Closing Cinelosophy, Final Thoughts, and Migrating Platforms

When I first started this blog, I did it for my family and for myself.  I had a few objectives with it.  First, I wanted to be able to chronicle my experiences in film school so that my family back home could follow along.  For my family that might be reading this, thanks so much for following along.  Second, as I was just starting film school and the next chapter of my life, I wanted a medium to be able to pour out my thoughts and ideas as they were developing.  That's why I called it Cinelosophy - I imagined that this blog could be an interesting combination of my journey studying cinema and my own personal philosophies.  For a time, I think that was true.  But, as time went on, I began to use this blog for school.  Our professors wanted us to blog our experiences, and I already had a blog.  Perfect!  Because of that, the blog migrated more and more towards the cinema studies side of things, and my personal thoughts and opinions on things began slipping through the cracks.

Through this process, I learned a lot.  For starters, I learned that I have a hard time breaking consistency, even when I should.  For example, this summer we were assigned to keep a journal/blog of our work through our Advanced Compositing class.  You might have seen the Advanced Compositing posts where I blogged about driving to the beach to shoot my GoPro footage or shooting green screen plates in the sound stage.  The goal behind these assignments were to keep professional blog posts chronicling our experience in this class.  However, since this was more of a personal and informal blog, I felt a sense of obligation to keep the tone consistent.  I couldn't just keep it a professional post, it had to feel like my post.  This might not seem like a bad thing - of course I should be keeping my personality in my posts!  But that leads me to the second thing I learned: I learned that I'm not a huge fan of blogging about more personal things.  I learned that I enjoyed blogging about the "cinema" much more than I enjoyed blogging about the "philosophy."  Maybe this will change over time, but right now that's where I stand.  I think that my effort to keep this blog inherently "Cinelosophy" while also transitioning into a more professional blog ended up hurting my blog posts in the long run.  Instead of being clear and concise, they just kind of existed, rambling on in one way or the other.

The sub par quality of my posts indirectly led to a pretty big experience for me: the first C of my entire life.  Throughout all of middle and high school I was a straight A student.  I held myself to the highest standards.  In college, that changed a little.  My freshman year I found that college was more challenging, especially when the grading scale changed and 90-94 was a B in several of my classes.  Nonetheless, I kept my grades extremely high and finished my first year with a 3.86 GPA.  The pattern continued into film school.  I finished my first year with all A's with the occasional A- or B+.  This Summer in my advanced compositing class, I received my first ever C.  At first I was really upset and even angry.  I thought the grading scale was unfair, I thought I couldn't possibly be wrong.  But after mulling it over for a night, I realized that I deserved the C.  And this was a huge revelation for me.  For the first time ever, there was a class that I didn't put the effort into.  There's no easy way to say it.  I just didn't try very hard.  When I accepted this reality, I really put a lot of thought into it, reflecting on the class, what went wrong, and where I could have done better.  There are so many excuses I could make, and most of them I found myself making!  The biggest excuse was that I was putting more of my effort into my directing class and my thesis development class.  But upon reflection, I was transported back to high school and my hugely influential basketball coaches, Coaches Paul and Drew Strauch.  The Strauch's didn't tolerate a lack of effort, and they especially didn't tolerate excuses.  I could give dozens of examples, but time and time again the Strauch's showed me that effort isn't finite.  You don't have "only so much" effort that you have to divide between tasks.  The Strauch's taught me that while time might be finite, effort is a choice.  And when I thought about that, I hated the fact that I let this class slip away from me over the summer.  Do I feel like there were things out of my control that made this class especially difficult for me?  Yes, absolutely.  But sports are no different.  Players would get injured, other teams got lucky from time to time, and refs would make bad calls - all out of my control.  But if each and every player didn't stand back up and give 110%, we were going to lose the game.  Period.  Sometimes, you give 110% and lose the game anyway.  But at least you knew you tried your best, and that spirit would carry over into the next practice and create a hunger for victory in the next game: a victory that would give you a chance to redeem yourself.  I didn't give this class my best, and recognizing that has really torn me apart.  So to my professors: I truly thank you for giving me this C.  Really.  It's a strange thing to say but I mean it.  It's the kick in the pants I needed to get myself back on track.  And now I feel that hunger for victory again.  I feel like I can redeem myself.

So here I am, with just over one semester left in college before I graduate, and now more determined than ever to give everything I do 110%.  Beyond experiencing the first C of my life, I went through a series of challenges through this summer and into this fall, and I think I have grown because of each one of them.  Regarding the blog, I've made some decisions based on what I've learned.  As graduation grows nearer, I believe it's time to steer my blog in a more professional and artistic direction.  I think I need to retool the blog to be more of an evolving portfolio as opposed to a blog full of personal thoughts on my experiences.  Moreover, I want to move the blog in a more visual direction.  If it's to be more professionally focused and portfolio oriented, I think the blog should be much less wordy and much more visual.  As a filmmaker, I am trained to tell visual stories.  Why should my blog be anything different?  With this new direction in mind, I think it will be best to archive this blog and begin a new one.  I plan on taking the opportunity to try a new blog platform that will be more visually friendly.  Blogger has been great, but in my two years of using it I have discovered that it's really aimed at writers; I have little to no customization over the visual components, so migrating to a new platform is the way for me to go.

Maybe I'll occasionally come back and post something a bit more personal here, but at the moment I don't really plan on it.  So if you've actually been following my blog, I hope you'll join me at my new one.  It will be something different, but it will still be there.  Blogger, so long for now.  Maybe I'll be back.  Someday.

You can find my new blog at austinbaur.wordpress.com.

Thanks for reading,
Austin

My Newest Student Film (F3) is Done!

SO EXCITED!!!!

This post is a few weeks late, but after over 380 days my third student film is finally done!  The film is called "At the Feet of the Union" and is about a young Confederate soldier in the Civil War who is struggling with self doubt.  I've blogged about it before, especially during the visual effects cycle, but now that we have been through the sound edit, the color grade, and all the formalities of picture lock in the film school it is finally finished.

Mixing in the mix stage.

The sound edit was a one week process that started in a calibrated edit bay.  Most of my film was shot during a horrible rainstorm, so almost every single line of dialogue had to be replaced.  I recorded ADR several months ago in an isolation booth, so I already had a good head start on the dialogue edit: I didn't need to do much cutting and filling of white noise at all, which saved me a lot of time.  The school has a great sound library, which is where I pulled all of my backgrounds from.  For foley, I grabbed my friend Travis and spent a day in the school's foley booth.  The foley booth is a lot of fun.  There are multiple surfaces to walk on to create various footstep sounds and dozens of strange props and materials in there to make sounds.  We did all of the footsteps, clothes rustling, prop noises,  and body sounds in foley.  Finally there were a few hard effects I needed to add in, such as guns firing, and I grabbed those from the library again.  After the edit came the mix.  The mix was supervised by Chuck Allen, the post production supervisor at FSU.  Chuck has a career of experience in the music industry behind him and really facilitated the mixing process.  Sound editing is a creative process that is a lot of fun and has more to do with story than anything.  In my opinion, once you learn the basic tools your skill as a sound editor wholly depends on your creativity as a story teller and your understanding of soundscapes and how they can enhance a story.  Sound mixing on the other hand is a highly specialized and technical skill set.  Chuck took my edit and ran it through various auxiliary sends and returns and helped guide me through a strong mix in one of our mix stages at school.  He gave me creative control as far as volume levels and equalizers are concerned, but there is no way I could have done what he did to my film without him.  (We finished the film in a Dolby LTRT format, which I had never even heard of before.)  This experience really showed me the value in getting professionals to work on your film in the finishing department.

My DP, Victoria, working the control surface in Resolve.

Then we moved into color correction and grading.  This is one of my favorite parts of the post production cycle.  I just find it to be really fun and I have invested a lot of time into learning multiple color grading softwares.  This was the first time I got to grade a film in the full version of Da Vinci Resolve.  Previously I have only ever worked in the Lite version, but the full release gave us access to some very powerful noise reduction tools, which helped us out A LOT because at the time of shooting our F3s none of us had had any experience with the equipment package the school provided us.  I had a chemistry teacher in high school who would constantly tell us he believed the best way of learning was through exposure, and that is definitely the school's approach when it comes to gear.  They threw a Red Epic our way with some old 16mm lenses and basically said "have at it."  Each show we continued to learn more and more about the camera and the lighting gear we were using, but the noise reduction was a great tool to help us fix our mistakes.  For example, when it started pouring rain outside during our night exteriors, we lost the ability to light the scene because of the danger of water and electricity, so we pulled up a jeep and used its headlights in tandem with a practical fire on set.  We decided to go with a zoom lens so that we wouldn't have to change lenses in the rain.  A big problem with this was that we couldn't open up the T stop below a 3.5 or something like that, so we ended up with dark and noisy footage.  But if I had to go back and do it again I would make the same decision.  I believe that my DP and I made the best decision we could given the circumstances of the shoot, and the noise reduction really cleaned those night exteriors up.  It was great.  There's an odd little texture that comes from the NR sometimes, but it is WAY more tolerable and WAY less distracting than the noise, so it's just a tradeoff we had to make.

Technical processes aside, I want to talk about what working on a seven minute film for 380-some-odd days did to me creatively.  The production itself wasn't really 380 days: we took a huge break in the middle of that time to continue or regular classes, but that said the F3 was still very much on my mind during that time.  During the year of classes I took during the post cycle of my F3, I feel like I became a completely different filmmaker.  We had some really strong directing classes with Jason Maurer, co-director of the feature length animated film Delgo, and Antonio Mendez Esparza, writer/director of the award winning Spanish feature film Aqui y Alla (Here and There).  I also began an independent study with Jason (which I am still working on) during which we break down scenes from films and work on pre-visualization techniques.  Beyond that, I have really gotten to know our parallel class of students in the Production BFA program and have worked on several of their thesis films.  I feel that this year I had a lightbulb moment, where suddenly some things started to click.  The visual grammar of film, as Martin Scorcese calls it, is really starting to make sense to me and because of a particularly laborious film seminar I went through this year I believe I have much firmer grasp on the core principles of storytelling as a screenwriter.  So the bright side is that I feel like I am a better filmmaker than ever.  The downside is that these discoveries I have made and the things I have learned all taint the way I look at my F3, and when go back to work on sound or color or visual effects or whatever, I just can't stop looking at what I consider to be my mistakes.  Having to constantly go back and analyze and critique my seven minute film for an entire year was a surprisingly difficult experience.  It really made me question my own talent and abilities and really resulted in a lot of soul searching.  It's really hard to adopt a constructive mentality when you know that you won't be shooting your next short film for months and months to come.  In short, I never want to go through a process where I spend so long on something so short ever again.  It's destructive to morale, and doesn't create any opportunities to keep practicing and improving.  I hate to say it, but I don't like watching this film anymore.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that I believe I have watched it over 500 times.  Mistakes should encourage you to be better in your next endeavor, but in this case that encouragement disappeared quickly because there was no end in sight, and the mistakes became like weights looming over my head for a year.  That said, now we are DONE and I am more confident than ever in my ability to make a great new short film moving forward into thesis.  I'm an optimist, and even though the whole F3 process was arduous, I hands down believe that I learned way more from that process than if everything had gone smoothly and I was happy with my end product.  Not only have I learned to become a better filmmaker in terms of blocking, shot selection, cinematography, etc, but more importantly I have learned how to handle high stress situations, how to deal with malicious criticisms, how to adequately self-critique myself, and how to persevere and dig myself out of a creative rut.

Now... on to thesis!

Advanced Compositing, Visual Effects Shot Weeks 2-3

I've got a two parter for this post.  First:

THE FAILED SHOOT

For my shot I had the lovely idea of a first person shot, much in the style of a video game like Call of Duty or Halo.  I wanted to shoot on the beach because I thought that could be very cool, but I needed a GoPro to replicate the first person shot.  Enter my awesome teacher, Ron Honn:

Ron Honn, ripped straight off Google Images.

Ron let me use his GoPro Hero 2 camera.  It's an older model, but who cares, it's great!

My buddy Collin agreed to be my actor, so together we met up at school where Ron gave us the GoPro.  We were in business!  Time to hit the beach!

The closest sandy beach to FSU is Alligator Point beach.  It's about 40 miles south and you have to go through some serious back roads to get there, so at times the speed limit can be rather slow.

The route from FSU to Alligator Point

Collin at the entrance to Alligator Point

I only post the map for one reason: to emphasize the distance.  It took a solid hour and a half to reach Alligator Point.  And that's an hour and half through nothing except about a dozen roads boiled peanut stands.  Why do I emphasize the distance?  So that my critical mistake becomes all the more apparent: I didn't check the battery on the GoPro.  Nor did I bother to check and see if there was a card.  I have never done this before in my life.  I told a professor of mine, and he laughed calling it a "rookie mistake."  I corrected him and called it one of a "complacent veteran."

But no worries.  Collin and I were problem solvers.  We could use my phone! I went to go get my phone.  DEAD.  The navigation to Alligator Point had completely drained the battery.  But it's okay, Collin had a phone too.  Using a batman mask Collin brought for no apparent reason, we were abler o rig together a face mount for the iPhone by velcro-ing it to the mask and tying it back with some duct tape and a scarf.

The batman face rig!

Somehow, this was going to work.  And that's when Collin's phone basically stopped working.  He had told me that his phone's camera had a hard time focusing, but I didn't think it would be a big deal.  It was.  His camera cannot focus on anything past a few inches.  It just can't.  We tried everything to fix it.  Nothing.

After sitting around for another hour trying desperately to figure something out, we left quietly in defeat.  A day wasted.

THE SUCCESSFUL SHOOT

Three days later we made the trip again.  This time, nothing was going to stop us.  I had the GoPro fully charged with a 64GB SD card.  I brought along a Contour ROAM, a GoPro equivalent that lost the branding wars years back when the portable cameras were first introduced.  It was fully charged and ready to go.  I brought an iPhone charger with me so we could use my phone if we had to, and I even brought my laptop in case I needed it to offload anything or reformat any cards.  We were golden. This time, the GoPro worked like a charm.

Collin strapping on the GoPro

At the beach after a fun days shoot!

I call this shoot the successful shoot, but there was a serious caveat.  This day the beach was MUCH more crowded… that means quite a few people I'll have to paint out in post.  It also meant I didn't feel comfortable pulling out our super cool prop sic fi gun, which would have added a lot of production value.  Fingers crossed, I hope this works.

Lots of people today… Oh boy.  Plus side, there were A LOT of cute dogs :)

Advanced Compositing, Visual Effects Shot Week 1

This summer in my Advanced Compositing Class we will be spending the entire summer creating one really big hardcore [hopefully] photo real visual effects shot.  I am looking to create a first person action shot, very much in the style of the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare trailer, which you can find by clicking here.

This first week was our green screen shoot.  We shot on the Red One on the green screen stage at Florida State University.  Check out some shots from my shoot!

It starts with the morning meeting.

Victoria looking inquisitive and Ron being awesome.

Here are some stills from shooting the plates for my shot, starring Collin as a hardcore looking tactical soldier guy:

And here are some stills from other students' shots, including Collin again wearing parts a home made Halo Spartan costume!  (Made by the incredibly talented Turner Sinopoli.)

And I took some creative liberties and went ahead and used one of these stills to promote my latest feature: "Halo: Lockett"

This will be my greatest work.

I'll be sure to be posting regularly as these shots progress!  Partly because I am required to, and secondly because I enjoy posting these blogs.  Until next time.

Stay On Target... Stay On Target

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 8

So here I am... eight weeks in, three days left... and I sit here at 11pm in the lab with my two remaining classmates, discussing the qualities of various kinds of pasta.  I've clearly switched off my targeting computer.

There are only three days left for us to complete visual effects on our third student films, woohoo!  It's a really exciting feeling and I can't wait to see how all of the films turn out.  Overall, this entire process has been an amazingly remunerative experience.  That said, I also am super ready to move on to the sound and color editing of my F3 so I can see it all come together and beyond stoked to move into thesis development this summer.  I love building Legos.  Love it.  But I'm at a point now where I'm just gluing the pieces together on this lego set and I'm ready to start a new one from scratch.

The F3 visual effects cycle, though filled to the top with fun and value, has began to feel like a road with no end.  But now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel - I just need to stay on target and be more focused than ever these next three days to get all of my work done quickly and to an exceptional level so that Christian's movie can be the best it can be.

Next week, I plan on posting a final review blog post where I will deep end on everything I went through and took out of this process.  Until then, I've got to go - Vader's come from behind, Han is nowhere in sight, and I've switched off my targeting computer.  Now, I just have to trust in the Force.

Looking Behind

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 7

Thorin: Where did you go, if I may ask?

Gandalf: To look ahead.

Thorin: What brought you back?

Gandalf: Looking behind.

As I write these weekly posts, I have been making efforts to try as best I can to stick to content related to visual effects and my problem solving process when it comes to the new challenges that each week brings.  But this week I want to dig into my headspace a little, if for no other reason to clear my head by writing what's inside of it down.

As with anything in life, an important and critical skill set to have is to be able to stay focused and work clearly despite what difficulties you might be going through.  (Bringing this point up in a sentence is simply my way of justifying this blog post ;) )  I've been feeling a little discouraged and drained lately.  I'm not sure why and there's no clear emotion or cause for me point at.  But between some difficult situations involving other students, the monotony of the lab, some things going on back home, and the constant struggle of becoming a better artist I've just felt a little down lately.

One thing I think I've pinpointed is that in my more recent work, I am missing some of the raw joy of creativity that I used to feel.  I was just scrubbing through the first "real" short film I made in high school, called "PCRT211", and was missing how much fun I had making it.  It was just me and a camera, a couple friends for actors, and an iMac with Final Cut.  Similarly I was thinking back on weekends where I would spend literally hours upon hours on Video Copilot doing Andrew Kramer's tutorials and beginning to craft my own aesthetic.  It was a blast, and purely raw creative expression.

This school has conditioned me to question and question and question every creative decision I make.  And for the most part, I think that is a GREAT thing, because it makes my work BETTER.  But, I am also coming to realize that it's really important to look back and remember where I came from and why I'm doing this in the first place, and sometimes just putting pencil to paper (or mouse to photoshop document) and starting to freeform something - anything - is super important.  This might be one reason I love playing music.  I am not a serious aspiring music professional like I am a serious aspiring filmmaker, so when I sit down to jam on my guitar or piano or drums, I am not really thinking about anything - I'm just playing.  I don't ever consciously decide to hit the third, the fifth, or the seventh.  It just happens.  And if it sounds awesome it sounds awesome and if it doesn't it doesn't. And if it doesn't I keep playing and having fun until it does.

So I am going to be working hard over the next few weeks and definitely into the summer to create things for fun.  To remember why I want to be an artist and to find the great spiritual joy that comes deep inside from creating things I really enjoy.  There's a lot more to that than just lighting a shot to a visually pleasing aesthetic or simulating a dust blast competently or compositing a spaceship scene.

What's strange is that right now in this very moment I know more about filmmaking than I ever have in my entire life - and yet I'm trying to find the inner voice I had in high school when I made "PCRT211".  What's really ironic is that I believe the very fact that I recognize that is part of what makes me today a better filmmaker than I was then.

I'll finish off the post with some stills from "PCRT211", based on the short story "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury.  Unfortunately, this film was taken offline by the Bradbury estate for copyright infringement.

Render Me This, Batman PART 2!

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 6

I love my title pun, "Render Me This, Batman," but I quickly became upset that I used it last week because this week the title is SOOO much more fitting.  So, I just decided to use it again and stick a part 2 after it, just like Hollywood nowadays, right?

Last week I spent most of my time lighting and comping for the animated show "Yeti In Paradise, and that inevitably results in rendering.  My renders on that show took a while to complete, but weren't particularly difficult or time consuming to set up, especially considering I was only able to render on two computers.

This week I am working on the animated show "Live Tree Or Die", and our renders are substantially more complicated and taking much longer per frame.  So... I am currently rendering on nine computers.  Nine!

I understand that professionally I will be rendering on render farms that are set up, maintained, and run by a highly specialized and talented IT crew, but for now at FSU we have to manually set up each render - which all things considered really isn't that bad.  The fact we have more than one 32-core machines to render on alone is amazing.  We have a second computer lab at the end of the hall called the DA Suite, and I decided to take it over.  After faculty worked out a spreadsheet for all of the producers to use so that we could allocate computers for each film to render on, this week I was able to come away with nine.  Like I said, each computer's render had to be manually set up as opposed to the more standard system of shipping the scene off to a farm, and to set up the same render on nine machines meant piping the scene through the server and then copying the whole project file to nine separate machines.  Then I had to manually test the the file paths and set up frame ranges on each computer.  All together it took me about two hours running hectically back and forth between two labs to set this up.  What I ended up with was something that would make Lucious Fox proud:

A sea of computers all quietly chugging away in the DA Suite, each using 31 of the 32 available cores to process :,)

Tears of joy.

Now let's hope we didn't miss something in our test renders.....