Cinemablography
Your friendly neighborhood film blog.
Stop-Motion Madness
067 days
by Reed Hewitt
in Productions
I’ve always been fascinated by stop-motion animation techniques, whether the medium is clay, legos, or real live people. I’ve played around with stop-motion from time to time, but never on a paid project until recently.
About a month ago, I got to team up with fellow Cinemablographer Stephen Henderson (one of the best parts of my job is getting to work with really cool people) to shoot a stop-motion commercial for a valet parking company. I thought I would share a few lessons I took away from the experience.
1. Stop-motion takes longer than you think.
I knew that stop-motion consumes production time like a black hole sucking in a cloud of cosmic dust, but of course, I still over-scheduled. My script called for twenty-one individual shots, which I had thoroughly scripted and storyboarded. Given our production window of about six hours, I should have cut about four of them. (I ended up cutting some extraneous shots in post anyway.)
2. Shoot lots of frames for small actions.
During editing, I found myself wanting more frames for the tiny nuances of motion that really sell the illusion of continuous action. For example, in one shot, a hand reaches into the shot to open a metal cabinet door. We shot frames for the hand reaching in and pulling the door open, but we didn’t get enough frames of the fingers actually grasping the handle of the door. The shot works, but it could have been a lot more convincing.
3. Shoot lots of frames for pauses and timing.
With stop-motion, it’s tempting to only shoot frames when there’s something going on. Instead, get in the mindset of shooting frames whenever time is passing in your finished shot. If the actor is just standing there thinking for a few seconds, shoot a few seconds worth of frames while he does it. You’ll need those frames in editing to fill the time. Stretching one or two frames over a long span of time will break the visual continuity of the stop-motion effect.
4. Sound effects are essential.
This is true of any film or video production, but sound is especially critical for stop-motion. Because the motion is inherently unrealistic, the audience needs the soundtrack to help them interpret the images. A well placed sound effect goes a long way to convey an action, even if your image sequence is less than perfect.
With stop motion, you can’t really record the sound in sync with the shot, but you can act out the shot for sound in order to match it up with the video later. It also works to do your own foley after the fact; stop-motion is very tolerant of unrealistic sound effects.
So those are my tips, based on my first serious stop-motion project with live actors. Any questions or wisdom from your own experience? Let me know in the comments.
Steve Jobs
0139 days
by Reed Hewitt
in Uncategorized
Steve Jobs changed everything. Within the walls of Apple, he was both the inspiration and absolute ruler, but in a larger sense he wielded unprecedented influence over the entire computer and media industries—and by extension, the rest of our culture. By most accounts, his leadership style was dictatorial, with abundant stories of Jobs firing employees for leaving a screw head visible on an iMac design or for bringing him the wrong brand of mineral water. There’s no telling what has or hasn’t been exaggerated, but I think it’s safe to say he was a challenging man to work for. Even so, it is not his managerial quirkiness that marks Jobs as a man of great accomplishment; it is his ability to pursue his vision with absolute, unwavering, uncompromising intensity.
Jobs built products around ideas, and in turn his products changed our ideas. Our ideas about how we interact with a computer. Our ideas about who can interact with a computer. Our ideas about media and entertainment: where we get it, how we consume it, how we produce it, how much it should cost.
Imagine a world in which the mouse-driven graphical user interface had taken an extra five or ten years to evolve, and had done so in the hands of IBM and Microsoft with no major competitor forcing them to raise the bar on quality and usability. Computing would still be a frustrating, opaque experience for most people. How would that have affected the development of the internet, which depends mostly on non-technical users to generate content?
Imagine a film industry in which Pixar had died as a small, unsuccessful startup, taking a massive chunk of inspiration out of the competitive landscape and delaying the advent of invaluable 3D animation tools and techniques.
Imagine if it required hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to create a simple video that today would be considered minimal in quality. I would be out of a job.
Steve Jobs’ accomplishments were not achieved singlehandedly, of course, but he was the catalyst. He took great ideas and made them happen. Even though we may not all use Apple products, we all benefit from Jobs’ unshakeable vision, which has shaped our tech-driven world in more ways than we can imagine. He created powerful tools that are an inspiration in themselves and he pushed entire industries into the next century. As a result, my work is more efficient and my dreams are more attainable. Thanks, Steve.
An Open Letter to a Beginning Web Designer
2149 days
I know, this is a film blog. So why am I writing about web design? For one thing, the web is a huge part of what I do. Film was (and is) my first love, but web design/development has become an equally important passion and it’s a huge part of what I do for a living. I also firmly believe that the independent DIY filmmaker should have a working understanding of web technologies because that’s where your films are going to be marketed and distributed. Plus, web design is fun!
I recently received an e-mail from a student worker at an organization for which I’m building a new website. He is a talented young man who is just starting out in the field of web design and he asked for my advice on what resources and strategies have worked for me. Here’s an excerpt from my response to him: (more…)
Tarkovsky on Long Shots
0226 days
by stephen
in Uncategorized
“If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.”
-Andrei Tarkovsky in Sculpting in Time
Write the Easy Stuff First
0226 days
by Reed Hewitt
in Screenwriting
When writing a screenplay (or a thirty-second commercial script, for that matter), I often find myself getting bogged down by the hard parts—the difficult descriptions, technical dialog, awkward transitions, etc.—which really puts the brakes on any kind of creative momentum. The solution I’ve found is to skip the hard stuff, the parts that just aren’t working, and go straight to the easy scenes. In other words, write nonlinearly.
The “easy” scenes are usually the ones that have been floating around in my head the longest, the ones I think about involuntarily while running errands and lying awake at night (my passive writing time). These scenes are already more developed in my mind, so it’s easier to get them on paper.
Once I’ve written the easy stuff, three interesting things happen:
- Writing the easy scenes gets them out of my head. Once empty, my head can start filling up with new scenes.
- The easy stuff provides context and motivation for the hard stuff, making it easier to write.
- Sometimes the hard stuff isn’t necessary after all.
These are things my high school English teachers tried to tell me, but it’s just now sinking in. So far I’ve been surprised at how much more productive this simple principle has made my writing time.
Buy Compressor 4 to Get ProRes Codecs without Final Cut Pro
1232 days
by Reed Hewitt
in Software
Final Cut Pro X has been controversial, to say the least. It has a slew of interesting tricks up its sleeve, but professional editors are up in arms about the omission of basic features. I have my own opinions about FCPX, but that’s not what I’m writing about today.
I am currently a very satisfied user of Final Cut Studio 2, which includes Final Cut Pro 6. In 2009, when Apple released an mild update to the suite, I didn’t feel compelled to upgrade. With one exception, there simply were not any new features or enhancements that would have significantly improved my life as an editor. That exception was the expansion of the ProRes family of codecs to include ProRes 4444, ProRes LT, and ProRes Proxy. ProRes 4444, with it’s alpha channel, is especially useful for graphics and chromakey work, where it can replace the system-choking Animation and PNG codecs.
I decided to wait it out and skip a version of FCS, eagerly awaiting the next release, which Steve Jobs assured me would be “awesome” and that I “would love it.” Well, FCPX may be awesome in a lot of ways, but it’s not for me. I probably won’t be buying it, at least not in it’s current incarnation.
But that leaves me with one problem: I still want all the ProRes codecs!
That’s where the title of this post comes into play. Apple’s new suite-less distribution model means that you can buy Compressor 4 on the cheap ($49.99) without investing in FCPX ($299.99). And guess what comes with it? Yep, ProRes. (And a few other handy codecs.) I should note that Compressor 4 does not work with previous versions of Final Cut (before X), so if you’re a Final Cut Studio user, you’ll want to keep your old version of Compressor around, too.
Once you buy Compressor 4 from the App Store, you can go here to download the ProApps QuickTime Codecs installer. (You can’t run the installer unless you have Compressor 4, Motion 5, or FCPX installed.) Then you should have access to all that ProRes goodness in your video applications of choice.
philosophical editing angst
1236 days
by stephen
in Uncategorized
Inline with my last post on editing, here’s another quote refitted and applied to film-making:
“…the opportunity cost of our lives appears to us to be the value of all the foregone alternatives summed together, not merely the best other one. When all the possibilities were yet still before us, it felt as if we would do them all.”
-Robert Nozick (quoted here)
I’m finishing a video right now, I filmed so much good stuff, I could go a thousand directions, but I have to finish and I have to only make one video at the opportunity cost of making all the possible others. Asi es la vida!
watching films slowly
0239 days
by stephen
in Uncategorized
“No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed? Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.”
How can this be applied to film and film-making? I want to watch and re-watch the best movies slowly, asking questions, and looting as I go.
Light Emitting Plasma – The Future of Photons?
0242 days
by Reed Hewitt
in Lighting
There’s been more and more chatter lately about LEP (Light Emitting Plasma) fixtures for film and video production, and it’s easy to see why. They boast ten times the power efficiency of tungsten lamps (or twice that of HMIs), which means they run cool. They produce broad-spectrum, daylight balanced light and they’re potentially affordable, although economies of scale have not yet kicked in. Perhaps most importantly, they produce a hard, single-point light—a niche poorly served by fluorescent and LED sources.
So… what’s the catch?
As with any new technology, LEPs have an assortment of idiosyncrasies that should be understood before one makes the leap. Veteran gaffer Guy Holt takes an in-depth look at LEP technology and the very limited number of products that make use of it on cinematography.com. Holt does a good job at sifting the hard data from the marketing hype.
The bottom line? LEP lighting looks like a winner to me. The advantages far outweigh the the quirks—in fact, LEPs seem to be much less quirky than fluorescents and LEDs. The main problem now is the lack of products on the market, but I’m predicting that will not be the case for long.
satisficing in video editing
1246 days
by stephen
in Uncategorized
“Satisficers are those who make a decision or take action once their criteria are met. That doesn’t mean they’ll settle for mediocrity; their criteria can be very high; but as soon as they find the car, the hotel, or the pasta sauce that has the qualities they want, they’re satisfied.” -Gretchen Rubin
I tend to get bogged down in the myriad of choices any particular video editing project provides, often dragging the project out, or if its a personal project, leaving it unfinished because it’s not perfect. A few days ago I read this article at the always helpful 99% website:
Don’t Overthink It: 5 Tips for Daily Decision-Making
After reading this article on descision-making, I’m going to approach my video editing this week as a satisficer, rather then a maximalist. I have a pleasant suspicion that I’ll get more done.