Tag Archive | "filmmaking"
Q4 of 2009 has seen a number of wonderful projects wrap up and get distributed.
Winnetka Story is a feature-length documentary about the history of Winnetka and the North Shore area, outside of Chicago. Once again I worked with the wonderful John Newcombe, with whom we authored the DVD for Rancho La Cañada: Then and Now a few years ago. Hearken Creative did all of the DVD authoring and DVD menu design, as well as managing the production for the packaging.
Servant Partners launched several new videos prior to the Urbana missions convention that Hearken Creative produced. Most of the interview footage was interviewed and shot by Loren A. Roberts, with video from around the world provided to us by Servant Partners in various formats. HCS brought it all together and turned it into several promotional videos, for use both online as well as looping on plasmas in the organization’s booth at the 20,000-person convention. In addition, HCS authored the DVD, designed DVD menus, and duplicated copies of the DVD for all staff members. Below is one of the four videos produced:
And finally, Dave Schultze of Schultzeworks created a video promoting a computer design that he calls the “Philco PC,” an homage to the Philco Predicta television set from the 1950’s. I was able to work with Dave, consulting on camera movement, editing, and pacing for the video (Dave occupies my old office space, and we have become good friends over the past few years). We were stunned at the response after releasing the video: Vimeo shows that it has close to 100k views of the video, the design has been featured on EnGadget and the NY Times, and Dave has received calls from news outlets and potential clients. This was a great collaboration for us, and HCS looks forward to consulting in the future for other friends and clients! See the video below:
http://www.vimeo.com/7951005
There are many changes coming to Hearken Creative in the new year, but the one thing that will not change is our passion and dedication to making our clients look awesome, bringing creative and powerful solutions to the world of advertising design and corporate video.
A piece of music that might go in the background of a new video I’m working on…
Check it out.
Honestly, unlike millions of you others I won’t be seeing Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen this weekend. But I enjoyed the technical achievements of the first movie, even if I didn’t care for the editing or storytelling. Pro Sound News has spent the whole last week detailing different aspects of the sound work on the new movie, with interviews from major players:
- Part One: Mixing and Sound Editing: “This new movie features twice the action, and many, many more robots than the series opener, he continued. “In normal movies, there are two, three, even four set pieces. Eight years ago, one or two of those set pieces would have made this a big sound movie. We have several in each reel. It’s challenging.”
- Part Two: Dialog Editing and Effects Processing: There was relatively little ADR in ROTF. “Michael doesn’t like using ADR; the majority of ADR will be for extra lines and line changes,” said Hopkins, adding, “I’ve got probably 30 or 40 ADR cues because of bad background noise.”
- Part Three: Music/Effects/Dialog Mixing: “The music is really driving and the effects track is very detailed. Because you have this animation and special effects that you need to sell, sound is so powerful for doing that. It brings a sense of reality to it all and engages the audience into the whole story. Michael sees that; he sees how powerful it can be and how it can bring these animated things to life, and give them a sense of weight and power and character.”
- Part Four: Connecting Sound to Picture: With so much mayhem onscreen, it was important for Van der Ryn and Aadahl to constantly strive for clarity and make some critical choices early on in the process regarding what remained in the mix. “If we were to not make choices until [the mix stage], it would be a wall of noise…Everything you hear connects to something on the screen, and if there’s anything that is muddying things up or washing things out, we do that in the editorial process.”
- Part Five: Getting Effects to Sound Good: “When you have multiple sounds happening in a sequence, we really broaden the scope of frequencies so that things aren’t living in the same range. That separation is necessary for clarity, as well as panning things and rhythmically having things syncopate so that they aren’t stepping on each other. Even if you offset ever so slightly, it creates separation.”
That’s it for today; I’m crazy-busy finishing off a few projects right now.
StudioDaily reports today that Panasonic is releasing a new, cheaper line of P2 memory cards for their video cameras. The P2 is a card, kinda like an SD or CompactFlash, but bigger. It does away with tapes in the production workflow, and, more importantly, can completely eliminate the “capture” process (where you have to play the tape back off of a deck to ingest the footage into the computer) — instead, you just dump the video files over from the P2 card onto the computer!
P2 cards originally were as expensive or more expensive than the cameras, making them prohibitively expensive. But with this new announcement, it looks like Panasonic is truly trying to carve out a niche for this technology. One of the cameras I am interested in is an HVX200, and the price-cut in P2 cards makes this option even more lucrative.
I wonder what will happen with Panasonic and Sony and Canon when Red releases its incredible Red Scarlet camera? It completely bypasses tapes or cards, and works direct to hard drive (I believe), and has a higher resolution than most of the current offerings.
So maybe there is a silver lining to not being able to buy a new camera just yet: there will be several new offerings by the time we are ready to acquire some new equipment…
I just got back from watching the new “reboot” of Star Trek. I really think J.J. Abrams hit it out of the park on this one. But that doesn’t surprise me: I have enjoyed parts of Lost, Alias, and his take on the Mission Impossible franchise.
What interested me was the seamless integration of really complex FX work. And when I read that JJ changed many FX shots after they were completed, I understood why the film flowed so well: he broke the cardinal rule of FX — plan so that you don’t have to re-do shots — so that he could tell a better story. But this created havoc in their production schedule, such that ILM had to create a new workflow. As Paul Kavanaugh describes it:
“I thought that we had to work as efficiently as possible or we would be spinning our wheels for a long time,” he says. “We needed to get multiple takes to J. J. quickly and get him to agree. So I combined layout and animation into one department for the show. I picked animators who had done cameras and layout artists keen to animate.”
Woohoo — a new workflow! What does this signify to me? As awesome as the “old” Hollywood studio system is, there is bloat and inefficiencies in the extreme specialization that occurs at every level of Hollywood movie-making. So ILM dumped it, in favor of speed — using animators who had operated a camera, or camera operators who wanted to work on animatics — and came up with a wonderfully fast, new way of doing FX work on a major motion picture.
And the proof is in the pudding: the film, story, acting, FX all flow together seamlessly. The reason people are liking this movie so much ($75 million at the box office on opening weekend!) is that, even though it is a sci-fi movie, story is at the heart. JJ gets it: tell a good story, and people will flock to the theater.
Good job. I like it when telling a great story compels people to think out of the box.
This Honda Insight commercial takes both in-camera and post/FX effects, and creates a very organic, dynamic spot that mirrors the ethos of the car.
Eric Treml, a cinematographer from Austria, accomplished this wonderful mini-film. In Studio Daily, Treml talks about film, lenses, and 20+ takes to accomplish what he wanted:
“The big challenge was how detailed each shot needed to be,” he continues. “Lining everything up was painstaking and time-consuming. We were chasing the light and there was only so much we could do considering that we often needed 30 takes. But the finished spot unfolds in a witty and delightful way.”
In a 30-second spot, every shot counts. And this little piece did a nice job of communicating the dynamic, communal, and fun aspects of this car. Nicely done!
If you haven’t seen this viral video (that actually is an advertisement for Samsung), take a look at it above. Then, go here and see how director James Rouse swears up and down that there are no virtual sheep on that hill.
Really fun spot. It’s definitely not a “hard-sell,” but I think it is effective, because I remember that Samsung is the one with the cool LED-lit sheep now…
Do you know what a gobo is? If you do, and you use them often, then this iPhone app is for you: it gives you a complete catalog of the current GAM gobos, but it takes them one step further. You can spin them, defocus them, color them right on your phone, so that you can see exactly (or approximately) what they might look like for your theater or film shoot application.
I believe this is an example of a portable app that truly starts to make the iPhone/iPodTouch (I have a Touch, not an iPhone) useful for specific industries. My hope is that, as the iPhone continues to mature, more and more of this type of application will be released and supported. I’m tired of simple games and “where are you?” and Yelp-type apps (although some of those are quite good); the future of mobile computing lies with truly making these devices work, and save time and money for the user. Congrats to Wybron for bringing this useful app out.
The L.A. Times had an interesting piece run a few weeks ago about the declining availability of funding for film projects. It’s not pretty, and with the current economic crisis, it’s not going to get better anytime soon. So how do we fund new films? Dawn Hudson from Film Independent was interviewed in the story:
Hudson’s group advised one filmmaker who was discovered later to be financing his film with the profits from his hydroponic pot farm and another who was trying to raise money from the Russian mob, though she declines to name them for obvious reasons.
“We had a filmmaker who mortgaged his grandmother’s house. That’s a sad story,” Hudson says, but not uncommon.
“We do a whole forum around these cautionary tales.”
The only other option for small filmmakers is to push the budget lower and lower. But, speaking as one of those people who have to work with the lower and lower budgets, at some point, I throw in the towel. A low budget usually means people work for free or drastically reduced salaries, and that doesn’t put food on the table. Again, from the article:
Hits made for less than $1 million dollars include “The Blair Witch Project” and “Napoleon Dynamite,” not to mention cult and art-house favorites. But the financial failures are too numerous to count, particularly because many of these films never get distribution.
So with The Fair Trade movie, we have cleared one hurdle: we actually have (home video) distribution. But how do we market the thing, when we are working off even less than a shoestring budget?
I’m spending the rest of the year attempting to figure out our (HCS’s) business model. Because this past year hasn’t worked. Books I have been reading are Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
and Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
. Made to Stick is encouraging, Crowdsourcing is completely discouraging because essentially every industry that I have taken the business into is being invaded by amateurs. And, while I don’t necessarily think that the word amateur is a bad word, I still hate the fact that people are giving away services (design, photography, film, music, etc.) for free (or almost free) while I am attempting to make a living for my family from those same services. Hence, it’s time to figure out HCS’s new business model.
So, we’re getting our first month sales figures back from the November 18 release of The Fair Trade movie, which is very exciting, especially since the preliminary numbers look really good, at least for a production of our size. But how do you keep the momentum going? I’m spending time checking conversion metrics on Google (absolutely none), Yahoo (none), and Facebook (a few sales that I know of), and trying to think up new ways to make the movie into a truly viral success. And then I read a post by Joe Marchese, where, in the same article, he quote a fellow panelist (Henry Jenkins) who says “When it comes to social media, if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead,” (i.e., viral is good!) but then goes on to say
But before you try to say the word v…v…vi…viral (had trouble spitting that one out), there is a key difference that Jenkins pointed out between viral and social spreading. People spread viruses by accident. It is not intentional to give someone a cold — at least I sure hope not — but when people pass things to each other by way of social interaction, there most certainly is intent. This means that people are rational about spreading something through their social connections.
And he’s right. I realize that I don’t want The Fair Trade to have a “viral” spread. I want people to intentionally tell other people about it, and then spread from person to person to group to group. So how do I do that?
Well, sales help, because the more people that see it, the more people who want to talk about it. But I would love to help that process along, and I’m still brainstorming how to go about encouraging people to “intentionally” spread the word about the movie.
I’ll keep you posted.
Flickr Photos
