Chris Jones Blog

Soundtrack for Cannes

One of the problems with presenting Gone Fishing out in the world is that the soundtrack is very dynamic. The loud bits are very loud, the quite bits are very quite. Great if you are in a cinema, not so great if you are in a noisy café in Cannes!

To combat this, I have made a special Cannes DVD where I have modified the soundtrack. First off I have downconverted the 5.1 into straight stereo, and then using Adobe Audition, I passed it through a ‘compressor limiter’ filter. What this does is take the loud bits and makes them peak at 99% of max signal (before it starts to break up and distort) and then pulls all the quieter bits up too, so they are louder. This effectively compresses the dynamic range. It’s what they do to movies on planes (though that system is ‘on the fly’ and much more heavy handed). Next time you are on a flight you will hear this hideous AGC (Automatic Gain Control system) which makes it louder in the quieter bits, and very hissy… What I have done with ‘Gone Fishing’ I hope, is much more effective and does not compromise the soundtrack like an inflight movie would be.

If you click here, you can see a much bigger pic of the before and after wave forms. You will see the louder bits peaking and flattening off, and the quite bits now being pulled up and so now having bigger peaks. The effect is very pleasing to the ear when in a noisier room than a dedicated theatre.

It’s just imperative that when people see the movie, they can get the full experience straight away, no matter how limited the technology or noisy the environment.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Dolby Digital MO disk collected

Last Friday I collected the MO disk of the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix for the 35mm prints of Gone Fishing. I had a brief glimpse into the Dolby transfer bay, which was a surprisingly compact room, looking more like a machine room at a small post production company than an audio lab. But then I guess they are just converting digits from one format to another (in this facility).

This MO disk will now be sent to the labs and transferred to a high contrast negative, that will in due course, be married up wit the 35mm print when it has itself been transferred from the 2k scans at Midnight Transfer.

I can’t help but wonder how long 35mm will persist as the dominant exhibition format. It all seems so compromised and messy. It’s robust and can play anywhere in the world, that’s for sure, but it’s got inherent quality limitations and it’s darned expensive too. Personally, I can’t wait for the day when every theatre is digital and movies are delivered on disk, or pumped down the line. After seeing Gone Fishing presented digitally at BAFTA (in the full 4:4:4 colour space and uncompressed sound), a 35mm print with compressed Dolby Digital sound will seem quite a step down I am sure.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Scanning Gone Fishing on to 35mm

Today I went to Cinesite to meet with the legendary Mitch Mitchell, to discuss how we are going to get ‘Gone Fishing’ onto 35mm. Mitch is a very experienced digital post production guru, who has even written one of the best books on the subject - Visual Effects for Film and Television. Cinesite have worked with Midnight Transfer before, and getting the 300gb of data between the two places is usually handled via FTP over a network. Once the data (that’s the whole of Gone Fishing saved as a DPX image stream) is at Cinesite, they shoot some tests to calibrate the system, and then scan the film onto neg.

Mitch is a refreshingly straight shooter, and we discussed all sorts of stuff. But two things really resonated with me.

First off, we discussed that many new film makers are very unreasonable and unprofessional, making it difficult for big players like Cinesite to help other film makers in the future. It’s just too much hassle. He told me of another company who had the worst experience in their entire company history while helping a new film maker! So guys, we owe it to each other, and those who follow after us, to be professional, organised, realistic, appreciative… Don’t burn other people’s bridges! Don’t you dare!

The other thing that was fascinating was his take on ‘film or digital?’ and how digital is not as cost effective as many producers, even experienced ones, sometimes believe. This is mainly to do with the huge amount of post production support that digital formats need, and on balance, there is rarely very much anything in it financially. So the choice of film or digital should always be made on creative or aesthetic merit, never on budget. Of course this is a different story if shooting on something like HDV, or another prosumer format. But at the top end - HDCam, Viper, Genesis, Red etc., there just isn’t much in it - think about it - making clone backups, managing terabytes of data, overshooting hugely as ‘tape’ or ‘disk space’ is perceived as cheap… Shoot digital if it suits the story. Shoot film if it suits the story.

Fascinating stuff!

Cinesite has a short PDF here about scanning out  to film and it  makes an interesting  read for anyone with a big propeller on their head.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Makining HDCam Downconvert tapes

I spent most of yesterday working with an editor friend of mine, Laura Kettle, in a large post production facility in West London. We had a number of jobs to do on ‘Gone Fishing’, first of which, was re-laying the newly mixed soundtrack onto 2 HDCamSR tapes.

After some messing around we managed this fairly easily.
Then I needed to make some new versions of the film on HDCam, that's not HDCamSR... HDCam is a lower spec format and much more accessible than its expensive big brother. So to make full HD digital screenings cost effective, we needed Gone Fishing on HDCam…. And that’s when the fun and games began.

Getting the film onto HDCam at 24P (24 frames a second) was fairly easy, BUT… 25P (25 fps) and 23.97P (which is slightly slower speed than 24fps, but converts very well to NTSC) were both a pain and after a lot of messing around, we had to abandon. So now I have to find a new way to achieve these two different versions. And as usual, with no money.

I felt haunted by spectre of the 24 / 24 fps debate…

One problem I have is that I need the HDCam tape to carry the full surround sound mix, and HDCam only has four audio tracks (not enough for the 6 tracks needed for uncompressed Dolby 5.1) – so you need to encode the audio into a dual track format called Dolby E (where a box takes six tracks and converst it in to a data stream, a little like how Dolby is delivered on DVD, but much less compressed)– and they guys who are doing that for me can only do it easily at 25P, not 24P…. And the tape I have is 24P! Typical!

I am sure there is a way around this, but again, I am reminded that while all this new technology is great, it also increases the amount of hoops you need to jump through, almost exponentially. And it’s all really new, so no-one is a real veteran of the format yet. Anyone with six months experience or so is considered a seasoned expert!

At the very least though, I now have two HDCamSR tapes, in full 4:4:4 colour sampling, with the full six track mix at 48khz and 24bit… And I also have a 24P HDCam tape that I can hopefully find a way to get the Dolby E mix transferred onto.

It’s never easy! It never ends!

I really do understand why people abandon projects in post, saying, ‘You know what, that will do…’ but I am nowhere near that point yet!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Planning the sound re-mix tweak

Since the premiere I have wanted to do a few very minor tweaks to the sound track. And I mean minor. When you see your film out in ‘the wild’ as it were, you always see something new that could be changed. This is the value of having the time to go back and make minor adjustments after the fact.

I always knew we would have to go back to the audio wizards Videosonics for some final mastering, so it was always possible to do few minor creative tweaks too.

We originally mixed the film in 24 bit and shot at 24fps, so we also need some new versions of the sound for different technologies… For instance, PAL DVD runs at 25fps and not 24fps and uses 16 bit sound and not 24 bit sound.

So here goes the abbreviated list… We need…

1. A version of the sound on DA88 tape which will go to Dolby and get converted to an MO (Magneto Optical) disk, which can then be converted into an optical / digital and optical / analogue format for putting onto a film print. Essentially, getting sound via light! If you get chance, look at a 35mm print and between the sprocket holes is a grey box – that’s Dolby Digital delivered on film.

2. A version of the sound in full 24bit for laying back onto the HDCamSR tapes.

3. A version of the sound that is slightly compressed for home theatres, in 24bit, for HD DVD and BluRay.

4. A version of the sound that is compressed and speeded up to 25fps and in both 24 bit and 16bit (the 16 bit version being for DVD) for home theatres.

5. And then, a conversion to Dolby E and stereo fold down for the HDCam version that we need. HDCamSR is what we have mastered to, and it is better than HDCam, but very expensive to use, so HDCam is more suited – but HDCam only has four audio tracks, so we need a way of getting high quality Dolby 5.1 (that’s six discrete tracks) into 2 tracks – that would be Dolby E!) Dolby E is a new one to me, so we will see how it goes.

Blimey!

And we haven’t even done an M & E mix! You can see just how technology is making things more complicated by the day.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

What's next for Gone Fishing?

So now we have tow major steps to complete for Gone Fishing.

First is getting it out there, getting the film working for us, especially with regard to things like film festivals, awards, agents, managers, studio executives etc. More on that in the next few days.

The other major step is to complete Gone Fishing from a technical perspective. This is done in three parts - Legal stuff (like the music cue sheet and Dolby licence), picture stuff (like archiving the digital files) and sound stuff (like making a stereo fold-down mix and the Dolby MO disk). Yes I know, propellers are spinning on heads!

Let’s just deal with the picture part for now. Yesterday I went into Midnight Transfer to do a tweak on the titles. I had to recreate the end roller to accommodate some mistakes I made, some were simple spello’s, some were peoples stage names that are different to their real name, and one was to accommodate the Make-up and Hair Department which I had incorrectly credited. That’s now done.

But while I was there with John Claude, we also had a chat about what needs to be done next… Yes I know we have already premiered but there is still loads to do…

Some are just technical hoops, others are tweaks after we saw the film for the first time out ‘in the wild’ as it were last weekend at BAFTA.

Here is a short precie…

1. Final tweaks on the picture grade.

2. Final tweaks on the end roller and re-grade title cards to be true black backgrounds (some of you may have noticed this at the BAFTA screening, I am guessing most didn’t).

3. Re-lay new version onto HDcamSR tapes in 4:4:4 at 24p (these will then be our master video tape versions now)

4. Render out a TIFF stream at HDCam res (1920x1080 res) so I can bring into After Effects and render out a BlueRay picture file.

5. Render out a TIFF stream at SD res so I can make an MPEG2 for DVD.

6. Render out Data for 35mm transfer at the recommended facility for Midnight Transfer (every facility has different specs and so we want to work with who MT recommend). This will give us a 35mm print of the film, unlike the digital version we saw at BAFTA.

7. Final archive of project to either hard drive or tape. This is a short so there is not too much data, perhaps only half a terabyte! On a feature we would be looking at anywhere between 2.5TB and 4TB! Blimey!

8. Collection of all materials including 35mm neg which should go into storage.

And that’s just the picture elements at Midnight Transfer. We will also have a whole separate process at the 35mm scanning company who will make a 35mm negative.

So much still to do…

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

More Creative Issues...

Six days to go…(blimey) And still the film is not complete!

I spent this morning back at Midnight Transfer, completing the picture grade. Editor Eddie Hamilton came in to take a look and some very minor tweaks were made – one frame here, two frames there, shaved of shots - mainly because we could see eyes more clearly now as we are full 2k resolution – something we could never have done on the offline Avid at DV res. The changes were tiny, but again, they made all the difference. It’s wonderful to work at such a high level where literally, we discuss and modify individual frames.

One other major concern was also tackled today. ‘Gone Fishing’ contains a long flashback sequence, and ‘movie convention’ states that flashbacks somehow look different to the main narrative in the film. Often you will see flashbacks strobed, or in black and white, or de-saturated… In the offline cut, Eddie had de-saturated the look, reducing the colours. And it really helped the narrative through the various edits. But in the final grade, we went the other way and saturated colours giving it a Kodachrome kind of look. Personally, I loved this look, as did DP Vernon Layton, but I had a niggling doubt that it could do with more. We discussed putting a soft vignette over the flashback shots, but both Vernon and grader John Claude, felt this was too much. We also ran out of time to deal with it in the main grade before Xmas.

So today we applied a vignette to the flashbacks. Each shot looked very attractive with this darkened edge look, but collectively, it became too heavy and resulted in a ‘narrowing’ of the image. These flashback sequences now looked darker and somehow less widescreen. So Vernon was right.

This really helps illustrate the creative dilemma we all face as film makers – who is right, which idea is best? All you can do is your ‘due diligence’ – try it out. Surround yourself by smart people, listen to opinions and then make a choice based on your own gut and their advice. Thankfully, on this occasion, trying out the vignette mean’t that everyone ended up on the same page and in complete agreement. So the vignette was removed.

We also had a problem with the end roller, so I am typing this blog now as 90% of my computer resources are rendering a new end roller in After Effects – only 40gb of individual frames saved as DPX files! Hopefully, I can drop them in tomorrow at Midnight Transfer.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Six in, one out... 'Muxing' the soundtrack

Now the final mix is complete, I wanted very much to listen to it in Dolby Digital at home, on my own 5.1 system, as well as start the process for making a DVD of the completed film once everything else is done. The only problem is that I left the final mix on Friday with a copy that is saved as 24bit, 48khz WAV files, six of them (one for each channel), all recorded at 24pfs. I needed to convert them to a single AC3 Dolby Digital file, which I believe is at 16bit and 48khz, and as the final picture transfer onto DVD will be at 25fps, the sound is also currently running 4% slow for that DVD.

The short answer to this problem was that I used, for now, a 24fps version of the film which inserts an extra frame every second, so that it’s running time is that of a 25fps version (though ever second the picture ‘bumps’ as a frame is repeated). I then used a program to ‘mux’ the sound from 6 discrete (separate channels) into a single encoded file. I used Soft Encode by Sonic Foundry, and it took all of five minutes to encode it. On balance, it was pretty easy.

I then took that AC3 it into Adobe Encore and used the ‘plop’on 2 (that’s the beep on the leader at the head of the film) to sync it up with the picture. Again, it worked fine and when played back, my DVD player recognised the Dolby Digital stream and my amplifier separated the tracks and sent them of to the correct speakers – left, centre, right, left surround, right surround and sub woofer.

I chose to shoot ‘Gone Fishing’ at 24fps, mainly to have the experience. I have always been an advocate of shooting at 25fps if your budget is low, and frankly, I am still an advocate of it. It seems to me that there are several technological hurdles when shooting at 24fps, with no real benefit to the end product. Certainly shooting at 25fps has no impact whatsoever on the final consumer or any potential distributor or broadcaster (if this were a feature film for instance). For me, choosing 24fps (when you have a low budget) is a matter of misinformation or zealous puritanism.

Of course we will have to see how HD pans out, and if 24p does start to dominate in the home and on broadcast, then that will change things… but I am not holding my breath. I believe that sadly, PAL and NTSC, are her to stay for the foreseeable future. HD had it’s chance at one world format, and it blew it.

Anyway, at least right now, I can watch ‘Gone Fishing’ with an offline cut at 24fps and hear the amazing soundtrack we produced last week at Videosonics, and experience it in all it’s acoustic glory.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

The Final Mix Is Complete! And it sounds AMAZING!

In nearly peed in my pants with excitement as I heard the final mix for ‘Gone Fishing’ It is simply AWESOME!

I have just spent the whole day with a team of audio wizards from Videosonics as all the final audio tracks are mixed into the single surround sound mix. Editor Eddie Hamilton popped in during the afternoon to listen to what we had done, and he was impressed, giving us the thumbs up – which is great as Eddie is used to working on and overseeing the mixes for $50m action movies among other stuff.

Both Bernard O’Reilly and Andrew Stirk worked their butts off all day – in fact, Andrew was in the studio mixing when I got there this morning, and I was already half an hour early. When I snuck away from lunch early to go back and have a listen, he was already there too… In fact I don’t think I ever saw him stop work.

Bernard and Andrew worked together, with Bernard updating, editing and tweaking tracks on one Pro Tools Machine, while Andrew mixed those tracks on another. The system seemed very fast and effective. Most of the day was spent mixing the tracks, making sure every single effect was audible. Of course we spent a huge amount of time mixing the action scenes which now sound like Lord Of The Rings! Huge. Exciting. Bombastic. Funny. Did I mention Exciting?!

We completed the mix around six o’clock and when done, we all sat in the front row of the cinema to listen to our collective handywork. At the end, we all knew that this movie really is something very special. So thank you to everyone at Videosonics who took a good little movie and made it a Great Huge Sounding movie.

As soon as we had viewed the final mix, I broke out the champagne! It’s obligatory at the final mix!

I think most people will be surprised by the scale of the soundtrack. When it kicks in, it really does hold it’s own with any Hollywood action movie. And when it’s sensitive, it’s subtle and beautifully crafted. This dynamic range, not just acoustically, but also emotionally, is what I am most proud of, and most grateful to Bernard and Andrew for helping to craft. You guys are superstars.

The final job was to burn a multi track 5.1 B wav file to disk so that I can now lay these tracks onto the HDCamSR master that we will be showing in a weeks time at BAFTA. A ‘B wav’ is a special audio file that also includes time code for sync purposes which should make dropping them into place very easy.

I also took a copy of the entire pro tools audio project on my hard drive which means that if we need to, we should be able to rebuild the final mix some time in the future.

Only a week to go…

Hoorah. And Hoorah again!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

The Final Sound Mix Begins!

Today was the first day of the final mix for the soundtrack to ‘Gone Fishing’. It took place at Videosonics, where on and off for the last six weeks, sound designer Bernard O’Reilly has been crafting a wonderful soundscape for the story. Today was the start of mixing all of those elements, along with the music, and live dialogue that was recorded on set, into the final surround sound mix.

The day started well with the senior sound mixer, Andrew Stirk, bringing in all the sound elements that Bernard had put together. We are mixing in studio 2 at Videosonics, essentially a small cinema with a huge mixing desk at the back. First order of business was cleaning up the dialogue tracks, getting the levels right, filtering out unwanted frequencies – and a problem from the shoot came back to haunt us. During shooting, sound recordist Ro Heap had warned me that one of the HMI lights created a loud high frequency buzz. All the way through editing we have been unaware of this problem as the speakers we used to monitor the sound were good, but not good enough… they simply didn’t have enough ‘top end’ to reproduce the problem. But now we are in a cinema environment, it was painfully loud. So most of the day was spent removing this horrible whine. Mixer Andrew, applied lots of separate filters, sometimes up to seven on a single dialogue track, to remove these unwanted frequencies… but we got there… finally…

The day ended with us mixing the first few minutes of the movie, and I am giddy as a schoolboy as it sound sooooo AMAZING! The attention to detail Bernard has shown is incredible. Tiny rusty squeaks on car doors, individual duck squaks, multi layered atmospheres, sparkling and multi layered foley effects… it all makes such an enormous difference.

The real fun begins tomorrow as we charge headlong into the final mix. We have done all the hard prep work. Track laid effects, atmos, music, foley... premixed dialogues... But challenge now is to complete the sound mix tomorrow as we are ten days from the premiere… the sound is not complete… the picture is not complete… but we will get there…!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Reflecting on the Picture Grade

Now I am more recovered from my ‘Xmas bashing’ food poisoning bout, I have been reflecting on the final grade for ‘Gone Fishing’. I have been amazed at how much effort and high-end technology goes into these final stages, and I am very pleased that I made every effort during script development to ensure that what was on the page, was worthy of the entire production effort, including these enormous final post production stages of sound and picture. As senior picture grader John Claude at Midnight Transfer said to me during the grade, ‘There is nothing more disappointing than trying to polish crap… and it sometimes happens…. but thankfully not that often for me so far…’ It’s a reminder to us all to always be at the very top of our game.

The tools for picture grading are so powerful, and so multilayered, it’s true, you can almost relight a film in post production – though clearly it’s better to get it right on set and then augment it in the grade. I loved that way that John and Vernon would place new shadows in shots, would add sharpening to ‘eyes only’ and then motion track that effect through the shot. Or how would select a certain shade of green and add saturation to that colour only, boosting that Kodachrome Summer look…

Another very cunning grading trick was to select some shadow area in the distance, and raise the blacks slightly, giving the impression of ‘atmosphere’ between the focussed subject in the foreground, and out of focus background. This increased the ‘long lens’ look, giving it an even more cinematic feel.

I know it all sounds quite simple to the Photoshop generation, but to see it work with these HUGE files, all in real time, and see the subtle enhancements, kind of blows your mind… And I am no newcomer to Photoshop! As I said, it made me feel very happy that I was never apologising for the narrative, as the script was very solid before we took it to set.

Steve Payne, one of the contributors to ‘Gone Fishing’ sat in on the grade… here’s what he had to say…

'What a difference a grade makes! I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours in the offices of Midnight Transfer in Soho watching some of the colour grading for Gone Fishing and I have to say I was blown away by what the techno wizards can do with a 2K DI version of the film. To sit in a dark studio with large screen projection and see how the skill of the grader and the critical eyes of Vernon (the DoP) and Chris scrutinised and matched every shot to produce beautiful and consistent images was an education indeed. This is a process I had long been waiting to witness and I have to say it was amazing. There is not enough time to talk about the wonders of motion tracking or vignettes (or even to pretend I understand them), suffice to say they are part of the modern day magical process of post production. It was exhilarating to witness. Amongst other things, this is going to be a visually beautiful film to watch. Thanks Chris.'

I am about to compile the last few shots for VFX guy Russ Wharton, and then figure out just how I am going to get them all to him in Wales! I would use YouSendIt, but we are talking many Gigabytes there and back.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Picture Grading… The Final Day…

We completed the grade on Friday, but it’s got to today to update the blog, Christmas day (!), as I left the grade and immediately fell ill with food poisoning! So no celebrations for me this year.

The grade went well. Extremely well in fact. Everyone is delighted with the outcome. However, there are  few snags. Russ Wharton, visual effects guy, came down from Wales but got caught in traffic all day, and so didn’t get to the grade until the final hour at 7pm. We managed to drop in the final effects and all were excellent, except one which needs a little more work. In the course of the grade, we also noticed a few more problems that need to be fixed as visual effects, so it’s over to Russ again. But now we are really up against it, as we have a premiere on Jan 12th, and I had hoped to get the shots to Russ before Xmas (on my way to my Brother who lives in Wales too). So food poising scuppered plan A. Plan B? Well I guess that will come into play tomorrow. 

But the good news is, 99% of the grade is now done and it looks every bit as good as we had hoped. Thank you John Claude at Midnight Transfer, you are a superstar!

Onward and upward…

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Grading - The First Day...

I spent today at Midnight Transfer, with senior colourist John Claude, and ‘Gone Fishing’ DP, Vernon Layton, conforming the movie and colour grading it. During the day we had a few visitors, other director and producer friends of mine, and some of the GF contributors - and everyone commented ‘Wow! It looks amazing!’

The first thing that strikes you when you work in an environment like MT’s grading theatre is just that – it’s a theatre. No computer screens or plasmas showing your movie, it’s up there on a cinema screen, with extremely complicated multi layered work playing back in real time. I am still reeling in shock at what we achieved in a single, but very long, day. The images already looked amazing, but now they are simply gob-smacking! What was most impressive was the real time selective grading of small parts of the screen, such as sharpening an actors eyes to give them more presence in a shot.

It’s been a very long day and there’s going to be another long day tomorrow too. I am now not sure that we will complete the grade before Xmas, but we will certainly go for it! Tomorrow, editor Eddie Hamilton will drop in too, as well as Visual Effects guy Russ Wharton so we can drop in his final marvellous work!

One strange aspect today was sitting in this silent, darkened and sedate theatre – and then going outside into the freezing cold circus that it late night Soho only a few days before Christmas! It really was like stepping into a whirl wind.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Bringing it all together...

I have been frantically dashing around, making sure everything is ready for the final picture conform / picture grade tomorrow at Midnight Transfer. Thankfully I have been pretty organised through the whole process, so while it’s a long haul, so far there have been very few unforeseen hitches. Let’s hope it stays that way. (pictured here is our Ace picture grader, John Claude in action at MT).

The final picture conform is like the full stop at the end of a sentence. Once it’s done, the image is creatively completed. This final stage is where all the various elements are brought together and made to feel like a single element, as though the happened ‘in reality’. For instance, all the images will be colour tweaked to make sure they look the same (remember some shots were filmed weeks apart, with different weather and yet they should still look like they happened in the same moment).

In Gone Fishing, we have a number of elements to bring together…

1. The 35mm film negative. This is the actual film from the camera, a negative, that has been scanned on Midnight Transfers Northlight Film Scanner.

2. The special effects. Theses are image sequences that were edited and manipulated on Adobe After Effects by Russ Wharton, and saved as a DPX image stream.

3. Titles. I am hoping to get them all nailed down tonight and created as hi res tiff’s in Photoshop, with one ENORMOUS long tiff for the end roller.

4. HiDef HiSpeed Images – we shot some images on a high speed High Def camera, and those also need importing and lining up.

All of this is really rather simple on paper, but in the real world, it can be a headache as every film is like a prototype. The smallest error can send things cart wheeling in the wrong direction… and let’s not even get into data movement. At this resolution, single image frame sizes are around 12mb! I bought a half terabyte USB2 drive to back up all the data once it’s completed! Blimey.

Right, got to get on with those titles… I have an early start tomorrow…

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Matte Painting Complete!

Blimey! I really mean it. Blimey! How amazing is that!?

Above is the original image, shot by second unit director Simon Cox, and the image below is the final matte painting, Audrius Urbonavicius did for us, and comped into place.

Above the new mountains are some whispy clouds which will be animated to enhance the realism. All the work was done by Audrius in Photoshop, ending up with a multi layered image that was 16bit and over 200mb for the single frame. What is amazing about this is how fast he was able to work. He really is an extremely talented artist. 

The shot only appears briefly in the film, as an establishing shot, and it will be dropped into the final grade, probably on Friday, when we will all see it in its final glory… at full film resolution. I CAN’T WAIT!!!!!

Pictures speak louder than words, so that’s enough for the blog today!

Well done Audrius and thank you Men From Mars!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Premiere Tickets Off To The Printers!

I have just sent off the premiere invites to the printers, and hope to get them back before Xmas. We have all sorts of stuff planned for the evening, and I just hope we have the time and energy to get it all done! It’s staggering how much is involved.

All the technical completion elements are also falling into place now, with the picture grade scheduled for Thursday and Friday at Midnight Transfer – I am just waiting for final confirmation. Some of the ‘Gone Fishing’ contributors will be sitting in on this grade, as well as crew, including DOP Vernon Layton and VFX whiz Russ Wharton. This means we will see Russ’ work up in the big screen at last. I will be getting the final matte painting for one of the wide establishing shots today, and immediately sending up to Russ via YouSendIt! in the hope that he can composite it into the shot by Thursday and bring it with him to the grade. That would mean all the visual effects will be complete by then and can be dropped in place – perhaps we can actually complete ALL the picture elements before Christmas. Splendid!

I also need to complete the final credits and make a huge Photoshop file for animating in After Effects. It never ends!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

The Voice of Goliath

I just spent a very enjoyable morning with sound designer Bernard O’Reilly at Videosonics. We booked the final mix (where everything is mixed into a single soundtrack) in on Jan 3rd and 4th, so it’s all guns blazing between now and then to track lay all the sound effects. It’s such a pleasure to work with great craftspeople like Bernard, as they bring so much more than is obvious to the project.

For me, it’s always about supporting and enhancing the narrative. Sure, sound is often music and sound effects that ‘go with’ the drama, but I like to take it to higher levels. For instance, we discussed putting some deep wood groaning sounds on the wide shots where we can see Young Bill is stood on a wooden jetty and being pulled around by the huge killer pike, ‘Goliath’. These groans add two dimensions not present in the image. First, it tells you that Goliath is HUGE, he must be if he could break a sturdy wooden jetty. Second, it adds a subtle level of danger – if the jetty breaks, Young Bill will go into the water with the killer pike! Then he has a real problem! All this equals more tension.

We discussed the fact that ‘Gone Fishing’ is in fact an action movie by stealth. By that I mean, when you look at it, at first it appears to be a gentle tale, but large chunks of it are in fact big old Hollywood style action – and track laying that kind of film is hard work. The sound plays like an acoustic symphony with just as many different distinct instruments as an orchestra.

We also recorded some ‘voice over’ for Goliath himself. What? Fish don’t have voices? You are right, but this is after all a movie. When editing, I noticed I was subconsciously giving Goliath a voice, kind of like what he would sound like if Brian Blessed were playing him. And so we have tried it out, in the studio. For a good hour I howled, groaned and cackled like I imagine Goliath would if he had a voice. I am not sure if this new dimension will work. When we hear it all in place, we might just say… ‘well we tried, but that’s terrible…’ Equally we might say, ‘wow that really kicks!’ I thinks it’s vital to always strive for innovation, and to take risks.

Now, time for my Lemsip as I have a very hoarse voice. This really isn’t a real job is it!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Gone Fishing enters final mastering stages

So the final mastering stages of ‘Gone Fishing’ have begun. I popped into the Film Clinic today to have a look at some of the problems we have with a few rolls of the film negative. When it was processed, some of the chemicals turned out to be a little dirty, and all manner of debris was left on the camera neg. Most of this has now been cleaned off, but there is still a little worrisome damage to the emulsion side of the neg where it was rolled up while still slightly wet.

My guts tell me that this won’t be a problem. We will see. I also met with senior grader, John Claude at Midnight Transfer today, and he watched a DVD of ‘Gone Fishing, before we discussed the completion schedule. By now, the neg will have been collected from The Film Clinic and it will be digitised at 2k resolution into Midnight Transfers Baselight (powerful film resolution grading system).

One day next week, I will be going in to MT to do the final picture grade. I can’t tell you how exciting this will be. And it will finally answer, do we have problems with the camera neg or not?

All things being equal, we should have a completed film just before Xmas. The movie will be presented at BAFTA on the 12^th in HDCAM SR, so it should look the best it could ever look. We will be doing a film out later.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Worm Shot Completed by Russ Wharton

Russ Wharton, VFX whizz in Wales, has just completed three shots for Gone Fishing.

Two were kind of image fixes, removing small cosmetic problems from the shot, but the third was a full blow VFX shot with a worm enlargement. In the story, Old Bill recounts the tale of how he needed the biggest worms to catch the biggest pike. When we shot it, the scene was fine. But in post, we realised we could increase the worm size and make it a funnier gag. If you have been following the blog, you will know we have been following how this shot has passed through film scanning to DPX, import into After Effects and so on. And I am delighted to now ‘premiere’ a quicktime of the completed shot. You can click on it here…

This is of course a low res version and not in the correct aspect ratio, but blimey Russ, job WELL DONE! So good is Russ’ work, I have now sent him three more shots. I will report on his ongoing progress as we get to each shot.

If you are as impressed with this shot as much as I am, drop Russ an email and say… Well done! His email is russ.wharton@btopenworld.com

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com

Making A Bigger Worm...

I asked Russ Wharton to detail exactly how he has gone about increasing the size of the worm in one shot from Gone Fishing. Here’s what he has said... Interesting if you are into digital VFX...Anyway, here are his words...

If you know you need a bigger worm before you film, then film the actor without the worm (have him hold a small white headed pin instead) and film the worm full frame against a keyable background (like a greenscreen). Then the worm can just replace the pin. Job Done.

If, however, you decide you need a bigger worm after the fact, then this is one way....

SUPERWORM RECIPE

— Not full details here (to keep it short and sweet) but enough to follow along —

For this tasty meal you will need the following ingredients:

Footage of Young Bill holding a worm
Adobe Photoshop (Any recent version)
Adobe After Effects (Any recent version, but I did use CS3's puppet tool)


The Problem:

We need to scale the worm. Which means we need it separate from its background.

Backgrounds blend into foreground edges, even more so with motion blur. You can pull out this bleeding with keying tools and colour correction but sometimes (as in this case) it doesn't leave much foreground to work with :o(

Also,
Scaling softens the image.
Speed of movement won't be accurate, big things have weight and move slower.

You can get a way with all of these if you're not scaling too big. But we want us a BIG worm, so...

The Solution:

Build a Superworm!

Take some neat (no mo blur) frames into photoshop and use to create just one new superworm image. Scale where poss and clone in some detail so we've got a nice sharp 200% worm to work with. Save out a .psd image with an alpha channel.

Animate the worm - put this image into AE and deform it over time (slightly embarrassed to say I used the new puppet tool - I thought this was a bit pointless when I saw they introduced it in the new version, but for this it was perfect!).

Copy the original worm motion for this. Then slow it down! Our 200% superworm will be weightier than its smaller sibling. I slowed it down by a third.

Tip - If you want an easier animating life, have one of those fancy computer things do the work for you (that's what they're for). Use motion tracking to follow the plate your matching (in this case the hand) and you've already got half the movement done! Very useful on slow moving objects, where hand animated imperfections show up easily.

Clean the background plate: anywhere the old worm shows up behind the new one you'll have to remove it! Its sometimes easiest to use an earlier part of the footage where the plate is clean as source.

Add edge feathering/light wrap — Remember the background bleeding that was such a problem in the first place? Well now we need to put it back! Using a duplicate of the background plate that's been cut out by a feathered edge matte of the worm.

Add a touch of motion blur and season to taste (depends on the shutter speed used when filming).

Put anything back on top of the worm that needs to be there — like fingers and grass. Again, use cut out duplicates of the background plate.

Finally, add a sprinkling of minor colour correction (to the worm, don't touch the plate) and leave to render for about 10 mins (depends on oven speed).

Enjoy!