This week was probably my most successful, although it might not look like it. I only did two things, but both were fairly involved practice activities. This was all in addition to running sound on a shoot on Tuesday and Wednesday for some friends who are still at Fox.
The shoots on Tuesday and Wednesday went pretty well, Wednesday went until 5am, but I actually miss those kinds of shoots. I did a good job on sound and from what I saw it's gonna look great (thanks to the eyes of friend-of-the-show David Ridder).
(These are the only pictures I have from set.)
I'm really looking forward to doing post sound on this film. Updates on that whenever it happens.
But onto things pertaining to this blog. For "Record a Podcast", Thursday I recorded an hour and a half conversation with my friend Victor (who incidentally runs my father blog). I have a couple episodes worth of Podcast probably, but for this week I settled on us discussing both of our D20 blogs. This was an easy yet time consuming project, I had a pretty good grasp on how to edit a podcast from my work on "Everyone is John" a couple weeks ago. I'm reasonably pleased with this. There isn't much creativity involved, but content is content.
Next up though is the time stealer, "Shoot Anything and Edit It" and while I cheated because I didn't film this footage, I did edit it and I did shoot something. I'm really really happy with this, it's probably tied with "Everyone is John" for my favorite thing I've made for this blog. I went into detail on what I did for this video, and I'm pretty happy with that portion of the post. I, at least, think it's fairly interesting. So check it out and see if you do too (you won't).
Overall I'm really happy with this week. I only did 2/3 of my intended projects, but if you count shooting for two days and the fact that the two projects I did were practice activities, it adds up to me being fine with it. But what does this new week hold?
17, 14, 9, 18, 13. Wow, that's a lot of Practice Activities, let's take a closer look:
Music Video Without Music (good lord, again?); Write/Record a Radio Play; Take Notes on a Film as I Watch It; Work on Jonesy and the Big Chap; Video Essay.
Well. It looks like a busy week. But keep in mind Thanksgiving is this week, and I don't know when I'll need to start working on post for that short film. With all that said, I'm once again hopeful for this week.
I spent a deceitfully long time on this to get it perfect. And it worked. This is perfect.
This was filmed a couple weeks ago for a shoot (nice) I was doing sound on, we had the opportunity to do this, and we took it. Huge shoutout to Andrew Koehler for inviting me on the shoot, and filming this video; also shouts out to David Ridder who was also there and sent me the footage and is just a good dude always. Let's go into a break down of the work I did on this.
First I brought the clips into Premiere. Looking over the shots, I came up with the idea pretty easily. I knew it was gonna take some After Effects work. I also knew that with what I wanted to do with the sound I would need to use Pro Tools. The footage had no sound, which is fine - I would've probably dumped it anyway. I dropped in the music to make sure everything was synced up how I wanted. To get the song right I had to chop it up in a couple places, but Ave Maria is pretty forgiving when it comes to editing, as it turns out. As soon as I had the edit how I wanted I exported the video and an OMF and moved to Pro Tools - my sweet, sweet Pro Tools.
I started out by making markers at each gunshot, to save me time in the future - which was a good idea. Next I went about finding my gunshots, which was made really easy thanks to Still North Media's Firearm SFX Library, a library I backed on Kickstarter years ago and is still paying dividends. It's free so check it out if you like sounds. I grabbed a couple handfuls of clips that had the tone I was looking for, chopped 'em up and spaced them out about where they needed to be. Fun fact, most of the gunshots are shotguns with a couple rifles. I wanted the shots to have more "boom" than "crack". After putting the gunshots in their general place, I looked for some gun foley sounds. Loading mags, racking the slide, and miscellaneous handling noise all found they're way onto the timeline. Once I had the gun handling at the beginning done, I focused on the gunshots. For every shot I also wanted to include the sound of the slide, just for some added texture. I synced the shots up to the video easily enough and moved on to phase two.
I bussed(sent) all the gunshot tracks into an aux input track, added reverb and made it juuuuust right. I did the same for the foley sounds which included all the slide clips. After all the reverb was good, I set to mixing the sound effects with music. I made sure every shot/foley was as loud as it seemed it would be on screen, depending on how far away the camera was and where the gun was. Once that was done, I bussed the "reverb" aux faders into two second aux faders to have easy control over the total volume of the tracks. And since the shots and the foley was on separate faders it was easy to lower the shots for the "flashback" part of the video. With everything mixed I watched the video through a billion times and almost cried with joy. Lastly, I added in some bird sounds just to give the beginning and end some ambience. I bounced the tracks and sent them to Premiere. Once there, I grabbed the video clip that needed VFX and sent it to (dun dun dun) After Effects.
This was a really simple idea that I made really complicated. I actually started, though, by making things easier for myself. I hit "Track Camera" within AE and it actually made a perfect 3D camera that matched what Andrew did on set, I was shocked. This made placing the thought bubble and text really easy. But of course nothing can be easy, and I put the bubble slightly behind me so that it had a bit of foreground interaction. I started by rotoscoping my hat by hand, but then I had the thought "Hey maybe the Roto Brush will work well for this shot" - a thought my VFX professor told us to never have. And while the Roto Brush was very precise, it was slow going. Probably faster than what I could do by hand, but who knows? Things were looking good, but I decided that this wasn't enough. I wanted the thought bubble to have a more unique and interesting look. So I spent about an hour trying to find the perfect look, and while I'm not completely happy with it, I think it looks fine. And after that things were looking even better than before, and then I thought "Hey wouldn't it be funny if I never blinked my eyes in this shot?" Another bad thought. I spent about an hour doing each blink - and you'll notice in the finished video, I blink. It looked okay. Not good enough for me to let it go through though. There were some finishing touches on my roto-work and then I rendered and sent the clip back to Premiere. After a quick color grade I exported the final product.
And that's that. I hope you at least somewhat enjoyed that write up on my WORKFLOW. I had a really good time doing the sound and a good time editing the video and an alright time doing the VFX.
I really stepped it up on the content this week. In my opinion.
Sorry for the absence, I was shooting things late Tuesday and Wednesday and need time to both do those things and recover from them. But onto the activity.
While I was down in Newberg for the shoots, I hit up Victor about recording a podcast. As I didn't have the time or equipment down there, we recorded via the web yesterday. Victor recorded in a coffee shop and they refused to listen to my demands of utter silence while we recorded, so that's all the noise in the background. There's a lot more from this recording session, some of which is good, some of which is quite bad. They may end up seeing the light of day at a later point. Victor and I also discussed some neat ideas that we may collab on later. So look forward to that maybe if it happens, also you don't know what it is so you can't really look forward to it.
