Happy Festive Greetings, Everyone

Hello from Fog City!

On behalf of my colleague Mullet, I'd like to extend our belated holiday greetings to everyone, and wish you all the best in 2008, the Year of Miller & Mullet....

Ed & Red’s Night Party: Our Adventures in Multi-Camera

A couple of weekends ago, we shot an episode of Ed & Red’s Night Party, the great Canadian TV show hosted by a sarcastic sock. I won’t go into detail about the show’s history because the Wikipedia entry does that better than I could. Nevertheless, to see a homemade show from cable access channel become a Canadian late-night institution is encouraging to anyone who picks up a camera hoping to give up the day job.
I don’t know where I could verify this, but I suspect that Ed’s show is likely the longest running Canadian late-night talkshow. If it’s not the Canadian champ, it’s definitely the Toronto and Ontario champ. The national networks have both created and abandoned talk shows—CTV most notably with Open Mike with Mike Bullard, Global with subsequent The Mike Bullard Show, and CBC’s infamous Friday Night with Ralph Benmergui—but Ed the Sock has fended off all of them, probably by not trying to appeal to as broad an audience as the others did. He knows his audience and gives them exactly what they want: edgy late-night humour, a healthy dollop of pop culture’s highs and lows, and plenty of sex-related humour and features.
The current version of Ed’s show, partnering him with Liana “Red” K., doesn’t have the traditional guest interviews where the guest comes out and is interviewed, but in our two appearances, we’ve been interviewed while in the hot tub and lounging on a couch where we were watching the show. The interviews weren’t conventional by any means, but we managed to plug our stuff.
I’ve never taken a TV production course, so my exposure to multi-camera shooting has been limited to a couple of occasions where we happened to have 2 mini-DV cameras on shooting day, and we used both at the same time to speed things up. It wasn’t true multi-camera shooting—the 2nd camera usually shot the same angle but at a different focal length so that we could get the closeups done at the same times as the master shots.
When we appeared in the hot tub on Ed & Red’s, there was only one camera assigned to cover us, so it was a single-camera situation and we worked to just one camera.
For our second appearance, we had 3 segments during the show, with at least 3 cameras on us (one across the floor for a head-on angle, one beside the couch for a side view, and a third somewhere in the middle). We weren’t required to work towards any one camera, so it was similar to a stage appearance where you only have to be aware of a general zone to work to. Mullet, sitting on screen right, had a camera directly to his left with the others spread out in front of him, so he couldn’t really turn to face me without turning away from the audience. I, on screen left, was looking almost directly into a camera when I faced him, so I made sure I turned to my left (screen right) when we were seated during the 3 segments so that Mullet wouldn’t face away from the camera best positioned for his closeups (but, rest assured, I was also pointing my face at that camera, so I wasn’t doing him a favour—I was doing us both a favour).
We got progressively more physical through the 3 segments, so not having to worry about where the camera was definitely freed up how we worked.
For no-budget filmmaking, multi-camera likely isn’t an option. You need at least 2 cameras of the same quality, video format, etc., etc. Hollywood always drags out extra cameras for those thigns even they can’t afford to do more than once (I recall a making-of doc on the Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom DVD where Mr. Spielberg had 14 cameras rolling for the one-time-only destruction of a footbridge), but the same could apply on a no-budget scale. If I were shooting something where I had to get a lot of coverage done in a limited time (a well-known actor is giving you a break by doing a scene for you but can only give you an hour, for example), or you’re shooting something that can only be done in one take (like having your character jump into a parade), I would definitely budget for a 2nd camera and an extra person. Likewise, if I were shooting a scale model’s destruction, I’d have to weigh the costs of making multiple copies of said model for repeated takes or renting a 2nd camera to shoot it once.
Another aspect of multi-cam shooting is that the lighting has to be designed for multiple camera setups. This means a lot more work at the beginning of the day, but the lighting guys only had to make minor adjustments here and there during the shoot. This also means you can move the cameras, zoom in for a closeup, etc., on the fly. Our area was pretty well lit, and the crew defined our working areas for us, so your talent can be given an area to play in rather than being stuck on a mark. I think you could adapt this type of thinking for single-cam shooting on a set, and you’d be able to go from setup to setup without keeping warmed-up actors waiting for lights to change. It wouldn’t work in every situation, of course, but if you didn’t need special lighting, you could probably get away with it.
We won’t be using multi-camera for our DVD, but doing Ed & Red’s was still a good experience, and I’d recommend to any no-budget filmmaker that they check out a traditional 3-camera TV shoot if they ever get the chance—watch those cameras work!

To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade—that is the question.

…Whether 'tis nobler to stand pat with what I’ve got….

As next spring’s post on our DVD draws nearer, I’ve been contemplating the post-production aspect of it: do I have the tools to do a really good job by current standards?

I could produce a functioning DVD with basic tools, even freeware apps, but the goal with this project is to produce a demo reel to put into the hands of the mighty. If we sell a few of them, all the better, but I wouldn’t want to sell anyone something that wasn’t the result of Mullet and I playing at the top of our game. Mullet takes the same approach with the comic, as does our artist, Kameron Gates.

At the moment, I have a G5 (single 1.6 GHz processor, the original low-end G5 model) and Final Cut Studio 1 as my software. I have a pair of 250 GB external hard drives for video capture, and I listen to the whole thing via a 10-watt Radio Shack amp and $30 Radio Shack speakers. This is probably as no-budget as you can get! I won’t be replacing the G5, so my focus will be on the software.

I’m running OS X Tiger, and I haven’t decided whether I’ll upgrade to the new Mac OS, Leopard, yet. I usually wait some time before upgrading, but I’m happy with how fast and stable Tiger is—Leopard’s new features haven’t prompted me to run down to Riverdale Mac just yet. I’ll revisit the OS after the DVD’s done, but I don’t anticipate, at this point, upgrading based on some of the negative experiences people have had. If the consensus on the various forums that focus on all things Final Cut and Mac come back with reports of speed increases or can’t-work-without features, I might take the plunge.

I am, however, evaluating 4 options for upgrading my current apps:

• Stand pat with what I’ve got ($0)
• Upgrade to Final Cut Studio 2 ($545 CAD),
• Buy Magic Bullet Suite ($799 USD) or just one of the Magic Bullet apps
• Buy Adobe AfterEffects ($1149 CAD for CS3, $1969 CAD for the Production Premium version, which adds PhotoShop, Illustrator, etc.).
  
  Taking Magic Bullet for a ride is step one in my evaluation. Magic Bullet was created by Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage, and it’s been a well-known plug-in and stand-alone app for years. Last spring, I bought Stu’s book, The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap, which I’d recommend to anyone making no-budget movies (even if you’re not shooting action flicks, there’s plenty of good information there), and found his blog and forum there quite interesting.
  
  Magic Bullet Suite is priced at $799 USD, and you get Magic Bullet Looks (applies preset or user-created “looks” to video), Magic Bullet Frames (converts 60i to 24p, also deinterlaces video), Magic Bullet Colorista (3-way colour correction), and Instant HD (converts SD video to HD video). These programs are either stand-alone or plug-ins for FCP and Motion, but the demos seem to be plug-ins only. I’ve read a few reviews for Colorista, plus various forum comments, and all have been positive. I can’t recall any negative comments, actually. I downloaded the demos for Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista, and in a future post I’ll let you know how they’ve worked out.
  
  Upgrading to Final Cut Studio 2 would give me the latest versions of that bundle: Final Cut Pro 6, DVD Studio Pro 4, Motion 3, Compressor 3, and Soundtrack Pro 2, plus the new app, Color. At the moment, this would be a $545 CAD investment. The learning curve is the lowest here given that I’m familiar with the previous versions of all these apps, with the exception of Color. There are no demos available for FCS 2, so I’ll have to rely upon reviews and the Apple website for evaluation. The reviews of FCS 2 have been positive overall, although some people don’t like Color.
  
  Whether I upgrade or not, I’ll be using FCP, Soundtrack Pro, Compressor, and DVD SP for the DVD. These are good, stable programs that meet most of my needs for no-budget post-production. The only needs I find wanting are in the areas of mastering and onlining.
  
  Stu’s book goes into onlining quite a bit—getting the video from your non-linear editing program to the final version enjoyed by millions. Colour correction and mastering are the two main areas. In the book, Stu has reservations about using FCP for onlining and recommends using AfterEffects since FCP renders at 8-bits and AE can render 8-, 16-, or 24-bits. The higher the bit rate, the better the filters and transitions look. With Stu’s workflow, you don’t do any rendering at all in FCP—you export everything sans transitions and filters, and apply them inside AfterEffects instead.
  
  In FCP 5, you’re limited to 8-bit rendering, but Apple promises that FCP 6 does 16- and 24-bit rendering, as does Color, but I haven’t seen anyone come out with a clear statement on whether it works as well as AE does, even on Stu’s blog and forum.
  
  I’ll download the AfterEffects CS3 demo and try it out once I’ve played with Magic Bullet. I had AfterEffects 3 way back when OS9 ruled the Mac world, so I’m somewhat familiar with the program, but I suspect that CS3 is probably a lot more sophisticated than 3 is!
  
  To evaluate the 2 demos, I’ll take the same sequence from a Final Cut project, export it as a DV QuickTime file, and import it into each program (bearing in mind that the Magic Bullet demo is plug-in only, I’ll presumably be using FCP’s rendering engine when I test Magic Bullet, so I’m testing the interface more than I am the output).
  
  I’ll come up with 3 or 4 different things I want to test, and use Magic Bullet, AfterEffects, and Final Cut Studio 1 to independently come up with 3 different versions. Once I’ve done all 9 or 12 tests, I’ll export them as QuickTime files and bring them into Compressor to convert into H.264 and DVD files. I’ll run the DVD files through DVD Studio Pro to create DVDs to look at on various TVs, and I’ll test the H.264 files on a mix of computers, mostly Windows.
  
  I’ll post results for these evaluations in the coming weeks.

Blade Runner the final cut?

There’s a new Blade Runner DVD coming out in December, so they’ve released a print in limited runs to stir up interest. Blade Runner the Final Cut started a run at the Regent Theatre on Mt. Pleasant a couple of weeks ago. I ended up seeing it three times so far, the most recent on a dark and rainy Sunday night with a nearly deserted streetscape echoing the movie’s vision of a city.

If you haven’t seen Blade Runner before (any of the 6 versions of it floating out there), stop reading as I’ll probably give things away that are better witnessed first-hand. The Final Cut represents version #7, if you’re keeping score at home.

The Regent is a great little indie movie house. Originally built for live theatre, it’s a post-production facility by day and movie house by night, so the projection system and the sound system are amazing. The room is also acoustically fixed up.

I own the Director’s Cut (version #6) on VHS and on DVD, but I’ve seen Blade Runner onscreen a few times—there was a scratched print floating around, and I got to see a genuine 76-mm print at the late great Eglinton Theatre once, even if it was also the “happy ending” version with voiceover.

So, to see a fresh print, digitally restored and remastered the way Ridley Scott had intended (he didn’t have control until version #6), in a great theatre, was too much to pass up on 3 separate occasions.

Blade Runner is quite a bleak view of the future (CITY-TV used to run it right after its New Year’s Eve show as a subtle but powerful statement), with perpetual night and constant heavy rain dominating the formerly sun-baked climate of Los Angeles. Enormous refineries spout fireballs of gas into the air during the opening flight over the dark cityscape as drums hammer the audience into their seats.

There’s a great book written about the making of the movie called Future Noir—I’d recommend it to any fans who haven’t read it—which will keep this entry short.

The big debate amongst the fans for the longest time was whether or not Deckard, Harrison Ford’s protagonist, was a replicant or not. Ridley Scott ahs more or less confirmed that the character is a replicant, but Ford has been quoted as saying that Scott told him that Deckard wasn’t a replicant when they were shooting the movie. In version #7, Deckard is clearly a replicant: the unicorn daydream and the origami unicorn are proof, glowing red eyes aside.

In the end, however, it doesn’t matter whether Deckard is a fake or authentic human. The final scene is powerful regardless.

After meeting and facing down the last of the replicants, Deckard returns home to pick up Rachael, the femme fatale, so that they can flee together. As he gets her to the elevator, he spots an origami unicorn on the ground—a sign that fellow blade runner Gaff was there. He picks it up and holds it in front of his face as a series of emotions play across his face, and Gaff’s last line, “It's too bad she won't live; but then again, who does?” is heard.

That closeup of Harrison Ford’s face is one of Ford’s finest moments as an actor. And it gives Ridley Scott a great, low-key climactic moment. Because Deckard’s feelings are not explained with dialogue, it’s ambiguous. And it’s absolutely brilliant on all parties’ counts.

Here’s how I interpret that last shot:

For devotees of the Deckard-is-a-replicant school, Deckard realizes that he is a replicant at that moment: the unicorn daydream could only be known to Gaff if the daydream was an implant (either Deckard’s or Gaff’s, or both). He realizes that he and Rachael are both hunted—by Gaff and the other blade runners, by their built-in limited life-spans, or by both. But Deckard still turns and joins Rachael in the elevator. In the “happy ending” version, this is followed by the closing credits over aerial footage as though from one of the spinners (flying cars) fleeing the city. In the other versions, like #7, it goes to black and credits.

For Deckard as authentic human, that moment is still awful: he realizes they’re being hunted, either by Rachael’s best-before date, Gaff, or both.

In turning to join Rachael, he’s not giving up, he’s seizing the day, he’s alive, dammit. That’s the faint light at the end of the Blade Runner tunnel. How anyone felt it necessary to throw in the aerial footage that cheaply represented the POV of a fleeing spinner….

Regardless of how you see Deckard, this shot, to me, is great filmmaking: a powerful climactic beat, with enough ambiguity to leave the viewer debating with himself what the character is thinking and feeling, and wondering what happens next.

It’s also an instructive lesson in acting with the eyes and face for film, and how to capture that acting in order to give that beat its proper expression.

Ford is completely in the moment during that beat. He’s not telling us his emotions—he lets them come from within and they take him and us through the beat. The beat feels honest because Ford is honest in that closeup.

Ridley Scott held that shot to let the beat pass uninterrupted. Here’s what I remember of that last scene: Rachael steps on the origami unicorn—cut—Deckard comes out of his apartment—cut—closeup as Deckard notices the unicorn—cut—Deckard’s hand picks up the unicorn—cut—closeup on the unicorn—cut—Deckard holds the unicorn in front of his face and the great moment happens.

I don’t remember what shot is next—Deckard turning around? Shot of Rachael in the elevator?—because those shots follow the climax of the film. The few seconds of Deckard following Rachael are the epilogue, to make sure we know he’s going with her, regardless of what’s chasing them.

Watch Blade Runner the Final Cut and you’ll be transported to a dark world with a faint glimmer of hope, a powerful and disturbing story that resonates so much with what we face in 2007. There are some great moments of writing and acting in it—the Roy Batty speech before he dies is another great moment in acting—but the whole movie builds up to that final 10 seconds of greatness.