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.