Chris Jones Blog

Bleeding Edge Technology...

One of the things I have always taught on my courses is that when it comes to technology, you can’t believe anyone. Especially when it comes to new technology. This is not because experts are mistaken or wrong, it’s because everything is so untested. There simply hasn’t been enough instances of it working out in the real world to offer a definitive rock solid recommendation or pathway. Software is often in Alpha or Beta phases (in fact most software in cutting edge facilities seems to be at the permanent ‘Stable Beta’ stage and never ever goes beyond that – it’s always in development.)

And now hardware also needs software to work! My BluRay player is more computer than simple player in the classic sense of a CD player for instance.

This problem has just cropped up with the guys doing the BluRay master. Even though they were assured that their HDCamSR player could play back the max definition tape we have of Gone Fishing, that’s in SR 4:4:4 – it turns out it couldn’t, or perhaps, their player didn’t like my tape? Who knows. The point is, once you are at the cutting edge of technology, problems through no fault of yours or theirs, seem to manifest. The lesson is of course, don’t be the guinea pig! This doesn’t bode well for anyone embarking on a feature film shot on the Red camera for instance. I would love to hear from anyone who has done it so we can nail down a work flow.

So now we are dropping down to HDCam 4:2:2 and making the BluRay from that. And don’t even get me started about the 24fps thing – or is that 23.97fps? Or 25fps?

I thought HD was supposed to make everything easier and cheaper. It’s a shame we now seem to have a gazillion format permutations to choose from, making it really hard, even for experts, to navigate the murky waters of final mastering.

On another exciting note, the film (DPX files) was scanned to negative last weekend at Cinesiste by superstar Mitch Mitchell, and is now at the labs being processed. The audio is also being shot now, by Warwick sound I believe, and within a few days we should see out first Com / Opt 35mm print. And that means a print will definitely be under my arm on that flight to Cannes!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

Blog facelift!

As you can see, the blog has been given a facelift. For some time now, I have been meaning to do this, and as Cannes is looming, I knew I had to do it sooner rather than later. I plan to update the blog daily in Cannes, and hopefully with either some audio or even video podcasting. Let’s see.

It’s amazing how much time can be spent on a website, and I am just pleased that the new look blog is built and I can get on with more pressing stuff – like writing the screenplay!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

Business Cards For Cannes

As part of my preparing for Cannes, I decided to make new ‘Gone Fishing’ business cards. It was cheap as chips to do at VistaPrint and done and dusted in under 30 minutes. I used one of the main images from the film, shot by DP Vernon Layton, and then mocked up a logo that will do for now – we are still looking forward to what the Creative Partnership will come up with, but I had to get these cards printed now or risk not having it sorted before Cannes.

Over the years, I have noticed a gradual shift in the way we swap details – it used to be a ‘calling card’, but now it’s more often a digital file – an email, beamed phone contact (that never works) or a text (which in Cannes will cost a few quid to send!). I am a serious techy myself but I am still staggered at how utterly rubbish computers seem to be at things like swapping addresses and the like, and don’t get me started on the hideously over engineered MS Outlook! I guess iPhone is the way forward in the film business, and I am sure will see a proliferation when in Cannes next month.

For now, I am happier with my glossy business card with a great image from the movie, and my contact details on the reverse.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

On the road with EEE

So after being out on the road for a few days with my new Asus EEE ultra portable laptop, I can confirm that it's really a perfect balance between power and portability. I have started to get my head around the Linux Operating System (which the EEE comes with), which I still maintain, is NOT for the faint hearted. But if you could get around with DOS many years ago, you will take to Linux very quickly.

I have added a few programs, all of which are free. Things like GIMP (which is like Photoshop), Audacity (audio editing), Thunderbird (email client) and plus a bunch of utilities, and I will be installing Crossover, a Windows emulator, so I can run Windows programs that I can't find equivalents for in the Linux world.

I am really impressed by Open Office (MS Office like suite) and in some ways, I can't believe major corporations don't make the switch, they would save a fortune. Open Office is after all, free!

As for the actual computer, it's very nippy. I never click and wait. Sure the screen is small as is the keyboard, but that means it's ultra portable – and I can plug in a screen and run it in higher resolutions when using it back at 'base'. So I have Office, Internet, Email, wireless, all on the move and as light as a feather.

I have also found the EEE to be a geek magnet. Just switching it on in public draws people over to ask 'What is that?', 'How much did it cost?' 'Where can I get one....' It's amazing how people are wowed by it.

Perhaps the best thing about the EEE is that I can drop it in my bag and really not feel in any way that I am lugging a laptop. Awesome!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

On the road with an Asus EEE 700

For years I have been in search of a portable computer. Powerful enough to do what I need, small enough (and tough enough) to carry in my bag without really noticing it. I have tried all kinds of devices in the past, and I just bought an Asus EEE – a tiny laptop that has no hard drive (uses flash memory) and runs Linux (though could run windows, even MacOS, but I think it would become interminably slow with either).

It’s pre loaded with a Linux OS, plus loads of software like Open Office, and so far, everything I have thrown at it hardware wise, has worked first time – USB mouse, Bluetooth wireless keyboard, Bluetooth wireless presenter, USB memory sticks, USB hard drive… And it has to be said, Open Office is astonishing! It’s open source free software, and to anyone who needs all the functionality you would normally use day to day in MS Office, it does the trick, and very well too. I was blown away by the Powerpoint style presentation module which even ran with my Bluetooth presenter. To me, it feels just like I am using Powerpoint. This means I can carry my presentations around with me anywhere I go, and be free to update it on the road.

And it’s the same deal for scripts too, though I have to figure out some way of converting between formats.

I bought this really because I can see that over the next year or so, I may have some long breaks away from the office, maybe sat in hotel rooms or airport terminals, and I wanted to use that time. Also, it makes writing the blog (like this first test one from a coffee shop) very easy on the road.

The downsides of this diminutive marvel are all plain to see. It’s small, which does impact on it’s usability for longer periods (though I now have an external mouse and small but full size USB keyboard for my luggage). But you know, I can’t have my cake and eat it – ‘I want it small but not that small, no, no, no, that’s too big now, no, now it’s too small…’ yadayadayada…

Best of all, it’s cheap, the basic model EEE 700 coming in at £200, though I would recommend the EEE 701 (for a whole host or reasons I wont go into here). And yes I know there is a newer version on the horizon with a bigger screen, more RAM and faster processor, but what’s new? It is a computer after all!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

 

Gone Fishing Trailer Windows Media Encoded

I had an interesting mail today from another film maker complaining about Quicktime – apparently the trailer for Gone Fishing would not play on his computer. And this is not the first occurrence of this, so if you have had problems playing back the Quicktime trailer, drop me a line – it would be useful to know if this is a 1 in a 100 problem, or 1 in 10 problem.

We decided to encode a Windows Media file too, so anyone with a QT hiccup would still be able to view the trailer (it’s on the trailer page now). On balance, Quicktime yields a more defined image, but it also has less contrast and colour saturation (after trawling the forums, it appears that this is apparently a big problem with Quicktime with no real solution as yet). The Windows Media file (which is the same physical dimension as the QT and the same data rate) is softer, and denser in both saturation and contrast. Personally, I still favour Quicktime, but if visitors have problems with it, they can now at least watch a Windows Media file that should be fairly bullet proof.

These problems serve to illustrate the bigger problem we all face when trying to deliver our work in excellent quality but with a guarantee that it will work. I guess the promise of HD over the web is not really there just yet.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

Fill out your e-mail address  to receive our newsletter! Subscribe Unsubscribe

Webstats for Gone Fishing Trailer

Now the trailer has been up for a little while, I thought I would let you know how it’s doing and how I managed the infrastructure. When we decided to put a trailer up, we wanted it be world class quality, which meant using the Apple trailers website as a template. In turn that meant using the Quicktime H264 codec (which has its niggles I can tell you). We decided to do the trailer in three resolutions, 480P, 720P and 1080P, the resultant files being 18mb, 43mb and 70mb in size respectively.

I had no idea how many downloads we would get, but I knew I needed more storage space and bandwidth than my current webhost could economically supply, so I needed another place to host the actual media files.

Lunarpages was the answer, at £3.99 a month for – get this – 1.5TB of storage and 15TB of traffic (no that’s not a typo, that’s terabytes!). Blimey. So now, no-one can say web delivery can be expensive, it’s cheap as chips. This really is good news for us as web delivery is an avenue that is easy to setup and sell, as long as your content is viewable on a computer (or I guess Media Centre PCs which are becoming more prevalent.)

So how is the trailer actually doing? Well I have had a lot of emails congratulating the team on it, which was great. So far we are averaging hits of around 250 a day, which I feel is pretty good. We had spikes on Sunday, Monday, a massive lull on Friday and another big spike on Saturday. So the highest traffic seems to be at weekends and Mondays. In terms of time of day, most downloads happened at lunch times, early mornings or very late at night. It seems that most of us still have day jobs!

I have also hosted two podcasts on Lunarpages. One with Adam Davies on funding, and the other with me about the Gone Fishing seminar next Sunday (you can hear it here but its not officially released from my site).

You can also view the Gone Fishing trailer here.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

PAL DVD of Gone Fishing Complete

Yesterday I completed the PAL DVD for ‘Gone Fishing’.

This DVD is for showing to festival co-ordinators and people who may be interested in the new features I am writing. For now, it won’t be available to anyone else, not even my family! (as I explained on the blog before, we need to keep tight reigns on the DVD so it does not appear on YouTube and destroy our festival aspirations).

I have been working with Adobe Encore which I have found very good most of the time, but cryptic and flaky at other times.

I rendered the picture and sound separately – the picture part of the DVD was made from an HD uncompressed Avid project, so it took a few hours (the 10 min project was 150gb in total), but it looks stunning. On DVD, it will never look better.

After remixing the sound, I was able to do a new soundtrack for the DVD too. We shot at 24fps and DVD runs at 25fps, so I needed to do a speed up – which I did in Adobe Audition (by changing the length to 96% using the Stretch tool). Incidentally, I was also able to make a Polyphonic WAV in Audition too – that is, all six channels of sound in single WAV file, uncompressed – it’s pretty easy in Audition, which also has a surround sound mixer built in.

I have spoken to many sound engineers and everyone is saying basically what I already knew, which is ‘don’t bother with pitch correction when speeding up or slowing down, as it introduces new and unnecessary audio artefacts.’ There is such an enormous amount of misinformation floating around about 24fps and 25fps and as anyone who has done my Guerilla Film Makers Masterclass knows, I have plenty to say about it! Well now I have even more having just gone through the grinder of 24fps with no budget. Categorically stated now, if you live in PAL world and have little money, shooting 25fps is easier and cheaper and has no technical or presentational disadvantages at all. None.

So now I have a version of the sound at 25fps (converted in Audition), and I used an old Dolby Digital Software encoder to create an AC3 5.1 surround file (which is compressed heavily). Dolby Digital can handle up to 640k /second, but Encore would crash out with using anything above 448 k/ sec, which is annoying, but they way that it is. It still sounds very good though.

I also managed to encode a DTS track which is 1.5mb / sec, so three times as much data, and it sounds so much better. As we speak, the 24bit files are being encoded by Richard Osborne at Abbey Road Interactive into a DTS HD audio stream, which will deliver uncompressed 24 bit sound via BluRay – that is if Encore will play ball (the manual says it will but I am not so sure – and so the BluRay saga continues).

Also, in the next few days I will be encoding an NTSC disk for the USA.

I promise once we get through this technical stuff, I will disengage my propeller head and get on with fun stuff like film film festivals.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

PROOF OF CONCEPT! IT WORKS!

And in fact, proof of workflow too! Yes tonight, I burnt my very first BluRay test disk of a clip from ‘Gone Fishing’ – AND IT WORKED...!

PROPELLOR HEAD ALERT! READ ONLY IF YOU ARE A GEEK LIKE ME!

I can report that the high definition does in fact make a HUGE difference when viewed properly. Perhaps this is not so visible on a TV but on my digital projector, it’s awesome with no pixilation, no digital artefacts, and razor sharp images - I can even see, very clearly, film grain (pic here is from my BIG screen!).

To get to this point has been a major uphill struggle as it appears no-one seems to know what they are talking about when it comes to mastering HD onto a domestic format. Even Sony, who have tried to get to the bottom of my questions, have scratched their heads at times. It seems like there are all manner of ways to do it if you are uploading from a camcorder, with just stereo sound…. But as soon as you say surround sound and working with uncompressed HD, people look at you in horror.

I have been using Adobe Encore CS (vers 3) to master disks, with its own unique twist (I had to master in 25i, which is in fact 25P delivered in two separate interlaced chunks - and as the image is progressive to start off with, it makes no difference at the end).

So here is how I did it… or rather how I will do it now I know it will work.

The movie was mastered at Midnight Transfer and exported as a 10bit TIFF stream, each of the 20,000 fames being just over 11mb (saved at 1080 x 1920 progressive images). I would use an NTFS formatted drive if I did it again (see earlier posts for general hair pulling).

I then used Avid Media Composer (software only version) to import it into a 25P 1080P project (not a 24P project as Encore currently does not support 24P properly – it does support 24P in NTSC, but it actually converts it to 24P into 29.97 FPS when it encodes, which frankly, is pants).

I imported it into Avid at the DNX185 resolution for the tests, but when I redo it over the next few days, I will do it at 1:1 10bit uncompressed. This will maintain maximum fidelity in the images. Taking the TIFF stream into the Avid took 5 hours. This is the firsat glimpse of how much data and power is needed to handle true HD, not 25mbit HDV passing itself off as true HD.

It didn’t speed up or slow down whether it was being saved as DNX185 or 1:1 so that implies that speed bottleneck is the USB2 drive and not the Avid. As for playing back, forget it, it just could not handle the bandwidth.

Once on a timeline, I exported a Quicktime reference file, which was created in seconds.

I could then take it into a BluRay project in Abobe Encore, which was set to PAL / 25i / 1080 Blu-Ray. I already had the sound from the DVD I made, so that was already in place (see earlier posts). I dropped the QT reference file on the time line and then selected the rendering settings.

I chose the best quality, with 2 pass encoding and using H264 compression and not MPEG2 as I have read it gives better results. I hit RENDER… and I waited. On my Dual Core 2.4ghz / 3GB RAM new PC (and I think it was using both cores) it took about one hour render about one minute. Remember, BluRay is physically six times bigger than PAL DVD files.

The big question I had was how would the disk burn and would it even play?

Blank BluRay disks are about a tenner a pop, with re-writable disks costing a few pounds more. So of course, I tried a RW disk first. And it worked without a problem, both in my BR burner (which costs about £160) and my Samsung BluRay player, which can be bought on the web now for about £250.

So that’s that short tale without the many, many headaches I encountered on the way.

I am just waiting now for a few new frames from Midnight Transfer and I should be able to build my final BluRay disk!

I just spoke to Eddie the editor and he commented on how amazing it is – you can now shoot and master to HD, even present in full HD in the home, with amazing surround sound too.

Blimey! Blimey! And thrice blimey!

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

Making HD BluRay at Home and FAT32

So I have now committed to BluRay (did they not realise that if you are not clear when you say BluRay it sounds like you say Blurry, not to mention Blurry is what my spell checker wants to change it to!) after several studios jumped camp and ditched HD DVD. The word from up top went along the lines of… ‘Consumers don’t know which format to chose, BluRay or HD DVD, fearing they will buy the one that loses the format war – so they wait, and both formats suffer… PS3 has sold a gazillion units, so let’s get behind BluRay…’ And so the format war appears to be drawing to a close. We will see.

So today, I went to Midnight Transfer who have rendered the whole movie out as a series of 10bit TIFF images. Nearly 20,000 11mb files in all.

That’s a lot of data.

The plan is to take this TIFF sequence into Avid, and render out an HD stream which I can then burn to BluRay so that I have Gone Fishing on a domestic HD format for showing when I don’t have an HDCamSR deck or 35mm projector to hand.

I took in a 500gb USB 2 drive that was formatted with FAT32, but all day it kept crashing out. Eventually, all the files were copied onto the disk, but strewn across a few directories. I offered to tidy this up so I could get away earlier, but no matter what I did, I just couldn’t get all the files in one single directory – remember that’s 20,000ish files at 11mb each! After some research I found out that FAT32 can handle 65,534 entries in one directory, but they need to be 8.3 names… so a name like

IMG0004.TIF

The problem is that this is the type of file name I am working with…

gf_conform_hd_tiffseq_00118.tiff

(note the underscores are used as Linux, which MT uses for their Baselight grading system, does not like spaces and uses _ instead)

Each file and subdirectory takes from two to thirteen entries, depending on the length of its name (the 8.3 format taking only 2), so with longer names, the available entries can reduce very fast, to the point where you just can’t fit 20,000 files in a single directory – which is why all day the system kept failing. Grrrr!

In short, we hit about 15,000 files before we maxed out and the copying crashed out.

Now the problem is I need to shift all of the data onto another drive, so I can reformat the other drive into NTFS which can handle 4,294,967,295 entries. Now that’s better! So why bother with old FAT32 format at all? I am sure there are other reasons but one is that it seems that Macs don’t like NTFS and can only read NTFS formatted drives and not write to them. Ho hum.

So finally I have got to the bottom of an entire days head-scratching. Now my PC will be on all night as it shifts 220gb of data, in 20,000 files, onto another drive. In the morning I will reformat the old drive into NTFS and shift the same 220gb of data back, then drop it all into a single folder, and then… hopefully, import it into Avid.

I thought I would be mastering a BluRay disk today. Now it looks like I won’t even get there until late tomorrow night.

Blimey…

And this is just a short film! The mind boggles at the notion of a feature film.

The moral? Remember you are pushing desktop technology past it's tolerance when working in true HD. There is just a huge amount of data and files to deal with. And pre-format your drives into NTFS if working on a PC.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

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
[email protected]

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
[email protected]

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 [email protected]

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

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!

Organising My Shot List and Boards with SpringBoard

I have spent the whole day on Storyboarding again – not working with Gabrielle this time, but planning the shots and ordering them so that next time we meet, I am clear about every single shot and how it will cut with each shot on either side.

I am used to doing a shot list, and this is just a logical extension of that process. But I wanted to organise my shot list alongside the actual boards – which is when I cam e across a superb little program called Springboard. It’s shareware and costs $35.It’s essentially a tool for organising your boards and adding arrows and zoom / dolly lines. It’s not the most sophisticated program, but in this day and age of over developed software, it’s kind of a joy to use.

For me, the real use comes in having a place where you can make an extensive shot list, with production notes, and marry that with storyboard sketches, then print the whole lot out neatly and cleanly. It’s also easy to re—order shots too, should changes be made. Plus it's got all sorts of drawing tools, which I don't use, but others probably will.

You can download a trail version from their website at http://6sys.com/

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected] 

FREE Writers Tools!

I just wanted to share with you an amazing little utility I found for writers on a PC. It’s a Dictionary / Thesaurus affair, and much more. It is called WordWeb, and it#s is easy to install and use. It features it’s own dictionaries, and can also link to web based content like WikiPedia. When writing, just put your cursor on the word, hit the hot keys and up pops a window with a writers cornucopia of word information.

Best of all, there is a free version too, so long as you don’t make more than two flights a year or drive a four by four. It’s a first for me, carbon-footprint-ware, and I think we should all support and applaud it.

You can download here, http://wordweb.info

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]