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.....

Render Me This, Batman

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 5

This week I moved on to my first animated show of the cycle, "Yeti In Paradise" directed by Lauren Hammond.  I was really excited for the opportunity to work on some animated shows because, while I don't personally have an interest in animating, I definitely can see myself working as an artist on animated films in the future.  I also might like the opportunity of directing one some day should the opportunity arise, but I'm not sure yet.  It's something I definitely need more experience in, which is why I was excited that Lauren was happy to let me jump on her show as a lighting artist.

I've been working hard over the past couple of days on helping Lauren to set up her render pipeline.  She has also helped me learn more about the general animation workflow working with reference files and repeating files when transferring storage volumes.  These are things I was aware of and understood conceptually, but had never actually had to do.  Getting that practical experience was great.

I also have been working on lighting the third shot in Lauren's film, during which her protagonist, Clark the Yeti, walks into a travel agency to buy some tickets only to be rejected and thrown out of the building.  Poor guy :(  We ran into some aesthetic issues with this shot.  We realized after the first day of working on the shot that the space was too flat to achieve the kind of long-shadowed look Lauren wanted.  So we reworked the shot today to achieve a new look that we were both happy with. I think this collaborative experience has been really valuable for both of us and I think we covered a lot of ground on Monday and Tuesday (in regards to rendering) that will end up saving Lauren a lot of time in the long run.  It makes me feel good to know that my contributions will still be helping out the show even after I leave it.

In other news, this morning I worked on cutting together some breakdown reals to present to FSU President John Thrasher, the College of Motion Picture Arts Dean Frank Patterson, and the associate/acting Dean Reb Braddock.  This was a really cool experience for me.  It was awesome to show my work to to them and to represent our college and class.  Seeing how impressed they were were the work our entire class was a huge morale boost for me, and I hope that my classmates feel the same way.  I was particularly happy to see Dean Patterson.  I don't know him well, only having met him a couple of times, but he remembered me well and showed a huge genuine interest in my work even though he's currently on leave.  That is huge to me and means so much.  It's clear that he cares about his students and his school.

This whole cycle has been getting me really hyped to move on to thesis.  I can't wait to continue for all of us to become better artists and to see what we can create.

Beam Me Up, Christian

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 4

This has been a really exciting week for me in the visual effects cycle: first, I wrapped all of the visual effects on my F3, "At the Feet of the Union" !!  W00T!!!  Second, I got to move on to Christian's science fiction film, "Flying High", as a matte painter, which I couldn't be more excited about!  Christian is giving me the opportunity to create an entire alien planet for the opening sequence of the film, and he is giving me almost complete creative freedom.

I already posted some of the mountain shots from my F3 a few posts ago, so this post I'll just post some of the ones I haven't posted yet as well as my work so far on "Flying High."

This is a really dark shot, but it is supposed to be.  We didn't have the time or resources to set up a whole Confederate camp, so instead I comped one together.  Classmate Collin Lockett modeled some great tents in Maya for me and textured them using onset texture references taken by AC Grace Colley.  Then I lit the tents, rendered them out, and brought them into Nuke to mix together the tents with several different live action plates.

In a similar fashion to the previous shot, we didn't have the time or resource to recreate a Confederate company.  There were seven of us that could dress in costume, including myself.  We shot 36 plates on set and changed clothes and props between each take, and then it was all stitched together in Nuke and then projected onto rudimentary geometry so that the camera could slowly push in.

This shot wasn't intended to be a visual effects shot, but on set it was raining and the fire burned out.  So I keyed out a healthy fire from another take, tracked it into the moving shot, then recreated the flicker by keying out the real flicker from the healthy take and rotoscoping out problem areas like heads and hands.

This is that matte painting I made for Christian's F3, "Flying High".  The scene involves a stoner named Hunter rescuing his friend Thompson from an ominous alien planet.  Christian tasked me with creating that ominous alien planet.  He gave me a list of descriptive words and 5 pieces of concept art from some of his favorite films that reflected the mood and look he wanted.  So after looking everything over and talking over some basic layout with him, I went to town in Photoshop creating this matte painting.  I started by using some texture brushes to block out the colors and shape of everything I wanted, and then I began texturing some of the planar surfaces using high res texture photos taken from the set.  Then, I began gathering a library of images that would fit the painting from the public domain.  From that point on it was just a matter of warping the images to fit into my blocking, recoloring the photos to look like the belong together, adjusting lighting and value to create depth, and adding it atmospherics.  I was even able to fit in the famous Vasquez rocks!  That was my subtle way of tipping my hat to some of the most influential science fiction moments in the 20th century.  I had a lot of fun bringing in some of the intricate detail into this painting.  My favorite parts are the rivers of blue lava.  I really like what those bring to the shot.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to this week!  Next week I start work on the animated film "Yeti in Paradise" then the animated film "Live Tree or Die" before hopping back over to "Flying High" for the the last two weeks of the process.  It should be an exciting time, I am really looking forward to the changes in scenery!  I have found that staring at the same shots for too long can sometimes be discouraging, and it can definitely become monotonous.  I'm really excited to keep moving forward in this cycle and to see what it brings.

Back to Business

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 3

Technically week four, I'm back after a week off for a rocking Spring Break in LA.

For week 3, let's talk about Nuke.

I have been spending almost 8 hours a day in Nuke for three straight weeks now.  My total time spent in Nuke comes out to about 27 or 28 hours a week, which means that since this cycle has started I've spent close to 84 hours or so in the program.  Couple that with the 10 hours or so a week I was spending in the program over the 8 weeks before VFX started for classwork/homework and the experience I brought in from our intro course last semester and it starts to add up to a lot of hours in the program in a relatively short amount of time.  I have really learned a lot about the software and am immensely happy with my progress in it.

This past week I have spent the majority of my time working on crowd replication and 3D camera projection.  These are big steps for me.  The crowd replication shots pushed my knowledge of keying and forced me to start looking for creative solutions.  Here are three things I started doing to my keys that made them stronger keys that looked like they belong:

1.  Edge Correction

One problem I was facing was green tinted edges around the edges of my comp.  Getting rid of them by eroding in sometimes wouldn't cut it.  It took me a while to sort out how to pull this off, but I eventually figured out that I could make a separate pipe off the keylight node, erode in the key to get rid of the edge in the alpha, then invert that alpha so that only the edge was present.  Once I had isolated that edge, I could use it as a mask on a color correct node and get rid of the green by grading it out.

2.  Core Mattes

One problem I was running into was the key pulling data out of the green channel across the entire plate, not just the screen.  This wasn't always an issue; it only became an issue on some of the noisier footage that was shot slightly underexposed.  To solve this problem I had to matte an alpha channel into the plate by using a shuffle node, then feed that shuffle down a separate pipe and merge it back into the main pipe after the key was pulled.  Then I just had to make a rough garbage matte in a roto node, animate it quickly to follow the action, and apply it as a mask to the new merge node.  I don't think this is the best or most accurate way to make a core matte considering it requires me to animate some roto mattes.  However, in this particular shot all of the subjects in my plates were standing almost completely still so this method was extremely fast and the results were great, and I do believe the best methods are the ones that provide the best results the fastest on a shot by shot basis.

3.  Keymixing

The ability to quickly and easily key mix in Nuke is one thing that makes Nuke a superior keying solution to After Effects.  In After Effects, it is possible to "keymix," but it requires either duplicating your plate as many times as your keymix will require and then masking and keying each plate separately or precomposing your composition after each key.  Both equally obnoxious and frustrating.  In Nuke, it's as simple as pulling another key and then plugging both keys into the keymix node and applying a fast garbage matte roto mask.  It's very fast and is just as easy to mix in the twelfth key as it is the second, as opposed to After Effects which gets harder and harder with each mixed key.  Keymixing was a fast and efficient way for me to isolate color variations across the green screen and take care of them.

In addition to these three keying techniques I used to help sell my crowd replication shot, I also added  in a 3D camera move in an effort to help glue the shot together and draw focus to the center of the frame.  In order to pull this off I had to utilize the technique of 3D projection mapping.  In After Effects I have created 3D moves by separating assets onto planes and pushing them back in z space dozens of times, but I had never attempted projection mapping before.  In AE, projection mapping is an overly convoluted and difficult process that I rarely had a need to even attempt, and when it could have come in handy I just chose to look for an alternative solution.  In hindsight, I really should have put the time into learning how to projection map in AE, but in Nuke it was an amazingly logical and fairly straightforward process.  I roughly modeled the scene out in 3D space using planes that I oriented to match the space (ground plane, house, people, etc) and then projected my comp onto the 3D scene using the Project3D node in Nuke.  The more accurate your 3d geometry, the more correctly the projection fits and the more accurate your camera move becomes.  But this scene was so simple just using rough planar geometry was enough to get by.  Again, the fastest way to achieve the result is the best.

I have learned a lot about Nuke over the past few weeks by being forced to think through all of these issues and come up with creative solutions.  I am really excited to see where I go from here with Nuke, and if I continue to learn and progress at this current rate I truly believe that by the time thesis visual effects roll around I will be at the level of total photo real compositing.  I just have to work on my 3D rendering first :)

Time to Go Mobile - Putting the Pedal to Floor to Deliver Market Fresh VFX in 8 Minutes

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 2

We're now over a week into visual effects production on our third student films at FSU and progress is really cranking.  I've only been working on my own film so far, and that has created an interesting feeling and approach to the work I have been doing.  I wrote last week about the schedule that I am trying hard to stick steadfast to, and now that I've experienced a full rotation of that schedule one side effect I hadn't really intended is that it almost industrializes the experience of creating art.  As opposed to writing or directing, with visual effects I really can just come in to school, put in an eight hour shift, and go home.  Writing, directing, and other steps towards the front end of the pipeline seem to occur more organically to me.  Ideas form slowly, taking shape over time with excitement and coming together to culminate in the amazing experience that is the creative process.  This is where working as the primary artist on my own show in this workplace of an environment starts to create the interesting feeling I mentioned above: because this film is MY idea and MY passion, I want to scrutinize every pixel of every frame and spend an eternity on each shot making it absolute perfection, even if that level of perfection is beyond my current skill set.  It is very hard for me to move on to a new shot whenever I "finish" one, because to be honest I'm not satisfied with any of my shots.

Let's flip the tables to when I'm not working on my own show anymore.  Presumably, I will be working towards another artists vision, obviously putting my creative fingerprints on their work but still reaching towards something that inherently isn't mine.  Suddenly, I might not be a huge fan of a part of my work (for aesthetic reasons) but it fits the directors vision and he or she loves it.  When this state is achieved, I feel like it will be much easier to move confidently from shot to shot knowing that I have completed my task and satisfied the director.  I believe that reaching a level of personal satisfaction will be easier if I am meeting the expectations that others place on me, because I won't have the burden of creating my own "perfect aesthetic."

This isn't to say I won't put forth 100% effort into other peoples' shows - on the contrary I plan on giving every show I work on everything I have to give.  I just theorize that it will be easier to be emotionally satisfied with my work when I'm working towards reaching someone else's design, because I always find flaws in my own work.  Ultimately I'll just have to wait and see if this reins true.  So far in my "career" as an artist I have only worked as a visual effects artist on two films that weren't my own, and I was only on each film for one week.  But it seemed true during those two weeks, so we'll just have to see if it stays true for the five weeks I work on other shows during this VFX cycle.

I keep telling myself that never being satisfied with my own work is probably a good thing, pushing me to work harder and get better, but ultimately it becomes a discouraging emotion and that's what I'm pushing through right now - finding the strength to stay on schedule by leaving one shot behind and moving on to the next.  Speed and structure are important, and without this kind of schedule it might become really easy for shots to get pushed back and pushed back and for things to missed and for deadlines to never be met until eventually the film never gets finished.  

Additionally, Ive found that this week has been a little difficult in the lab for personal reasons.  Artists will quarrel with other artists and sometimes feelings get hurt on both ends of the spectrum.  I believe it's crucially important for me to take those kinds of experience personally, examine them, grow from, become a better artist from them, and work through them, continuing to create quality work in a professional environment.  I can't let disputes bring me down, I have to harness what they can give me and find ways to improve from what they bring.

To sum up, I've come out of this week feeling a little discouraged with my own work, but I'm trying to use that experience to propel me to make better work than ever.  I'm also working at a pace that is completely new to me.  In fact, it is this speed that inspired the title for this weeks post.  It came from a fantastic YouTube video I discovered a couple of years ago after The Dark Knight Rises came out.  You can watch it here if you have the chance.  I encourage it, I found it quite enjoyable.

I'll finish the post by showing some of the shots (at various levels of completion and also highly compressed) I have been working on thus far.  I shot in Florida, but am striving to make the show feel like Tennessee.  Hope you enjoy!

Thomas and General MacArthur overlook the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee at Sunset.

The same shot from a slightly different angle.

Close up on Thomas at Sunset, the Smoky Mountains a haze in the distance.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire - Welcome to the Production Pit

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 1

First off, I'd like to say that this weeks title was completely stolen from my friend Collin, who titled his blog post the same thing.  But then again, the title is originally from Chapter 6 of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, so I'm just stealing what Collin stole first.  It's my way of a not-so-silent protest.

This week we started visual effects on out F3s, our third student films at FSU.  For the zero people out there that actually keep up with my blog and are wondering about what happened to the F2, maybe someday I did briefly gloss over it it posts here and here.  I probably won't ever go into a detailed BTS of it like I did with the F1, but going behind the scenes of the F1 was more of a reflective exercise for me in my spare time and I've kind of changed how I do that now.  Now I keep a small journal and sometimes I'll go outside and noodle some thoughts in it or something.  Our workload at school has also changed dramatically: new city, new professors, new curriculum - essentially a new life.  I think it's important to change how you do things as your world around you is changing.  I had an English teacher in eighth grade who made sure he made at least one big change in his life every couple of years.  For example, one day he decided to start brushing his teeth left handed and he's been doing it ever since.  Likewise, a couple years later he decided to start tying his shoes backwards.  Never went back.  I've never tried doing something like that on the minor scale that he did, but I think that the concept would apply in the macro to our lives as a whole.  But what the heck do I know, right?

For the F3 visual effects cycle, the faculty are giving us eight weeks.  I got scheduled as an artist on four films, including my own.  So this comes out to roughly two weeks per film, but that's not how I got scheduled.  I'm spending three weeks each on two live actions films as a matte painter and compositor and one week each on two animated films as a lighting artist.  I couldn't be more excited.

For the entirety of film school so far everything I have done has been on a Mac, but for this cycle we were moved to a lab colloquially called "The Production Pit" - all PC's.  The adjustment has taken a little time to get used to - mainly I keep hitting alt instead of control because that's where the command key is on a Mac - but the machines are much faster and more powerful and I haven't run into any issues.  We also have dual 35" monitors and HUGE tablets.  Sometimes I have to pinch myself.

We've only been in the VFX process now for two days but already I have been incredibly productive and am super excited about my results.  This year I am tackling all my composite shots in Nuke instead of After Effects, and while I will always love After Effects - and still firmly believe it is a better program for 2D motion content creation - Nuke is an absolute dream.  I am able to achieve better results faster, and that's something that just doesn't happen every day.  So far I have completed one matte painting asset and almost completed one shot composition, and I believe that they are on the photo-real level which makes me unbelievably satisfied.  I have been working towards the goal of photo-real set extension for years now and this shot might be the first time I have ever accomplished that.  Years of practice from middle school up is really starting to pay off... at least I think it is.

One reason I believe I have been able to complete a matte painting asset and photo-real composite in just two days is because of an incredibly efficient time management workflow really stressed on me by my professors Jason and Ken.  They have pushed taking a 5-10 minute break every couple of hours, not working over time, timing yourself while you work, and meticulously logging all of my hours.  Additionally, my professor Jonathan helped all of our shows set up incredibly detailed shot breakdowns using a management solution called Shotgun.  This workflow has kept me laser focused in the lab.  I built a playlist in the glorious Spotify of some of my favorite music and some new music, made an account at www.toggl.com to start timing myself while I work, put my headphones on and have been powering through tons of work at a high speed and still had time to relax and play basketball in the afternoons.  This new schedule really excites me because if this pace continues, not only will I be getting more work done but I will also have more time to myself to get back in physical and spiritual shape.  In the F2 VFX cycle, I worked close to 16 hours a day for two weeks straight, and by the end I looked horrible, felt horrible, ate horribly, and each day dragged on and I got less and less work done.  If I really can get much more work done in this much more reasonable F3 schedule, I will have discovered possibly the greatest thing in the history of mankind...

I'm really looking forward to continuing through the visual effects cycle and becoming a better artist, while having more time to myself to develop thesis and other short film ideas.  I've also freed up a lot more time to play basketball, which is great especially considering I'm out of shape right now and my intramural team needs me more than ever as we move into the playoffs.  Tonight we played our first playoff game and won by 1 point with 2 seconds left.  It was awesome.  Hopefully and can keep winning and extend our season by another five weeks - that championship t-shirt really would look great hanging up in my closet.

ZBrush Studies and Character Art!

Being a character artist or concept artist isn't really something I aspire to be professionally, but this semester I am taking the character art class and starting to play around in ZBrush and boy is it fun!  This is definitely something I see myself picking up on as a hobby, and I think it's a valuable skill set to have also even if it's not the career field I plan on going into; you never know when your skill sets might come in handy, right?

Additionally, the class has served as an interesting lens into writing.  Studying the look and feel and design - the art - of a character forces you to really dig into their backstories and their personality.  It is great practice for becoming a better filmmaker as a whole.

After five weeks of practicing with ZBrush, and lots of HORRIBLE models, I've finally made something I think is worth posting, even if it's not the greatest.  This is my second attempt of sculpting the female torso, and I think it came out pretty well.

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 :)

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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 :)