Coyote and Thunder

I know I just posted a few days ago, and I really don't like double posting like this, but I just finished a project at school that I am super excited about!  This summer we took a stop motion class and for our final project had to make a short stop motion film.  So here is my final project for stop motion class, "Coyote and Thunder", based on the Native American Klamath myth "Coyote Steals Fire."  I worked with my classmate Susan Curry on this one, and she was the primary animator and did a great job!  I was the photographer and also built most of the set and did the sound editing and color work.  Hope you guys enjoy it!

I'm Going to SIGGRAPH! And Let's Talk About My Second Student Film...

Summer Semester down here in West Palm Beach is coming to an end, and Florida State University's South Florida film initiative with it.  Our film program in West Palm Beach took a sour turn when our partner Digital Domain filed for bankruptcy in late 2012.  As a result, the Board of Governors at FSU decided to move the Digital Arts and Animation film school back to Tallahassee.  We return back to the land of champions (and free crab legs...) later this August.  But not before I take a trip to Vancouver to attend SIGGRAPH 2014!

For those of you that don't know what SIGGRAPH is, don't worry, I don't either.  Well, that's not entirely true, but I certainly am not sure what do expect.  As the banner indicates, SIGGRAPH is an international conference for computer graphics/visual effects and interactive techniques.  Interactive techniques is really referring to knew experimental technology in robotics and engineering and such.  I applied to the student volunteer program earlier this summer and was accepted into it along with a classmate of mine from school.  We will be in Vancouver from August 6-16 volunteering at SIGGRAPH and exploring the conference floor in our free time.  Expect to see some posts on cool things I discover at SIGGRAPH in the near future!

Now, onto the matter of my second student film, which I talked about posting in previous blog posts but never did... Our school is not permitting us to post the rest of our student films online.  This is for two reasons.  First, my film is technically the property of the University and therefore the state of Florida.  Our Professor compared us posting our films on YouTube/Vimeo to JJ Abrams posting Star Wars Episode VII on YouTube before the release date.  It's something we just can't do.  However, if you send me an email or a message on google or Facebook, I can send you a copy to watch if you are interested.  My second film is called "Red Soil".  It was written by a classmate, Lauren Hammond, and was my first step into the vast realm of visual effects.  I will shortly be posting a VFX Demo Reel of mine that will include some shots from "Red Soil", so that should give you guys an idea of what kind of project it is and what kind of work went into it.  I hope it is something you all can enjoy!

In other news, I am in the process of preparing a professional website that I can present to peers and industry professionals when I am at SIGGRAPH, so that should be up shortly.  I am really excited to launch it and make my first mark on the internet as a budding professional.

To finish the post I'll simply say that The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is out on Blu-Ray now, and if you haven't picked up a copy yet you definitely should get your hands on one and give it a good watching.  The bonus features are amazing!  Check it out and enjoy it!  Middle Earth can bring out a childlike wonder in all of us that not much else can.  Until next time, take it easy!

Star Wars: Episode VII and My Upcoming Second Student Film

It's high time I write another post, and I was torn between discussing my excitement for the next installment in the Star Wars saga or writing about my [now completed] second student film.  So... I decided to kill two birds with one stone and write about them both!  I don't really plan theses posts out, so maybe by the end I'll have found some way to tie the two together to give some form of coherency to this post... but probably not.  Let's start with my second student film, "Red Soil."

My second semester of film school was significantly different than the first.  For the vast majority of the first semester, I was ahead of the technical learning curve.  I already had a good deal of experience in cameras, video editing software's, Photoshop, and After Effects.  On the technical spectrum over the course of the first semester, the thing I learned the most about was audio mixing.  I challenged myself to really learn Audition and switch to it as my primary audio editor for both film and music (which I had previously been using Garageband for).  All this was on my own though, although I have to pay it to the school for giving me access to all the softwares and a vast collection of resources to learn from.  However, on the creative end of the first semester, I found all the coursework was geared towards breaking down my current ideas and stances on filmmakers.  I came in with a lot of preconceived notions, and the creative coursework for Semester 1 seemed to really be all about erasing them.  The second semester marked the start of building them back up, while simultaneously presenting new technical challenges for me to grasp in the world of 3D.  The second semester's creative coursework was all about interpreting scripts, directing actors, and really seizing your vision and directing a team to actualize it.  There was very little story training in the second semester, as opposed to the first where we took an entire class on storytelling.  As the creative focus of the second student film was interpretation and directing actors, we were not permitted to write our own script and were instead given a script to interpret.  A pool of about 30 scripts was released and we got to choose the one we wanted to film.  I chose a script called "Red Soil", and I'll get to why in a minute.  As mentioned earlier, the technical focus of the second film was on 3D visual effects, and we began work on 3D modeling, texturing, and rendering in Autodesk Maya.  One of the prerequisites of the second film was that it had to include visual effects.  I chose the script "Red Soil" because it took place on Mars, and out of all the scripts that were presented to us, I thought it would face me with the biggest challenge in terms of visual effects, and the opportunity to learn more about VFX than any other script could.  The script was written by classmate Lauren Hammond, and is about a young girl on Mars who is faced with a critical decision after her brother discovers that the planet's teraformed ecosystem is failing.  The film is now complete, and I can't wait to post it online for people to see!  This summer I will also be creating a VFX breakdown of some of the shots from the film, that I will no doubt be blogging about later.  As for the behind the scenes of "Red Soil", I will definitely be writing a BTS post before too long, but I will probably limit it to just one as opposed to the three I wrote about "Starfishing."  The F2 films were all limited to two and a half minutes, due to the extensive amount of post production work that goes along with VFX (one student passed 1000 hours of render time...), so there won't be that much to talk about.  Furthermore, I view this second student film much less as a personal creative piece of art and much more as a learning experience.  It's not a story I would have written myself, but I challenged myself to pick it up anyway and make it my own while also challenging myself to create the most difficult visual effects I have ever attempted.  I learned sooo much over the process, and I think that with the conclusion of the F2 and the second semester, my preconceived notions had been successfully torn down and the foundation for the rest of my education has been laid.  I can't wait to get into the F3 and use this new knowledge and outlook on filmmaking to a new original story.

One thing several classmates commented about my choice of script was the fact that it was a science fiction, like my F1.  I at first defended myself, saying that I chose "Red Soil" not because it was science fiction, but because it presented me with awesome learning opportunities.  While I still believe that to be true, I can't help but acknowledge a grain of truth to what my classmates were saying... what can I say, I'm a Sci Fi buff!  (Here comes that connection I talked about!)  Star Wars was what inspired me to become a filmmaker, and all (literally ALL) of my first home movies were Star Wars movies.  JJ Abrams had solidified himself as my favorite contemporary director with the release of Star Trek II: Into Darkness, and then when they announced he would be directing Star Wars VII I literally flipped.  I have never been so excited for a film in my entire life, and honestly I have complete confidence in the filmmaking crew that is making Episode VII, especially since they are reportedly following George's original story outlines for Episode VII.  I believe that while George Lucas might not be the worlds best screenwriter, often times poor with dialogue, overkilling comic relief, and struggling with pacing, he is a FANTASTIC story teller who has constructing the amazing story that is Star Wars.  Hiring great writers like JJ Abrams (Super 8, Armageddon) and Lawrence Kasdan (Empire Strikes Back) to write Lucas' story for Episode VII fixes that problem and presents us with - hopefully - the best screenplay possible.  I also love JJ's visual style - yes, I'm a fan of the lens flares - and know that the film will look amazing.  JJ is a character driven director, which is exactly what the saga needs after a story-centered prequel that received the amount of criticism and disdain that it did.  When it comes to plot and storyline, JJ prefers to emphasize the mystery.  He gave a fantastic Ted Talk on what he calls the Mystery Box, this idea that so long as you keep the box shut, no matter what is inside the audience will keep watching.  I think this is most apparent in Lost.  I think the combination of a character centered film with a brand new Star Wars mystery for audiences to be intrigued by, following the treatment of one of the greatest storyteller's of our generation along with the return of the beloved original cast will make for a fantastic film.  I'm confident this film will be awesome, and I just can't wait for it.  I had to write a post about it in some way shape or form, because going back to Star Wars is going back to my roots.  It's why I'm here in the first place, and while I am my own filmmaker with my own ideas and my own stories to tell, Star Wars will always hold a special place in my heart (along with Lord of the Rings) and will always be an influence to me in everything I make... and who knows, with three new Star Wars films (plus spin offs) on the horizon, and my upcoming graduation form film school (2016), I might even find a spot on one of them... At least I hope so :)

This particular post almost seemed barfed out my brain, with one paragraph teasing at upcoming posts and the other fanboying over Star Wars, proving my true nerd-dome to the galaxy.  But hey, it's something to keep the blog going while I wait for the distribution process of "Red Soil" to complete (Hopefully May 28).  If you have any thoughts about Episode VII or Star Wars in general, post them in the comments (although I don't expect anyone to), because who doesn't like a good discussion about Star Wars!?

What "Starfishing" Means to Me and Various Happenings In My Life

In my Behind the Scenes posts for "Starfishing", I mentioned that I wanted to write a fourth part that involved the more personal elements of what my film meant to me and what I hoped it would mean to others.  I've decided to take a different approach to discussing those things based on some things that have happened to me lately, so this is really as close to a Behind the Scenes of "Starfishing" Part 4 that I'm going to get.

I'll start with a question.

Have you ever been scammed?

It's a horrible feeling, and one I experienced for the first time this week.  It was about 9:50pm and I was rushing to get to Publix before it closed so I could buy some groceries for the week.  I had spent a little bit too much money as of late so I knew I needed to get some cheap groceries that could last me the week.  I made it in time and got about $20 worth of food, feeling good about myself.  On the way out the door a man stopped me and asked for $3 for a bus ticket.  He explained to me that his car was broken down and he had to meet his daughter somewhere.  I would have loved to help him out for the small price of $3, but I was out of cash.  I told him I was sorry, and started to walk away but he continued to ask if there was anything that I could do.  He said he was running out of time and that no one would help him.  I really wished I could have helped him, because he seemed genuinely worried and he was only asking for $3.  At this point he pulled out a Publix gift card and asked me if I would buy it off of him.  I told him again that I had no money, so he offered to go into Publix with me to try to cash it out.  But Publix was closed, and the door was being guarded by a police officer, so we couldn't go it.  Finally he remembered that there was an ATM down the street and begged me to please buy the gift card from him.  Finally I agreed and walked with him to the ATM and withdrew $20.  On the way I got to know him a little better.  He was from Louisiana but went to school in Illinois and got a major in political science.  He was 64 years old and a middle school teacher at a local middle school.  In the 70s he played two years of pro football with the Minnesota Vikings.  He also told me he was a Christian and that he believed God was always looking out for him.  Finally I bought the gift card from him and we parted ways.  As I examined the card, I noticed some funny things.  It appeared it had already been peeled off the cardboard cover.  The $25.00 was sloppily written on the card in smeared ink.  And then it occurred to me: this is a used card and I just paid a man who told me his sob story $20 for it.  The more I thought about it the more it made sense.  He was hanging around Publix at the time he knew it closed, and told me that the card was legitimate and that I could go in and check the balance knowing that Publix was closed, but pretended not to know.  He didn't follow me to the door where the police officer was standing.  He made sure to stress that he was a good Christian man and he knew exactly where the ATM was and what the fee was (he made sure to mention it was only a $3 fee).  He also told a detailed story about his life in effort to gain my trust.  As I walked back to my car, I realized that I had been had.  It was a frustrating realization, and also a sad one.  It makes me sad to know that there are dishonest people out there who will take advantage of the people who actually are willing to help.  I called my parents and explained to them why my account would be $23 emptier then went home and called it a night.

The next day I went back to Publix and decided to check the balance of the card just incase.  I knew it was going to be in vain, but in my heart I kept this small since of hope that maybe this guy was an honest man.  I handed the card to the cashier and waited for the balance.  Finally the receipt printed.  Balance: $25.00.  I was shocked.  I wasn't scammed!  It was such a good feeling to know that not only was I not scammed but that I was able to help someone out that was in need.  Fiscally, the world seems to scream that having a good conscious can be a naive thing, and I was afraid I had learned that the hard way.  But in the end my act of kindness had paid off.  But that emotion got me thinking: what if I had been scammed?  Perhaps I simply lucked out this time and really was being naive...

But the more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that if I had to go through that experience again I would do exactly the same thing.  There are only two possible outcomes: I help the man out and keep my money, or I help the man out and lose my money.  But there is only one possible cause: that this man needed help.  Either he was in a tight situation or desperate enough to result to scamming people in the streets of West Palm Beach.  Either way, I was in a position to help this man who needed help whether he was humble enough to admit it or not, and so I sit confidently knowing that even if I had been scammed I did the right thing.  (Now this is not to say that everyone is in the position to help and should just fork over $20.  For some people that $20 could be the difference in keeping the lights on or feeding a family, and if you are not in a position to help then I believe you should kindly move on, but I was not in that tight of a situation.)

And that brings me to the other morning.  I decided to meet a friend at taco bell breakfast (PS it's really good if you haven't tried it yet) before heading into the computer lab to work some more on the visual effects of my upcoming film.  As I was leaving taco bell, a homeless man rode up on a bicycle and started a long speech about the labor pool etc etc.  Essentially he needed food, and unfortunately today homeless people have come to realize that without an explanation, most people won't pitch in to help them get the food they need.  I didn't care for the story, I told him I would go in and buy him a meal, so I did.  In this specific instance, the words of my old youth minister echoed through my head: "If a homeless man turns down a free meal from taco bell he's either not homeless or something's wrong with him."  Food is a human necessity that everyone needs, and I believe buying someone a meal is a great way to show them that there are people out there that care about them... ESPECIALLY if it's Taco Bell, I mean, come on.

As a Christian, I believe that the Gospel message is abundantly clear when it comes to helping other people and showing them God's love.  Jesus' story is full of examples where he helped people who, by all Jewish standards, shouldn't have been helped at all.  In fact, most of the great stories in the Gospels involve Jesus helping sinners who were unworthy of the Jew's time, or let alone of God's grace. But the fact is we are all unworthy of God's grace, yet He gives it to us anyway.

That is the Gospel message, and that is a message that I want all of my films to support.

I've heard the expression before, "If you give a man a fish, he can eat for a day.  But if you teach a man to fish, he can eat for the rest of his life."  This is a concept I completely agree with, and I hope that someday I will be in a position to support charities and organizations that "teach men to fish."  However, I believe this expression is often misinterpreted to "Don't give a man a fish, teach him to fish instead."  But I don't think this can be more wrong.  Sometimes, giving someone that fish can be the first step in teaching them to fish, and you never know when that fish you give them - whether it's $20 for a bus fare or a steak burrito from taco bell - could change their life forever, or even save it.

I believe that when you are in a position to help someone, there really are no negative side effects to helping them.  "Starfishing" was a small film during which I tried to explore the value of selflessness and helping others, but hopefully someday I will be able to make films that explore the values of love, mercy, grace, redemption, and sacrifice in a way that is intriguing, convicting, challenging, and exciting for everyone, not just Christians.  I want to make films with themes that people of all different world views will be proud to stand by and support, yet not lose the heart of the Gospel message.  To me, "Starfishing" is about much more than helping others because it embodies my dreams and aspirations as a filmmaker.  I hope that everyone can gather something unique from the film, but that through it all the central message of loving others and helping those in need shines through.

The Making of "Starfishing" - A Behind the Scenes Blog: Part 3

Well, here at FSU we just wrapped production on our second student films, so I think it is high time I finish writing about my first student film.  This blog will focus on the post-production process for my F1.  While I would love for people to learn something form this blog, I'm not treating it as a tutorial so I won't go too deep into anything technical that I did.  But if you have any questions, as always feel free to ask! :)

Post-Production

With Production wrapped, and one quick weekend to wind down, it was time to enter the lab.  The lab can be interesting.  My school has two computer labs: a mac lab and a PC lab.  Both labs are connected to the same server and have all the same software installed, but the PC's are stronger machines.  Unfortunately with that being the case, the upperclassmen claimed the PC lab as their own, not letting us in without some form of right of passage.  But it's really okay, the macs are great machines too and I personally likes OSX better than Windows anyway.  The lab can be a fun place... Lock 15 film students in a room full of computers for about 50 hours and you will get some interesting results.  I'll leave it at that.  The lab was where I went through the first stage of post production: the edit.

The Edit

For "Starfishing", I shot around 80 minutes of footage.  All of this had to be taken off the camera card and brought onto the computers.  For this, I used Adobe Prelude.  Prelude can seem like a worthless program sometimes if you have ever used it before, and honestly I didn't even take advantage of it really when editing my film.  But it did serve one immensely useful purpose.  The Canon XF305 initializes the CF cards in such a way that it stores each clip in a separate folder.  If you were to simply drag on drop the clips off the CF card straight into your editor, you would have gotten a hundred bins inside your project window and you would have had to open each one individually to find all your footage.  Using Prelude bypassed this problem.  Prelude pulled all the clips out of the folders for me and allowed me to name each clip before shipping them off to my editor, Adobe Premiere.

Once in Premiere I started editing right away.  The first cut of my film went really well, but I did face a small internal battle.  I knew we were going to have to screen our first cut to faculty, so while I really wanted to smooth out all of my audio cuts, I was afraid it would be a huge waste of time because I was just going to have to recut a lot of it anyway.  But I did it anyway and made my audio sound nice and smooth... and sure enough, after getting some GREAT feedback from faculty, smoothing out the audio proved to be totally worthless as I had to redo it all again anyway.  I went through five cuts of the film before I was satisfied with what I had.  In the first cut, my professor rightly pointed out that I rode on way too many close ups.  Instead of cutting to close ups to make an emotional impact, they served as my primary source of dialogue coverage.  So in my second cut I worked really hard to fix that, but as a result I think I had way too many wide shots and not nearly enough close ups.  In my third cut, I think I finally found a nice balance.  Then came the fourth and fifth cuts, by far the hardest.  Getting everything down on my timeline was easy, but by the time I reached my fourth and fifth cuts all that was left to do was fix some minor issues or improve small areas I wasn't quite happy with.  Sometimes the difference between a bad cut and a great cut can be just a few frames, and that's what the fourth and fifth cuts came down to: fixing the tiniest issues in an attempt to make a huge impact.  I believe in my fifth cut I ended up only making one chance from my fourth cut, but figuring out that one change took just as long as laying down my entire first cut did!  The devil's in the details, that's for sure.  Once I finessed the edit, I was able to move on to the visual effects.

The Visual Effects

The visual effects in this film were pretty small, and to pull them off I used Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop.  The only VFX shots in the film are the shots involving Hope's power cell.  To pull off the effect, I made a battery graphic in Photoshop and then motion tracked it onto the prop in After Effects using Corner Pin tracking.  Then I just changed the blend mode, slapped some glow on there, and did any necessary rotoscoping (altering the shot frame by frame) work needed to make sure it passed beneath Hope's shirt.  Finally I had to mess with the opacity keyframes in the shot where the battery flickers off.  It was all around a pretty simple shot and I'm super happy with how it turned out.

The Color Grade

After my cut with visual effects was complete, I was able to move on to possibly my favorite part of the post production process: color.  I graded my film in Da Vinci Resolve using the schools Tangent Wave board, and let me say, I was BLOWN AWAY by the awesomeness of this program and this board.  It has spoiled me and I hate color grading on anything else ever since.  To grade the film, I made a new timeline in Premiere and flattened it all down to one video layer, then I deleted the sound and exported the sequence as an EDL.  In Da Vinci, I imported all of my source media from the server and then imported the EDL and reconnected all the edits in the conform window (now the "edit" window in Resolve 10).  The grade itself was really two steps: first I went through and matched the color of all the shots.  This was essential because as we shot outside, the light from the sun was always changing due to cloud cover and time of day.  Matching all the shots was essential.  For this task I relied mostly on the scopes, matching each clip to the clip from that scene that I liked the most. After I completed the color correction, I moved onto the creative part of the process which is the grade.  First, I added a lot of emphasis on my characters faces by tracking some power windows over their heads and raising the levels.  Second I adjusted the overall color balance of the image. Then I adjusted all of the contrast to something I was happy with.  For a lot of the shots, to accomplish the right contrast I used a technique designed to emulate a bleach bypass by creating a layer node, desaturating the top layer, and then chaining the blend mode to overlay.  This effect can sometimes look amazing, and in a lot of my shots it really did.  Finally I went through and sharpened a lot of shots, especially around the eyes.  Adding a sharpening power window around a characters eyes really makes them pop, a trick I learned from colorist David Lindberg.  Check out his website, http://lindbergdavid.com for some great inspiration.  Once I completed all of these steps (which took about two entire days) I exported my footage as uncompressed 4:2:2 8-bit (what the Canon XF305 shoots in) and brought it back into Premiere.  Now it was time to move onto audio.

The Sound Mix

For my sound mix I used Adobe Audition.  I like to think of sound as one of those areas that I think I know a lot about but I really don't.  Every time I think I learn how to do something really cool, I listen to some reference of professional mixes and realize how crappy mine really is.  Reference is so important: when you are sitting in a sound room by yourself listening to nothing but your own mix for 6 straight hours, you start making some decisions that you think are great.  Then you leave for 2 hours to grab some lunch, come back, give it a listen and want to slap yourself in the face.  My biggest piece of advice for sound mixing: unless you are a professional, educated mixer, listen to professional mixes for reference and try to match them.  It will help you a ton, and this is something I WISH I had done during "Starfishing."  Instead I tried to mix it myself, which proved to be a huge challenge.  Nonetheless, after 4 or 5 days in the mixing room banging my head on the desk wondering why nothing seemed to work, I think I came out with something pretty decent compared to what I started with.  The natural sound of the alleyway was horrible, and I did a fairly good job I think of pulling a good amount of that sound out of the shots.  I pulled enough anyway to make the dialogue at least understandable, which I was satisfied with after 4 days of going nowhere.  I ended up using a notch filter to pull out background sound.  The notch filter identifies specific frequencies and eliminates them with a little bit of falloff on the surrounding frequencies.  It worked wonders in my alleyway in ways that noise reduction could never dream, and when paired with track EQ's and the sound effects, I think it turned out alright.  Something that was really fun about the sound mix though was my foley sound effects.  Our school has a foley booth set up with all kinds of interesting things to make interesting sounds with.  I set up a couple of microphones and recorded some great footsteps, rustling clothes, impacts, breathing, and other various sound effects to use in the film.  This was actually a lot of fun, and I could see myself hanging around the foley guys on some film someday just to have fun.  I also downloaded a lot of sound effects from Creative Commons websites, which were promptly credited in my film.  It all came together to make a decent overall mix, although the sheer amount of on set noise just made it difficult to hear some of the lines, no matter what I tried in post.  So this is the part of the blog where I obligatorily state to all budding filmmakers: get good audio on set.  You won't regret it.  I wish we had been permitted the use of lavalieres on the F1 set, and also I wish our school had a sound blimp to put over our shotgun microphones.  I think that would have made a huge difference.  Nonetheless, I think what I ended up with was pretty good, and I'm proud of all the work I put into the mix :)

•          •          •

Well, today is March 29, 2014, two whole days after taco bell breakfast has been released and I still haven't even tried it.  I think I'm gonna head that way now and try one of those AM crunch wraps before heading back to the lab to do everything I just talked about again on my second student film.  Oh the life of a film student - it really is awesome :)

The Making of "Starfishing" - A Behind the Scenes Blog: Part 2

"Go make your movie."

~ J.J. Abrams

I love this quote.  It is literally four extremely simple words stuck together into an extremely simple sentence, but it encompasses so much more than the simplicity could ever imply.  Filmmaking is all about passion, and if you don't have it, it will show.  In the context of the interview, JJ was asked, "Do you have any advice for young filmmakers?" to which he answered, almost dumbfounded by the question as if the answer was obvious, "Go make your movie!"  He then began rambling on about how easy it is for the kids of my generation to pick up a video camera and start shooting movies, whenever they possibly can, and how that will build the passion that you need to succeed.  This concept was in the back of my mind throughout the entire production cycle of "Starfishing"; this wasn't a student film that I was making for a grade, this was my movie that I was making because I wanted to.  Treating it that way is the first step to becoming immensely passionate about your project, and it's that passion that will drive you (as it drove me) to stay up all night in the lab, to put in the extra hours in the color suite, to do your own foley sound recording, to properly mix and master your soundtrack, to edit and re-edit your film five, six, seven times; having passion is the first step in the production cycle, everything else is all just sticking to your guns and following through.

PRODUCTION

The policy at FSU for F1 production is that you get one 12 hour day to shoot with a one hour break at the halfway point for lunch, totaling to 13 hours.  The faculty are very strict on the schedule, meaning that not only are you done shooting by the 13th hour, but that you are completely packed up and disappeared by the 13th hour, as if you were never there in the first place.  This obviously creates a time crunch, but once preproduction is complete, the actual physical production of the film is a relatively straight-forward process.  Assuming you did your homework in preproduction, what you do on set as a director should feel completely natural and, in theory, everything will run smoothly.  This isn't to say there aren't any snags - on the contrary, you will always, ALWAYS, run into problems on set.  In all the sets I've been on in film school, something has always gone wrong.  During the filming of "Starfishing", one restaurant bordering the alleyway had their septic tank pumped, so for about two hours we couldn't use the alley; another restaurant was having their grand opening, but their kitchen wasn't finished yet so all day chefs and construction crew were coming in and out right by our set and making A LOT of noise; we filmed the third scene of the film - when Hope is running around like crazy - first, but then it started pouring rain, so we filmed the whole scene again in the rain; our extension chords weren't long enough to reach our set during the night shoot, so we had to move the whole set down the alley to a backup location that wasn't ideal (but ended up working really nicely); and finally, filming in a city by a crowded city street meant noise, and A LOT of it - a lot of really great takes were ruined by car horns or street noise or passerby's.  All this goes to show that when filming a film, expect that nothing will go right.  I mean this honestly: if you do that, you will remain mentally stable when nothing does go right and become mentally awesome when things do go right.

As I mentioned above, the physical production is a relatively straight forward process.  So what I will do is talk a little bit about some of the directorial decisions I made during production, but mostly just show a lot of photos from the production.  The photos are fun and they capture what the essence of the production was like much more than my descriptions can.

WORKING WITH ACTORS

The hardest part for me during production was remembering that the performances of my actors are worth a lot more than the frame they are staged in.  That's why a black and white movie from the 1930s can still hold merit today, even without the amazing technology we now have.  This was probably the single biggest thing that I learned during my first semester at film school, and it was very difficult for me to hand off the camera to my crew and then walk away and work with my actors.  Trusting that they were going to set up the scene the way I pictured it in my head was difficult to do, but the detailed storyboards and floor plans from preproduction made it easy for them and the results they got were incredible.  While working with my actors, I would always walk away from the set and then just let them rehearse the scene.  I would give my input and then they would go again.  From my classes, I was encouraged to never read a line to an actor.  "We want inspiration, not imitation," my professor said.  This was difficult for me - it was a new way of working.  But I trusted my professors and the result was outstanding.  By giving my actors motivations, stakes, and objectives - as opposed to where I desired various inflections and pauses and changes in volume - I was truly able to mold and shape their performances to help them jump off the page.  Once we did get back to set to start shooting, I would do the same thing: after each take, a little praise, a little critique, and then right back at it.  And on the note of praise, I can't stress how important that is.  No actor likes to sit there and be critiqued all day.  Besides, odds are your actor is a much better actor than you!  Praise your talent for every good thing they give you.  It really improves the morale of the set and helps their performances reach the next level.

Working with actors away from the set was an important part of the process.

Ryan, truly focussed.  Nikki... uh.... 

Big shout out to Nikki for being a trooper through the freezing, wet day. 

Ryan waiting for us to finish building the set.

Performing a scene.

Working with Nikki.

It really was a wet day.  The umbrellas were super helpful.

"Ryan you do what I tell you or else!"

CHOOSING THE FRAME

Despite the fact that I trusted my crew to set the initial frame while I worked with my actors, the frame was still very important to me.  The frame to me is much more than the relative positioning of actors and the camera on set though.  To me, the frame involves all the technical aspects as well, ensuring that I can have the best possible image quality and color to support the feel of my film.  Something I brought with me to set from my background in shooting DSLR filmography was the importance of proper exposure.  We shot our F1's on the Canon XF305, which is a broadcast quality camcorder.  From my understanding, it is aimed primarily at news crews.  The XF305 would be absolutely fantastic for documentary filmmaking, but can really be hard to work with on a film set, especially when coming from a DSLR background.  Some key functions we are used to like ISO, Picture Style, Color Space, and interchangeable lenses are entirely gone.  Others like aperture, shutter speed, and focal length are present but entirely different.  However, a bright side to the XF305 is it's picture quality.  Unlike DSLR's which shoot in the messy h.264 codec, the XF305 shoots its own MXF format, which is a wrapper for some from of MPEG-2.  I'm not entirely sure how it works but the bottom line is that the clarity is AMAZING.  You don't get the pixel dancing on the XF305 that we might be used to on the Canon EOS DSLR series, including the 5D Mark II at times.  But the downside to this is how slow the lens is on the XF305.  If you turn off the lights you just aren't going to see anything.  Period.  My solution to this was to shoot my film at a completely neutral exposure, drop the camera gain to the lowest possible setting (even lower than the default "Low" setting), and to use tons and tons of on set lighting.  This kept my actors bright even in the even of having to underexpose a shot to keep detail, kept all noise out of the shot, and kept my colors as neutral as possible for leeway in post.

Another decision I made about my frame was to shoot in a 2.35 widescreen format.  The downside to letter boxing 1080p video to appear to be shot in anamorphic widescreen is the loss of data: by doing this I effectively cancel out about 33% of my frame.  But I chose the widescreen because I believe that widescreen can greatly add to the feeling of isolation and desperation when used properly, which I believe really paid off in my third scene.  I also believe it lends itself to tension more than a full frame.  When you look at a square and a rectangle side by side, which appears to have more action?  I believe that narrower frames add an inherent dynamic to the composition that seems to imply complexity mores than a full frame.  Finally, I believed that by cropping a third of my image out of the frame, I would help to hide the shortcomings of the XF305 and thus help keep my audience interested in the story as opposed to being thrown off by poor quality video.  Shooting on the XF305 meant overexposing a lot of skies to keep my actors bright.  Cutting out those skies threw my audience's focus completely onto the characters - which is what is important - on top of placing them in a medium they are more accustomed to seeing (most films are shot widescreen), all adding to what I hope is an increased immersion in the film.

Finally came the actual composition of the frame, which is the most important part of all.  My storyboards were very helpful during this part of production, and for the most part my director of photography, Victoria, nailed the framing every time.  I simply handed her my board, showed her where I wanted the frame on set, walked away to work with my actors, and when I came back it was done.  This also applied to lighting.  I would tell Victoria what kind of look and feel I wanted and when I came back the lighting would be almost spot on.  As for lighting though, I had a very specific plan in mind.  I really wanted to stress the depth of the alley, so I threw really cool blues into the background while keeping he foreground warm.  I also really wanted to showcase the grittiness of the world while staying true to reality.  This was difficult, because in real life alleyways have soft, overhead, tungsten lighting but I wanted a really hard lighting feel.  It was a difficult balance between finding my light source and applying just the right amount of diffusion, but my gaffer Grace Colley did a great job.  Obviously, there was a lot of tweaking throughout the day, in both the framing and the lighting.  No one can exactly match my vision without being in my head, it's not philosophically (or physically) possible.  My general on set workflow, therefore, went a little something like this: at the start of a new setup I would show Victoria the storyboard and light plan and explain to her what I wanted.  Then I would walk off set and work with my actors while Victoria would work with the crew to set up the set how I wanted it.  When it was done, my assistant director Justin would come and get me and the actors and bring us to the newly built set.  I would then place my actors where they needed to be and do some rough blocking, then tweak the camera and lights until they were perfect and start rolling.  At the end of a setup we would tear it down and start all over again.

My Director of Photography, Victoria Cragg

Boom Operator Elangie Pereda works with Victoria.

Checking the frame.

Elangie booms a wide shot from far away.

"Who wrapped this cable grrr..."

Ta Da!

A wide shot of the set

Victoria filming a shot.

Cinema?  I direct dat.

Grizzly.  Et Syder y Razza.

Getting ready to roll!

You can see the 2.35 widescreen bars farming Ryan.

Cool DIY dolly rig.

Victoria goes hard.

The start of the night shoot.

Directing at night.

Deeply thinking... I'm sure it's about dinner.

Shooting into a light always looks cool.

•         •         •

I hope you guys enjoyed this post and that it didn't get too dry with some of the technical stuff there in the middle.  I know in my last post I said I would touch on post-production in this post also, but I think this post just reached a point where it got too long.  I never want my posts to dry out by the end, and if I am reaching that point please let me know in the comments!  Finally, I just want to make one remark about all of the pictures: one crew member who is missing from all of my pictures is my gaffer, Grace Colley, and that's because she's the one taking the pictures!  So a huge thanks to Grace for taking all these awesome pictures for me, I really do love all of them!  On that note, keep checking in for my next post on the post-production process and then what will be my fourth and final post in this BTS Blog which will touch more on the personal side (the -losophy) of the film for me.  Thanks again for reading and showing your support :)

The Making of "Starfishing" - A Behind the Scenes Blog: Part 1

In my most recent post, I showed you all my first student film here at FSU, titled "Starfishing", and made a little promise at the end that I would write a few more posts on the film.  I want to go ahead and make good on that promise and dive into the film right now :)

A fair warning - making a film involves creative and technical stages, and making a good film involves taking command of them both.  These looks into my thought process will include both sides of that equation, and if you have no interest in the numbers and technical know-how, feel free to just skip those sections and move on ahead.  No feelings will be hurt.

DEVELOPMENT

Every film starts with an idea.  My idea came suddenly while sitting around my apartment on the day before concepts were due in Story class.  You never know when ideas will hit; waiting until the day before the story concepts were due wasn't procrastination.  Rather, I just hadn't had an inspired idea hit me in time, and as a result I had to force myself to come up with an idea to meet a deadline - something I am not entirely fond of.  Idea after idea rolled off my pen and onto my paper and they all just  felt forced, I can't really explain it any other way.  They weren't right.  Finally I looked over at my TV and the mess of plugs around it and wondered how I ever got anything plugged in.  BING!  Idea.  This was a natural idea that popped up on its own accord - by accident - as opposed to me racking my brain looking for something.  That being said, right away I already knew it was a better idea.  Who's going to write the better paper, the student who has to write an essay for school or the author who writes whatever he or she wants?  My point is that I believe that working and building upon inspired ideas will always lead to a better end than trying to build upon those that are uninspired.  Moreover, the idea is absolutely crucial.  It is your cornerstone, and although the building  may change throughout construction, the cornerstone must remain as a firm foundation.

After we (my class) submitted our concepts to class and received feedback from our professor, we were instructed to expand the concept into a fully fledged story treatment.  A treatment is essentially a deeper investigation into the idea.  A treatment serves to hammer out the actual story beats and develop a specific plot on top of the general idea.  You may know that in your story you want your character to travel from New York to LA, but how does your character get there?  Does she take a car?  A plane?  A train?  These are the details that have to be detailed out in the treatment.  Furthermore, a treatment is a great place to explore your world, characters, and themes.  As my professor put it, a treatment should effectively answer every question about your film: who, what, when, where, why, and how.

After submitting our treatments to our professor and, of course, receiving feedback, we went ahead and dove into the first drafts of our film.  Unfortunately, this fell on week 7 of the semester, and if you have already read my post about weekend project 6 (which was actually on week 7), you will know that that was no easy weekend.  If you haven't read that post, you can check it out here.  As a result, we had a class writing party at IHop... at 2 in the morning... with all you can drink coffee... One long night later, we finally got to bed at the healthy hour of 5 in the morning, only to wake up at 8 to make it to class by 9 to submit our first drafts.

My first draft was substantially different than what my film turned out being, and for that I am immensely grateful.  The wisdom of my faculty and advice of my peers went a long way in revising my script to what eventually became the final draft, which I believe was a much more powerful piece than what I originally started with.  Four minutes is not a lot of time to make a film, and sometimes it is really tempting to try to tell a cohesive story within than four minutes as opposed to defining a moment.  In my opinion, finding a moment and fleshing it out - for all that it's worth - can be much more powerful in four minutes than trying to create an intriguing plot.  I think PIXAR does a fantastic job with this, and the PIXAR shorts were a huge inspiration to me in making "Starfishing".  PIXAR shorts always tell a story, but focus completely on the characters and their emotions as opposed to their lives.  OR, the films have a witty ending that leaves the audience entertained (like "Geri's Game").  In either case, the films focus on a single aspect of each character's life as opposed to following them around and learning their story.

But all that PIXAR stuff aside (man, it really is easy to go off topic when freeform writing in a blog - in fact, just yesterday... wait a minute), by the end of week 11 of the semester, my final draft was locked and I was ready to begin production!  But of course, I wouldn't have been able to enter production without all the work I put into the film during preproduction... which conveniently overlapped with the development stage, making our lives much easier...

PREPRODUCTION

Aw man, did I say easier?  What I meant was the opposite of that.  Generally speaking, a film won't enter preproduction until the film is developed to the point that preproduction work won't be in vain.  This isn't to say the script is always finalized before preproduction.  In fact, most scripts are constantly revised all the way through filming!  But rather, elements of the film are developed enough that the filmmakers can begin preproduction work on the film knowing that the work they do will in fact contribute to the the film as it is seen on the screen.

For the sake our F1's, the preproduction work that was required included a minor script analysis (I thought it was a major script analysis until I started my second semester), storyboards, shot designs/floor plans, and production design.  What was unfortunate was that as I would complete a draft of storyboards, I would radically change the script and have to go back and do them all over again.  Trying to balance all of that and yet maintain my 6-8 hour a day class schedule proved to be difficult, but I definitely got it done.  The weekends were a big help.

My storyboards went through a couple of revisions before I was happy with them, and obviously I couldn't finish them until my script was complete.  Once I finished my storyboards, I passed them off to my director of photography, Victoria Cragg, to design the shots based on my framing.  For Victoria, this meant figuring out exactly where to place the camera, where to place the lights, and how to balance the lights to the correct colors.  This phase of preproduction we call shot design... I'm not sure if there is an official name for it, but basically we just make a floor plan of what the final setup will like including all the actors, lights, and cameras from a birds eye view.

As for production design, for our F1's we were our own production designers, meaning we had to gather our own props, set dressing, and wardrobe.  I had plenty of time to do that, because although my script radically changed from the first draft to the last, the world and the characters stayed more or less the same.  As a fun fact for the costumes, for the holes and wear and tear on Red's pants, my Dad took a blowtorch to them.  I was skeptical at first but it turned out great!  Moral of the story: you never know when a good blow torch may come in handy while filmmaking.

My final piece of the preproduction puzzle was the script analysis.  Before shooting, I made sure to meet with both of my actors and go through a rehearsal process.  This is where I identified the beats of the story with my actors and went through their motivations and objectives with them.  It was an extremely helpful process that proved to be incredibly valuable when we got to set, and even more valuable in the cutting room when editing the film.  After we read through the script several times and decided on story beats, we blocked out the scene so that when we got to the set we would have a good idea of exactly where each character needed to be and how we would accomplish each shot.

•             •            •

In my next blog post I will go into production and post production.  Then, hopefully I'll have a third post where I go into miscellaneous aspects of the film, like what it meant to me and why I told the story I told.  The title of my blog mixes the words cinema and philosophy, and so far I've had a lot of the cine- and very little of the -losophy.  I definitely hope to be able to touch mere on the latter soon.  And I know I warned about the potential of some highly technical paragraphs, but for the most part it looks like I stayed away from those this time around :)  Although beware, the technical will most definitely return in the next post when I tackle post production, so stay tuned for that.

And I know I said this last post but I just want to emphasize it again - for the few that read my blog, thank you so much.  It really means a lot more than you might think.

My First Student Film! - "Starfishing"

I've been trying to get around to this post for a couple of months now, and finally here it is!  All those weekend projects I posted and all the classes I went through during my first semester all lead up to this production.

Each person in my class wrote and directed their own student film.  We began the writing process in our story class a few weeks into the semester.  As the semester went on, each class began to devote more time an effort into our first student films (called F1's - see the Film School Lingo post).  After writing the script, we had to break it down both from a creative standpoint and a production standpoint.  Creatively, we looked for beat changes and various strategies that the characters used to reach each beat objective.  This in turn affected how we directed our actors during rehearsal and on set.  From a production standpoint, we broke down the script looking for what locations, characters, props, and other expenses would be needed.  Eventually we held a casting call and I cast two wonderful actors: Ryan McInerney and Nikki Smith.  Both of them did an excellent job both in rehearsal and on set and were awesome to work with.  Finally our regularly scheduled courses ended in week 11 of the semester, and we went into production on Monday of week 12.  Each student had one 12 hour shooting day to complete their film, and we entered post production on week 13.  We had the next three and a half weeks to edit our films until viola, we reached our finished products!

I will write more about the film later - I hope to have a couple more posts where I go more in depth into the film, the production cycle, and what my film means to me.  But that being said, please check out my first student film!  Please share it and show it to your family and friends, it would really mean a lot to me.  For my small audience out there, thanks so much for the support.  It really does mean a lot :)

Weekend Project #7 - Hearing Things

At long last!  I have gotten around to posting my seventh and final weekend project.  I love posting these weekend projects and sharing them with you guys - however small an audience you may be - however, I must confess, I have been really eager to finish posting these weekend projects so I could start posting some of the really cool stuff we have been up to here at FSU film.  I wanted to post these weekend projects before anything else, so that chronologically in the archive they would be my earliest posts.  They are the first things we did at film school, an honestly they don't compare in quality to anything else we do here, so I want them to almost hide deep in the archive, where they shan't ever be found…

Okay so I'm partly kidding.  I take pride in all of my work, and would show any of these weekend projects to anyone on any day, buy I am absolutely stoked to be done posting them and get to move on to some of the much more awesome work I have been up to.  So with that being said, let's get on with this post.

This project was all about using offscreen sounds to propel a story forward.  I decided to take on the additional challenge of mixing the entire project within my NLE, Adobe Premiere Pro, instead of bouncing it into an audio DAW like Adobe Audition.  I must say, Premiere was much more capable with the audio than I think most people give it credit for, although it is still no Pro Tools or Logic.  So without further ado, here is the project!

We downloaded all of our sounds from Creative Commons websites, which means that they are free to use as long as we credit the original artist.  As a quick breakdown into my workflow, I first mixed whatever in camera sound I wanted to keep, which was mostly a little bit of ambient noise and Victoria's grunt when he hits the ground.  I made sure it all flowed together smoothly without any cracks or pops and then sent it all into a bus.  Then I started layering on my sound FX that I downloaded from the creative commons sites and positioning them in the right places.  Then I adjusted the volumes of everything, routed all my sends and returns, keyframed the overall track volumes of the bus tracks, normalized everything to -3db, and viola.  A short film mixed in Premiere.

As much as I learned about the mixing capabilities of Premiere in this project and also about the importance of sound as an element in our stories, I learned a lot more through the very nature of this project.  From the moment my second weekend project got slammed by my Professor until the end of the weekend project cycle, I looked at each one as a learning experience and tried to learn as much as I possibly could from each one.  I didn't care about the quality of the finished product nearly as much as I cared about the elements that we were learning in each video.  But through all of that, I lost sight of one of the most important pieces of filmmaking: HAVING FUN.  Taking the mindset I had, I went in to each weekend project viewing it more like a homework assignment than an opportunity to make a movie.  At my school, my homework isn't calculus or European history; my homework is MAKING MOVIES.  How cool is that??  For this project, my entire crew just threw their arms up and basically said "screw it, let's have fun" and instead of meticulously planning everything out and being very picky, we all had so much fun.  We made this project up as we went along, as opposed to the other projects which were storyboarded out cut by but.  We came up with ideas spontaneously on set that were awesome, even though some of them didn't work out.  We saw a train track and decided to film on it, which might be illegal, but I wasn't really sure so we just went for it.  This project was so much fun, and one of those moments that I realized that if you don't put your heart and soul into what you are doing, you won't ever be successful or more importantly, create good art.  Filmmaking is a balance between the technical and the creative, and I have discovered that both sides flourish the most when passion is put into them.  When you're truly passionate about what you're doing, you're going to have fun doing it, and that's a fact.

Weekend Project #6 - Play It Again Sam

This was far and away the most intense weekend project we had.  The assignment was to recreate a scene from one of your favorite movies, focusing on matching the production and shot design.  The catch was that you were not allowed to let any of your actors see the scene before hand, and you had to try verbally directing them until they could match the performances in the actual scene.  For my project, I chose a scene from "Inception".  As a result of having to recreate a scene, each project came out to anywhere between 2 and 4 minutes as opposed to just 1, which made the overall shooting across the projects take about 3x longer than usual.  To top it off, our scripts for our upcoming F1's (first student films) were due on the following Monday.  This was my first truly sleepless weekend in film school; throughout the entire weekend I probably only managed to catch about 4-5 hours of sleep.  The class as a whole was freaking out over not having enough talent to act in each of these movie scenes, and everyone's schedules got all thrown out of whack.  As a result, we essentially broke out of our groups and basically took any help from whatever group we cold find.  Some of us (myself included) even began begging upperclassmen to come help us out.  Although it was a truly hectic weekend, it turned out to be loads of fun, and I am really proud of how this weekend project turned out especially since it had an extremely fast turn around time.

That being said, check it out!

To create this project, I took a very systematic approach.  I'll break down my step-by-step process below.

Shot-Design

The first thing I noticed about the clip I chose (I would post a link to it but I couldn't find it anywhere online) is how many slow dolly creeps there were.  Christopher Nolan loves those, so I immediately took note of which shots were moving and which direction they were.  Next, I watched the scene about a thousand times over, pausing on each individual shot and taking a picture of the frame.  I kept doing this until I was able to construct a model of what the scene looks like and the relative camera placements of each angle.  This was extremely important, because the room we had to film in was way too small to actually set up my actors in the correct positions.  Instead, I threw them all around the room and gave the illusion of setup through controlling their eye-lines (the directions characters look).  This is called cheating the space, which was crucially important in this project.  After this was all done, I laid all my photos out in storyboard form and made multiple copies of my model to show my camera crew (aka one person, a very gracious upperclassman named Ryan), my actors, and just extras so I wouldn't lose it.  Here is what my model (aka floor plan) looked like:

As you can see, through watching the scene over and over again and storyboarding it out, I was able to identify 7 separate camera placements (not including the insert shots).  I also made note, which is not evident on the floor plan, of which angles had a dolly move and which direction it moved.  Once I had all of this figured it out, it was easy to direct my actors and make sure they were always looking and speaking in the right direction, even though in reality they might have been staring at a window of a blank wall.  This freed me up to move onto Production Design.

Production Design

I really had a lot of fun trying to make this room look like a scene from Inception.  There were obviously some things I just didn't have, like hi-tech lab equipment for instance.  But I put a lot of work into making the room look like a warehouse like setting like it does in the movie.  Something that was particularly fun was making all of the old aged newspaper to pin up against the windows like in the film.  This process actually took about 2 hours, and I had a ton of help from my awesome classmate Elangie.  She silently helped the whole time, and made some awesome PD decisions that ended up making my film look better.  Setting up the room took about 3 hours total, and then it took another hour or so to put back.  This was by far the most time and effort I had put in to the set of any weekend project we made.

I also made sure that each character's wardrobe matched the character in the movie.  It's not perfect, but I did what I could.

Production

Production was interesting.  I had put so much time and effort into my production design that I expected shooting to be an intense process, especially considering several of my actors, including myself, were due to go work on other weekend projects later that same day.  But instead, it was insanely chill.  I guess all the preparation made it really easy.  Everyone showed up, got in their places, we filmed two or three takes of each angle, and then we were done.  Just like that.  The only thing that took some time was lighting.  The whole scene in Inception is interesting, because even though the color palette in the costume and set design is warm, the scene has an overall cool temperature.  To keep everything cool, I white balanced my camera to tungsten light and then let the sunlight from the windows shine right in.  Sunlight is a very blue light, and balancing my camera to a warmer color balance made the sunlight appear even bluer.  However, because none of my actors were being directly lit by the sunlight, I was able to use the tungsten lights as their key lights.  The orange tungsten lights now appeared white because of the white balance I applied to the camera, so each one of my actors was lit nice and evenly by the tungsten light, keeping their natural flesh tones in tact, with very cool backlighting on the whole scene.  I'm actually quite impressed with how all the light and color came out considering I hadn't really drawn a light plan and we figured it out on the fly based on the storyboard photos.  One element that really suffered in production though was my sound.  With all the groups being mixed up this week, I had no one to operate a boom, so instead we just stuck a shotgun mic on the camera and let it roll.  This would be unacceptable in a real film production, but for a weekend project it was all I could do.  The huge reverb-y room did not play well with a shotgun mic that was 20 feet away from who was speaking.. I'll just leave it at that.

Post-Production

For other weekend projects, I was more concerned on the content of the assignment that I was with the actual quality of the piece.  But after how much work I had put into this project, I decided to go ahead and color grade the whole thing.  I used Adobe SpeedGrade and was quite impressed by it's temperature slider, easily able to match the color temperatures of each shot.  Then just for the heck of it I messed around with some of the preset LUT's and actually found one I really liked, so I used an LUT designed for ARRI Alexa footage that really brought out the blues in the scene.  Then in a new grade layer I just started tweaking the footage with masks until I got something I was happy with.  As much as I liked SpeedGrade though, I find its interface overwhelmingly clunky, as opposed to Da Vinci Resolve which just feels natural.  Unless Speedgrade can give me a definitive reason as to why it is better than Resolve, I'm going to stick with Resolve.