Something I’ve been toying with for a few years mentally is the idea of a mobile production office. On top of this mental toying, was my idea that I may have to go around the country to promote my movie Crashing Down if I don’t get a good enough offer to pick up. While the shooting has been slo(add several ohs here)w, it will be finished eventually, and I’ll have to sell it. I don’t want to settle on a crappy, one-sided deal just to get it sold. I know others have gone around and 4walled etc to get their films to be worth more over-all, and I think that may be necessary, especially now that so many indie outlets have closed. A bus made up for living/working could facilitate such a project.
So anyway, I bought an old flatnose Bluebird All-American school bus to convert. It was an awesome deal that I couldn’t pass up even if the timing was in the middle of production instead of afterward.
Eventually, it should end up looking something like the bus that Jake VonSlatt converted, except with office space. This bus is HUGE, so office space will not be a problem.
Did I mention this bus is huge?
Driving it back from Arkansas was a hell-of-a-thing. I’ve driven the big rigs before (people that know me will be saying “dude, is there any job you haven’t done?” it was only a brief training job), and this bus, though not as big, was just as hard to get around corners. The first corner I took put me in everyone else’s lane. I could see their little faces with “0″ shaped mouths and upraised hands. But after a couple of corners, I got the hang of it and couldn’t continue to have multi-lane fun with an excuse.
It’s parked and ready for… something. I guess I’ve gotta get out there and pull the seats. Good thing others have already done this so I can see the ‘right’ way to do it.
Spent a few hours last week with the wife and some animated chips. We managed to get it all in the 30 second limit, which is a challenge for someone who doesn’t normally work under those constraints like a ‘real’ commercial producer. But, I have to say, it ain’t so bad (especially after looking at some of the others, a few are good, the rest?)
Check it out and show some comment love. NOTE: Their Flash player is only 4×3, so my 16×9 file will look kinda squished. I swear it’s not originally like that. Also, when you click the link, there’s a skip intro button on the lower right… very useful.
DON’T LET ‘EM GET AWAY
UPDATE: The 16×9 squeeze to 4×3 was killing me, so I uploaded a 4×3 center cut version. Same thing, just looks a little better.
I’ve never been happy with the soundtrack on the Bank Scene. The music was cool, but sounded too out of place — didn’t work. I wasn’t going to mess with it again until we had everything in the can, but since I had some time on my hands, I decided to try something else. It is at the very least, more ’soundtracky.’ This isn’t final either, but hopefully it’s going in the right direction. What do you think?
Spent the weekend location scouting in absolutely beautiful central Texas weather. I didn’t find the ‘magic’ locations that I so hoped to find, but I did snap a few cool photos. Hey, ya gotta do something to make the time worth the effort right? It doesn’t hurt that I like taking pictures of old stuff — good for maintaining perspective.
If you know what a Canon 50mm 1.4 is, then you know the images it renders are beautiful. But damn, Canon had to skimp somewhere didn’t they?! This thing has a plastic inner barrel that the whole thing moves in and out on for focus. This is a known issue with this lens. Any little bump will make the focus rough due to bent plastic, and the auto-focus will get iffy because of those rough spots.
I took that sucker apart and fixed it.
But I didn’t stop there. You see, it’s a full-time-manual lens with one of those micro-motors. Since I’m mostly making movies, and don’t really use auto much, I decided to regear this thing to just be a manual lens. What!! Yep, I disabled the auto-focus. It will just spin and spin if you don’t. Makes it somewhat inaccurate if you’re trying to pull with a follow focus. Especially this lens, because if it has a rough spot due to the aforementioned problem, it will skip, and your focus marks will be off.
Not anymore baby! It rolls from one side to the other stopping on each side like a ‘real’ lens. Of course, I can still use the beep that tells me when I have focus, so all is not lost functionally. I didn’t bother taking the motor out, I just took out the little gear between the motor and the focus gear, dropped some JB Wield on the shaft of the main focus gear where the plastic gear sits on top (it only spins without the motor gear) and boom! we’re manual only.
I took some pix to make sure it was all good. I’d say we’re in business.
We decided to put up 2 scenes from the movie Crashing Down just as teasers (and to help in the financing hunt of course). I tell ya man, even though it’s only 2 scenes, it was a LOT of work. These aren’t what they’ll look like in the final movie, but they’re close enough for show-n-tell. Being that this film is based on Dante’s Inferno, there’s always some correlation to something from the poem. In these 2, the first one is the main character passing through the gates of hell, the second is some scenes later when he’s made it into the first circle.
I could tweak on this for another month, but sometimes, you just gotta say enough and move on to the next thing. The voice over does need to be redone though as I’m not a V.O. person (does that have to be pointed out? LOL). V.O. redone by Jim Braton! I still have to upload the two scenes, but damn they’re big files!
Another day, another pass through the audio editing process. Reaper turned out to be a dud, which is a bummer, as I really liked the interface. Everything was going great until I dropped in a few EQs and a noise filter or 2. Ugh! Static!
Random static was introduced in various places. I watched my CPU usage and it was barely moving, so I know it wasn’t that. Besides, I’m running a Black Edition AMD Phenom 955 quad running 4ghz with 8 gigs of ultra-low latency ram all overclocked to their rightful speeds on a fast tweaked-out raid.
I know there’s no bottleneck there. And the audio hardware is an M-Audio Pro Fire 610 that has never batted an eye at anything thrown at it.
So, I returned to the old stand-by that I’ve used on and off for years; Sonar.
So far, it’s running pretty solid. I had to do a few things to get the Cineform codec to work, but we’re all good now. As I’ve said before, Sonar has some quirks in the interface that bug me, but it’s a solid program that’s never choked on anything I’ve ever thrown at it.
I would’ve tried Samplitude, but they didn’t have any trials on their site that I could find.
We’re shooting Crashing Down in 4k, but finishing in 2k. Some of you already know why this is badass, but let me elaborate for the ones that don’t. The obvious reason is that you’re getting more resolution. It does make a different. Once the footage has been downrezzed to 2k from 4k, you can see the apparent sharpness go up, and the noise go down. But, that’s only one small reason why I’m doing it.
Picture this; You’ve shot the scene, crammed all the coverage the schedule would allow, and get back to edit only to discover a spot that won’t cut together. Hey! You’ve got 4k! Just recompose shots by enlarging or shrinking the 4k in the 2k bounds until it works.
Here’s my current workflow. By the way, if someone with more experience knows why I shouldn’t be doing it this way (image degradation perhaps?), or has a better way, let’s hear it.
I bring in the 4k footage and edit on a 4k timeline (can you believe this? I can edit in 4k and it plays back!). There are parts I can tell I want to recompose, so I make a note of it but don’t do it yet. Once I have all the good stuff lined out, I copy and past this into a 2k sequence.
Now I re-edit, make it tighter, and recompose shots so that they look better. In some cases, I can get what appears to be more coverage by just leaving some of the setups as 4k in the crop, say a master for example, while using the 53.3% reduced version elsewhere.
Once this is locked down, I copy the sequence for backup, then right click and hit “replace with After Effect composition.” After Effects opens with all the cuts in a composition spread out on separate layers. You could also just open AFX and copy/paste the footage into a comp, but my way makes the comp settings ready (length etc) so I don’t have to do it manually.
I’m done with Premiere at this point. You’re apparently suppose to be able to play this comp in Premiere, but my machine chokes on this. Leaving the program to hog resources seems like a waste, so I close it and move my attention over to AFX for coloring.
— Quick note about coloring and AFX. I use adjustment layers and don’t apply the coloring tools directly to the footage. Why? Well, what if I want to tweak some edits? The way I have it, I can just copy/paste from Premiere again (after deleting the footage from the AFX comp) and realign any missed adjustment layers.
There’s a step in this process that I didn’t mention. The audio. We’re shooting with external audio that has a tether going to the Red One. When we first started, the Red needed an upgrade on the board so we had a hum in the audio. I had to go in and replace all the red audio with the external audio (that’s what it was for after all). Larry has since sent off and fixed his rig, so now I don’t have to do that unless the external audio is better for some reason. I haven’t tested the quality difference yet, but when I do, the workflow for audio might change. We’ll see how it goes.
