Prelude Workflow: Really I Love Bread Eating

A Prelude can be described as, “Something that comes before and leads to something else.” When it comes to naming programs, Adobe seems to have it right. While many are familiar with the editing software, “Adobe Premiere Pro,” just as many are unfamiliar with it’s lesser known brother, “Adobe Prelude.” Designed specifically to work in conjunction with Premiere Pro, Prelude is designed to speed the review, ingest, logging, selection, and export of tapeless media.

 In short, Prelude helps speed up the arduous naming, reviewing, and selection of footage. Furthermore, by transcoding your clips to a more manageable file type you’ll eliminate the headaches when trying to export your film. Specifically, Prelude allows one person to review and capture all footage, build a selects reel, and INSTANTLY export it into Premiere Pro CS6, or Final Cut Pro, so that the editor can begin editing immediately.

Can you imagine? You only have to export your film once. Nothing dropped, no errors, NO MESS! And you thought it could only happen in your dreams.  

All those student editors out there, I have even more good news. If you’re a competent editor and aren’t horrible to be around you’ll probably end up with a job. The cool thing about having a job is that you earn money. This news isn’t so great for producers though.

“Someone using Prelude is not editing, they are collecting and organizing clips, and putting them all into one spot for the editor.” -Larry Jordan, Author of "Edit Smarter"

If you don’t need an editor to use Prelude, then why pay someone $40 an hour when you could pay a Production Assistant $7.64 to go through the Prelude process and save some bucks where you can. Now I have some bad news for you student editors out there. I just lost us some easy money. Now the production assistants are going to take our jobs. Sorry about that. 

So hopefully by now I’ve convinced you that Prelude could, potentially, increase the efficiency of the editing team. But how does one go about actually using the software? In order to understand Prelude’s workflow, one *must remember the acronym: RILBE.

R: REVIEW clips from camera, card, or hard disk

I: INGEST just the clips, or portions of the clips that you need

L: LOG clips to add comments, and select the good clips

B: BUILD a rough-cut of selected clips to send to the editor

E: EXPORT the rough-cut to Premiere Pro (technically you could also export to Final Cut 7 but that’s not our focus for today)

I came up with a great phrase to remember the acronym: “Really I Love Bread Eating.” This works for me because, well, I really love eating bread. But you all can use it too if you want. Or you can create your own fun way to remember the correct sequence of the Prelude workflow. The ball is in your court. 

Let’s start with the R— Review clips from camera, card or disk.

When you first open Adobe Prelude, you’ll notice that it possesses that classic Adobe aesthetic. 

I feel at home already. Once you create a project, you’ll find that you’ve landed in the INGEST workplace. I know what you’re thinking— “Wait, Erin, the ingest workspace? But Ingest is the SECOND letter in the RILBE acronym.” Good catch! But actually, dear reader, the Ingest workspace is exactly where we need to be. This workspace allows you to review clips before you capture and transfer them to your hard disk from the camera, card, or hard disk where the source masters are stored. While revising the clips are important, I find this particular workspace the best place to label all of my clips.

Let’s move on to the second letter of the Prelude workflow acronym, INGEST. 

When Adobe says “ingest” they really just mean “transcode.” When you ingest an apple you change the composition of the apple. And when your body is done editing out all of the nutritious pieces of the apple, you end up “exporting” something completely different altogether. The benefit of ingesting clips is that you can transform the footage to a myriad of more manageable file types. This will save you the hassle of running into exporting errors later. Would you want to eat an apple without chewing it first? Prelude “chews” the clips before they seriously mess up your editing timeline. But what clips to chew? It’s common knowledge that transcoding large video files can take hours, days, even years to complete. Adobe offers several solutions to this. 

Solution number 1:

Clear your schedule for the week and ingest every damn clip

Solution number 2:

Clear an hour of your schedule and ingest all of the clips you know, or think that you may use in your final edit. 

Solution number 3:

Adobe allows you to pre-select portions of clips to ingest. Technically, you could select all of the in and out points of each clip and only ingest those specific clip bits. I caution you against doing this, however, because not importing the entire clip makes it fairly difficult to change your mind about things like length when they’re exported into the editing timeline.

I’m not going to tell you which solution is the BEST one, but it’s 2. Solution 2 is most likely the one that you’re going to want to go with. Ingesting clips is as simple as clicking the checkbox on the lower right corner of the thumbnail, selecting the format you want said clip transcoded to, and proceeding to push the big Ingest button in the lower right corner of the Ingest Workspace. The formats that are understood by editing softwares best (Apple ProRes, DNxHD, CineForm etc.) all require you to create a custom transcoding preset within Prelude. Once complete, the Adobe Media Composer will pop up and ingesting ensues. 

Here’s a great video on how to create custom presets in Adobe Prelude:

A GREAT VIDEO ON HOW TO CREATE CUSTOM PRESETS IN ADOBE PRELUDE

(thanks Arturo)

Reviewing footage and transcoding files into entirely different formats is not the only things that the ingest page is good for. Prelude is designed so that you can provide a link to the media (for tagging, and searching purposes) and you can copy media/ save your work to an unlimited number of destinations. That means you can save it to ALL of your hard drives. At this point I’m sure that you feel quite overwhelmed with the number of dreams Prelude is making come true for you. 

Now comes the 3rd step in our Prelude workflow— LOGGING

Logging is my favorite RILBE action because it involves the use of colorful markers. Each colored marker indicates something different when used on a clip so it’s very important that you become familiar with each marker’s use. Imagine if Van Gogh didn’t know what the blue marker did? 

“Starry Night you call it? By golly that could be a picture of anything Vanny old chap!” < This quote is fictitious in content as well as inaccurate in terms of culture, time-period, and vernacular. 

Prelude is no Crayola, but it offers six distinctly different types of markers as illustrated here:

While each color marker has its place, the most useful (in my opinion) is the blue “sub clip” marker. You can create sub clips, also known as clips within clips, by selecting in and out points with the blue marker. The sub clips will then be saved and marked (Command+S) when you end up importing the re-furbished footage into Premiere. 

See, even Vincent Van Gogh likes blue best.

Which brings us to the 4th letter in the RILBE Prelude workflow acronym— Building a Rough Cut. 

This step of the Prelude is optional especially if you’re giving the job to production assistants rather than your editor. However, you can create a rough cut by double clicking the rough-cut icon and opening the rough-cut workspace. In a circumstance where the editor is not the person working in Prelude, the stand-in may take on the responsibility of assembling the good takes in one place so the editor wastes less time reviewing each and every take. If you do decide to make a rough-cut in Prelude, be sure to select File > Save before going on to the very last step of RILBE.

EXPORTING:

One of Prelude’s greatest attributes is it’s ability to transfer files to Premiere Pro unbelievably quickly. By selecting, File > Send to Premiere Pro, a  new timeline will appear in Premiere and your clips will be transferred almost instantaneously. (This knowledge makes the transcoding process much more bearable to sit through.)

So that’s the end of this Prelude. Don’t you worry, there will be much, much more to come. Until then, Really I Love Bread Eating. Cheers!

SO YOU WANNA BUY A HARD DRIVE: PART II (Speed)

So you wanna buy a hard drive. If you’ve read my last post, “If You’re Gonna Shake it Back it Up,” you know that I’ve gone through a lot of hard drives. I mean, A LOT. I’ve lost them, dropped them, overheated them, you get the picture. However, because I’ve had to say goodbye to so many hard drives, I’ve also gotten really good at, well, buying external hard drives. And that’s why you’re here. Whether you’re a video game enthusiast, an editor, a photographer, an accountant, or a working mother of 9, somewhere out there is an external hard drive just waiting to back up your life. 

SO YOU WANNA BUY A HARD DRIVE: Part II (SPEED)

Before you even THINK about purchasing a new hard drive, you need to consider SPEED. By “speed” I am of course referring to the rate that your external drive read/writes/transfers data, not the illegal substance. Still, I have heard that the drug “speed” is a great way to be productive for weeks on end— you don’t even have to sleep! I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the hard drive thing:

In my last post I discussed the difference between Solid State Drives (SSD), and Hard Disk Drives (HDD)— speed and price being the main distinguishing characteristics of the two drives. Solid state drives are exponentially more expensive than hard disk drives because they are capable of transferring files at an extraordinary rate. Before you decide to splurge, however, I must caution you: Your external hard drive is only as fast as the CONNECTOR you utilize when transferring files. Here’s what I mean: Most consumer external HDD drives nowadays come packaged with a USB 3.0 connector cable and/or a Firewire cable. The main reason for this is that most computers either have USB 3.0 capabilities, or a firewire port. If you’re still using USB 2.0 it’s probably a good time to update your computer.  

You can buy the most expensive, speediest, thunderbolt solid state drive on the market, but if your 13 inch macbook that your uncle gave you three years ago doesn’t have a thunderbolt port, that drive isn’t going to move any faster than your $50 USB 2.0 compatible drive will. eSATA, for example,  is one of the most expensive external hard drive interfaces, theoretically capable of (3000Mbps). That’s literally an entire order of magnitude faster than USB 2.0. Still, eSATA doesn’t provide power through the connector cable which means it requires either a USB cable for power, (AKA the data will travel at USB speeds making the fast speeds of eSATA irrelevant), a combined USB/eSATA cable and connecter, or an external AC adapter. Make sense? 

Let me break it down for you. Here are a few of the most common external drive connectors ordered from fastest to slowest:

Thunderbolt: Thunderbolt devices can be daisy-chained together to work with one connector on a laptop or desktop. Also like FireWire, the Thunderbolt interface can be used to boot a Mac (USB boot drives may not work on some Macs). Best of all, the Thunderbolt 2 interface has the fastest theoretical throughput: up to 20GBps. That’s speedy enough to transfer a full-length, high-definition movie in less than 30 seconds! It remains to be seen who adopts Thunderbolt aside from Apple. AMD has announced a competing technology called "Lightning Bolt," but it remains to be seen if much interest here will be in a competing interconnect technology. 

USB 3.0: USB 3.0 is becoming the port of choice because it provides faster transfer speeds than eSATA and USB 2.0 and requires minimal fuss— (almost all desktop and laptop PCs come with USB ports.) 

FIREWIRE: Almost as common as the USB 3.0, Firewire is faster than USB 2.0 and is good for daisy chaining several drives/devices to a single port. The most recent Mac’s don’t come equipped with a firewire port so this can cause potential compatibility problems in the future. Luckily, most consumer external drives come with a USB 3.0, as well as a firewire cable in order to remedy this particular issue. 

 

USB 2.0: USB 2.0 is by far the slowest method of data transferral. No one buys anything new that is only USB 2.0 compatible other than old people and “bargain” hunters. I like to think of a USB 2.0 connector like the Internet Explorer of the connector interface world.

PC Magazine gives some advice about what to do depending your computer’s connector interface compatibility: 

“If you are transferring lots of files over a speedy interface like eSATA (fast),USB 3.0 (faster), or Thunderbolt (fastest), then by all means go for the 7,200rpm (HDD) drive. However, if you're limited to USB 2.0 or FireWire 400/800, then trade speed for capacity and get the largest 5,400rpm (HDD) drive that your budget allows. If all out speed is your goal, multiple drives (7,200rpm, 10,000rpm, or SSD) over Thunderbolt 2 is the fastest (and most costly), with a single SSD connected via Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 as next fastest, and so on.” 

When it comes to convenience, USB, Thunderbolt, and FireWire all provide enough electrical power to run an attached drive, (unlike eSATA), so the only cord you’ll need to carry with you is the appropriate interface cable. This leads us to the topic of next week’s blog: portability and drive security. 

An Aside: Consider Yourself an Editor?

As someone who spends a fair amount of time editing video, I can be more specific about what speeds work best when you’re working with large files. As an amateur editor, you can get away with using a Firewire 400; but that’s the bare minimum you’re going to want to go especially if you don’t want any delays when scrubbing through your timeline. A thunderbolt connector interface, of course, remains the most optimal method of data transfer. I would recommend using a Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, or Firewire 800 connector in conjunction with a 7200 RPM hard disk drive. Next week I’ll be talking more about portability, but as an editor you should look to the future when buying expensive drives. Sure, 1 Tb MyPassport drives might cheap and convenient now, but these drives are meant for storage and often overheat/crash when they’re edited on for extended periods of time. Instead, it’s much more worth your money to buy a hard drive that is built to manage active files (active drives are usually equipped with an internal fan that prevents the drive from burning itself up.) While they may be more expensive up front, active drives are much less likely to crash and delete all of your current projects. 

Editing and Stuff

"The effect you can get from juxtaposing different shots together in a film is unlike anything else in writing, or photography." -Vsevolod Pudovkin

Anyone who's ever edited anything thinks he/she is a great editor. It's the nature of the art. Learning how to cut clips and apply filters are easy to learn, and can create impressive looking material. However, just as there is a difference between Instagrammers and professional photographers, there exists a wide gap between a consumer cutting some clips on iMovie and a working editor. But what makes an editor great? Although I've come across a wide array of contrasting opinions on the topic, I've found a couple of attributes that most of the Internet could agree on:

1. Cut tight – The best editing approach is to cut tight scenes without becoming too “cutty”. This means taking out unnecessary pauses between actors’ delivery of dialogue lines. Sometimes it mean tightening the gaps within dialogue sentences through the use of carefully placed cutaways. It may also mean losing redundant lines of dialogue, after the director has reviewed your cut.

2. Temp music – Many editors like working with temporary music as a placeholder. I advise against this for two reasons. First – people tend to fall in love with the temp score and then it’s hard to get real music that feels as good. Second – temp music becomes a crutch. You tend to be more forgiving of a weak scene when there’s interesting music than when the scene is naked. I prefer to cut a strong scene and make it work through editorial solutions. If a scene can stand on its own, then the addition of sound effects and a score will make it that much better. The exception is a visual montage set to music. Here, I tend to do better when I’m cutting to music rather than the other way around.

3. No Dragnet edits – The original Dragnet television series used a certain approach to cutting dialogue scenes. Audio and video edits tended to be made as straight cuts between the actors without any overlaps as they delivered their lines. It followed this formula: cut to actor A – deliver the line; cut to actor B – deliver the line; cut back to actor A and so on. Walter Murch refers to this as the Dragnet-style of editing. Our brains seem to react better to edits where the change in picture and sound is not always together. These are called split edits, L-cuts or J-cuts.

4. Matching action – Matching actors’ hand positions, use of props, eyeline and stage position from one cut to another fall into the technical category of how to make a proper edit. Walter Murch offers a rule of six criteria that form reasons to make a cut at a given instance. The greatest weight is given to whether that cut drives the emotion of the scene or moves the story along. Technical matching is the least important concern. I’m not saying you should throw it out the window, because a mismatch that is too extreme can be very jarring to the audience. On the other hand, as an editor friend often tells me, “Matching is for sissies.” The audience will often ignore many minor continuity differences from one shot to the next if they stay totally engrossed in the story. Your job as the editor is to cut in such as way that they do.

5. Moving camera shots – Moving the camera around is a staple of action sequences. This might be a camera on a dolly, crane, Steadicam or just handheld. In an action scene, this is designed to create a level of tension. When I cut these shots together, I prefer to cut on movement, so that the camera is in constant motion from one shot to the next. Many directors and DP will disagree, preferring instead to start and stop each camera move before making the cut. Both approaches work under the right situations, but my tendency is to cut tighter and not let the audience’s eye rest on the set or a shot or a scene for too long, unless there is a reason to do so.

6. Don’t cut back to the exact same angle – If you have a choice of several camera angles, don’t automatically cut back to the same camera angle or take that you just used in the previous shot. This is, of course, unavoidable in a dialogue scene with only two angles and one take of each; but, if the director shot different takes with different framing, try to use a little of all of them. Don’t get stuck in a cutting rut, like master/single/reverse, master/single/reverse, etc. Mix it up.

7. B-roll shots in threes – When the scene calls for cutaway inserts, it feels right to use three on a row. Not a single shot, not two, but three. These should be at least 1.5-2 seconds long (or longer). An example might be when a character enters the room and looks around. The POV inserts work nicely in triplets and give the audience a good idea of the landscape that the character encounters. It mimics our real-world experience of moving our head around and seeing different aspects of the same surroundings.

8. Cut for the eyes – Actors that do well on TV and in films (as compared with the stage) are all very expressive with their face, but most importantly, their eyes. When I’m cutting an intense dialogue scene, I’m looking at how the actors’ eyes play in the scene. Do they convey the proper emotion? What is the reaction of the other actors in the scene? What the actors are or aren’t doing facially determines my cutting. It drives my decision to stick with the principal actor delivering the dialogue or whether I briefly cut away to see reactions from the others.

9. Pull the air out of actors’ performances – Going back to Item 1 – I like to cut tight. Recognize that many actors will overact. They will milk a scene for more than is appropriate. They will accentuate pauses, add more stumbles and stammers (where scripted) and give lengthy glances. Sometimes this works, but your job as the editor is to dial these back as you cut. Take these pauses out by cutting away and then back. Cut out redundant actions and line deliveries. Make it real, so it doesn’t feel like ACTING.

10. Shaping story – It is said that there are three films: the one that’s scripted, the one that’s been filmed and the one that’s edited. When you cut a feature, pay close attention to the story chronology and don’t be afraid to veer from what was written or filmed if it makes sense to do so. Many editors use note cards on a storyboard wall to create a quick visual representation of the storyline. This helps you make sure that you reveal things to the audience in the most logical order and that nothing is inadvertently edited out of place.

11. Digital aids – Modern NLEs and finishing techniques like digital intermediates offer a lot of tools that aid the filmmaker. For example, digital images are very tolerant of blow-ups. You can add camera zooms or blow-up a shot (creating a wide and a close-up from a single shot) with these tools. This is especially true if you shot on 35mm film or with the RED One camera, because the large image area of the film negative or camera sensor allows more overshoot space than HD cameras. Don’t be afraid to zoom in as long as the image quality holds up.

12. Make your choices, but be prepared for others – Your job as the editor is to shape the story and the pacing of the film. First and foremost this means you are there to help the director realize his or her creative vision. But you were also hired for your own best instincts. Most editors finish a first cut without the director sitting over their shoulder. During that time is your initial chance at putting your own stamp on the film. When the first cut is completed, the director and editor work together to refine that cut into the director’s cut.

Look at it from this Perspective

Although the phrase "forced perspective" sounds intimidating, chances are you've already utilized it in your photography. If not, you've definitely seen it used before.

These two pictures use forced perspective in it's most basic form. One subject stands very close to the camera, while the other rests much farther back. This creates the illusion that the subject in the foreground is much larger than the background subject. This exaggerated size is something we love to play with (especially around historic sites).

Some examples of forced perspective in photography:

Still, forced perspective is not confined to photography. I stumbled across this walk through while researching. A small, independent group of filmmakers wanted to create a scene that involved a man discovering a huge block of ice. Unfortunately, there was no room in the budget to create a 6' by 6' block of ice. Not only that, but the weight of said block would be completely impractical; especially since they wanted to load it into a truck. 

So what did they do? Just a little forced perspective magic. First, they got a block of ice. However, instead of the 6' by 6' dimensions they were originally pulling for, the filmmakers settled on a 7" by 7" ice cube. 

Here's the little guy in front of the green screen: 

 And here it is on set:

Then, using the minds of master illusionists, the filmmakers came up with a floor plan that would make the ice block look much larger than reality. Apparently, 216 feet was the magic number.

The floor plan:

Here's a still of the achieved look:

I'll embed the video here but I'm warning you now: it looks low budget. It's not actually very good. But, they did achieve the look they were going for through the use of forced perspective. 

Here it is:

Although primarily used in low budget movies where CGI and other special effects are unavailable, big blockbusters too have been known to incorporate the use of good "old-fashioned" forced perspective. I use the word "old fashioned" very loosely. Nowadays, although it's done physically, moving cameras have caused things to get a little more complicated. 

Take for instance this example from The Lord of the Rings:

So although the rigs are getting more and more complicated, this example proves that CGI doesn't have to be the answer. What I like about the moving rig method for moving camera shots is that although the machinery is semi-involved, the idea of forced perspective remains a simple constant.

You Don't Need Money to Scare the S*** Out of People

As a college student looking pursue a career in the movie industry, I have heard the same advice on countless occasions: 

"Movies? Yikes...You should probably study something more stable; like psychology, or art history." 

However, upon realizing that I'm pretty set in my decision to make films, people in the industry give me another piece of advice: 

"Start by producing horror. They're relatively cheap to make, and they have a built in audience." 

I decided to do my own research on the topic. How small of a budget can horror films have and still make a profit? Does a bigger budget necessarily guarantee a better movie? I started by comparing two horror films with very different budgets.

This is the trailer for the 2010 thriller, The Wolfman directed by Joe Johnston. It cost $150,000,000 to produce.

This is the trailer for the 1978 horror film, Halloween, directed by John Carpenter. The independent film had the minuscule budget of $325,000.

When looking exclusively at box office sales, The Wolfman outperformed Halloween; grossing a whopping $139,789,765 as opposed to Halloween's $70,000,000. Despite this, in the end, The Wolfman lost $10,210,235 while Carpenter's Halloween made $69,675,000. This comparison isn't the only example of low budget horror films ultimately earning more money than bigger budget productions.

Director Tobe Hooper's 1974 film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is my all-time favorite example of the little budget guys coming out on top. The thriller cost under $140,000 to produce and ended up grossing $26,000,000. Not bad Tobe. Not bad. 

For those who haven't seen it:

Horror movies will *almost always sell tickets.

 ( *I use the word "almost" due to the failure of the horror film Playback which earned exactly $265 at the box office in 2012.)

Horror films will always sell tickets, but they'll never be blockbusters. Some people just don't like scary movies. They never will. Luckily, there will always be those high school couples and adrenaline junkies that will go out and see anything classified as a horror film. Keeping this in mind, it doesn't economically make sense to spend millions upon millions of dollars to produce a genre of movie that targets a relatively small (although stable) population.

So in the end, the second piece of advice is correct. Scary movies are a great place to start when you want to break into the industry but don't have any money. Still, if horror isn't your thing, there's always porn.

Lens Whacking: Its Not What it Sounds Like

When my friend first suggested we try lens whacking, I was confused, intrigued, and very, very anxious. "I definitely should have gotten my lens insured. It'll never make it." Luckily, (probably due to the look of horror I was definitely sporting) my friend quickly elaborated. Contrary to my initial presumption, lens whacking has nothing to do with beating a camera lens with any sort of blunt object. In reality, lens whacking refers to a video capturing technique that involves holding the lens in front of the camera's sensor instead of fully attaching the lens to the camera body. Upon digesting this explanation, I once again felt confused, intrigued, and very very anxious. Questions ensued.

"Why would anyone ever want to try something like that?"

Apparently, lens whacking, or free lensing, allows the camera operator not only to manually manipulate the focal plane of the shot, but also allows for light to creep through the cracks between the camera body and the lens.

If you're doing it right it should look something like this:

Usually, shooting in the classic sense, (with the lens attached), is all you need. However, correct use of lens whacking can produce dreamlike, romantic-feeling sequences that are very different from any filter used in post. Usually, images produced through free lens shooting are composed of two different elements. Often, there exists one very focused element within the frame. The rest of the image tends to be sprinkled with lens flares and soft light leaks. "When you take the lens off it creates an effect, look and feeling that is totally different, you really can connect the image. Because it's real and not added in post, it's randomness gives a dreamlike quality. Its almost like how your mind remembers images and I love the feeling it gives. Its a romance, it really is." -Someone being anonymously quoted on someone else's blog

Here's a still of a shot created using the free lens technique:

"So would we just use this lens?"

Turns out, we wouldn't have been able to use the lens already on my Canon 5D. Usually, one has to buy a brand of lens separate to that of his or her camera in order to meet the following criteria:

1. The lens should have a short focal length
• Short focal length = greater depth of field and can be set to infinity focus
2. The lens should have a small mount
• This is the main reason the lens usually needs to be of a different brand
• Small mounts allow the operator to swivel the lens without scraping or damaging the camera's body
3. The lens should be able to be manually exposed
• Lens whacking involves opening the aperture completely
• If you can't open the lens' aperture when it's not mounted on the camera, you're kind of in trouble.

When shooting with a Canon, most lens whackers choose to shoot with either a Nikon, or M42 lens.

 "How are we supposed to control how the shot comes out?"

The main things the videographer needs to worry about when it comes to free lensing is manipulating the focus and controlling the amount/direction of the light reaching the sensor.

We'll start with the focus. There are two ways to focus when lens whacking: by tilting the lens, or by physically moving closer/farther from the subject. Although tilting the lens is by far the easiest method of adjusting the focal length, this method also allows for more light to creep into the sensor. To avoid this potential problem, the camera operator will most likely have to move forward or backward to ensure that the subject is in focus.

Now let's discuss the light. When shooting like a normal person (I.E. with the lens actually attached to the body of a camera) light can only enter the sensor from the front. Free lensing, on the other hand, allows light to hit the sensor from the sides as well. The camera operator will often manipulate the direction that the light enters by using his hand as a visor.

When light enters the sensor from the side it creates more pronounced, purposeful highlights. One can note the defined beam of light in this picture:

When light enters the sensor from the front, the picture takes on more of a uniformed wash of color/light:

Despite which style you're looking to achieve, using your hand as a light manipulating tool will prove essential.

I'd like to conclude this post with a segment I like to call: Erin being much too dubious about a camera technique that she's never actually tried and probably never will.

First of all, I don't believe for a second that the product created through free lensing is too random to recreate in post. In fact, creating these kinds of effects in post would give the creator more freedom to create the exact image he had in mind. Furthermore, going to out to shoot without a strong idea of what each shot should look like seems unnecessarily risky in my eyes. Despite this, I do understand why one may prefer to create this dreamlike effect on location. There's something a little bit magical about creating an effect through "natural" means rather than dropping it on a digital file later.

But then I remember how this "natural" effect is shot and I begin to worry about the camera's sensor. Most DSLR owners are known to switch between lenses with awe-inspiring speed. The main reason for this, of course, is to limit the amount of time the sensor is exposed to all of the dust and who-knows-what particles in the air. Dust on the sensor =  really bad news. With this in mind, how safe could free lensing be when one has to purposefully expose the sensor to dust/debris for extended periods of time?

Hoping to be reassured, I looked to the Internet for answers regarding ways to protect both the back of the lens, and the the camera sensor while free lensing. This is what I found:

I could:

1. Use an ND filter as a dust block on the sensor
2. Attach some sort of optical quality polyester film like Melinex to act as a dust block
3. Don't do it

For those who are successful lens whackers; I applaud you. Your skills with a camera greatly transcend mine. The shots that you can achieve on location are extraordinary and blow my mind. I'm glad you all are utilizing this game-changing technique so that I don't have to. Maybe one day I'll join the free lensing fan club. Until then, I'll thank God for After Effects.

MoVI: May Your Shots Forever be Stable

A large part of what separates the amateurs from the professionals in the visual media industry is how smooth the shots look. When you think about it; it makes sense. As of now, steadicams, (currently the easiest way to achieve these seductive, sweeping shots) go anywhere from $150 to over $10,000. Your average Joe isn't about to dish out a thousand dollars for smooth shots when he's got a built in stabilizer on his T3i. However, in the future we might see a steady drop in the price of steadicams with the introduction of the Freefly MoVI rig.

So you may be thinking, "What's so revolutionary about the MoVI?" This video will clear up any questions you may have:

One thing I found particularly intriguing about the MoVI rig is it's ability to not only be operated by one person, but also operated dually. Much like how a follow focus could be focusing a camera from another room, the MoVI allows one person to follow the action with the camera while another sits somewhere else concentrating entirely on framing. 

Secondly, even those looking for that, shaky, running with the camera look can find the MoVI rig useful. For example,  the MoVI M10 offers a user adjusted shakey cam that allows the operator to shoot with consistent, realistic movement. Who would have thought that a device could be so good at being smooth that a shakey camera would be considered a feature?

Below I attached the link that directs you to Laforet's finished video. Keep in mind, the short was made for the purpose of displaying the MoVI's abilities. Therefore, the plot of the video is fairly lacking and in itself not so interesting. However, when focusing on the shots one can easily see the upgrade in production quality the MoVI brings to the table. As of now, a MoVI rig goes for about $15000. However, I doubt it will be long before similar rigs aimed towards consumers come unto the market. Knowing this, one must question how much longer the line separating amateur productions from professional productions will remain in tact.

http://www.freeflysystems.com/media/videos.php

Extra, Extra, Read All About It

Over the past couple of years, I have been a pretty avid follower of the yahoo top news stories. I know its not the greatest link for news, but it gets the job done and helps me stay knowledgable about what's current. Recently, I just saw an article that talked about movie extra's in feature films and how people will do anything to even have a chance to be on the big screen. The producers and directors will normally send out a mass invite to anyone in the local area interested in part taking in his/her feature film. This past summer, I drove out to Heinz Field In Pittsburgh, PA to be apart of the The Dark Knight Rises. The final batman movie had a scene in the stadium where the main villain interrupts the game being played with explosives and fireworks. It was sweet to see all the cast members and have the chance to be in the background of a very popular soon to be film.

At the end of the article i was reading, the author provided a link to a youtube video of the world's most used extra. The video identified the person in over 50 films and

shows, a pretty impressive number if you ask me. The man's name is Jesse Heiman,

a 33 year old actor who still to this day plays teenagers and young adults in the backgrounds of many films. In some cases, the actor is paid for the countless second he is on the screen for. I thought it was cool to have a chance to be in one movie, but this guy has been in over 50, a number that will probably never be topped.

101 Acting

After watching the video today, I realized that acting is not so much a talent, but more of an art. Michael Cane went on to talk about how simple you have to look in front of the camera and that less is more, especially on close ups. I did some researching of my own and found some other helpful tips that might help the rest of the class with their replication project.

1. If your scene has dialogue, tell your actor/actress to make sure he/she knows the character they are playing. if the character is serious, then the dialogue shouldn't come across funny or sarcastic. IF your having trouble keeping your actors from laughing, go through the scene a couple times until the laughter dies out. It is too easy to spot out on screen actors holding in their laugher, and it only ruined the shot.

2. If you have characters in the background or just simply not speaking, give them something to do while on camera. What I mean by

that is to make sure he/she isn't doing something to just get T/V time. They should have a purpose to the shot and should be doing every day kind of things.

3. Last, be aware of overacting. Make sure you understand what the scene's purpose is and that you don't exceed or miss the point. A lot of the time, beginner acts feel like they need to stand out from the others so they feel obligated to try and make more of what they are suppose to do. This mistake is easily avoideable and shouldn't be seen in any of our projects.

I hope this helps to all that read. Give me any feedback you got or anything else that I should maybe add to the list.

Steve Kinslow

CineSkates

I was looking around Kickstarter.com and came across a very interesting invention made by a student at MIT. He starts off with a statement that I really liked. "Video quality is no longer limited by resolution but instead by stabilization." Unlike 5 years ago, it is now hard to find a single camera at any store that doesn't shoot in high definition. Even the camera on my phone shoots in crisp 780p. And for under 1000 dollars anyone can buy a very nice DSLR that will shoot in 1080p with the ability to buy new lenses. At ICTV rush night I discovered that almost every field show was choosing to shoot on a DSLR rather than a traditional camera. CineSkates is perfect for DSLRs as they simply attach to a small flexible tripod and allow the tripod itself to act as a dolly. The whole video on kickstarter is shot using CineSkates and it has some impressive shots.


This is also a good example of how powerful kickstarter is when you have a good idea. This project was asking for 20,000 dollars and has already been given 240,000. It makes sense though because if you pledge 275 dollars you get the whole system. I thought about doing it myself.

Circular Replication

So for our first project, I decided to go against the rules a little for video production. The first commandment in shooting a movie to always follow the 180 rule, and for those of you who don't know the rule it states:

the 180° rule is a guideline that says two characters or objects in a certain scene should always have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line.

Know you ask how should i break this law. Well, for a thirty second time period I decided to leave the camera in one location and slowly pan in a circle for 30 seconds. To make this look good, I have to make sure something is going in each quarter of the circle. I wanted a challenge for this project and I definitely think this task will give it to me. If you have any question, comments, or suggestions please comment.

thanks

Steve Kinslow

How To Do It

Welcome everyone!. The following project structure is intended to provide you with a methodology to be both specific and help you track the progress and meet your milestones. Since individual projects vary widely some points might not apply. However, you can use it as a roadmap to define/clarify your deliverables and go back to it frequently and methodically.

It has four distinct phases:

DISCOVERY

This phase helps you understand the big picture and the opportunity to achieve the main goals of your project; to take an idea from conception to completion in the most effective manner.

Brainstorming, sketch models, scenarios, analysis and feasibility assessments.

Define the requirements, scope, timeline, budget (your time and resources) and benchmarks for the project.

Requirements of Analysis:

• Prioritize and validate requirements based on quality(1) and strategic factors
• Determine success criteria and metrics
• Define a preliminary list of production requirements.

Synthesis:

• Produce a final script with the discovery result.
• Develop a high-level implementation plan. (storyboard)
• Present a timeline and a budget estimate.

DESIGN

During this phase, create the look and feel of the solution (style). Develop the story requirements, the creative components, the technical design and infrastructure that supports the project.

Creative Design:

• Storyline and character creation
• Script
• Storyboard
• Art Direction
• Audio Design
• Production Design

Technical Design:

• Equipment requirements
• Set/backgrounds/location/plates
• Lighting diagrams
• Special efx design
• Models, costumes and makeup

PRE-PRODUCTION

Develop and integrate all the creative, technical and information components.

Creative Production:

• Location Scouting
• Casting
• Rehearsals
• Graphics, 3D video/audio production needs
• Technical integration

Technical Production:

• Set design
• Lighting
• Cinematography
• Sound
• System testing
• Problem resolution
  

DEPLOYMENT

Demonstrate the solution after all final specifications and testing results.

Live environment:

• Projection
• Audience Test performance and feedback
• Implement promotion/communication strategies

Showtime!

That's all folks!

1-Quality: the true nature of things, the peculiar and essential character

All Illustrations custom made by Rich Powell