dawn lingering  in the valley was cool (because of the hot color temperature frequencies from the sky.) I panicked from the time constraint. I didn’t know what to choose, so I tried to straddle the color balance choices. The result was that the highlights looked yellow, the mid-tones looked purple. I though it was an interesting look. It was out of limits of any software to correct and match with other footage. I knew this andwas hoping they would bring all footage to some middle ground (giving all of those scenes more artistic looks) but management was too conservative for such a risky artistic choice. Sure, I learned not alow myself to be rushed. More importantly, I learned not to be skeptical of  management’s ability to understand the spectrum of artistic possibilities.

Yeah, even after all these years, I’ve accidentally left the auto-focus on, auto iris on, crossed the line of action, didn’t assert myself when a problem arose, etc.

But, my favorite recent mistake is within post. I have a tendency to become impatient with best practices of post production work-flow. My most frequent recent error habit is when I begin to add effects (special, correction, movement, audio, layers, transitions, etc.) and other sweetening processes before my cut is complete. Then when I have to go back in order to make changes, my work-flow is slowed because my project is dragging the computer procceses down because I’ve crammed the prject full of effects and transitions to early. It’s the worst when I do this on individual clips instead of an adjustment layer. Then when a change is required, I have to open up every damn clip for these minor tweaks instead of only just one. 

Every day is another lesson.

So Poor I Can’t Even Pay Attention

Posted on March 4, 2009

I was on a shoot with a basketball theme. Some jackass executive starring in his own vanity project. We were to make this guy appear to be playing with the Lakers. We had an impressive night at the local university coliseum with a dozen extras in Laker uniforms, cheerleaders too. We also had about a hundred extras in the stands. The next day was green screen work back at the studio. We attempted a slam drunk with a wire rig. The previous night we had employed trampolines. We were lucky no one got killed. For one shot, the director and I were passing the ball in a circuit to the Vice president. A momentary lapse in concentration resulted in my getting hit in the face with a basketball. The director completely beaned me in the head full force. It was damn funny.

Pay attention.

That night in the coliseum I overheard mutiny on the microphones. That time I was paying attention. I had wired the three executives for sound and while they were awaiting completion of a setup, they remarked about the time it was taking to make progress in the shoot. The second responded with a derogatory remark about our studio’s professionalism (compared with what they were used to working with back in Hollywood.) The third executive mm-hmmed in agreement. I couldn’t let this insult to our character go unanswered, so I told the producer what I had heard. I told him not to give any indication what his source was. Just inform them about what time investment a proper shooting schedule will logistically require, and how efficient we were running. Because, we were. We were getting a lot accomplished very quickly. So he marches right over to them and states how the audio guy overheard them trash-talking us. I literally ducked under my audio cart as they looked around for me. He threw me under the bus. The producer assumed that, since the four of them were on the other side of the coliseum, I wouldn’t be able to hear their conversation. He forgot that those three were wearing wireless lavalieres. That’s how I heard them in the first place. And then his explanation about our shooting progress was worthless.

I should have paid more attention to whom I could trust.

When I would work crew for that producer and he would direct, he had this odd practice of not paying attention to the performances. He would allow take after take to commence with huge flaws unseen in the shot.

I had to pay attention for him, but didn’t have the authority to fix such problems.

Some personnel from another department came to use our equipment. They were right to complain about how old it was. Considering that the entire industry was in this new digital format we didn’t have, why didn’t we have any of that new equipment, especially since it was so inexpensive. (Specifically, they wanted to shoot on cards, not tape.) I said, yes, I had planned to replace it, but I’ve lost my budget for the year, it wasn’t approved. Therefore, I can solve your problem if you help solve mine: go to management and, as clients, demand this service which will be logically funded through my budget. So, they went to management and bitched about cards and tape. Said I had sent them up there. 

I had not payed attention. If I had, I would have realized they were idiots who knew nothing of politics and lobbying.

Gossip and political espionage. If you’re going to play. You have to pay attention to what you say and whom you say it to. It reminds me of what Sydney Greenstreet said in The Maltese Falcon, “Well, sir, here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding. I distrust a closed-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice. I’m a man who likes talking to a man who like to talk.”

Whipped Like a Rented Mule

Posted on March 3, 2009

Seven years ago, I was shocked to realize that the DP I was AC’ing for was getting paid ten times as much as me. The director would only work with him, they were old friends. They enjoyed the herb on location.

I first began to become irritated when he would ask me technical questions about the equipment. Really? Come on, he had been working with that ARRI camera for over 20 yrs. He kept asking me the same questions about it.

Furthermore, he was growing myopic in his middle age. He had the worst habit of trying to set focus for the shot, even though it was my job, as AC, to measure it off. He wouldn’t tell me that he was doing this. Since he couldn’t see well enough to judge focus at the shot’s current exposure, he kept breaking the gaff tape seal I had placed on the exposure ring. Then he would open up the iris all the way to let in enough light for him to judge focus. Of course, he wouldn’t reset the iris ring back to the f-stop we were shooting at (yet he would close the light valve on the eyepiece?) I didn’t notice it for a while because hewould do this intermittently. I would eventually notice it when I slated the scene and quietly reset it, hoping no one saw me near the lens. (I didn’t report it to the AD or Script because we had several more takes left in the setup, the over-exposed takes weren’t going to be used anyway. For some reason we were rolling on action that hadn’t been fully rehearsed. So, all of the final, good takes were properly exposed.) But, when I would see the gaff tape dangling off the lens I would mentally panic and berate myself for not keeping the camera under my control. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that it couldn’t have happened by accident. I was just so busy. But, this practice eventually resulted in an entire sequence, an entire setup was two stops over exposed. Sure, we were working with Kodaks’s new 400 speed stock with denser grain, but we hadn’t tested it for those circumstances. Everyone had had previous experience with overexposed fast stock, so we weren’t going to trust it. We had to re-shoot that scene the next day.

One day we were on the other side of the state on a music video shoot. This was a job which was a favor for the director, I was working for half pay, so that time this DP was getting 20 times what  was (and I was both 1st, 2nd, slate, focus-puller, video assist, and loader… for two cameras… 35mm! those 400′ rolls at 48fps ran out every two minutes!)  So, he asks me for the 85, I brought him a yellow filter, he bit my head off. Literally yelled at me in front of the crew, “No! The 85mm lens!”

That day they all sat around smoking a box of cigars someone had brought. The biggest insult came when I went to get a new battery for the steady cam op. A lit cigar stub had been left behind the charger, right where I placed my hand to support my weight as I leaned down to harvest the battery. My entire weight, plus tool belt (since I allways operated as swing between electric, grip, and camera department, my belt had three times as much gear as other crew memebrs), plus magazine, and slate. I couldn’t get off the cigar quickly. The blister an was immediately the size if a dime. An hour later, it was as big as a silver dollar. I had to pop it then and cut it off in order to keep working.

While I was doctoring myself, they were all yelling for me (aloud and over the walkies) to get back.

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