Deep Thoughts, and Shallow Ones, Too

Update from the world of Miller & Mullet

2009-05-12T10:14:00.003-04:00

I've been tardy in getting the HV30 posts put together and online, but I've been busy with other stuff, too.

On or around Canada, or the 4th of July if you prefer, Miller & Mullet will be launching a whole bunch of stuff.

With artist Kam Gates, we're kicking off a weekly comic strip. Think of it as the Addams Family (the original Addams' strips) meets Ziggy, or Hitchcock meets Garfield. Something like that. At any rate, Mullet and Kam are coming up with some darkly funny stuff that works best in the 3-5 frame world of comic strips.

Alongside the strip, we're launching a tri-weekly radio series starring Miller and Mullet. I'm doing the post stuff on that project, as well as most of the writing. The nice thing about audio-only is that sound effects are a lot cheaper than visual effects, so we can finally put some ideas to work without having to worry about how much it costs. The radio show will be available on our website and will, hopefully, be available via iTunes as a podcast. Look for Miller & Mullet Radio.

And, as the third prong of our 2009 Extravaganza, we're posting our 2003 project, Babysitters, in chapters on Youtube and as video podcasts at iTunes. Each week, we'll release another chapter in our first major project. this will be the first time Babysitters has been seen since our rough cut screening at Christmas of 2002.

Back to work!

The HV30 White Balance, Part 2

2009-05-02T14:05:00.001-04:00

Okay, now the histograms for our white balance experiment. The first four look similar in the red, green, and blue channels, but there is a significant difference in the luminance (black graph) channel, with more spikes for the Custom white balance setting (unsurprising given it responds to whatever you put in the lens while setting it). It is different from the fully-automated setting, but the spikes are in the same neighbourhood, as is the bump to the left of the spikes.

The two fluorescent settings differ in the luminance channel more than they do in the 3 colour channels. This makes sense as the fluorescent-corrected is intended for lights shifted from the greens of regular fluorescent lights (measured as 4100-4400 K colour temperature) towards the bluer temperature of sunlight (5000-6500 K). Shooting in real daylight creates one spike (or 3 shoved together?) for the daylight-corrected setting, but 3 distinct spikes for the conventional fluorescent setting.
Looking at the actually Daylight setting, it resembles the fluorescent setting in terms of the luminance, and not the corrected one. Interesting, and not what I expected.

The Shade setting pushes the 3 spikes of the Daylight setting together, with nearly identical colour channel readings for both. The Cloudy setting, by comparison, has luminance spikes somewhere between Daylight and Shade, which makes sense.
Finally, the tungsten setting, which is designed for the 3000K colour temperature of the halogen incandescent bulb (I’m guessing the 2700K average for conventional incandescent are probably okay with this setting, too). I’ve grouped it with the two fluorescent settings (which I’ve misspelled, perhaps reflecting my past work in the restaurant business…) to see what the 3 artificial light settings do.

As the screen cap from last time shows, this setting spikes in the blue channel farther to the right than the other settings. The three green channels are quite similar, but the tungsten setting pushes the red channel towards the dark side—not surprising given the light bulb gives off a distinct orange-yellow glow and tends to tint everything towards the red. The luminance graph is different, too, with that ragged, wide spike in the bright end of the scale—I’m guessing the heavy shift in the blue channel means the luminance spike moves over, too.

Based on this third histogram comparison, I’d say that the more corrective the white balance setting, the more spikes and shifts in the luminance and colour graphs. The Tungsten and Fluorescent settings correct strong red and green shifts, respectively, by changing the image much more than what we see in the three natural light settings and the daylight-corrected fluorescent settings.

The most detailed histogram is the custom setting, which I had set by zooming into an area of virgin snow and pressing the white balance button to set the camcorder. Going forward, I’ll carry a grey card (backed with a white card) with me in order to manually set the white balance, relying upon the presets only when I forget the card or it’s not practical to shoot one in advance (such as when I shoot a stage show and don’t have the opportunity to set up properly).

The HV30 White Balance, Part 1

2009-04-28T14:41:00.001-04:00

The next part of the HV30 tour is the white balance settings. There are a number of presets as well as a manual setting. For these tests, the HV30 was in 1080 60i mode, with the Cine Look since I think it will be one of the more frequent settings I use.

First up, the automatic white balance. I’m guessing the camcorder looks around for the whitest-looking pixels and picks them to represent what white should be. Here, the snow in the park hands the camcorder an easy one.

The snow looks somewhat grey in the sunlight—only the snow across the road in front of the building looks white. Let’s see what the daylight setting does:
The snow is whiter in this shot, so I’ll avoid the automatic setting, at least on sunny days.

Next, the cloudy setting. The sky on the day of the shoot was clear and bright, so this is not the setting’s best test:

Next, we get into the Shade setting. I assume this setting works to level out contrasts between things in shadow and any hotspots in the same frame?

Leaving natural light settings, we get into the white balance settings for artificial light. First up, the tungsten setting, probably the worst to use in daylight since it’s looking for a much cooler light temperature:
Yup, that’s definitely the wrong setting. Nothing that colour correction in post couldn’t fix, but I’ll bet the reds and greens are probably not as vibrant. We’ll see with the histogram next time.

Next on the bulb part of the tour is the normal fluorescent bulb setting:
This isn’t that bad at first glance—certainly a bit darker, but it’s not blue like the tungsten setting, and the brown building still looks brown. The histogram will tell the tale.

Next is the daylight-balanced fluorescent setting:
This looks less blue than the normal fluorescent setting. The histogram comparison should be fun!

Finally, we get to the custom setting, or the manual white balance. In order to ensure that the framing was identical to the other white balance settings, I didn’t zoom into the sunlit snow to get an accurate white balance as I would normally do, so the white balance in this clip is based on the entire frame you see here:
This doesn’t look too bad—the whites look white, the blues look blue, and the browns look brown. The histogram will tell the tale.

That concludes the white balance comparison for this week. Next week, the long-anticipated histograms of these shots, just to see just how the colour balance changes from setting to setting.

The HV30 Special Scene Recording Programs, Part 2

2009-04-13T14:44:00.000-04:00

Okay, here, finally, are the histograms for the special recording programs. Aside from the Fireworks mode, I can see two distinct patterns emerge.

The Beach and Snow programs have two spikes towards the bright (right) side of the graphs for all four channels. The dark (left) side is diminished in comparison to the other programs' histograms, so it's obvious these two programs shift the entire image to the bright side.

On the other hand, the Night, Portrait, Sports, Spotlight, and Sunset histograms look fairly similar: a bump on the left-third of the graph, two or more spikes in the middle, and a somewhat empty right-hand side.

Clearly, I need to do more testing of these programs to see how they work in other situations!

Next time, I'll take a look at the white balance settings.

The HV30 Special Scene Recording Programs, Part 1

2009-02-24T09:44:00.016-05:00

My tour of the HV30 continues!

The HV30 comes loaded with a whole bunch of presets for typical situations that someone might come across while shooting. There are eight settings (Portrait, Snow, Sports, Spotlight, Beach, Night, Sunset, and Fireworks), and I shot footage with the HV30 in 1080 60i mode, shooting just 10 seconds per setting in order to minimize the shifting sun (directly behind the camera).

First up, the Snow Mode, just because I’m shooting a snowy field. As seen above, the image looks pretty good, with what appears to be balanced colour. The snow in the sunlight looks blown out, though.

The snow in shadow and in the sunlight halfway up on the left doesn’t look blown out, nor does the park sign just right of centre. Something with this setting doesn’t like a mix of shadow and light, even if it’s snow. The tree shadow in the lower right has a slight tint to it—somewhat magenta? That would mean the red and blue is cranked up or the green channel is cut. I’m definitely interested in seeing the histograms for this series of test images!

Next, the Beach Mode:

First thing I noticed was that the shadow of a bare tree (lower right) has lost the magenta the Snow Mode gave it, but the detail is about the same. The broken snow in the lower right is not defined very well—it looks blown out like in Snow Mode. The red channel is definitely subdued here—look at the brick building and the concrete pole on the left side of the image and the office building across the road.

Our third setting of the day is the Night mode. Shooting a snowy field on a bright winter’s day is probably not the best way to test this setting, but I was interested by the differences with this mode compared to Snow and Beach:

Looks darker overall, but I think that’s what anyone would expect. What is interesting is that the broken snow on the lower right is sharp and not blown out. The brick building and the concrete pole have more red to them like the Snow mode compared to the Beach mode, so at this point I’m thinking the Beach mode must chop the red channel down compared to Snow and Night. Good to know!

Next, the Portrait mode. Designed for making people look good in close-ups, probably by doing something with the red channel, here’s what it does with a snow-covered park:

Like the Night mode, this is not the best subject to shoot with this mode. The image is dark, but the broken snow is not blown out, and the brick building and concrete pole don’t seem to have lost any of the red as in the Beach setting. I was struck by how similar this image was to the Night mode image—I had to go back and make sure I hadn’t used the same image twice by mistake. When I do another round of tests, I’ll have to find a better subject to fully understand how the Portrait Mode affects the HV30’s performance.

Next, the Sports Mode. My first guess was that this mode would speed up the shutter speed to better capture fast action, but I have a TV with a sports setting that shifts the colour balance away from the red channel (the TV’s movie setting definitely warms up and image by shifting towards the red).

Here’s what the Sports Mode did with my snowy park. It resembles the Portrait and the Night Modes. The broken snow is not blown out, and the image is darker overall. The red in the brick building and the concrete pole doesn’t look altered at all (a red car happened to pass through and other than being dark, it looks red).

Next, the Spotlight mode. Interesting to see how it compensates for the dark and light areas in the frame—it seems to darken everything equally:

The dark is definitely darker, and the lighter areas are definitely darker, too, so this is clearly the wrong setting to use in this type of situation. I’m looking forward to comparing the histograms for the last 3 modes, just to see what the differences are.

Next, I fired up the Sunset Mode (which I assume could be used for sunrises, too?).

It looks like it’s somewhere in the middle of the pack. The broken snow is still sharp, and the red channel doesn’t look suppressed, but it’s a brighter image.

Finally, my favourite of these tests: the Fireworks mode. Not surprisingly, a snow-covered park doesn’t work with this image at all. I captured a perfectly white image:

I never suspected changing the recording program on the HV30 would crack me up, but this one did! Rest assured, I shot all 10 seconds of this blank shot like the others (and the HV30 still worked after I was done). This setting must work better in low-light, high-contrast situations. Again, this is one I’ll have to test under much different conditions.

Next time, the histograms of these pics to see what exactly the HV30 did for each mode.

The HV30 Recording Programs, Part 2

2009-02-17T14:38:00.009-05:00

Continuing from last week, here are the histograms for the HV30 program mode tests. I used the same TIFF files as last time, loading them into Photoshop. The histograms are screen captures from Photoshop.

I had to head to Wikipedia to figure out how to read these graphs, so I'm relying on the information there being accurate! The top row (in black) shows the luminosity for each setting, with the left side being the darkest and right the brightest. The higher the peak, the more pixels there are in the image at that particular luminance.

The colour graphs show the locations of the RGB pixels, with the darkest values on the left and the lightest values on the right. Therefore, a white pixel will appear on the far right side of all four graphs, and a black pixel will appear on the far left of all four.

The overall shape is roughly the same for each program setting, with that somewhat phallic peak in the centre or to the right of the centre, but there are some significant differences between them.

In the Program AE mode, where the HV30 has complete control over the shutter and aperture settings, the camcorder spreads the phallus into three distinct columns for luminosity reading, and adds a peak to the right side where the other settings have a slight bump.

The Av and Tv histograms are nearly identical, so I’ll need to do more testing. I have read opinions favouring shutter or aperture control for shooting quality video, so this bears further testing to see what works best with the HV30 in a wider range of tests.

The Cine Mode setting shows the most differences between itself and the other three programs. This mode really clamps down on the brightest 1/3 of the luminosity and the three colour channels. The lower end, the blacks, is also a bit different—the little spikes, particularly in the blue channel, are compressed compared to the other graphs. Where Cine Mode boosts the image is the mountain to the left of the phallus—all four readings are higher there than the other three program settings. This finding matches what I've read about how the film-look settings on camcorders work to match how film captures luminosity and colour.

This round of test shows what the four program settings can do. I can see that the Cine Mode is significantly alters the image, so I will definitely pursue further testing with these settings in other conditions, particularly the Tv and Av modes. I don't know if the Cine Mode's changes can be reversed in post, so I want to see if another mode provides a better canvas to do colour-correction in post.

Next week, the special scene recording programs.

The HV30 Recording Programs, Part 1

2009-02-04T13:57:00.012-05:00

It was warm enough outside this weekend, finally, to take the HV30 out and shoot some stuff. I really haven’t had much opportunity to use the HV30 so far this winter as we’re not shooting anything right now and the weather’s been cold and snowy on the weekends.

The first thing I did was play with the recording programs, so this week’s missive is devoted to seeing what they do.

I put the HV30 into the default HDV 1080 60i recording mode for all of these tests, and I went to a small park covered with snow (with a busy street in the background to give some contrast to the snow). I even found an angle that put some shadows on the snow, just for detail. Then I shot just 10 seconds at each setting to minimize the effect of the sun moving west (I had some tall apartment buildings behind me, so I had to hurry to avoid the long shadows that were creeping in from left of the frame). I put the camera facing north-north-east, so the sun is almost directly behind the camera.

For the screen caps below and in the subsequent tests, I captured the footage using Final Cut Pro, and then exported them as TIFs. I captured using the HDV 1080 60i settings. From there, I put them in Photoshop and used the Save for Web option to convert them to JPEGs, using the ICC medium JPEG setting. I think I minimized the changes to colour, contrast, etc., that file conversion would have brought about.

The HV30 comes with four recording programs (Program AE, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, and Cine Mode). First, the Program AE mode, in which the HV30 has control of both the shutter and aperture. This is the point-and-shoot mode:

I consider this the baseline since the HV30’s brain is doing all the work. This is what the Panasonic engineers came up with in terms of the optimum exposure settings. There’s not a lot of red, other than the brown brick building to the left and the yellow fire hydrant in the right-centre, so I think the blue channel is probably doing most of the work in this shot. The white snow across the street, in direct sunlight, is pure white here, and the snow and sign in the foreground both look white. And the blue sky is just as blue as it was on the day.
Next, the Tv mode, where the shutter speed is manual and the aperture is controlled by the HV30. In this case, the shutter speed was at 1/100:

The blue sky looks bluer here, but I can’t really see a difference between this image and the Program AE image.
Next up, the Av mode, where the aperture is manual and the camcorder controls the shutter. I didn’t change the aperture value when I switched from Tv to Av, and I didn’t write down what the aperture setting was, so I don’t know what the aperture was actually set at! At any rate, here’s what it looks like:

It’s pretty much identical to the Tv mode, so the camcorder didn’t change anything when I went from one setting to the other. I am planning on testing the Tv and Av modes more extensively later on.
Finally, here’s the Cine Mode still. This setting has no manual controls, so the HV30 is doing all the work here but trying to give the image a film-like exposure:

It looks a bit darker, and the snow in the forground looks more grey than blue compared to the previous screen caps. The contrast seems to be compressed a bit—the whites are less bright and the darks are less dark. The colour of the fire hydrant across the road looks the same, but the blue sky is definitely a different tone than the earlier settings.
I will post histograms of these four images next time, just to see what exactly the differences are.

JCVD and RocknRolla: Comebacks I’ve Seen

2008-12-10T15:33:00.002-05:00

I have seen two interesting movies in recent weeks, two projects that mark the comeback attempts of two men whose careers have seen better days.
The first movie was RocknRolla, Guy Ritchie’s return to his roots, the crime comedies Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Between Snatch and RocknRolla, Ritchie directed his wife Madonna in Swept Away, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen (although I saw it at an anti-Valentine’s Day party where the partygoers suggested dialogue that made the screening fun). I have been advised to avoid Revolver, the next movie in his filmography, so I haven’t watched it.
RocknRolla has a lot of the touches that Ritchie brought to Lock, Stock and to Snatch, but it’s not quite of the same quality—the editing seemed muddled somehow. Where in the early movies, the characters and relationships were established by a rapid pace, a fun narrator, and some great performances , RocknRolla doesn’t seem to do the same. Sure, there’s rapid editing, narration, and some great performances, but it’s really not clear as to what One Two’s relationship is to rest of the London underworld portrayed in the movie. In the first two movies, it was quite clear as to who and where the characters were in their world, and Ritchie’s failure to achieve the same in RocknRolla took me out of the movie as I wondered who these people were.
Guy Ritchie’s comeback has started as his marriage to Madonna comes to an end in the glare of the media klieg lights, but he’s still not as sharp as he was ten years ago. RocknRolla is entertaining, and there are some amazing things in it (Toby Kebbell’s performance as rock star Johnny Quid is one of the best I’ve seen in any movie in 2008).
JCVD is the 2nd comeback movie I’ve seen this month, and it succeeds much better than Guy Ritchie’s movie. Jean-Claude Van Damme, the king of the action movie during the VHS years, makes a comeback with a great performance as a burned-out version of himself.
The movie itself is directed by French director Farouk El Mechri, and it is a stylish, fast-movign Rashomon –type story, showing Jean-Claude in a spot of trouble that is both hilarious and gripping. Van Damme’s performance is world-weary and touching, the martial art gymnastics ignored in favour of his acting chops, and he carries the movie over some pretension that could have torpedoed it with a lesser actor. A soliloquy, featuring Van Damme floating amongst the studio lights, could have been horrible, but Van Damme pulls it off and it becomes moving (no pun intended) as he looks back on his life and shows the price he’s paid.
I hope Van Damme and Ritchie both succeed in their comeback efforts—Van Damme was a revelation in JCVD, and Ritchie’s first two features are still favourites of mine.

Capturing from the HV30

2008-11-11T16:22:00.001-05:00

Having spent my half hour on Yonge shooting with the brand-new HV30, it was time to capture. I’m using Final Cut Studio 1, so Final Cut itself is version 5.0.4 on my 1.6 GHz G5 tower. I connected the HV30 to the G5 via the Firewire 400 port on the front panel, with my capture drive plugged into the Firewire-800 port to keep the two devices on separate busses.
Setting the in and out points for batch capturing is the same as regular DV, but doing the batch capture itself seems to run into timecode errors on a regular basis. I seemed to hit an error every other or every 3rd capture, but clicking on OK sent FCP back to work and it would capture everything okay during the 2nd or 3rd attempt. The capture window for HDV is different than the one for regular DV, and you don’t get the image mirrored in FCP as you capture. Not a big deal as I normally watch the camcorder’s flip-screen during capture.
Capturing the first shot, the 24p, took no more time than usual, once I’d gone through the first timecode error message. Putting the clip on the timeline prompted a red render line across the top of that window, so I started to render. FCP said it would take 9 minutes to render the 30-second 24p clip, but I think it was closer to 4 minutes. Exporting said clip to QuickTime (without conversion) took seconds—it must spit out the render file pretty much as is. Here’s the 24p footage after Youtube got its hands on it:

I exited FCP and set up a new project in order to capture the same clip using Apple’s intermediate HDV codec. The 30 second 24p intermediate clip didn’t require rendering, and the export prompted a warning of 11 minutes, which was probably less than 2 minutes in total. Here’s what the lower-res 24p footage looks like:

Exiting FCP again, I set up a 30p project file. As with 24p, FCP indicated rendering was needed. The 30-second 30p clip generated a 2-minute estimate but actually took about a minute and a half to render, so it’s clearly less complicated for FCP compared to the 24p clips. I’m no engineer, but I’m guessing that it’s easier to pull the 30p data off the 60i tape feed from the camcorder. Exporting the 30p clip took a few seconds. And here’s the clip:

The next setting was the plain-Jane HDV, the 1080i format. Capture wasn’t a problem, and putting the clip into the timeline prompted the red render line. FCP initially reported 12 minutes to render, but the counter fluttered between 10, 11, and 12 minutes in the first 30 seconds or so. In actual time, the rendering took about 10 and a half minutes, so for 1080i, FCP guessed fairly accurately. Again, the export to QuickTime took 4-5 seconds, and this is what it looks like:

Capturing a clip shot in regular 60i standard-def DV was problematic. The easy setup choice for DV didn’t work—I kept getting timecode errors. I went in and played with the manual settings (mostly by selecting something else and then going back to the proper setting), and it started to capture. I got the audio rate mismatch error message when it was done, so I’ll have to go back and try to match what is undoubtedly not a 48k sample rate on the camcorder. Strangely, I had to render the clip once I plopped it into the timeline—clearly it’s not pure DV or I’ve missed a setting somewhere (the clip appeared fine in the viewer, but was a tiny square in the middle of the Canvas view before and after rendering). I went back to the manual the next day and realized I had left the HV30’s export setting at HDV instead of switching to standard-def DV—I’ll do a another test with the other setting to see how it turns out. Exporting this first attempt to QuickTime took just a few seconds. Here’s what it looks like (don’t squint too hard):

Finally, I set up a FCP project to compare the 24p and the 24p Apple Intermediate codecs. FCP didn’t seem to like me mixing the two on the same timeline as the image sizes changed when I dropped the 2nd type into the timeline. I set up some graphics and some split-screen action to compare. Rendering took about 2 minutes, and the export took less than 5 seconds (clearly, those render files are going straight into the QuickTime files). Here’s the comparison as it appeared:

This clip took very little time for Compressor to convert to the Youtube settings as detailed at Ken Stone’s site (here’s the article that I followed to set up Youtube 4:3 and widescreen presets) compared to DV clips (it takes at least 3 hrs to render a 2-minute DV clip, so the two formats are clearly quite different). The other HDV clips took much less time than past DV clips I’ve converted using these settings, too.
The Youtube website itself took longer to upload those clips, so any speed gains in Compressor seemed offset by slowdowns with YouTube. I had assumed that HD footage would take longer for both steps, so it’s a fair tradeoff.
Next time, I hope to have my 2nd field trip tests and results, this time to explore the different manual and preset options, and to try setting the export settings to DV for the old-school shots.

The New Camcorder

2008-11-03T10:53:00.002-05:00

And the winner is….

I went with the HV30, the front-runner of my little contest. The DV Shop had the best price I’ve seen (and I’ve bought a lot of stuff from them in the past and I like the store).

I would have shot an unboxing video… if I’d had anything to shoot with. I got the camcorder home, unpacked it (everything that was supposed to be in the box was, happily, there), installed the battery, and left it to charge overnight.

The HV30 battery is a different beast than the Ultura’s battery, so I won’t be able to carry over the old batteries, which still provide me with many hours of power after nearly 9 years of use. When I buy extra batteries for the HV30, I hope they last as long as the Ultura's did!

On the other hand, the HV30’s 43mm lens threading allows me to carry over a few things. My 46mm Canon wide-angle and telephoto lenses will fit on the HV30 once I get the proper 43/46 stepping ring (I’d been using a 27.5/46 stepping ring for the Ultura). And I’ll still be able to use Cokin filters, once I replace the filter-holder ring with a 43mm ring, so I'll be able to use my circular polarizer (the HV30 has neutral density filters built in, but I can add extras as needed).

After setting the date, time, and time zone (all the North American zones represented by American cities, so my HV30 thinks it’s in New York!), I set out to test it. I was looking for something with a lot of movement to better compare 24p, 30p, and the 1080i modes, so I went over to Yonge Street and shot from Beltline bridge overlooking the subway and Yonge.

I brought the manual to figure out where settings were hidden in menus to get started, but the camera is well designed, and I had no problems figuring how to operate it after reading the manual, particularly the menu items listings.

The manual warned about mixing formats on the same tape, so I put gaps on the tape between the different shots. I let the camera roll during the red light on Yonge so I could get a consistent shot for each to compare, and the subway added movement on the other side of the screen at random moments.

I kept the HV30 in the cine-look recording program for all the shots, as well as the daylight white balance setting (for sunny outdoor shooting), just to make comparing the different formats more scientific. I’ll play with exposure, shutter speed, and other settings in a future outing.

After about a half hour, I’d shot footage in the 24p, 30p, and 1080i HDV formats, and I also shot some standard definition 60i DV as well.

Next time: the first capture.

The New Camcorder Search, Part 3

2008-10-29T20:08:00.005-04:00

Having spent the last few weeks studying the camcorder market, I realized I had to develop a list of criteria to make the decision to buy a new camcorder. The falling Canadian dollar also became a factor—with retail prices on electronics undoubtedly to rise as a result, I had to decide sooner rather than later. So… here are the four main criteria in my decision-making:
1. Mini-DV format
2. Firewire/IEEE1394 equipped
3. Final Cut Studio compatible.
4. HD and SD capable

Compression is the main factor behind the first two items. Mini-DV and Firewire are still the best in terms of the least amount of compression applied by the camcorder or computer. Hard drive, DVD-RAM, and flash memory camcorders use higher compression than mini-DV cameras, so tape still wins (until I can afford those fancy P2 card systems). USB-2 is faster than USB, but it’s still not as good as Firewire. I’d rather not add additional compression by using a slow transfer bus.
The third criteria is dictated by the computer I’m using for post-production. I’m not upgrading from Final Cut Studio 1 as explained in an earlier post, so the camcorder has to work with it and the G5. From what I’ve read on various websites and forums, as long as you correctly tell Final Cut what kind of footage you’re uploading, it should be able to accept any SD or HDV camcorder. Mini-DV cams record video as 60i even in 30p or 24p format, but FCS can handle the various pull-down ratios. Most of the problems I’ve read about on the HV20 User and other forums are related to people not setting the right format before attempting to capture. And Adobe AfterEffects has some additional capacity for dealing with pulldown ratios if Final Cut can’t.
Finally, with HD becoming so prominent in broadcast, online, and home entertainment video, the smart choice is to buy an HD camcorder. I still need something that can play SD video for the projects already shot on SD. So it has to be a dual-format camcorder.
Other factors, although not critical, are related to the fact that I’m replacing a camcorder. I don’t think Canon has changed the form factor of their batteries, so my still-good Ultura batteries could be carried over to another Canon (this, of course, gives a boost to the HV30). An XLR mike input would be really nice having used an inline transformer with the Ultura for all this time. And if the new camcorder fits in my camcorder bag, I’ll be happy.
Next week, the decision and the purchase

The New Camcorder Search, Part 2

2008-10-21T14:08:00.002-04:00

There are only a few companies that make camcorders these days. I’ve used Canon and Panasonic, and I have only passing use of JVC or Sony camcorders.
A near clone of the HV30 is Sony’s HDR-HC9. Sony has been competing head-to-head with Canon for this HD prosumer market for a couple of years—the HC9 is the successor to the HC7 just as the HV30 is to the HV20. The Sony and Canon camcorders look so similar you need to see the manufacturer’s logo to figure out which one is which--both Sony and Canon made this year’s camcorder in black after making both predecessors in grey last year. I smell corporate espionage….
The first place I went to for research for all the camcorders was http://www.camcorderinfo.com/. This page offers thorough reviews of all major features, and it tests the important stuff—how well the camcorder processes image, colour, etc. In the HC9 review, it compares the HC9 to the HV30, giving the Sony the edge for durability and ease of operation, but gives the Canon the thumbs up for performance and features. I’m prepared to sacrifice ease of operation for performance and features, particularly 30p, so at this point, I was leaning towards the HV30.
Camcorderinfo.com pointed me towards the current JVC and Panasonic models, so I scanned through them to pick out the prosumer products in their lines. JVC doesn’t produce prosumer or even high-end consumer mini-DV camcorders anymore, so they’re out of the running.
The Panasonic model is the PV-GS500, successor to the popular GS400. Physically, it resembles the Sony and Canon models closely—the industry seems to have settled on a specific form factor for palmcorders after 30 years of development. The GS500 is a 3-chip CCD camera, as opposed to a CMOS like the other two, and it has a real live focus ring instead of a sliding switch of some sort (the GS500 has a sliding switch for the zoom, though), although the ring is not marked to indicate settings. In terms of performance, the GS500 does well in various lighting conditions, and the full range of manual settings makes it a compelling option.
I’ve decided to seek out the HV30, the HC9, and the GS500 in retail showrooms to play with them as well as searching the web for more reviews (and prices!).
Next week, the decision-making process.

The New Camcorder Search, Part 1

2008-10-15T14:50:00.004-04:00

My needs for a new camcorder are simple: I need mini-DV so that I can recapture stuff I’ve already shot, and I want to continue to use mini-DV tapes as that format still offers less compression than consumer-grade hard drive and DVD-burning camcorders.
The leader of the camcorder pack, out of the gates, is the Canon HV30. This is the successor model to the HV20, the camcorder that brought great excitement and joy to the indie filmmaking scene when it came out in 2007. The HV20 offered, for the first time, a decent HDV camera for less than $1000 USD. The HV30 ups the ante by offering 30p as well as the two formats the HV20 offered (24p and 1080i).
I wasn’t aware of what a CMOS camcorder was prior to the HV20’s arrival, but the image quality is high enough to offer HD capability, something I haven’t worked with yet.
Naturally, the first question is whether or not the HV30 will work with my Mac. I have a 1.6 GHz G5 equipped with Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) and Final Cut Studio 1, and I don’t anticipate upgrading to anything any time soon. My Mac had no problems capturing 24p shot from Panasonic DVX100 and DVX100A cameras we’ve used, so the next step is to see if FCS 1 can cope with whatever pull-down process the HV30 uses for 24p.
The HV30 comes with a Firewire-400 (IEEE 1394) port (as well as USB-2, HDMI, and component video, and composite video ports), so it’s not a problem getting the signal from the camcorder to the computer. The question is, of course, whether or not the computer and the camcorder speak the same language.
Next time, the other camcorders in the running.

Requiem for a Camcorder

2008-10-06T15:07:00.002-04:00

In the spring of 2000, I bought my first camcorder, the Canon Ultura. It was one of the early consumer-grade mini-DV, all-digital camcorders, and it was great—I remember being amazed by how vivid digital video looked compared to the graininess that I’d come to expect from analog video camcorders.
The Ultura was a great camcorder, enabling me to shoot my UK vacation that summer, and then allowing me to start shooting Miller & Mullet and other stuff. The Ultura also served as my capture and export deck for a series of Macs and Mac OS’s, and it never let me down. Until, that is, this summer while I was trying to capture footage for a short my friend Jeff had shot. After 8 years of regular (and sometimes heavy) use, the Ultura’s playback head is kaput. Not even my trusty head-cleaning tape could fix the problem.
I paid $1500 CAD, plus tax, in early 2000, which was a typical price for a camcorder back then. I remember looking at various cameras, including Sony and Panasonic, before picking the Ultura from Japan Camera at the Eaton Centre.
The Ultura is a single-chip camera, but it was a better camera than most that year. Canon had actually put in a better lens in it, much better than the ones used in their ZR-series and Elura camcorders that followed. The Firewire connection worked perfectly, as did the tape mechanism, and I never had to take it for repairs, despite the abuse it received, including shooting a feature during an incredibly hot and humid Toronto summer, capturing the footage from that feature (on nearly 30 mini-DV tapes)….
Canon withdrew the Ultura after a year in production, and I remember the replacement models weren’t of the same quality. Sure they were samller and had more buttons, but the quality wasn’t there (I’m basing my opinion on what I saw in various camera store showrooms).
I tricked the Ultura out with cheap Cokin filters (the key filters being the neutral density and circular polarizer, but I also bought 2 grades of orange for counterbalancing the ND filter, and a blue filter that I never got around to using for day-for-night shooting), so for outdoor shooting, the Ultura did a great job. Indoors, footage tended to be grainy if it wasn’t in a horribly bright room. I tried to go manual as much as possible for colour balance and exposure as the automatic controls tended to over-react to any change in lighting levels. Overall, though, I learned how to avoid the Ultura’s limitations, and I think the resulting video looked better than most one-chip productions did.
The most annoying aspect of the Ultura, though, was the audio jack. I curse whoever decided that a ⅛” plug was a better option than XLR or even 1/4 “…. The transformer I bought to convert XLR to the ⅛” worked great, but eventually you had to find the sweet spot where the plug and jack were both in full contact and the audio was actually reaching the recording head (I went through a series of cheap headphones dedicated to ensuring the audio was making it to two channels at the same time).
So… after spending several hours over a couple of nights trying to capture and recapture Jeff’s footage, I realized my beloved Ultura had reached the end of its working life and was now destined to sit as a memento on my bookcase rather than actually shoot anything.
Next time, part one of my search for a replacement.

Burn After Laughing

2008-09-24T10:40:00.001-04:00

I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading this weekend, and it’s definitely a lot funnier than No Country for Old Men.

Spoilers lurk after this point, so if you haven’t seen the movie, stop here. It’s a fun movie best enjoyed without preconceived notions.

It’s definitely one of the Coens’ funnier movies, with Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, and Richard Jenkins playing the dumbest characters I’ve seen them do. These three talented actors play gym employees who fumble their way into the Coens’ whacky thriller, and, for me, half the fun is seeing how these smart people play clueless people. Pitt in particular is hilarious with his remarkable gym trainer Chad.

The Coens contrast these three clueless characters with smart characters—Tilda Swindon and John Malkovich play intelligent upper-middle-class characters whose crumbling marriage gets the plot rolling, with Tilda’s Katie having an affair with Treasury agent Harry, played with twitchy energy by George Clooney.

Clooney’s character is what fascinates me the most after my first viewing of the movie, with one scene in particular resonating days afterwards.

I realized I had, while watching, divided the characters into 2 groups, the smart ones and the dumb ones, since the Coens had kept the 2 groups separated into those groupings for much of the first act. I assumed that Clooney’s character, as twitchy and as jogging-obsessed as he is, was one of the smart ones.

Harry, while having an affair with Katie, is also married to a successful children’s book author (Sandy, played by Elizabeth Marvel) and trolls internet dating sites for flings, including McDormand’s Linda. Despite being intimidated by Malkovich’s Osbourne at a dinner party, Harry seems bright enough to be involved with Katie, a doctor. He’s a philanderer, sure, and obsessed with “getting a run in,” but he blends in with the smart characters quite easily. The twitchiness is explained, early on, by his former job as a U.S. Marshal where he acted as a bodyguard, and by his current job as a Treasury agent—he’s in law enforcement, used to constantly monitoring his surroundings. He’s an older man for a field agent, so I had assumed he’d started taking the job home with him and constantly watched his surroundings even when not on the job (we never actually see Harry working).

But at one point in the movie, he reveals a secret project he’s building in his basement to Linda during his wife’s absence. We aren’t shown much of it prior to this scene: just some metal pipe purchased from a store, and some sort of complex metal hinge or mechanism as he works on it (he does, however, keep it locked up in a caged area within the basement, so I assumed it was something related to his job to require the extra security).

The Coens use the moment to not only reveal a great joke, but it also made me realize everything I’d assumed about Harry up to that point was wrong—he was as misguided as the gym trio. It’s a brilliant bit of writing. The thriller genre demands that information be given to the audience bit by bit as they solve the mystery, but the Coens apply this strategy to Clooney’s character (perhaps as a contrast to Pitt’s more obvious character, whose obliviousness is clear from the moment we watch him snap something in a customer’s body by accident).

With Linda at his side in his basement workshop, Harry unveils his device to her and to the audience, telling Linda that it’s a gift for his wife, Sandy. The machine has a seat on it, which Harry rolls back to activate a thrusting pink dildo. A beat later, after the comedic shock has worn off, you realize Harry has built this for his author wife, a woman who has appeared as intelligent and as cultured as Katie or Osbourne during the dinner party. Harry eagerly tells Linda he copied a machine he’d seen in a men’s magazine, building the device for a fraction of the cost. And he’s told her it’s a gift for his wife—he’s forgotten the lie that he and his wife have ended their relationship.

The character of Harry changed for me at that moment—he went from being the long-in-tooth law enforcement man to a sex-obsessed goof who has probably tormented his wife with inappropriate gifts and other whacky behaviour.

The scene doesn’t really advance the plot that much, but it’s not a throw-away gag inserted for laughs, despite the roar of laughter the pink dildo creates when it emerges over and over again from the black seat (a comic version of the alien chestburster from Alien maybe?). It is a clever, and hilarious, means of revealing Harry as a character, tweaking the audience’s expectations. From that moment forward, we realize Harry’s not as smart as he’d seemed to be, and that he isn’t the smooth philanderer we’d assumed he was—he’s a sex-crazed lunatic.

That scene allows the Coens to move Clooney’s character into buffoon county quite easily—in scenes following, he shoots someone in a reflexive moment (followed by a mad panic) and becomes increasingly paranoid as the plot rolls along. His wife, revealed in the scene to likely be long-suffering based on what he considers a gift to her, is on a book tour where she is having an affair of her own with someone presumably smarter than Harry.

The critics are calling Burn After Reading a minor Coen movie, but that scene proves to me that they are still master writers and filmmakers.

Knight is Darkest before the Dawn

2008-08-14T15:12:00.001-04:00

It took me a few weeks, but I finally saw The Dark Knight, the Batman blockbuster that’s brought in nearly $450 million USD since its release.

I’m not a big comicbook guy (my collection is less than 20 books, all of them ungraded cheapies, which is peanuts by most collectors’ standards), so I can’t tell you which comic the movie was based on or what was left out, added, etc., but it is one kick-ass movie. The Dark Knight transcends the action and superhero genres—it is a dark, gritty tale with the lead character leading a double life, all the while grappling with the slippery moral slope of a vigilante, officially wanted by police, who fights violent crime with violence.

This Batman is as far from the campy Adam West Batman as you can get.

I liked the first Batman movie when it came out as it was the best superhero movie I’d seen up until that point. Michael Keaton’s portrayal of Batman and a sleepy-eyed, distracted Bruce Wayne were well done. But the subsequent Batman series of movies, increasingly camp and more about spectacle than the story of a disturbed man, treated the world of comicbooks as a childish fantasy. The movies were safe, touching on the troubled psyche of Bruce Wayne, but the filmmakers kept their hands clean.

This new Batman movie not only touches on the troubled psyche, it envelopes itself in it. Violence is not camped up—the cause and effect of explosions, blades, and bullets is shown, the victims display the shock and grief those things create in the real world.

Much attention has been paid to Heath Ledger’s Joker, his final performance before his drug overdose. Ledger’s Joker is breathtakingly evil, profane and funny, and one of the best portrayals of a sociopath I’ve seen. He enjoys mayhem for its own sake, so he not only messes with Batman and the Gotham Police, he takes on organized crime, all for the fun of it. Ledger’s Joker is a perfect counterpoint to Bales’s Batman—each is compelled to do what they do for reasons they may not understand (but Bruce Wayne is more self-aware and troubled by the path he has chosen).

The story of Dark Knight is very well done. For a 152-minute movie, there are no gaps or moments where I fell out of the story or got impatient for a scene to finish. And the plot twists were worthy of a first-rate mystery story, with the Joker’s schemes subtle enough that they weren’t obvious like most Hollywood on-screen schemes are. The audience realized the tricks at the same time as the characters, not minutes (or even hours) before. The screenwriters treated their audience’s intelligence with respect and assumed the average viewer would be intelligent enough to understand everything as it happened.

The pacing of the movie is relentless and, coupled with the performances and the story, makes for a very good 152 minutes.

After seeing the movie, I realized that the Batman franchise has updated itself to our times just as the James Bond franchise has done. In our post-9/11 world, violence and disasters have become real, random, and heartbreaking. Dark Knight, like Casino Royale did, reinvents a sometimes cartoonish character for today’s audience.

Web Video

2008-07-22T10:46:00.004-04:00

Over the last few weeks, Mullet and I have been spending a lot of time discussing web video, and I realized haven’t written about it here very much.

When I started buying video gear seven years ago, the 3 major players in web video were QuickTime, Real Player, and Windows Media Player. All three played a range of codecs, but there weren’t easy ways of moving between the three formats. Being a Mac user, I used QuickTime by default, but I did have the other two players on my computer.

The players were all clunky and finicky. It wasn’t uncommon to see reduced frame-rates, lowered resolution, and even minimal action to make things look better.

Back then, I didn’t have a website or even an internet connection. The main means of delivering video was by running the signal from my capture card to my VCR. VHS was king—everyone, amateur or professional, used tape.

When I upgraded and got my G4, I suddenly had a DVD-R burner, and that led me to supplement Final Cut Pro with DVD Studio Pro (a couple months later, the Final Cut Studio bundle came out at a lower price than what it cost me to buy FCP and DVD-SP separately—thanks, Apple!).

Thus equipped, in 2003 I made history at the late, great Second Ciné video show by being the first to submit a video on DVD. But it was still a VHS world, and I backed up that DVD by exporting my clips to my VCR.

When I traded in my G4 for my G5, the new PCI expansion slot arrangement rendered my capture card useless, so I dropped the VHS option completely. By then, DVD burners were cheap enough that the indie world had shifted away from VHS.

DVD seemed to be the new king, unbeatable with its portability and flexibility. You could play it on your TV with a regular DVD player, or you could put it in a DVD-equipped computer. DVD sprouted in rental stores and retailers, offering special features and all the things impossible on VHS (subtitles and audio tracks in different languages, commentary tracks, alternate endings, etc, etc). The disks didn’t wear out like all tape-based technologies do—with care and handling, you would see the same image quality on the 1000th play as you would on the first play.

For an indie producer, you could easily crank out a DVD (maybe not the DVD-9 dual-layer format, but something that worked in most players and nearly all computers) that looked and played the same as the big boys’ disks.

I bought the 3rd edition of Chris Gore’s excellent film festival book in 2005, and we started to base our video efforts on the advice given. Film festivals were still king, and most of the ones that encouraged indie contributions readily accepted all the digital formats.

I bought Gore’s follow-up book on producing indie DVDs and used it as the main guide for our first appearance at the San Diego Comicon in 2006.

But it was at San Diego that I saw the future, and its name was not DVD but web video.

The big 3 players were still in the game, but Apple had introduced a new wrinkle—the iPod and iTunes. With incredible ease, you could download podcasts and listen to them on your Mac or iPod. The arrival of video-capable iPods sparked video podcasting. Flash video had arrived in force, with the help of some serious web video sites like YouTube. The big three media players changed membership, with Real player becoming a distant fourth. In fact, by 2006, I didn’t even have Real installed on my G5 as nobody was putting out video that QuickTime or WMP wouldn’t handle.

Gore and Mark Bell from Film Threat hosted a couple of panels at the con’s film festival (where my costumed appearance got some nasty looks from the black-clad filmistas—clearly a line is drawn in some people’s minds between the film fest and the convention itself!), and I attended a couple of them.

In one panel, Gore and Bell introduced the two guys behind Ask a Ninja as well as a couple of people from Hope is Emo, two of the most popular podcasts. I was still sans-internet at home, so I wasn’t aware of how big podcasting and web video had become. More people were watching these online videos than hundreds of film festivals put together.

But the indie aspect of these productions—Ninja was shot in the star’s apartment (painted up for green-screen production)—made it clear that you didn’t need a lot of money, just enough technology and, of course, a good idea well executed, to build an audience.

DVD suddenly looked less essential, just like VHS. Apple introduced its TV interface, and with flatscreen TVs and computer monitors becoming essentially the same, the average consumer realized they didn’t need a disk or tape to watch movies, TV shows, and indie video. The messy blue laser fight didn’t help, with the traditional market split into 3 different camps—DVD loyalists, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD. Even with HD-DVD losing the fight, most people I know aren’t rushing into the blue laser world. After seeing CDs largely replaced by web music, most people are expecting the same of video.

So… in the 9 years I have been dabbling with indie video, I have seen it change completely. A physical product is no longer the primary goal since you can find a larger audience thorugh the magic of internet pixels.

Mullet and I are prepping our old feature, Babysitters, for web in small chapters. Our long-in-development DVD project is now a web video project with a DVD version also available. We’ll follow the footsteps of successful web video people like Rob Schrab or the guys behind Chad Vader and put the videos online and make a full-quality DVD available for sale.

More on web video to come. After all, it’s Tuesday. There’ll probably be some new development on Wednesday….

Happy Canada Day, Happy Independence Day

2008-07-01T20:39:00.001-04:00

Happy Canada Day to everyone north of the border, and for those of you (all the millions who read this blog) south of the border, happy Independence Day.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday.

Thank you, Ed & Red’s Night Party

2008-06-26T10:31:00.000-04:00

Ed & Red’s Night Party will go off the air in August. The new owners of CITY-TV here in Toronto are ridding the station of everything that made it unique in Toronto: Speaker’s Corner, Ed the Sock….

This is a shame—CITY was the fun station, sometimes annoyingly pretentious like Queen West can be, but never boring or entirely predictable like its buttoned-down, blandly corporate competitors.

Ed the Sock started out on the cable access channel with the nefarious Rogers Cable in 1992. Stars on press junkets through Toronto started to stop by a talk show hosted by a puppet who pulled no punches. I never saw the show on cable as I was still an over-the-airwaves viewer, but I knew about it by way of the media and friends who did have access to it.

A mere two years later, the Sock got called up to the big leagues at CITY. The show was a must-see on Friday nights. There were a few sidekicks along for the ride (Humble Howard of CFNY being the first one at CITY, and Craig Campbell in either the 3rd or 4th season). But as talented as they were, the Sock was still the main draw as he insulted guests, the show, the audience….

Ed’s Night Party was, for a long time, the only night time talk show in Toronto and Ontario (probably Canada, too).

The leading national networks, CBC and CTV, both launched high-profile, late night talk shows, the CBC doing a weekly show and CTV doing 5-nights a week. Both efforts were clones of the big US shows, down to the placement of the desk and the guest chairs (with the requisite funny musical director and the house band to one side, of course). Both were entertaining in their own way, but they broke no new ground and both efforts eventually left the air after ratings slipped away due to boredom.

But the Sock was refreshingly original. You never knew what was going to happen on the show next, something that even Letterman couldn’t claim. You couldn’t jump into the middle of the show and know exactly where the show was (opening monologue/comedy bit/first guest… they’re still following this calcified format).

After turning into a day-job wage slave, my nights began to end earlier and earlier, and I stopped watching Ed the Sock, Letterman and the rest at some point. Heck, I even stopped watching Saturday Night Live and missed that whole Tina Fey revival. I didn’t start watching Ed the Sock again until we met Ed and Red at a comic-con here in Toronto.

Ed & Red’s had evolved into a different show from the what I’d watched the first 3 years he was on CITY—the interviews were usually done in the field, and the bikini quota went way up. The comedy remained edgy, however, and Ed & Red are tremendous improvisers, ranging from groan-out-loud puns to edgy barbs aimed at society’s sacred cows. The show self-mockingly went for the young male demographic with spring break footage of wet t-shirt and bikini contests, topless hot tub girls, and some of the dirtiest jokes ever told on Canadian TV.

The show is less predictable in this late incarnation, breaking away from the monologue-sketch-guest-guest-guest format that has solidified the genre into an indistinguishable ritual—only the host, the set dressing, and onscreen graphics distinguish the big American shows (Jimmy Kimmel providing a breath of fresh air but not as popular as a result). Ed the Sock, meanwhile, marching to his own drummer , made his cast of dancers, tub girls, DJs, and his co-host Red into a complete repertory company capable of doing anything.

I hope we haven’t seen the last of Ed the Sock, but I do know that Ed and Red will do well in their next step, whatever form that takes.

CITY-TV, meanwhile, won’t be the same with all the fun tossed out like yesterday’s garbage. I fear the one station that embraced the great city of Toronto will become another bland corporate entity, indistinguishable from the safe, generic, predictable dullness of the other Toronto stations.

Maybe it’s better that the Sock is now free of the new CITY—it would be sad to see him sanitized into something he is not.

Dance of the Sugar Plum Scaries

2008-06-10T13:42:00.001-04:00

Our 3rd appearance on Ed & Red’s Night Party aired on Friday (June 6), with the repeat running on Sunday, June 8. As I wrote back on April 24, this was an appearance in a sketch rather than being guests plugging something on the show.
Should Ed & Red post the clip, I’ll link to it here as I think we did some of our best work so far on that sketch.
That leaves one more appearance yet to air. Our fourth appearance is just a cameo, and it should last a few seconds rather than minutes.
You’ll get a chance to meet Ed & Red, as well as Miller & Mullet, at the Paradise Toronto Comicon, which runs July 12-13 at the Holiday Inn on King. This show is dedicated to comic books, so if you’re a fan of sequential art, drop by and say hello.

The Kings of Silent Comedy

2008-06-03T14:13:00.001-04:00

My exposure to the silent-era comedians courtesy of Mother’s Pizza led me to research and seek out the great silent clowns, as Walter Kerr called them.

Charlie Chaplin: the superstar of the silent era. His movies seem dated now (theatre-style compositions, a wide maudlin streak), but he is still an important teacher. Chaplin used characters to create comedy rather than stringing together a series of gags (pay attention, Mike Myers), and he spent his career trying to find the perfect blend of comedy and tragedy.

Buster Keaton: a man before his time. Watch any of his shorts or features and you’ll see the roots of modern comedy filmmaking, with the naturalism and cinematography of our movies today. Watch his masterpiece, The General—there’s not a wasted frame in that tightly controlled, well-told story, and the film ranks as one of the best ever made. Where Chaplin’s tramp instantly mastered any task thrown his way, Buster’s poor sap would struggle before mastering anything.

Harry Langdon: the man-sized infant. His comic persona was that of a baby trapped in a grown man’s body, and he puts it to good use by putting that character into unsavory places as often as possible. He was the master of making the little things bigger than the big things. A glance, a stunned stare held for a beat—Harry was the master of understatement, but he made every gesture and beat stronger for it. Watch The Strongman if you can.

Harold Lloyd: the go-getter. It’s possible to watch the development of Harold Lloyd’s “glass character” through the surviving shorts. By the time he’d fully developed the character, he was creating great comedy that rivals that of Chaplin and Keaton. He was the king of the “thrill comedy,” with Safety Last being his finest effort.

Laurel & Hardy: two gods of comedy, no waiting. Most people have seen the duo’s sound-era shorts, but they did quite a few silents as well. I’ve seen parts of their silents in some of the Youngson re-releases. The characters are overgrown children, polite and well-meaning, but placed in their well-crafted stories they fail time and time again. The Music Box is one of the best comedy shorts ever made, but any of their shorts are gems. I love Towed in a Hole and Me and My Pal. Stan Laurel was a great craftsman, writing and editing their output. Their later features aren’t as good as those shorts are, but they are still a lot of fun. Laurel & Hardy took action and reaction and set them to a comfortably slow pace, allowing the gags to build on each other, with some of the finest physical comedy on film.

Interestingly, these great clowns, all long-gone, have official websites. There is hope that future generations will know their work.

Blockbuster Season, 2008

2008-05-26T14:17:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, I worked for Dickie Dee Ice Cream, pedaling one of those white ice cream carts around the south end of Oshawa, where I was more the neighbourhood mobile nutrition centre than the floating dessert vendor. My favourite product was the grape Blockbuster, one of three flavours of a Creamsicle™-type ice cream bar.
But say the word blockbuster to me now, and I tend to think of the big popcorn movies that come out in the summer, what the industry types called the tent-pole movies (not sure if they still do or not).
This year, Iron Man led off the pack, opening at the beginning of May and doing quite well. Let’s hope that the inevitable sequel(s) maintain the same quality as this one.
The next big movie was the Narnia sequel, which I haven’t seen. The trailers for Narnia 2 give me the impression that the movie is much of the same as the first one, so I’ll probably skip it. It’s nice to see fantasy epics returning to the big screen in the wake of the LOTR trilogy, but the first one felt like a Harry Potter retread rather than a source of Rowlings’s scribbles.
This past weekend, I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter shortened to Indy 4). This movie was as entertaining as Iron Man was, and it’s a worthy addition to the franchise. I went in hoping it would be better than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and at least as good as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Fortunately, there’s no Jar-Jar Binks to be seen. Dr. Jones fist-fights his way on and off trucks, sneaks into booby-trapped ruins, and still manages to teach archeology to classes filled with enamored young women. The movie doesn’t drag, with godless Russian commies taking the place of the Nazis of the earlier films, and the movie is kind-hearted in its treatment of the characters in the world of the 1950’s. It’s not a documentary, so the plot holes are pretty easy to ignore—it’s pure, escapist fun intended to allow you to put the world aside for 120 minutes of adventure, which is how I define the summer popcorn movies.
There are a few other movies I am looking forward to seeing this summer.
Three high-profile superhero movies promise to make comic-con crowds dress up as more than just Imperial storm troopers this summer. The new Batman movie, featuring the late Heath Ledger, is coming out, as is a sequel to the excellent Hellboy movie.
I’ve only seen one trailer for The Incredible Hulk, so I haven’t decided whether it’s something to see (the 60’s TV cartoon is still the best Hulk experience, hands down, with a rockin’ theme song).
Tropic Thunder looks like fun: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. playing war-film actors stuck in a real war. With a supporting cast that includes Steve Coogan and Nick Nolte, this should be a lot of fun. Downey plays a white actor who dons blackface to get a role, which has generated some controversy, but I’m sure it’s more a source of comedic gold than something racist. I saw posters at the theatre this weekend, and Downey’s makeup cracks me up. I hope the movie’s as funny as that poster….
There’s an Adam Sandler movie coming out—to come out in prime-time, it must be pretty good by Sandlerian standards. He plays an Israeli agent who just wants to style hair in New York. So… he’s a martial arts expert with a funny accent. You Don’t Mess with The Zohan may be my guilty pleasure this summer. Or it may be two hours wasted.
One controversial comedy is on its way: Mike Myers’s The Love Guru. Hindu organizations are up in arms over this movie’s portrayal of their religion, which will undoubtedly drive ticket sales up for the first weekend. The first trailer was the most unfunny thing I’ve seen in a long time, to the point that I was shocked they would put it out in the first place. The second trailer was actually funny, so I’ll probably end up seeing this one. Guru is a throwback to the politically-incorrect movies of Peter Sellers, such as The Party or The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, where he impersonated people of other races. Today, that type of racial comedy is somewhat risky, with the unwritten rule being that you have to be from the ethnic group being mocked in order to mock a group of people. Still, in a world where Larry the Cable Guy’s white-trash, homophobic, xenophobic semi-routines have propelled him into making a series of what could be called next generation Pauly Shore movies, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see a white guy from Scarborough play a South Asian man. Still, the true test of a comedy is whether it’s funny or not. I have my doubts.
I may actually go to the theatre to see a Uwe Boll movie for the first time ever. Postal is getting decent reviews from the blogosphere, and it features the mighty Dave Foley, one of my favourite comic actors.
Surprisingly in the testosterone-soaked world of the blockbuster, the movie generating the most mainstream press these days is a chick-flick, Sex in the City, starring the ubiquitous Sarah Jessica Parker. Not my cup of tea since I don’t collect shoes or purses, but at least I have an excuse to ignore infotainment shows for the next few months….

Robert Downey Jr is Iron Man, Ozzy

2008-05-07T13:32:00.001-04:00

I actually went to see a movie on opening night last week: Iron Man. I’m not a fan of opening nights, generally—on Friday nights, movie theatres are crowded, fanboys are high on carbs, small children are screaming.

If I think a movie is likely to disappear within a week of release (either it’s really horrible or it has such a limited release nobody knows about it), I’ll go to a matinee that weekend. For the movies that seem to have enough buzz that I’m sure they’ll be around for weeks or months, I wait until at least the 2nd weekend to catch a matinee. Or I wait until the movie goes to the 2nd-run houses here in the city.

Iron Man is well worth the annoyance of going to a multiplex on Friday night in the city’s heart. The two morons who shouted out what they thought were funny things at the beginning of the movie eventually got into the flick and shut up—it was that good.

Robert Downey Jr. makes the movie work—he charms the audience with his portrayal of Tony Stark, a character with the same wild streak he has. The best casting decision of the popcorn movie season is casting Downey in this movie. They took the X-Men approach in casting good actors (as opposed to casting the prettiest people they could find), so the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges fill out the cast. They also got around the faceless superhero problem seen in the Spiderman movies by showing Tony Stark inside the costume (making the costume another foil for Stark’s wit).

The script was written not as a fanboy superhero movie, but as a character-based action flick featuring a protagonist who happens to become a superhero. The filmmakers (Marvel Studios in their first step away from collaborations with movie studios) were smart enough to realize that the drawing power of the comic book heroes is not the fighting and explosions (as cool as they may be) but the writing. DC may have created some of the iconic superheroes of the 1950’s and 60’s, but Marvel was king in the 70’s because they caught the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood and created flawed and complex heroes. Spiderman, the X-Men, the Hulk, even the bland Fantastic Four, all had their doubts, fears, prejudices. The Superman comic bored me when I was a kid, frankly. An invincible hero saves the world—you knew a chunk of kryptonite was just waiting around the corner.

Where superhero movies succeed or fail is not in how spectacular the effects are or how many villains they fight at the same time—it’s the writing, stupid. Are the characters interesting? Is the story compelling? Most of the time, Hollywood gets it wrong and thinks the visual spectacle is more important. Maybe it is to some people, but the power of storytelling is stronger than that of the visceral thrill. Compare the tepid stories and weak characters in the Fantastic Four movies to the stronger choices made in the telling of the X-Men or Spiderman, or, similarly, Superman Returns to Boredom versus Batman Begins to Not Suck.

So… Iron Man moves to the top of my favourite superhero movies list. Sadly, it displaces one of the best Channel 101 series I’ve ever seen….

Two More Socks for Miller & Mullet

2008-04-24T13:30:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, we completed two more appearances, our third and fourth, on Ed & Red’s Night Party. Back in December, I had written about our second appearance and our experience in a multi-camera situation.

Our third appearance is a cameo, at the end of an episode where Ed the Sock has decided to sell his studio and has allowed potential buyers to look at the place while they’re shooting. We cap this gag with our arrival with our bags packed at the end of the episode, and we may appear in the closing credits, fighting beside the desk. As in our earlier appearances, the producers gave us a very loose description of what we were to do (a cue line and the instructions to fight beside the desk), so we went out and did it. It was fun, but I don’t think it was as good as our earlier appearances. Maybe the editing will prove me wrong—I’m going on my gut response to what we did without having seen the raw or edited results. I think I wasn’t fully prepared for the cameo, and I think it will show. Mullet said he wasn’t comfortable with it, either. But it’s in the can, and the only thing to do is learn from the experience and move on.

Mullet has plenty of improv experience, so he’s more adept at winging it. But I’ve always worked better in situations where I plan things out in advance, like with a script. As a duo, we realized after the cameo that collectively we work better with a plan.

Our fourth appearance is our first appearance in a sketch rather than as part of the show itself, so the producers gave us more structure this time. Without giving too much away, we were part of a parody of high culture, ballet to be specific.

The producers shot it before the actual episode as an isolated segment. This meant we didn’t have to worry about any cues outside of the sketch itself. After the dinner break, we went into the studio to work it out and shoot it.

They’d told us the day before what we were to do in the sketch, so we’d had time to start thinking about what we were going to do. We talked over what I would do and what Mullet would do and what our motivations would be. We came up with a pretty good idea of the beats we’d follow, who would do what and when. If the sketch was to change, we’d have to rethink things, but we were prepared, at least, to adapt our plan or come up with something new, if needed.

We weren’t alone in the sketch—there were 6 others appearing on-camera (Liana K., 3 of the bikini girls, and 2 dancers)—so we had some logistics to work out on top of the beats of the sketch itself.

At first, we went with the two dancers to the studio floor with the director and the crew. The dancers worked out their moves with the music and then Mullet and I walked through what we had planned. Everyone laughed at the right times, so we knew we’d made the right plan.

We had to change one thing—I was facing away from the closeup camera, so I had to turn to my left instead of my right. Not a big deal—Mullet helped by approaching me on my left side. A few more walkthroughs and we were ready to go.

We got to use breakaway props for the first time. We had enough props to do one take, so we didn’t even rehearse with them. When the props were unpacked and placed on the set, the producer made sure cast and crew knew where they were and that they were fragile. Fortunately, the props broke in the sketch and not before.

I liked one of our final rehearsals—it got a laugh from the rest of the people on the floor, and it felt good. We did one more to make sure the cameras were in the right place, and then it was time to go to work.

Liana and one of the girls introduced the segment, the dancers danced, the other bikini girls heralded my entrance, I did my thing, Mullet came out and did his thing, we broke the props, and it was done. All in one take with all four cameras on our set. I ended the sketch on the floor, trying not to breath hard after a bit of a workout, until they’d made sure everything in the trailer was okay. Then we were done.

I liked that second-last rehearsal better than the actual take, but I was working to the audience of cast and crew in the rehearsal—that laughter wasn’t there during the take because they’re all doing their jobs when the tape is rolling. We did get applause backstage from the other people there, so it must have looked good on the monitor there.

I’m looking forward to seeing both performances. Watch our website www.millerandmullet.com or join our Facebook page for updates on airdates.

Upgrade Update and Why DVD Studio Pro is Teh Suck

2008-04-15T14:55:00.002-04:00

First, an update on my upgrade plans. I’ve eliminated one option from my ongoing post-production software. Way, way back in an earlier entry, I wrote about upgrading from Final Cut Studio 1 on my G5. I played with Red Giant’s Magic Bullet suite and came away impressed. I also played with Adobe AfterEffect’s demo (which I haven’t blogged about yet). Last week, I started to research my third option, Final Cut Studio 2. That’s when I discovered a problem with FCS 2: my G5.

I have a 1.6 GHz G5, the low-end model of the first release, the slowest G5 ever made. I have a stock model, with an extra gigabyte of RAM. The original graphics card is the stock GeForce FX5200 Ultra, a card that isn’t certified to power Color or Motion 3. The card I would need is the Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition, which is no longer available new (Amazon and eBay prices range from $250 to $350 for used and "new" cards. Apple carries an X1900, but it's the version for the Mac Pros).

My G5 turns five in August, so I have to ask, “Is it worth spending $300 to upgrade an old computer so I can spend another $600 to get Color and Motion 3?

I’m not convinced my colour-correcting or motion-graphics skills are worth $1000. And there’s no guarantee my G5 will run the apps efficiently. Therefore, I’m taking Final Cut Studio 2 out of the equation. And then there were two….

And now our second topic. Last week, we got the Ed & Red appearances dubbed from VHS to mini-DV. I was able to capture the footage, edit everything in Final Cut, use Compressor to convert the footage for DVD, and then set up a project in DVD Studio Pro.

I’ve always found DVD Studio Pro to be the problem child of Final Cut Studio. It works great up until I start a build or format a DVD. I don’t recall any projects where I didn’t have to trash all the build files and start over. Sometimes, each disk I burned required me to trash and start over again. Clearly, Apple doesn’t care about the DVD—it’s the interwebs, stupid!

The Sock DVD is just for friends and family who missed our appearances, so I did a barebones project, with four options: both complete shows, the excerpts of us, a main menu, a menu for each show, and a disclaimer video to make sure nobody plays it around kids or at work. Nothing fancy, or so I thought.

So as I started to burn a test disk, the app crashed. One moment, it was on screen, the next, I was staring at the Finder. This happened every time. I trashed all the build files and folders, rechecked the project—everything I’d done in the past that had worked I did. But nothing worked, even after rebooting, checking Software Update for anything related to Final Cut Studio 1, sacrificing a goat to the gods, etc., etc.

So I trashed the video and audio files and re-rendered everything through Compressor again. I started from scratch and reprogrammed the DVD. But as I started to drop the video from one of the shows into its track, DVD Studio Pro again vanished. This happened each of the four times I tried it.

A third trip through Compressor seemed unavoidable, so I went back into Final Cut and removed the chapter markers from the troublesome track. Compressor churned out new files, and I went back into DVD Studio Pro muttering things about Steve Jobs. I put together the entire project from scratch, for the third frigging time. Then, sure I was ready to toss the G5 off the balcony, I clicked on Build/Format again, but opted to build a disk image instead of burning directly to disk. Then I went into the next room and watched TV to bring my blood pressure down.

To my shock and horror, DVD SP actually worked. I had a working disk image on my hard drive. Using OS X’s Disk Utility, I burned the image to a blank DVD and, lo and behold, I had a working DVD. So… hopefully… this is a workaround that continues to work going forward.

DVD SP allows you great control over every aspect of your DVD, so I am frustrated by Apple’s inability to prevent it from blowing up real good….

Influences, Part II: The Marx Brothers

2008-04-08T16:01:00.001-04:00

I first saw the Marx Brothers courtesy of a Buffalo TV station—one of them used to broadcast old comedies on Sunday mornings. I think I saw their first swansong, The Big Store (1941), first, and despite it not being their finest work, I was hooked by Groucho, Harpo, and Chico.

If you’ve never seen the Marx Brothers before, I’d recommend watching their movies in chronological order (The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) are adaptations of their Broadway shows). If you want to jump in head first, start with the next 3 Paramount movies, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933). The start of the downfall is their first MGM movie, A Night at the Opera (1935). With Zeppo in tow, the boys attacked high society with a zeal that must have been like what the Sex Pistols did to music in 1977.

I like the Four Marx Brothers a bit better than the trio—Zeppo adds something that is missed in their later movies. As a wooden parody of the male love interest, his scenes in Monkey Business are pretty good (“the trees are lovely” while escorting a lovely lady around the deck of an ocean liner is my favourite Zeppo line and scene). He doesn’t do much in the other movies other than help move the exposition along (one scene in The Cocoanuts features him doing nothing other than saying “yes” to Groucho).

I initially liked Harpo the most—he’s an amazing clown, and with his silent act he gets in some great physical business. Alone or with Chico or Groucho, he gets a lot done, with the most visibly anarchic attitude. Harpo was a force of nature.

I think Chico’s best scenes are those where he plays with Harpo as they try to pull some scam on someone, usually Margaret Dumont (they do some great physical comedy together, such as the effort to escape from the gamblers in Horse Feathers or stealing a painting in Cocoanuts). I also like Chico’s scenes with Groucho as they mangle the language and the logic of language. The Chico-Groucho scenes are the ones most remembered (the contract scene in Opera, the map scene in Monkey Business, and the Why a Duck scene in Cocoanuts). Chico is a great con artist, ignorant and sometimes stupid, but shrewd enough to fleece you without you knowing it.

Groucho is probably the best-known brother today, and his machine-gun delivery and non-sequiter style still influences comedy today. Groucho would have been a great standup comedian if he were born into this era.

The greatest Marxist scenes involve all four (or three) brothers: the stateroom scene in Opera, the passport scene in Monkey Business, the speakeasy sequence or the lecture in Horse Feathers, for instance.

At Paramount, the Brothers were the romantic male leads—the leading lady was either Margaret Dumont or Thelma Todd. Both of these actresses were great comediennes, and the Paramounts would not have been the same without them. Todd, a gifted physical and verbal comedian, holds her own against Groucho in two of the Paramounts, playing a sexy femme fatale. Dumont, matronly and stuffy, represents the upper class and spends her time (and in some of the MGM’s) as the target of Groucho’s half-hearted efforts to woo her money into marriage. In both cases, you don’t expect the romance to last long after the movie ends as the boys move onto their next scam.

At MGM, the Brothers became the helpers for the romantic leads, and the movies aren’t the same. Although they were never as sentimental as Chaplin was, the later movies don’t have the same bite to them as the early ones. By giving up the role of the male lead, the boys became secondary to the plot. MGM wanted to sell tickets to women by featuring more romance, so you can blame your great-grandmother for it all.

Still, a bad Marx Bros. movie is better than no Marx Bros. movie….

Earth Hour, YouTube, and Web 2.0

2008-04-01T21:20:00.003-04:00

We had a big media blitz for Earth Hour here in Canada this year, and I decided to do my part and shut off all lights and appliances for an hour on March 29th. This I did.

But I did run one electrical device: my camcorder. I put my trusty ol’ Canon Ultura on my tripod and parked it in front of my balcony window to capture the beginning and end of Earth Hour. I used my Canon wide-angle adaptor (similar to this but not the same model) on the Ultura to make sure I got as much of the landscape as possible, so the balcony railing and the ceiling above it are both curved—but I caught a much wider angle than I would have otherwise.

I captured it the next morning to my hard drive, used Final Cut to edit it, and sent it through Compressor to prepare it for YouTube. I sped the footage up to 1000%, so each minute of video became 1.7982 seconds. I must admit I was impressed with Final Cut’s abilities to do so—with frame blending, it became seamless. Watching the headlights of cars showed how smooth Final Cut can be.

Here’s the video:

You’ll see someone slide the screen door open and then the balcony door several times—if I do this again, I’m putting a moratorium on going out on the balcony until after the camera’s shut off!

After I’d rendered and exported the video to QuickTime, I used a Compressor preset I’d obtained from Ken Stone’s website. The tutorial you’ll find there (by Brian Gary) is quite thorough, and I’ve been really impressed with the quality after YouTube finishes rendering. One thing to remember—you can ignore title-safe and action-safe as your entire video ends up on YouTube.

As I was waiting for Compressor to finish rendering, I wondered what the world in front of my balcony looked like on video on any other night—would it be a noticeable difference? So 24 hours after Earth Hour, I shot more video, with the camcorder in approximately the same spot.

I captured the subsequent night footage, sped it up and exported it to QuickTime as before. Then I brought both clips into Motion, where I planted them side-by-side with a background and text to try to make things clearer. I considered doing a wipe back and forth between the two clips, but side-by-side made the most sense for quick ‘n’ dirty video. I sent it through Compressor and then uploaded it.

As of tonight (April 1), the first video has 137 views and the second has 98. Some people have added comments, the “honors” link shows that the videos were in the top videos for their category, and I feel I’ve made a small contribution to the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Interestingly, the first video I put up, Hotdog, has gone from my 3 test viewings to 22 views since the other videos first appeared. I have no idea how anyone wathcing environmental videos would respond to Hotdog’s somewhat scatological bent….

I have had some time to think about the impact of these videos given the comments people have made—there was a 2-person mini-debate about global warming in the 2nd one—and I think I should have made clearer that I was shooting a great swath of residential space, where streetlights from a few major roads as well as row upon row of residential streets, dominate the landscape. The busiest stretch of highway in North American, the 401, crosses just below the horizon as well, so a lot of those lights were not part of Earth Hour. If I’d been able to shoot the skyline from my tiny bathroom window, I would have cpatured the CN Tower and the bank towers downtown going dark, as well as parts of Riverdale and the Beaches. So, in hindsight, I would have put in captions or title cards to put things in context—I didn’t intend the comparison video to present Earth Hour in a negative light (no pun intended).

If I’m still in this apartment a year from now, I’m definitely repeating the experiment and I’ll post all 4 videos for comparison.

One Near-Hit, One Bomb, One Classic

2008-03-28T16:28:00.001-04:00

Over the Easter weekend, I saw two comedies on the big screen. This is the first double-movie weekend I’ve had in a long time—I used to go once a week or every other week, but I haven’t been motivated to leave my DVD player much in the last year. Good comedies are scarce in recent months, so most of my movie choices have been from the comparatively consistent flow of good and great dramatic and genre movies.

On Good Friday, I saw The Grand, an improvised mockumentary a la Christopher Guest. Directed by Zack Penn, it boasted a cast including a few of my favourites: David Cross, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Farina, Michael McKean, Judy Greer, and Ray Romano, with many other fun performances. It wasn’t a great movie, but it wasn’t terrible, either. I’m not sure how Penn’s methods differ from Guest’s, but Guest can always find the comedic gold with his actors through conflict. I don’t think Penn did that as well as Guest can, so other than David Cross’s Larry feuding with Gabe Kaplan’s father character, the other characters didn’t really bicker or fight, so it lacked the punch and pathos of a Guest movie has in spades. I’d recommend The Grand as a rental as it was a lot of fun just the same—Michael McKean’s absent-minded developer steals his scenes, as does Werner Herzog. Dennis Farina isn’t given much to do, as is Judy Greer, which is a shame given how much fun those two actors can be.

The other movie, Be Kind Rewind, laid an egg on Easter Sunday (sorry). I really wanted to like this movie—I hoped it would be like watching Channel 101 on the big screen. It ended up being more like Channel 102, sadly. The plot is goofy enough, but Michel Gondry (who I only know from the marvelous Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) wastes the talents of Jack Black and Mos Def by chasing what should have been a subplot as his main plot.

This movie has more loose ends in it than any movie I’ve ever seen. I suspect this movie was butchered in the edit bay because the creator of Eternal Sunshine couldn’t have created such a sloppy mess here, right? Let’s see—a romantic subplot is set up in a charming little scene and then completely ignored… Black’s character takes on a power station and gains superpowers in a hilarious sequence that is later nullified with a funny pee scene)… a rival video store run by another kindly neighbourhood man which seemed to be set up as a possible merger partner and therefore a solution to the other store’s closing—what the hell was the point of introducing all of this if nothing is done with it? The story of Black’s character taking on the power station and the superpowers he gains would have made for a much better comedy if they’d stuck with that as the main plot. The making of fake movies was funny the first time (Ghostbusters, which was featured in the Be Kind trailers and got me excited about seeing it), but the other movies weren’t funny not because they weren’t funny but because they showed not the finished movies but the making of them--in a fucking montage!

I’d recommend you wait for Be Kind to wind its way into the discount DVD rental pile. There are a few things in it well worth seeing (Jack Black and a chain-link fence is one lighting-fast but hilarious visual gag), but I wished I’d had a scan button in the theatre.

So what’s a guy to do after watching 2 disappointing movies? Fire up the DVD player and watch some proven comedy.

I watched all three seasons of Bottom over the last few weeks, and it restored my faith in character-based comedy after Sunday’s fiasco. Bottom ran for 3 seasons in the UK, written by and starring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, our heroes from the last entry.

The two leads, Richie and Eddie, are much less angry than Rick and Vyvyan, but the relationship has some similarities. Richie and Eddie are flatmates in a rundown London neighbourhood, with Eddie supporting them with his welfare cheques. Rick comes across as the bitchy wife type, and Eddie is an alcoholic who prefers spending time with his buddies Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog (the latter played by the Young Ones’ Christopher Ryan).

Mayall and Edmondson did a number of tours in the UK with the characters, and the show has a definite theatre feel to it—most of the scenes take place in the living room/kitchen area of their multi-floor flat.

On tour, the two were noted for being able to drop the script and improvise around flubs, comment on the performances, etc., before returning to the story. I think you can see the results of this in the three series of the TV show. All 3 series (1991, 1992, 1995, with 6 episodes each) were good, and there was no decline in the quality of the show. The last episodes are as funny as the first ones, and they spend more time outside of the apartment.

The episodes aren’t as tightly plotted as The Young Ones. Sure, there’s a main plot for each episode, but the scenes feel more like distinct sketches. In one episode (Smells), for instance, after returning home after not picking up women, the boys head out and obtain a spray that will make them irresistible—and then head off to the pub to test it out. The apartment, sex shop, and pub scenes could all stand on their own as sketches, and you could remove any one of those and still have a pretty funny episode (which would still make sense plot-wise).

There’s still a lot of violent slapstick, toilet humour, and two people who hate each other yet couldn’t function without the other. Edmondson and Mayall were inspired to write the show after appearing in a production of Waiting for Godot, and there is a certain bleakness to the characters’ lives. However, instead of lives of quiet desperation, these guys live lives of loud desperation. Definitely a highlight of 1990’s British comedy just as The Young Ones was in the 1980’s.

I haven’t seen the Bottom movie, Guest House Paradiso, which followed the TV series in 1999, but it’s definitely on my list, as are the taped performances from the 5 tours. Next time I’m in England I’m going to be buying some region 2 DVDs….

The Young Ones

2008-03-14T11:35:00.002-04:00

Ask us who our biggest influences are, and we’ll likely include The Young Ones near the top of the list, along with the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Rush, etc.

We often have to explain who The Young Ones are—the show didn’t run here in Canada until the 1990’s, long after they’d left the air in the U.K., and only on MuchMusic, Canada’s music video channel, at weird hours. The show centred on four college roommates (a revolutionary poet, a punk, a hippie, and a con artist) who, for me, personified the punk aspects of the new wave of British comedy in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

For more information about the show and its place in the history of comedy, check out this Wikipedia article.

I once worked with a real-life anarchist, and he was the one who recommended The Young Ones to me. I bought a VHS tape of the first 3 or 4 episodes, and I loved it. I eventually got all four tapes to complete the collection.

So why The Young Ones?

First, the show is very funny. I still laugh after many repeated viewings. Like all great comedy, it’s not predictable, and the inherent friction between the four main characters drives the show and the comedy. The Young Ones was my first forays into the 80’s new wave of British comedy, so it was as refreshing to me as Monty Python’s Flying Circus was when as a kid I saw the reruns on PBS.

Second, for a TV show, there was a lot of physical comedy. TV relies heavily on the verbal branch of comedy, so I’m always pleased when I see good physical comedy on a TV show (Three’s Company, for instance, is one old show I’ve rediscovered as a great source of slapstick—John Ritter was one of the greats). In its day, the usual grim types criticized The Young Ones for the cartoonish violence, as was Rik Mayall and Ade Edmundson’s earlier work with as the Dangerous Brothers. But the violence is so over the top that a small child can tell that it wasn’t real or to be emulated. Rick embeds a pick ax in Vyvyan’s skull, yet Vyvyan survives. Vyvyan is the most violent, frequently using his trusty cricket bat to restore or destroy order, but he resorts to using frying pans and even a window to punish Neil, the hippie, for being himself. The Young Ones were so physical that there were a lot of master shots and medium shots to capture the action, and very few closeups as you find with most verbal comedy. As a result, the show often feels like a filmed stage play rather than a sitcom.

Third, the structure of the episodes was disjoined and surreal. The A-plot revolved around that week’s adventure with the four main characters, but it the writers weren’t afraid to make the plot somewhat non-linear, such as “Bambi” where the boys conduct a mission to the laundromat, then hop on a train to be on a gameshow. The writers also interrupted frequently with cutaways and brief b-plots. The diversions varied, ranging from live action scenes to the use of puppets (including Vyvyan’s pet hamster Special Patrol Group as well as skating vegetables, a shark, filmmaking flies, and cannibalistic rats). The live action scenes usually segued between scenes of the main plot and had nothing to do with the rest of the show. My favourite is the Narnia parody in “Flood.” Alexei Sayle would also appear, as their landlord Jerzy Balowski or one of Balowski’s relatives, and do a standup bit, sing a song about his Doc Martins (“Oil”), or even become part of the A-plot. The structure reflects how they wrote the scripts: Ben Elton would take the material Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer had written together and incorporate it into the material he’d written, making for a melding of styles, plots, and ideas. This was no American sitcom with a strong A-plot supported by a comic-relief B-plot.

The Young Ones was a big influence on our first video effort, Babysitters. We wrote the script separately—Mullet was two time zones away that summer—so we unknowingly emulated the way the writers worked on the show.

The Young Ones’ spirited anarchy puts it in the same part of town as the Marx Brothers. They attack the status quo with a glee and energy that draws the audience in—you find yourself rooting for them. It’s classic outsider humour—us versus them—and we identify with the outsiders in this case. The four leads are all poor (except maybe Mike who seems to be running some sort of underworld empire at times), and they end the series as homeless bank robbers on the run. They follow the tradition of the Marx Brothers, who frequently played penniless immigrants who conned their way into the halls of the wealthy.

Even when they are shown amongst their fellow students, the Young Ones maintain their outsider status. The party they host in “Interesting” reveals Rick to be awkward in a social situation. Later, Rick is mocked by a bomb-plotting anarchist after he discovers Rick is just a posturing rebel. Vyvyan’s friends are violent punks, the extreme outsiders, yet he admits he’d like to join the police force. Neil’s hippy friends seem the most like him, but in another episode, “Cash,” he becomes a police officer and arrests them at another party. Mike is the only one to not have outside friends shown in the episodes, but he seems to be the most connected of the group (has employees running a roller disco, got Bambi a TV commercial job, and is blackmailing the dean).

The Young Ones has a strong political streak, with frequent references to Margaret Thatcher’s government. Being Canadian, I can easily substitute “Thatcher” for “Mulroney,” and I immediately remember a time when a conservative government polarized the country during the economic and political turmoil as well as the Cold War rumblings of the 1980’s. The show contains the uncertainty and pessimism of the early 80’s quite well.

When The Young Ones first aired in 1982, the top sitcoms here in North America were Family Ties and Cheers, alongside existing shows like MASH, Buffalo Bill, and Webster.
When the second series of The Young Ones ran in 1984, Who’s the Boss, AfterMASH, and Night Court were starting out here. None of these shows were anything like The Young Ones, so it’s little wonder that the show didn’t air here until long after—and on specialty cable channels. Fox apparently made a pilot for an adaptation of the show with only Nigel Planer crossing the Atlantic, but the network decided not to make it a series.

Next time, a rambling look at another Mayall/Edmondson collaboration, Bottom.

Magic Bullet Looks

2008-02-05T13:19:00.000-05:00

I had to learn how to use the screen capture feature in OS X. I’d used it a long time ago in OS 9, and I was cursing tonight as I tried to figure out why I couldn’t paste after pressing Cmd-shift-3. It wasn’t until later that I noticed a bunch of image files on the desktop. Sweet!

Magic Bullet Looks is pretty easy to use. I downloaded the Motion plug-in version, so I don't know how the Final Cut or other versions work compared to this one. I plopped my test clip into the Motion project, opened the library tab to find the Looks filter (not under 3rd party filters, but under Filters/Magic Bullet). I dragged the filter to the clip and it’s ready to work:

The red X is the demo’s reminder that I haven’t paid for this yet, but you get all features enabled in the demo, which is nice--I've always disliked feature-disabled demos.

I clicked on the Inspector tab and pressed the big edit button to open the interface, which opens a separate app named LooksBuilder. This is a really nice interface, easy on the eyes, and clearly designed by people who do this type of work:

By moving the cursor over the Looks tab on the left side, you get 10 categories of different looks (Basic, Black and White Tints, Diffusion, Horror, Music Videos, Popular Film, Popular TV, Special Effects, Stock Emulation, and Tints). To apply a look, you open the category arrow and click on the specific look. Here I’m picking Crime Scene so that my sunny outdoors clip looks like it’s a crime scene in Vegas.

Once applied, you can tweak to your heart’s content, with Lift-Gamma-Gain, Saturation, Crush, Exposure, Color Contrast, and Shoulder being your tools. I’ve picked Saturation here, and a colour wheel and sliders pops up.

But wait—there’s more! By clicking on the tools at the bottom, you can open the tab on the right side of the screen for more tools I’ve ever seen before. Here is the Matte tab, with 22 tools on it alone. This is where the hardcore tweaking takes place. As I’m not a colour-correctoin or video expert, I’m not going to get into the nuts and bolts here as I’d need too many words and time to stumble through their use. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of things you can do to your video here.

Clicking on OK takes you back to Motion, with all the tweaks you’ve made added to your clip as an easily reversible or deleteable sub-layer.

I spent the longest time trying out the different looks and a little bit of time playing with the tools, but I’m way over my head with this stuff. I’ve got a book on colour correction that I’ll blog about later on, once I get my feet wet with this type of pixel-pushing.

Overall, I’m really impressed with Magic Bullet Looks. It’s easy to use yet provides you with a lot of tools to do some hardcore work. For a no-budget filmmaker like me who is more interested in the writing and acting end of things, this plug-in is certainly an easy way to look good on video.

At some point, after I’ve looked at the other software in my 2008 Roundup, I’ll post some video created with each program as these stills aren’t offering a lot of detail on how the video looks when it’s actually playing….

Characters with Hearts of Gold

2008-01-30T14:37:00.000-05:00

I’ve been playing with Magic Bullet Looks, but I’m still working on the blog entry. My AfterEffects trial ran out before I could get into some serious work with it, so I’ll have to see if I can get a new trial installed to play with it. There’s a lesson for you: never install a trial until you’re positive you can actually get time to play with it!

Meanwhile, here is this week’s (or last week’s) entry.

I’ve been tardy about getting my testing done because I’ve been busy writing scripts. We’re still a few shy of having enough to look at, pick a few, and shoot a select few.

I have the advantage of writing for two main characters that are well established, and we’ve steadily added a pool of recurring characters that live in Miller & Mullet’s world, so I don’t have to look too far to find foes, foils, or friends. I’ve used them in the scripts for the shorts, and Mullet’s used them for the comic book scripts, so we’re working with the same materials, and we’re fleshing out characters that we can continue to develop.

Several of these supporting players date back from the Babysitters script. Two of them, Officer Bob and The Shark, first appeared in Babysitters (played by Teige Reid and Dave Pearce, respectively), and they (the characters) have since appeared in our comic book series, Miller & Mullet in Space, although they don’t resemble Teige or Dave very much. Officer Bob is a corrupt cop or ex-cop, and The Shark is a hustler and conman usually involved in Bob’s schemes. These guys are natural villains in Miller & Mullet’s world. Morally, Miller isn’t much different from these people, but he lacks the ability to pull off a scheme—or at least come up with something that actually works. From a writer’s perspective, it is a lot of fun to have three swindlers locked in a room together, and I expect that we’ll see more of them going forward. Between Babysitters and the two issues of the comic book, these two are our most fleshed-out villains.

Two other characters we’ve repeated are Honey and The Pimp, both of them appearing in Babysitters. Ron Fromstein played The Pimp and Tasha May Currie played Honey. These characters haven’t appeared in the comic books yet, but they play important roles in the lives of Miller in particular.

Honey is the prostitute with a heart of gold, or at least our version of that cliché. If she’s a reluctant prostitute that the cliché requires, we don’t see that part of her character as she’s quite enthusiastic—or at least willing to provide service—when Miller appears (we’ve never shown her with other johns, so that might be the next step if we want to play with the cliché). Honey probably loves Miller, but she doesn’t hesitate to beat him savagely when he rips her off. Yet her feelings for Miller allow him to take advantage of her (before she retaliates). A strange, sadistic relationship, to be sure.

The Pimp, Honey’s “boss,” is a vicious psychopath who hates Miller and carries a corkscrew as his primary weapon. Honey and The Pimp haven’t appeared in the comic books, but I’ve written them into a couple of scripts.

There is no shortage of people we can bring back from any of the movies or comics—these four are the most important recurring characters in the stories we’ve written so far, and I expect that they’ll continue to remain important.

Another character who has never appeared on-screen is Miller & Mullet’s agent, Larry. Larry seems to get them work, albeit birthday parties and other jobs they’d like to leave behind for greener pastures. We’ll have to put Larry directly into a story at some point, although the idea of an unseen recurring character is interesting, too—think of Charlie of Charlie’s Angels.

I’ve written three or four scripts that include a blind person as a character. In Babysitters, we had Humphries, a blind person (played by a rampaging Sandy Jobin-Bevans) who Miller robs to pay Officer Bob and The Shark. In a couple of shorts, I’ve written other blind characters as foils who get caught up in various misadventures courtesy of our heroes. In these cases, the characters are more vulnerable than the average person is, so you save some exposition by not having to explain why they’re trapped in the situation with Miller & Mullet—it’s as obvious as the white cane and dark glasses that they’re using. I’m not taking out any prejudice against blind people, honest: I have a white cane that a blind friend donated to the cause, so we can come up with a blind person with a white cane. If I had access to a wheelchair or one of those clunky hearing aids from the 1950’s, I would certainly create physically challenged and deaf characters.

There are some other characters I’d love to have in our shorts, too. If I could get a police uniform or two, we’d have natural bad guys or foils. Give me a clergyman’s collar or nun’s habit, a firefighter’s bunker suit and I’ll make use of them. The thing about no-budget filmmaking is, of course, you don’t necessarily have the budget to dress the cast as you’d want, so you have to make do with what you can get access to. In Babysitters, we bought a police officer’s blue shirt for one scene, but otherwise we’ve never supplied a costume (my favourite costume is still the bright red marching band jacket that Steve Chamberlain thought his jockey character should wear while he doped a horse). Of course, if we weren’t trying to keep the world around Miller & Mullet realistic, we could adopt more deliberately unrealistic standards for costumes, like kiddie hats and plastic raincoats to portray firefighers, but we’ve chosen a different direction for the shorts.

Next time, I’ll either get on with the evaluations or I’ll write about finding props in the garbage….

It's a RAID

2008-01-16T11:07:00.000-05:00

I’m still playing with the software tests, so here’s an exciting article on hard drives and hard drive maintenance. I spend a few hours each month taking care of the drives, and I believe it’s helped me avoid problems ranging from dropped frames to corrupted files.

Last week, my G5 was equipped with 575 gigabytes of hard drive turf. For an average computer owner, this is a lot of space, but video editing really eats up the bytes. I needed to add more hard drives, so I opted to buy a RAID, which adds an additional 1000 GB (or 1 TB, but I wanted to spell out the 3 zeroes—cheap geek thrills!) of capacity to my Mac.

I have a 1.6 MHz G5, which came with an 80 GB boot drive. Back in 2003, that was a pretty generous boot drive. I took the two 120-GB ATA drives that had been mounted internally in my G4 and put them into Firewire enclosures for 320 GB in total. OS X is not a space hog like that Windoze crap, so less than 4 GB of real estate is occupied by the operating system, leaving well over 300 GB in free space for apps, docs, and media files.

I used my G5 for everything: preproduction, post-production, grocery lists, money management stuff, and games. I kept the media files (clips, audio, graphics, rendering files, etc.) on the external drives, and I put everything else on the boot drive.

But my iTunes library kept growing as I ripped more of my CDs, so I added a 250 GB SATA drive in the empty bay and moved all the docs off the boot drive. I partitioned the SATA drive into an 80-GB partition (for backing up the boot drive) and the rest for docs.

I added Final Cut Studio 1 to the mix, plus a bunch of other apps, and I also added Internet access. The available space on all the drives began to shrink.

I added a couple of apps to help keep things clean by removing temp files, etc., which can clog up space. The first was a freeware program called MacJanitor which runs built-in Unix maintenance programs that normally run overnight, but with people like me who don’t keep computers on constantly, this program helps. I eventually replaced MacJanitor with a bigger app, Onyx, which does everything MacJanitor does plus a whole pile of things, especially cleaning up temp files. For safety, I bought Micromat’s excellent TechTool Pro, which has a suite of tests, diagnostics, and optimization tools.

I used a shareware program, Carbon Copy Cloner, to back up the boot drive about once a month. Since I set up a subscription with Mac.com, I use the Backup app included with the deal, I haven’t used the Cloner, but it’s a great tool.

The DV Shop recommended against defragmenting media drives—they recommended reformatting once the project is done. But with our projects still ongoing, I’ve had some of the clips on the external drives for a few years, so I periodically use Techtool to defrag the hard drives.

Every time I ran software updates, I’d lose more space. Eventually, I had just 9 GB free on the boot drive, which means I was using 89% of the drive. I’ve read in a few places that you shouldn’t exceed 80%, so it was time to change the boot drive. I hadn’t experienced any slowdowns with the nearly full drive, but I didn’t want to have anything go wrong during post-production on the DVD.

So… my first thought was to swap the 2 internal drives, using the larger partition (170 GB) on the 250 GB drive as the new boot drive and the original boot drive for media.

My external drives were filling up, too, with the DVD projects taking up space as we shot them, and I was keeping the olde stuff on there in case we needed it for the DVD as well. Out of the 250 GB or so of media drive real estate, I had about 60 GB left open. This is probably enough space to get through the DVD production next summer.

Then I saw an ad for Carbon Computing, who carries Elephant Storage disk drives and— boom!—another option appeared. With Serial ATA drives coming down in price, the Elephant 1 terabyte RAID (two 500 GB SATA drives in a case) was just $400 CAD. I couldn’t find 1 TB RAIDS as cheap anywhere else.

Weighing the two options, I decided to put the money down and expand the media drives and take care of my current and future hard drive problems with one device. I bought the RAID.

The RAID is not large at all—it’s not much bigger than the 2 cases the ATA drives are mounted in. It has a Firewire 800, a Firewire 400, and a USB 2, and it comes pre-formatted for OS X. The default configuration is as a striped RAID, the drives alternating, but can be reformatted to mirrored status. I opted to keep the striped RAID going—this was going to be my new media capture drive.

There is no instruction manual in the box, or on the drive itself, but there is a downloadable PDF at the Elephant website. The Elephant website is somewhat vague about the company’s particulars, so given that Carbon is the only retailer listed I think it’s probably part of the Carbon Computing company. I have no complaints about the product so far—everything’s assembled, you get USB, Firewire400 and Firewire800 cables, and the powerpack. The case is similar to the Mac tower’s metal case, and the front grill glows blue when it’s on.

Setup was painless. I plugged in the power supply, connected it to my Firewire800 port, and fired up the RAID. It appeared on the desktop without any problem. I turned on the other 2 external drives (one in a Firewire 400 case and the other connected via Firewire 800) and copied both to the RAID as the first test. I didn’t time them, but the Firewire 800 drive transferred files faster than the Firewire 400 did.

Next, I copied the contents of the two internal SATA drives to the RAID. I used Carbon Cloner to copy the boot drive, but I just dragged the other drive to the RAID and it copied. Overall, the internal drives copied much faster than I expected, but as expected the boot drive cloning was the slowest part of the process.

After I’d copied all the drives, I tested random files on the RAID to make sure everything opened and worked normally. I also ran Tech Tool to make sure the RAID was okay, and all the tests came back good.

One quirk, probably a bug from the depths of Firewire 800, is that I can only disconnect the drive to shut it down if the other Firewire 800 drive is also on and connected. Not a major problem, but I have to wait until the G5 shuts down before I can power off the RAID.

Next came the scary part. I deleted the contents of the partitioned drive and reformatted it as a single 250 GB drive. I considered using the install DVDs to create the new OS, but I opted to use Carbon Copy to duplicate the boot drive to preserve my settings. The boot disk now fills 71 gigabytes, so there’s plenty of space for more stuff!

I then went into the OS X Control Panel and picked the 250 GB drive as the startup disk. Then I rebooted while holding my breath, and when it restarted, everything worked fine. I spent quite a while making sure that all the apps worked, the external drives connected properly, and that all the docs opened properly. I ran Tech Tool’s tests a few times to make sure all the drives were working.

Once satisfied, I reformatted the 80 GB boot drive and copied the documents from the RAID over to it.

Next, I reformatted the two external drives to free them up. This wasn’t as stressful as all the contents worked fine on the RAID. I then set up Backup to backup the boot drive to the Firewire 400 drive.

The Firewire 800 drive is now my floater—extra space for post-production on my G5 and to move big files between my G5 and my iBook. I’ll probably backup the iPhoto and iTunes libraries as well.

The speed of the RAID is noticeable. I don’t have the software to time things out (nor do I really care to do so), but Norton whipped through an antivirus scan that would have taken hours, not minutes, on the external drives. And file transfers are faster. Clearly, the SATA interface and the striped drives are much quicker than a single ATA drive with an Oxford 911 enclosure.

Well, that’s all the excitement for this week. I hope to get one of my evaluations posted next week—honest!

Walk Hard: the Review

2008-01-02T13:36:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year! This week, I’m posting a review—the software testing is going slow with all the holiday distractions, but I hope to have enough done to post some results next week.

Mullet and I saw Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story this weekend. It likely won’t stay in the theatres that long as it failed to make the top 10 box office list, which is sad.
The movie itself is a really good parody of the music-related bio-pics that have come out in recent years, particularly the Johnny Cash bio Walk the Line, along with a swipe or two at the Ray Charles bio Ray. Walk Hard also references Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson, as well as portraying The Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper.

I thought about my favourite comedic music-related movie, This is Spinal Tap, afterwards, and I realized that there was something missing. Don’t get me wrong--Walk Hard is funny (the punk song, the Beatles, and the angel-dust freakout being my favourite scenes), but it wasn’t a great comedy like Spinal Tap is.

Webster’s online dictionary defines parody as:

a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule..

It also defines satire as:

1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

The difference, for me, between Spinal Tap and Walk Hard is that Spinal Tap is a satire of the then-dominant heavy metal/hard rock segment of rock music in the 1980’s, and Walk Hard is a parody of musical biographies. Spinal Tap shows a heavy metal band on the brink of extinction, with interal dissent, led by their slighty-smarter manager, through a North American tour in support of an album that few outside the band seem to want to hear. Gigs are cancelled or changed to smaller venues, the set list changes to older material, and the manager eventually leaves in favour of the lead singer’s girlfriend. Only a place on the Japanese charts and a subsequent tour keeps them together in the end. Throughout the movie, the music business is ridiculed by showing a rotating cast of record company personnel, promoters, radio, and retailers spark, mismanage, or barely survive mishap after mishap. The band’s personalities collide frequently, with large egos battered and bruised as they take 2nd place to a puppet show and end up at an Air Force dance. Spinal Tap is not a parody of anything else other than rock documentaries of life on the road, but as a satire it shows no mercy.

Walk Hard, on the other hand, mocks not the subject of the musical bios but the bios themselves. It mocks the plot and characters of Walk the Line most of the time, but breaks it up with parodies of Brian Wilson’s wall-of-sound 60’s burnout, Dylan’s wordplay, the Beatles’ trip to India, and even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. You could argue that Walk Hard holds up human vices and follies to ridicule (Dewey’s drug addictions, multiple wives and children, etc), but when the movie does so it is lifting something from Walk the Line and exaggerating it for comedic effect.

The poster itself parodies The Doors original poster and DVD artwork, but, alas, there is no walk in the desert for Dewey, nor do we get a chance to see him confront the rise and fall of disco, punk (aside from a drug-fuelled romp through his biggest hit), New Wave, hair metal, boy bands, etc., etc. A satire certainly would have done so, but the parody has to follow the path of its target, so we skip from the 70’s to the 90’s via a hilarious transition device that I’m not going to spoil here.

Parodies have returned with a vengeance the last few years (Epic Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie, etc., etc.), but there have been very few satires by comparison. Scream satirized the horror genre, and itself was parodied by Scary Movie. Walk Hard avoids the gag a minute frenzy of those movies (and the earlier parodies like Airplane! and the Naked Gun series). This, however, seemed to confuse some of the audience we were part of—a few walked hard for the exits, actually. Knowing the sources of parody helped, to be sure, but these people were not in the mood to sit and wait for the jokes.

There are some great comedic performances in Walk Hard. John C. Reilly, a great character actor in both dramas and comedies, proves he can carry a movie (and sing). Jenna Fischer is also great in this as the femme slightly-fatale, as is Tim Meadows as Dewey’s longtime drummer. The four men playing the Beatles steal their scene effortlessly, as does Jack White as a knife-packing young Elvis Presley.

Go see movie. It’s better than recent parodies, but it’s not on the level of a Spinal Tap.

Happy Festive Greetings, Everyone

2007-12-26T14:43:00.001-05:00

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

2007-12-17T16:31:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-12-11T11:31:00.000-05:00

…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?

2007-12-04T15:33:00.000-05:00

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.

What’s Going on Today (or, Meanwhile back in 2007)

2007-11-27T14:06:00.000-05:00

Now that I’ve updated what went on in 2001-2002, here’s an update on what we’re doing right now in 2007.

Mullet is slaving away on the issue 2 script. This is taking a lot of his free time, naturally. But he’s way ahead of where we were for issue 1 so there’ll be more time for story editing and polishing. I’ll see the script eventually and give him some feedback as his story editor.

Writing a comic book is a unique craft compared to screenwriting or prose—you have to come up with the usual story elements (plot, character, dialogue, action), but you also work on the layout of panels and pages. Until Mullet started writing our comic book, I had no idea what the roles of the writer, artist, etc were in that format. Like with movies and TV, well-written and well-designed comics make the writing transparent, so I never really thought about it before. I have more respect for the writers now, to be sure.

Meanwhile, back at the video ranch, I’m chasing a bunch of loose ends. This blog takes some of my time, and I’ve used it to find the discipline necessary to get back to writing almost every day (with the goal for every day). I am working on several script ideas, which I hope to have ready for Mullet by December. I have 4 shorts on the go as rough drafts, plus about a dozen interstitial/blackout type ideas that I think we’ll either use on the DVD as transitions and/or as a collection of short bits that we’ll post online.

When I get tired of writing, I’ve been playing around with the Babysitters final cut, and I finally got back to working on the edit of Can that Andrew Currie did for us. I still have to put Stalled together, and I’m working on an idea for opening credits (for the shorts) that will tie into the comic a bit (I sketched out some quick storyboards and then started some tests in Motion to see how I could accomplish what I’d drawn).

I’ve also downloaded the demo for 2 elements of Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Suite. More about that next time, once I’ve had the chance to play with it.

So that’s where we’re at, for the moment.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 7: Afterwords

2007-11-20T10:14:00.000-05:00

When we finished our feature, I asked myself 2 questions: what did I learn from Babysitters? And would I do it again?

I learned a lot, things that I wouldn’t have learned by taking a class. I also didn’t learn things I would have learned in class, but, overall, I think I came out ahead with practical experience in no-budget preproduction, production, and post-production.

I learned 3 key lessons overall. There might be more, but I can’t think of them at the moment.

First: you need a strong script before anything else. Your entire project is at the mercy of the first telling, the script, and any weaknesses in that first telling will multiply in the second telling (production) and the third telling (post-production) unless you are fortunate enough to spot those mistakes and correct them while you can. Otherwise, you run the risk of having a plot or characters that doesn’t engage your audience.

Our shooting script was an unedited first draft because we did no story editing at all. This was a mistake—the script wasn’t ready, despite having some good scenes and gags in it, and the story was overly complicated and self-indulgent. We didn’t kill our babies, those bits we loved that didn’t move the story forward. I don’t think we were alone in making this mistake—I’ve seen other rookies do the same, and even the pros crank out crap based on bad scripts (Phantom Menace is probably the best example I can think of right now. It had some interesting ideas and new characters, but a good story editor could have cleaned up a lot of the babies that should have been killed in that movie—and still pleased both the kiddie audience and the hardcore fans).

We now spend a lot of time working on scripts—most of the time, actually. In the last 12 months, we’ve had 4 shooting days, but we’ve spent 5-6 months working on story ideas and writing scripts and story editing and rewriting and all that other fun stuff.

With Mullet working on the comic books, I’ve become the principle writer on our shorts, so he comes in only when I think the script is ready for him to see. He approaches the scripts as a story editor does, looking at the story first and giving notes on his reactions to it beat by beat. Sometimes, I have something he likes and we shoot it unchanged. Sometimes, I end up rewriting several times before we shoot it. But, most of the time, he doesn’t like it and I throw the script out.

Second, every hour you spend on preproduction will save you a great deal of trouble later on. We managed to shoot 120 pages of script with 2 dozen actors, countless shots and takes, on dozens of locations, on weekends spread out over 8 months. We did this equipped only with a handful of Excel and Word documents. Every hour I spent preparing shot lists, call sheets, and all the other logistical stuff saved us hours on shooting days, and saved us hours again in post-production. On later projects, I’ve started drawing crude storyboards (complete with my stick figures) to make sure I’ve got the visual stuff worked out. I’ve even done rough animatics with scanned storyboards and dubbed audio, just to make sure it works on screen. You can leave things to chance, but the odds are usually against you. It’s not easy putting a story onto film or video, so why make it harder to do so if you’re forcing yourself to make it up as you go along?

Third: learn from your mistakes and practice what you’ve learned in the next project. I’ve made a few shorts to learn specific things that I knew I hadn’t grasped or tried in Babysitters, and I’ve read more books, taken a producing class and a directing class, and watched a lot of videos to further what I knew or didn’t know when we made Babysitters. We’ve completed two shorts and started on 3 others since that time, and the lessons we learned from Babysitters have paid off with these latter efforts. Each time I do a project now, I decide in advance what I want to learn from it, and I’d recommend that approach as I think it forces you to give yourself hands-on experience with a new skill. Why do something if you’re not learning from the experience?

With so many hours of production under our belts, Mullet and I have learned to work quite well as a team. We tend to approach comedy from a feel rather than anything mechanical, so we shoot until it feels right. We usually shoot our rehearsals as takes, but I think we’re much faster at finding the beats now. We’re much better at writing scripts and story-editing them.

Would I do it again? Yes. Without hesitation, I would do it again.

I should clarify that if I could go back to the year 2000, I would. Back then, YouTube didn’t exist and online video wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. Most video projects were more-or-less demo reels on VHS tape, with very few seen outside of filmmakers’ friends, video nights at comedy clubs or, even rarer, on a specialty cable TV channel. The means of getting video out to large numbers of people was there, but it was slow and cumbersome despite whatever format (QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real Player) you used. VHS was king! Streaming video was still in its infancy, and video files were too large even for downloads for the average user. DVD-R burners were just starting to appear on new computers (by the time we finished post in late 2002, however, the DVD-R had begun to replace the VHS tape as the preferred format).

For anyone reading this today, unless you have a time machine, forget trying to make a feature on videotape—stick to shorts until someone pays you to make a feature.

If we were starting out from scratch today, instead of a 74-minute feature, I think we’d make 15-20 shorts (5 minutes and less) instead, committing to a similar schedule. We would make mistakes early on, but the repetition of doing 15 shorts over a long schedule would help us find our feet just as Babysitters did. At the end, we’d have a selection of 15 shorts to choose to put online, on DVD, enter into festivals and competitions, or whatever future channels of opportunity emerge.

That’s the end of my look back to our “boot-camp” project. Thanks for reading, and watch for a taste of Babysitters on the Miller & Mullet DVD.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 6: Revisiting the Past

2007-11-14T16:28:00.000-05:00

We sat down and watched Babysitters recently. I hadn’t watched it since some time in 2003 or 2004, so I’d forgotten a lot of things about it. Come to think of it, I’d forgotten about most of it.

I have to admit I didn’t look forward to seeing it again. I’d been grateful that we’d left it alone for so long. When you’ve advanced ahead in terms of experience and knowledge, it’s not easy to go back and see earlier efforts and not cringe at the mistakes.

So, as we started the movie, I waited for the cringing to begin.

The first part of the movie ran surprisingly well. From the beginning to the opening credits, the pacing helps to hide the flaws. So far, so good….

The first scene after the credits, featuring a well-known ACTRA and SAG performer who donated his time, is quite slow, but after the buildup to the credits, it felt right to slow down before starting to build up again.

The middle of the movie had a sequence that no longer made sense to be in the movie (Mullet had to remind me why it was there, actually: to fit one of the plot points in Gulliver’s Travels), so we decided to cut it out. The rest of the movie builds up a bit and comes to an abrupt end.

So, we’ll be recutting it again, from 74 minutes to something much shorter, likely still over the Academy’s 40-minute limit to qualify as a feature, but under an hour and with most of the leaden pacing removed. There are some things we won’t be able to take out or speed up, so there will still be some loooooong moments in there.

The audio is out of sync in a few places, so I’ll have to spend some time playing with that to fix it. Fortunately, with Final Cut Studio, you get a marvelous audio workstation program, Soundtrack Pro, which allows this type of finessing.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to not hate it as much as I had feared before the screening. For a first project for a couple of guys who hadn’t been near film classes before, it’s not that bad. So, for once, I realized that the effort we had put into it, all the work our cast and crew had put into it, was worth it.

I think we should be able to put the opening sequence on the DVD, just to show the world what you can do with two clown, a baby, and a camcorder.

A lesson from the Newcastle schoolteacher

2007-11-09T14:42:00.000-05:00

Last night, I attended The Police concert here in Toronto. Sting and the boys powered through their greatest hits, most of them rearranged with jazzier melodies and a grungier guitar sound.

Why am I writing about this in a filmmaking blog? It was a great example of showmanship (not a gender-neutral term, but I’ll use it here given that the 3 performers who inspired this entry are all male; if you have a better term, please add a comment).

Webster’s defines the term as follows (bundled in with the showman entry):

showman

Main Entry: show·man
Pronunciation: \shō-mən\
Function: noun
Date: circa 1734
1 : the producer of a play or theatrical show
2 : a notably spectacular, dramatic, or effective performer
— show·man·ship \-ship\ noun

The current Wikipedia entry for “showmanship (performing)” is a lot more fleshed out and I think applicable to my argument:

Showmanship, concerning artistic performing such as in Theatre, is the skill of performing in such a manner that will either appeal to an audience or aid in conveying the performance's essential theme or message.
For instance, the Canadian stage magician Doug Henning used many classic illusions in his magic show. However, he made the old material seem new by both by rejecting the old stylistic clichés of the art such as wearing formal wear, and by presenting them with a childlike exuberance that respected the audience's intelligence.

Within the annals of rock music, The Police story is about 3 guys getting together during the punk movement in London, becoming the biggest New Wave band in the world, and then breaking up from internal pressures, primarily from Sting’s desire to do his own thing, when they reached the top and dominated rock and pop music.

With this backstory, the press coverage of this reunion tour has focussed on the possibility of the band imploding again due to clashes of ego, particularly between front man Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland.

Before the show began, I’m sure this aspect of the band was on most of the audience’s minds as I heard people talk about it as I entered the building and found my seat.

So, on top of re-jigging the hits here and there, there were also moments where the musicians played up the anticipation and expectations. Sting at one point hopped up o the edge of the drum riser (nearly falling into the drums, which cracked both him and Copeland up). With the onstage cameras beaming the closeups to the overhead video screens, Sting playfully nodded at two cymbals at the front of the kit, provoking Copeland to smash them. On the third (comic) beat, Copeland playfully lunged forward to hit Sting, but Sting jumped off the riser. Copeland’s demeanor while drumming is quite serious, so there weren’t any cues from him that he was joking (Sting, meanwhile, wore a smirk).

At the end of their set, as they headed off to await their encore (a funny tradition in rock), Copeland met Sting at the back of the stage with arms wide open. Sting playfully darted past Copeland and offstage.

So… was this a display of subdued tensions or two guys messing with the band’s public image? The trio arrived onstage and left onstage as a group (not scattering different directions like my buddy Bob had seen the Eagles the moment one of their reunion tour shows ended).

It doesn’t really matter, when it comes down to it. Regardless of whether the tensions are real or not, they brought them into the show. So, you can see it cynically, as guys faking their long-past feuds like wrestlers do, or you can see it as people being honest with how they feel about each other (and including it in their act). Or two guys playing with everyone’s head by toying with what the audience is expecting? Or elements of all 3? I don’t think anyone but the band would know for sure.

The Police could never be accused of being cynically-manufactured given that they didn’t produce crap, tripe, or filler—in my opinion, and I own the box set….

So, amidst the songs about loneliness, obsession, pain, suffering, and love, they had 20,000 ticket holders wondering whether they’d be pulling razors on each other backstage or be bundled off into separate rooms by nervous management types.

Again—what the heck does this have to do with filmmaking? I think putting yourself fully and completely into your projects creates honest, exciting, and compelling entertainment. I hope to apply to my own work the lesson that the Newcastle schoolteacher and his mates taught last night.

Rock music has a tradition of onstage feuds, ranging from The Kinks actually throwing punches at each other to Aerosmith using the position of wings in their stage logo to indicate if Stephen and Joe were fighting or getting along that night. I’m glad I witnessed another fabled chapter of that tradition!

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 5: No-Budget Finances

2007-11-06T14:08:00.000-05:00

Compared to most student features, Babysitters was an inexpensive project, but for two people putting up all the money themselves, it wasn’t cheap!

With the purchase of computer software and hardware, video equipment, supplies, props, and the mandatory on-set food and drink, I put around $5500 CAD into it (equivalent of about $3600 US in 2002). Mullet put in $2000 CAD, so our budget for Babysitters for 2001-2002 was $7500 CAD, or about $4900 USD in 2002 dollars (all dollar numbers below are in Canadian funds).

So… what did $7500 buy us besides 74-minutes of hilarity?

Most of that money went into fixed assets like computers, software, extra hard drives, a tripod, shotgun microphone, etc., so the money we spent on Babysitters has saved considerable money on subsequent projects. We can now make a short for the costs of blank tapes, food, beverages, gas, parking, office supplies, and the occasional new prop.

For Babysitters, as a general strategy, we decided to buy inexpensive gear rather than rent better stuff since we had a lot of single shooting days spread out over 9 months. If we’d scheduled the shoot to take place within a single block of time or two, the rental option would have made more sense, so your schedule will dictate your finances a great deal.

We never prepared a budget beforehand, which is something we should have done, in hindsight. If we had done a budget, though, we would have revised it constantly as we came across new expenses that we hadn’t anticipated—every rookie mistake will cost you money.

We averaged about $100 each day for food, beverages, props, gas, parking, and supplies like mini-DV tapes, and that has been our typical budget ever since. We’ve always been able to borrow cameras, so we’ve never had to rent one (about $200/day for a DVX100 or similar camera in Toronto these days).

We also don’t pay our actors or crew anything. This means we don’t use people who belong to the acting guild in Canada, ACTRA, as we can’t afford the minimums that the guild has in place for its members. If we did use guild people without following procedure, we would never be able to sell the project to anyone, so it’s not worth it. ACTRA does have a low-budget program, but they’re still pretty big bucks for anyone at the no-budget level. The guilds in your area will have similar rules and policies that you should know before starting a project.

Any decent film school has an introductory producing class, so I’d recommend taking one before plunging into shooting. If I didn’t live near a dozen film schools like there are in Toronto, the internet has leveled the playing field—you can get just about any book on film and video producing, and there are a lot of good websites, lists, and blogs on the topic as well. I’ll post an entry with some links at some point.

You also want to budget your time. For longer projects, you should anticipate the demands on your time during all phases of production. A good production management book or course can give you an idea of how much time you’ll need to do things (and it will always take longer to do something than you’d think it would…).

We saved money where we could with gear. Instead of buying a microphone boom pole, I modified a $15 window-washing extension arm with a PVC collar and mini-bungee cords to create a shock mount (this guy had a similar idea). We used a $5 desktop mike stand for most of the shoots—putting the mike at the feet of our performers just out of frame with the mike aimed up. I bought 3 sets of halogen work lights for our interiors, using gels to convert them whenever needed to sunlight-balanced light. I built camera stabilizers (to make handheld shots easier) with raw materials from Canadian Tire (after seeing how much a pro stabilizer cost). All of this stuff may look cheap and crappy, but with a little work, it does the same job as the pro gear at a fraction of the cost.

We only had to pay for locations three times, when we shot scenes in rehearsal spaces. We used both our apartments, interior and exterior, for as many distinct locations as we could squeeze out of them, and we used someone’s apartment for another location. We found and used a deserted lot downtown, and we used public property elsewhere. We didn’t build sets, which is another big expense even for something small.

We were fortunate in that we avoided the debt like a lot of filmmakers get into with features, so I don’t have any advice to others on how to manage it. Just avoid it if you can. After all, no-budget means no-money….

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 4: Post-Production

2007-10-30T09:50:00.000-04:00

When we wrapped, of course, we had an enormous job in post-production ahead of us. We had over 30 hours of footage to on a large collection of mini-DV tapes. By then, I’d traded in the Powermac 8600 for a brand-new G4. I captured footage each week, once we’d watched our “rushes,” and I’d logged all the takes, but I did nothing more at that point until we were wrapped.

Mullet and I spent one memorable week sitting in front of that G4 trying to put together our first cut. It was sheer hell, so in a blaze of inspiration, we called it Hell Week.

Our self-taught shooting style came home to roost that week.

Our coverage was thin, so we didn’t have a lot of alternatives or any way of speeding scenes up—there was nothing to cut to. So… things had to stay as they were, usually as master shots. To match shots, we had to let things go on too long, and, to further complicate matters, very few shots matched perfectly (no continuity person to notice these things). We ended up using takes because they matched rather than using the best takes. That was the hell part of Hell Week.

There are a lot of first-time filmmakers who have made and who will make the same mistakes, but the silver lining is that we all learn more about putting moving images together when trying to solve problems than when something together easily (an equally important lesson is, of course, to learn from the mistakes and not repeat them the next time).

Today, we edit as we go, so as soon as we’ve shot something I start to put it together to see what we have. Otherwise, you’re blind to what you’ve missed, and your mistakes will likely not be fixable, unless your cast and locations are still available.

Another frustration appeared during Hell Week, something we couldn’t avoid that late in the project.

We’d started working on the project on with Adobe Premiere 6, which proved to be crash-prone and completely unreliable for anything other than crashing the computer at random moments. We had each scene in a separate project file to keep things manageable, but it didn’t matter how long or short the scene was—the software would crash regularly, and whatever work we’d done since the previous save was gone.

To be fair, we were probably demanding too much of Premiere. If we’d been working on a short, it probably would have worked just fine, but even keeping scenes in their own project files was probably too much at times.

Nonetheless, after the rough cut was done, I switched over to the first version of Final Cut Pro, which proved to be much more stable. I ended up using FCP to recreate the editing of a few scenes, and the rest I exported from Premiere as QuickTime movies. I stuck to the separate project files for each scene, but the crashing stopped and we were able to get through the rest of the process much easier.

Despite the obstacles, we had a 124-minute rough cut assembled by December, 2002. Technical errors, the lack of coverage, and the convoluted plot—for a first, student effort, I don’t think we did that badly. If you were to set a classroom full of first-year film students off and running for 8 months of Saturday shoots and the same budget, I think we would have held our own.

Some of the jokes were really good—a DVD gag played really well in particular, and we were complimented by a few people about specific gags that worked well. Some of it doesn’t work, and the story isn’t clear enough at times to make sense—we more or less walked away from the plot during Act 2.

The ending didn’t work very well, but it was because we made a classic rookie mistake when we reshoot parts of it to try to make it work. We didn’t reshoot the entire scene—just the specific shot needed. The retakes, naturally, didn’t match the original shots.

Lesson learned: any time you have to reshoot something, always look at the footage for the entire scene or sequence, print screen caps, and take them with you to the location. Or you can save yourself headaches by getting yourself a really good continuity person!

The project taught us things that we wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

The team itself was well-balanced. Mullet has a lot more performing experience than I do, so in our live performances he did better than I did because I wasn’t as experienced in improv—and we improvised almost everything on stage. With a script, I could hold up my end of the stick better, and the team was much more balanced, something that has carried on in our following projects and live performances.

We both learned a lot about storytelling with video, and the old saying about telling a story three times (on the page, in the camera, in the editing) is very true.

It was time to show our project to an audience to start working on pacing and structure. We had a Christmas Party at the now-defunct Tim Sims Playhouse for the cast, crew, and some invited guests, and we showed them the 124-minute version with temp audio tracks and placeholders for some of the graphics.

I remember not wanting to be in the room while it was playing. Surprisingly, the cast and crew were still in the room when the lights came up.

It was useful to see it with a real audience, though. Audience reaction showed us where we had to make cuts, and so, a few months later, we had a second cut running 74 minutes.

I moved onto the audio. All of our onscreen dialogue was recorded with a shotgun mike directly into the camcorder so the audio was, in theory, synched with the video, although the software occasionally disagreed and shifted things. Otherwise, all I had to do to was adjust volumes for individual clips until they were consistent.

On a dare from me, Mullet composed a crazy patchwork of a score, ranging from solo piano to a wall of indescribable noise. Dave Pearce recorded some songs that Mullet had written. Scott McClelland, a recording engineer/musician/music teacher, mixed and mastered the songs for us, and I used Final Cut Pro 1 to mix the final audio together. I exported everything as QuickTime movies.

We showed the car theft scene at Second Ciné, a show hosted by Andrew Currie, at the Tim Sims. Each month, AC screened a number of short comedies, having the director and/or performers come up after the short for an interview.

The Second Ciné audience wasn’t moved to violence, and I even got asked about what camera we’d used, likely because of the clarity of the image when we were shooting through the windshield (a Cokin circular polarizer and an ND filter, which made my one-chip Ultura look a lot better than it should have).

AC nominated us for newcomer of the year for the season-ending awards, but we lost out. Still, it was nice to be nominated, and, no, we didn’t prepare a speech in case we won. We would like to thank the academy….

Next time, the financial aspects of a no-budget feature….

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 3: Life in Production

2007-10-23T15:07:00.000-04:00

So, what’s it like shooting a feature movie on a no-budget project? It’s a lot of work, but with enough preparation, you can get an enormous amount of work done.

I was working full-time at my day job, so I did all my prep on weeknights. There were weeks where we didn’t shoot anything (we didn’t shoot on long weekends or for most of December and early January, for example), but for the most part the process took up the bulk of my free time once we’d started production. Every hour and minute spent on preproduction is worth it—don’t scrimp here or you’ll pay for it on shooting day.

Before we started shooting, I created a master shot list during my script breakdown process, plus the schedule itself. Each week, I updated the rough plans for each shooting day to prepare a call sheet to e-mail to our cast and crew, rechecked the shot list, made sure we had the locations lined up, props ready, cast contacted, and all the little details, like “Do I have enough makeup for next week?” or “where can we get a ceramic dog?”

For exteriors, I’d also track weather forecasts. Probability of precipitation [POP] was the key as we would go ahead whenever it was 60% or less. I used several local sources, just to build concensus on how the weather was going to turn out.

I spend my Friday nights pulling together everything together to make the day go as smoothly. I’d gather my bags of gear, charge or change batteries, made sure I had enough mini-DV tapes, went out and bought food and beverages.

I can’t stress the importance of checklists. Any time I forget something important, like camera batteries or blank tapes, it’s always because I haven’t opened up the bags and cross-checked with my checklist. When you’re tired and your head is filled with details of what you’re shooting, you will miss something crucial, like your battery pack or tapes.

For all shoots I’d bring a bag containing the camcorder, battery pack, microphone cables, daylight gels, clothespins, clamps, extra battery for the mike, desktop mike stand, duct tape, clapper, markers, chalk, camcorder shoe accessory adapter, screwdrivers, and pliers. For interiors, I’d add work lights, three 25’ extension cords, spare bulbs, and work gloves. In a padded 3-ring binder, I’d have copies of the script, pens, markers, shot lists, and continuity forms. I’d also have props and a cooler for food.

The day of the shoot, Mullet would get up around 6 a.m. and start getting ready. I’d get up at 7 to check the weather to make sure it was still a go. It was a very dry year and I think we only had one or two rain-outs, and one fog-out where I couldn’t see across the street.

Once we’d decided to go ahead, I’d check the mountain of gear in the living room to make sure I had everyhing. Mullet would arrive in his car by 8:30 or 9 a.m., and we’d head out to pick up the cast and crew.

We were usually at our first location by 9:30 with the first setup started by 10. Once we’d warmed up with some rehearsal takes, we’d get right into it, and our mornings were always productive—our best work was usually during that time. Our afternoons were usually productive, but once it started getting hot in that May-July period, our pace from mid-afternoon onwards wasn’t always as peppy.

On set, I set up the shots and gear with the help of whoever was our crew that day. Meanwhile, Mullet briefed the actors, ran the lines, and brought them in to do the blocking, giving notes as needed.

Since then, we’ve changed the way we work. It’s still collaborative, to be sure, but I direct the actors now, and with using filmmaking buddies on our projects, I don’t have to worry about setting up the gear as much (or even picking where to put the camera).

We’d shoot a couple of rehearsal takes just to find the beats and figure out the blocking. We’d then shoot a few takes as rehearsed, repeating until we got at least 2 good takes on tape (always have a safety take just in case…). If there was time, we’d start improvising a bit, just to see what else we could find. If a scene or shot wasn’t working, we’d rewrite on the spot, sometimes using improv but mostly huddling together with the script and a pen. Most of the time, we shortened things or adapted to take better advantage of the location.

For scheduling, we’d always try to have the cast wrapped by mid-afternoon, leaving any Miller & Mullet-only shots to the end of the day if needed. Most of the cast didn’t have to give us a full day, but those who played the more important characters, like Marcel St. Pierre, generously gave us a full day’s work. Marcel volunteered for 4 shooting days, with one of them being cancelled due to dense fog. One way to pay back for your cast’s generosity is to not waste their time and get them done as early as possible.

We’d normally wrap by 4 o’clock, but sometimes we went to 5, and I think we had a couple of 6 p.m. finishes. We also had a couple 2-hour shoots where we wrapped in time for lunch. Your schedule will vary, mostly depending upon cast and location availability.

Usually that same night, Mullet would come over and we’d watch our rushes. I’d take notes on what we liked or disliked to add to the spreadsheet I’d set up to use during editing. This saved a lot of time when we sat down to edit, and for anything with more than a few shots, I still do it today.

I also made notes on the bad takes, indicating what went wrong, just in case we could use part of a bad take and edit around the mistake with another take. Otherwise, we would have had to watch all the takes for a particular shot when we were editing (we did do that a number of times, of course, but not as frequently as it would have been otherwise).

Our Saturdays were long, usually 12-15 hours by the time we watched the rushes. But we only did we two shooting days back to back once—the last scheduled weekend we shot both the Saturday and Sunday, all exteriors, during the hottest weekend of the year. I don’t even remember what we shot on the last day.

Sunday mornings, I’d log the tapes in Adobe Premiere and let the computer batch capture all the footage to my hard drives. Because I’d made my notes the night before, I didn’t need a lot of time to do the logging, and I’d leave the computer to do the capture itself.

On Monday nights, I’d start the process over again. Even if you're shooting a 5-minute short, you should expect to have a similar workload. Being a producer is the unsung role of no-budget filmmaking--no executive mansions or fat paycheques....

Next time, post-production.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 2: Preproduction

2007-10-16T15:46:00.000-04:00

(Continues from Part 1)
Mullet moved back to Toronto that fall, when the script was nearly done. He lived in my living room for a month, until he found a job and new home, which definitely made it easier to lock the script and start pre-production. I did breakdowns of the script, figuring out shot numbering, preparing shot lists, figuring out what had to be shot on specific days for specific locations and specific actors, and then roughing out a schedule.

While I took care of the scheduling and planning, Mullet did the casting, putting a lot of TheatreSports improvisers in most of the roles. We held an audition for the remaining roles, where we managed to fill all the remaining roles with a cold read of a scene from Taxi Driver. In total, we had two dozen actors in the movie. Unfortunately, some of those actors were members of ACTRA, the screen actor’s union in Canada. By doing so, we’d unknowingly made our project largely unusable for self-distribution. This is a classic rookie mistake—always check out guild and union rules before using their members on your projects!

Crew, of course, is usually harder to find than cast. There are not a lot of people outside of film students interested in working behind the camera for free on someone else’s movies, so you end up working on your buddies’ projects as a trade of labour. Amazingly, we ended up with 3 people who donated a lot of time over the next year, none of them film students: Kasia Czarnota, Jeff Orchard, and Nic Pearson.

Nic brought along his Canon GL-1 and shot our interiors in glorious 3-chip colour, although he did insist on using his camera light, which made white makeup glow hot enough to blow out any detail (another rookie mistake). Nic dropped out during the winter due to cancer and stopped returning my calls (he actually died of cancer the following summer, something we didn’t find out until months after the fact, when I Googled his name and discovered he’d dropped us to direct a Fringe play and, presumably, didn’t have the time left to help us out.). Jeff gave us the most time, starting off as our boom operator, and then doing everything from setup to being our DOP, to driving actors home at the end of the day. Kasia helped out a lot, too, starting with script supervision and eventually becoming our 3rd DOP as she had the most interest in visual arts of any of us. All three gave us a lot of long Saturdays for nothing more than tomato sandwiches and abuse from Mullet (he was a hard-ass on set).

Our first shoot was on a cool autumn day in October of 2001, and we wrapped in July, 2002 on the hottest day in the history of humankind. We shot on Saturdays, using Sundays our rain days (I think we only missed 2 or 3 Saturdays in total). We also chose one of the hottest summers in Toronto history in which to shoot exteriors, giving myself and 2 of our cast sunstroke during our last weekend of shooting, a grueling Saturday-and-Sunday-super-shoot weekend, which took place during a month-long heat wave. I remember we wanted to get a shot of one actor on a hill looking down on the city, but the smog was so thick the cityscape wasn’t visible in the shot….

Next time, how a typical shooting day unfolded.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet 1: Writing the script

2007-10-09T11:22:00.000-04:00

Quick: the summer of 2001—how did you spend your time? How about those dark days after September 11? And that hot summer of 2002? Know what I did? I spent a lot of that time writing and producing and directing and performing in and editing a feature called Babysitters. It was our first video project. And it was a feature-length video project.

Up until that point, Miller & Mullet had busked on Toronto streets and appeared in several variety and cabaret-type shows. I’d purchased a then-state-of-the-art one-chip Canon Ultura in the spring of 2000, and, with my trusty PowerMac 8600, I’d started exploring video editing and graphics. My vacation video, plus a couple of quick things I’d done for friends, led us to think we should immortalize our act on tape.

We made a number of decisions before writing that affected how the project turned out. Instead of doing shorts, we thought we should do a feature. A feature shot with a consumer-grade camcorder... with no budget. This was to be a head-first, eyes-closed jump into the deep end, without water wings or anything.

Why a feature? Everyone starts with shorts, so we thought it best to distinguish ourselves with a big project to start. This was pretty fuzzy-headed thinking, but you have to realize as a live act we’re pretty far out there—anti-comedy is our friend! We’ve never held back from doing anything on stage, so why do the same on video? We weren’t following any standard game plan. Youtube and web video didn’t exist like it does now, so short films were still a genre dominated by demo reels for film students and up-and-comers. Our first project had be a feature, which we naively thought would put us on the map.

First thing we did was figure out how long a feature is. This was a topic of some debate between Mullet and I. Eventually, with research, we determined that we needed something over an hour long to justify the description “feature,” so we aimed for 90-120 minutes just to ensure that we’d have a feature, even if we had to cut a few scenes or sequences. Our script, therefore, had to be around 120 pages at the standard rate of 1 page per minute. I think the script ended up being around 125 pages, and I think during production we shortened it to around 112 pages by not shooting a few things.

Never having written anything as long as a feature film before, we decided to use an older story as our framework for the script. This is a well-worn strategy, and I think it is a useful tool, especially if you’re writing in a genre or type of writing that you haven’t worked in before.
Mullet was keen to use Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, so he came up with some plot points loosely based on that story. Unfortunately, he was familiar with the TV version that skimmed the surface and left out the grosser parts, and I was going by the copy of the book I had, so our concepts of the story differed at the beginning and we had to spend time getting onto the same page. Overall, it was Mullet’s story—I followed the plot he’d created (we’ve continued to work in a similar mode, one of us as the main writer but now the other as sounding board/editor/cheerleader/occasional co-writer).

In hindsight, we were trying to stretch what should have been a simple little story over an overly complicated plot—like a fat guy squeezing into a tight t-shirt. I think this was the main flaw in the project, and it affected the rest of the efforts we put into it. Film and TV work best with simple plots—especially comedies where the fun isn’t in the story but in how it’s told and the characters living that story.

Mullet suddenly got a summer job in Alberta chasing dinosaurs, so we wrote scenes separately, with him in Drumheller and me in Toronto. We divided up the scenes, e-mailing them back and forth and rewriting and editing as we went along. Most of the time, we added stuff to the other guy’s scene, so the page count increased every day. I think we improved each other’s scenes, to a degree. Mullet rewrote Ed’s introductory scene from my brief ripping-off-the-hooker scene to the one we shot, a much longer trying-to-rip-off-hooker scene, for instance. I can’t recall anything I did to his scenes, but I was in a Groucho Marx phase and added a lot of one-liners and rapid fire type dialogue to everything I touched that summer.

The writing process was beneficial—it was the first time we’d collaborated on anything longer than 4-5 pages. We’d written sketches for a never-staged live show, we’d improvised a lot of live appearances, but we’d never written anything longer than a sketch. We learned how to work as a team, what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were, as well as our strengths. There was give and take, back and forth, but this grew as we learned to trust the other’s comedic instincts. Mullet was the chief writer on the script as he’d provided the plot and most of the characters, but the finished script definitely had my fingerprints all over it. The most interesting part of the process was that I ended up writing most of Mullet’s dialogue and scenes, and Mullet ended up writing almost all of my dialogue and scenes.

The weakness of our process was that neither of us stood back and acted as story editor, so by the time we finished, we had a shaggy dog story with a really convoluted plot and all the jokes you could eat. The basic plot was that Miller gets a job babysitting and leaves Mullet in charge. A creepy doll collector decides to steal the baby and Miller & Mullet spend the end of the movie getting the baby back, with the middle devoted to a long and confusing journey spent not finding the baby. To fit the plot over Gulliver’s Travel, we wrote a series of episodes. This allowed us have most of the cast come in for just one day and allowed us some room in dropping stuff if the schedule didn’t permit us to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.

Our influences are pretty obvious now, when I watch the finished project. The Gulliver story is not obvious unless you read the paragraph above where I explained we’d used it as our story’s frame (unless you caught the baby’s name as Lemuel...). In terms of how the structure, it definitely shows the results of us being huge Young Ones fans. I’ll go into our influences in a separate post at some point, but the style of that 1982-84 TV show certainly put a mark on what we were doing in 2001. For dialogue, we invoked the spirit of the Marx Brothers quite frequently. Ed has a definite Groucho streak going, and Mullet occasionally ventures into word confusion that Chico could have done.

Next time, pre-production on a no-budget feature.

September Roundup, Part II

2007-09-26T15:08:00.000-04:00

If you made it through Part I, congratulations! This part will deal with the non-writing stuff I’m doing right now.

I have started work on a few video projects in the last month or so. Andrew Currie delivered the first cut of Can last month through the magic of a portable hard drive. I have AC’s project file as well as all the clips as he had logged and captured them—I haven’t had to go near my camcorder on this project!

AC’s cut was a first cut, so a lot of the clips are not trimmed completely so it plays really, really slow. In the second edit, I’ll trim everything up to pick up the pacing. I’m not changing any of the shots AC chose or the order he placed them, so the only differences will be the trims and any slow-mo and, er, fast-mo shots. There’s also a bit of CGI in it, a gag that AC came up with that wasn’t in the original shooting script. I’m using Motion to create it, and I’ll probably end up doing 10 different variations. I’ve tried 3 different ways so far, without coming up with what I want, but that’s how I’ve always worked with pixel-pushing software like Motion or After Effects: hack away at it until you get something.

After the CGI is done, I’ll start the audio work and get some sound effects in there, adjust the dialogue tracks, and prep it for whoever ends up scoring it. I will likely put in a temp score courtesy of my iTunes library to give us and our future composer an idea of what the music should do in different places. A couple of shots will need “stunt music,” specific genres to help set up or payoff a gag.

So that’s where Can stands this month. Next, the other short we worked on this summer, Bags.

Mullet has to come over and watch the rushes from the 3 shoots we did. We still need to shoot the exteriors for it, but all the interiors are done. Once we watch the footage from the 3 shooting days, I’ll start putting the takes we liked into a first cut.

We’ve always watched “the rushes” together after a shoot, just to pick out what works and what doesn’t work. Of course, sometimes in the editing you can’t use the best take because it either doesn’t match the preceding or following clip, or the best take is way too long/short and kills the pacing, or it steps outside of the story for too long or at the wrong time in the story. Most of the time, though, the best take ends up in the final edit. Sometimes, watching the rushes reveals that the takes we liked on the day aren’t the best takes on tape. We judge the takes by feel as much as by story logic, visual and aural clarity, etc., so it’s all about listening to your gut. The best takes tend to make you laugh out loud, even if you are watching a few hours after doing whatever it is that is making you laugh.

I make my notes, noting takes and timecode (we don’t usually keep continuity records while we’re shooting—we’ve evolved into a looser system where I number the takes on the clapper and don’t bother making notes about no-goods and goods until we watch the rushes.

Afterwards, I rewind the tapes, fire up the Mac, and start logging everything to batch capture. I capture all takes, even the false starts, because you never know when you’ll need something unexpected, and you can quite often find good stuff in bad takes, between takes, etc., especially with closeups. Most of it, of course, will never see the light of day, but during editing it’s invaluable to have all your crap handy, just in case.

Also on the go is a blast from the past, Babysitters. This was our first project, a 74-minute epic that took nearly 2 years to write, shoot, and edit. More about it in a later post….

Finally, I’ve been working on a teaser to post on our website and elsewhere to promote the DVD. I’ve done a couple of versions of one that I think we’ll likely put up when Mullet revamps the website in the New Year. I’ll have to come up with followup videos, of course, so that’ll be an ongoing process until we head to San Diego next July.

And, of course, we need opening credits for the shorts.

I did some quick ‘n’ dirty credits last July to loop on DVD at our table at the 2006 San Diego con, but it was basically Miller & Mullet running around. Someone recently gave us advice about the comic book, suggesting that their lack of knowledge of the characters made the story harder to understand, and I think this applies to the DVD as well.

We’ve been performing the act for 7 years, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that the rest of the world doesn’t know who we are.

So, our opening credits will likely be a Gilligan’s Island type with the lyrics carrying exposition as to what’s going on. Another, more recent model is the House of Cosbys from Channel 101. An animated series of shorts, House of Cosbys has a great, funny theme song that, with animation over it, explains the backstory to the series so that you know instantly what’s going on. We need the same thing, so as I work on these other things on my Mac, I’ll earmark footage that we can use. Of course, we’ll have to come up with a theme song, or at least lyrics that someone can compose a song for, but that’s an entry for another day….

September Roundup, Part 1

2007-09-25T11:04:00.000-04:00

If you’re checking out my rambling diatribes via the link that Andrew Currie graciously put on his blog’s links page, welcome to the drollhouse…. Sorry. Been saving that one for years, and this felt like the right time!

This entry appears near the end of our first month of our shooting hiatus and I am exhausted. No, not really. I’m writing this on a Monday, so it feels worse than it looks.

Mullet is recovering from his dental work and writing issue #2 of the comic book as our artist, Kam Gates, sharpens his pencils and stirs his inks. But what am I doing, dear reader, while we wait for January and our planned return to shooting video?

I’ve been reading that bestselling screenwriting book, Story, by Robert McKee. I’m doing this as part of my plans to write more scripts this autumn by edumacating myself gooder. This book has been the 800-pound gorilla on my bookcase for about a year, and I figured it was time to reduce my yet-to-be-read books by one.

I was expecting something different, based on comments I’d seen about the book, and the author’s portrayal in Adaptation a few years back. I was expecting something that was geared towards cranking out mindless action-based fun as that is what happens to the Kaufman brothers’ script after they attend a McKee seminar. But the book is, happily, a detailed examination of how we tell stories, and how to tell stories. McKee is in the neo-Aristotelian school of writing, and The Poetics is referred to regularly, especially at the beginning.

I’ve never read anything formal about this, but I’ve noticed that screenwriting authors tend to be either pro-Aristotle or anti-Aristotle, with a few straddling the fence or avoiding the argument altogether. I read The Poetics long enough ago to have forgotten anything I read (other than remembering the section on comedy has been lost to the ages), but in examining how I write and have written in the past, I can see that I’m probably closer to the pro philosophy than the anti-Aristotle philosophy. But I’m not a purist or espousing one school of thought over another—I’m a pragmatic writer. Still, any tool in the wrong hands can be dangerous, and like all those books that become the new Hollywood bible (Syd Field, McKee, John Truby and Christopher Vogler being the ones I’m aware of becoming must-read script gurus ), I can see how someone could take this book and either write crap or greenlight it, if their grasp of the concepts laid out in the book isn’t a good grasp or is beyond their reach.

(Side note inspired by that last sentence: Bob Odenkirk has a hilarious short about a pitch meeting online, and he plays both himself and the exec to which he’s pitching. Has bad words, so NSFW.)

My first screenwriting book was Syd Fields’s first book, Screenplay, about his 3-act paradigm, and I also read Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. I haven’t read Vogler’s Writer’s Journey, which is basically a rehash of Campbell, but I have read a few things Truby has posted to the Raindance website. I have an ancient version of Dramatica Pro (running in OS 9), just to round out the screenwriting materials out there.

One of the key anti-Aristotelians I’ve read is Lajos Egri, whose Art of Dramatic Writing was really difficult to find in the 1990’s as it had gone out of print, but I managed to get a 2nd-hand copy, and I’ve seen new editions out there since then. I was urged to read Egri’s book by the 2nd screenwriting book I ever bought, whose title and author have vanished in the mists of my brain—all I remember is a white cover with purple detail—you remember the one, right?

I have a copy of Elements of Screenwriting by Irwin R. Blacker that is composed of photocopied pages of the library’s copy. I couldn’t find a new or used copy at the time, but it’s now back in print. I’ll buy the book itself one of these days….

I’ve read all of these books with an open mind, Story being the only one I had any preconceived notions about—when something becomes a must-read or must-see, I usually wait until the hoopla dies down before checking it out for myself. This approach has saved me from watching reality TV shows, for example. I’ll try to rent Season 1 of The Sopranos to see it for the first time. Yes, I’m that out of date….

Back to my point! I’ve used all of these screenwriting gurus in my efforts to try to become a better writer, and all of these books have the stench of truth about them despite their differences in philosophies and practical approaches to writing screenplays. I don’t think there’s any ultimate truths about writing anything, so each approach has things I can use.

On the creative front, I’m starting to brainstorm ideas for some more scripts. Ideally, I’d like to have a dozen ready in December to give us plenty to either reject or shoot in January. Some of the past scripts will be in that pile, but I’d like to have at least 5-6 new ones worth showing to Mullet (he’s my best critic). Our plan is to shoot some interior stuff this winter, thus taking the pressure off our schedule in the spring. At this point, I have no idea of what I’ll write, but I’ll try to keep most of them indoors. I’m following Robert Rodriguez’s recommended method for writing no-budget scripts: start with a list of things you have. His famous El Mariachi list included a bus and a tortoise. My list will be radically different.

By the way, even if you’re not a fan of Robert Rodriguez’s films, his DVDs always include his famous “10-Minute Film School” segments and are well worth checking out. He has included these on all the DVDs of his I have owned or rented, and the earlier ones are much more applicable (El Mariachi and Desperado, for instance). The Once Upon a Time in Mexico edition shows how he did a couple of shots with CGI in a surprisingly low-tech way (not the CGI itself, but rather how he shot the 2 shots with Salma Hayek and Antonio Bandaras that the CGI was drawn into later on).

And I will probably watch Lloyd Kaufman’s DVD, Make Your Own Damn Movie, again, as I’ve found myself staring at the gaudy yellow spine the last few times I’ve browsed my out-of-order DVD collection. It’s a funny look at no-budget, B-movie filmmaking, made cheap but with tons of interviews and that Troma craziness.

I like to review these low- and no-budget filmmaking sources before I start prepping for shoots, just to shake things up and maybe come up with a brilliant idea that either makes something in front of the camera better or make the behind the camera stuff better. When you’re in a comedy duo that spends a combined 2 hours per day putting on and taking off the makeup, anything that makes the actual shooting easier is much appreciated on the day.

This post is probably long enough to wade through for now. Next post, likely minutes after this one, I’ll go through the list of post-production projects I’ve got on the go.

End of Summer (almost) Roundup

2007-08-29T12:39:00.000-04:00

OK, my biweekly promise has gone the way of Paris Hilton's dignity. I can't even remember what I wrote the last time, so I'm probably going to repeat myself from earlier posts here.

So here's an update on the Miller & Mullet DVD:

1. This week, Andrew Curriecopied the media and project files for Can onto my external hard drive. I now have his rough edit on my Final Cut timeline. The cut turned out really, really well. It's different from how we would have shot it on our own, which makes it a better short, I think. We've been doing a more theatrical style of shooting, and Andrew shot Can in a dynamic, visually interesting way. The cut he gave us is a rough edit, so the cuts have to trimmed for timing and any future sound effects added, but the overall shape is there. The current running time is 4 minutes, and I'd expect at least 30 seconds to come off that, if not more (depending on how much I play with speed).

2. We did all the interiors for Bags, the short formerly known as Dressing Room (finally found the one-derful, er, one word title we wanted). We shot the stage manager scenes with Alastair Forbes, a Theatresports colleague of Mullet's and an outstanding talent. Alastair graciously allowwed us to shoot in his home, so he gets two gold stars on his Miller & Mullet report card. A week later, we shot my interior pickups to replace my laryngitis-plagued original takes. Mullet directed me, and while I was batch-capturing the takes, a few things made me laugh out loud (which is rare becuaase I normally cpature stuff as soon as I get home from shooting, which means I'm watching something that was repeated ad nauseum all day and has lost all the funny by the time I watch the multiple takes of said something repeat itself on my camcorder). I still have to sit down and watch all the takes for the 3 shooting days before I even attempt to start cutting something together. Unlike Can, I'm too close to this to be excited about it --if the magic struck this production, too, I won't know until I play it for another person and see their reactions. The only remaining scene is an exterior with Alastair's character to wrap up the short, which we'll shoot when schedules permit.

3. I've dusted off our "boot camp" movie, Babysitters. We shot this from October 2001 to July 2002 and ended up wtih a 74-minute feature, all shot on a single-chip Canon Ultura. Insane? Yes. We went into it with the goal of putting something together that we could use as a calling card, but it was also meant to be our self-taught film school. We shot almost every Saturday, dragging friends Jeff, Kasia, and Nic out to help us shoot an episodic story about two babysitters (guess who?) who lose the baby they're supposed to care for --will theyy get the baby home? We ran a screening for cast and crew in 2002 and then put it quietly aside (after about a year's worth of post-producction). We plan on doing another screening this fall or in the winter for the cast, crew, and friends jsut so I can get it off my hard drives.

4. I'm re-editing a short we did in 2004, Stalls. Stalls was our first post-Babysitters project, so it has some similarities to it, such as a linear storytelling style and limited coverage. I've been working on it, on and off, since then, but we did have a cut that we submitted to the 2006 San Diego Comic-con film festival in conjunction with our entry into the small press section that year. The short didn't get in, so I've been tinkering iwth it since then. I'll likely turn a very linear story into a non-linear story. comparing Stalls to Babysitters, the first thing I notice now is that the writing improved greatly, as did the performances (especially mine --I was taking a directing class at Ryerson U when we shot it, and the Meisner technique had taken hold of my performing by then). but we cut out all the distractions and shaggy dog plotting that makes Babysitters a mess, and told a very linear story. But with us not shooting a lot of coverage, there's no room to change that linear story very much, so I'm going to break the plot up a bit with flashbacks to make it, hopefully, a less predictable and more lively short.

So that's where we stand --3 shorts in various stages of post, plus an old "feature" awaiting its final tweaking.

The NeutrinoPlex show ended in July, and I had withdrawal symptoms for a couple of Fridays afterwards. I think I benefitted from being part of the show, even if I wasn't actually shooting stuff myself. I was the cheif button pusher, running the intro and outro DVD clips, cueing up mini-DV tapes, and switching each scene. Three teams went out and shot 3 scenes each of a story, rushing the tapes back to the theatre, where we started playing them after about 20 minutes of videos or standup comedians. It was a high-wire act, with late tapes spelling disaster a few times, but otherwise, when the show worked, it was comedic gold with improvised scenes that made the most of what the performers could find and use on the bright lights of the Danforth. Each week, before the show, we'd watch the prior week's archive tape, and it would be the first time I'd really see the show without the distraction of loading and unloading tapes. I learned the value of closeups, making relationships between characters clear and distinct right from the start, and many other lessons that will come to me after I've posted this missive. I would say that the NeutrinoPlex cast and crew, plus the inestimable director, Andrew Currie, provided me with a course in no-budget, on the fly filmmaking that has freed me up from how I've thought out shots and cuts before. All for the price of dinner every other week! If and when they do the show again, I'd be glad to be asked back.

Alastair Forbes, the improviser I plugged earlier, asked us to help him out with some shorts he and Natalie Urquehart were putting together. Mullet's off for a while after some nasty dental work, so I volunteered. I was glad I did --the shoots were all fun and very easy-going. I did minimal prep for the 2 shorts, Spy Bum and Office Wizards, basically figuring out the style of shooting for both. For the Office Wizards short, I emulated the Office (UK version) with handheld camera, riding the zoom lever in and out to give it a documentary feel (I didn't hide behind office plants or anything like that --the emulation was a bit limited by geography). For Spy BUm, I watched the sole 007 tape I own, the George Lazenby Bond, On Her Majesty's HOlidays in the Sun. It had a very conventional '60's style, so I shot Spy Bum entirely on tripod, zooming only when needing to reframe (and practically panning on each zoom as well). Both shorts were a joy to shoot --the cast, all improvisers, worked out the beats with a few rehearsals, and then did the scene beautifully each time. Office Wizards was done from top to bottom each time, and with a master shot, 2-shots, closeups, and inserts, I think they did it about 20 times in total. Yet, with the skills of the improvisers at hand, they made minor variations work each time, and I am glad I'm not editing it as I don't think it will be easy to pick one take over another (aside from a few takes that did go south). With Spy Bum, the short was broken into several scenes, so it's much more of a bits 'n' pieces production. Again, the cast were amazing. My hope is that I managed to get that magic on tape so that Alastair can cut them into something wonderful.

So, now that the summer is rolling into Labour Day (the sound of summer ending in Toronto is the airshow at the CNE), I'm shifting into post. I also ahve to start writing more scripts for our winter shooting plans, which would likely be in January and February (interiors, naturally). And then there's the theme song we need to write and get someone to perform. More about that next time --hopefully in two weeks....

Third Shoot in the Can

2007-07-17T09:41:00.000-04:00

My plan to do this biweekly blog hasn't worked out very well....

On Saturday, we did our third shoot for the DVD project, doing a few scenes with Alastair Forbes, an up-and-coming improviser who graciously let us use his bedroom as the location. We didn't have anyone to crew it for us (it sort of happened last minute), but we were able to get the shots done. Just one shot actually had me, Mullet, and Alastair in it, so it wasn't really difficult to manage; the camera was locked down for all the shots, so we didn't need someone to pan or zoom.

This was the second shoot for Bags (working title was Dressing Room). We'd shot most of the dressing room scenes despite my laryngitis in the first shoot, and this weekend, we did the scenes outside the dressing room. Alastair plays the stage manager (probably the assistant to the assistant of the stage manager) who brings us to the dressing room for the unseen variety show. We changed the script quite a bit during the first shoot, but we stuck to what was written in the revised script to come up with some fun stuff. Alastair and I go nose to nose at one point, and we found the beats pretty quickly. Alastair came up with some gems, both verbal and physical, that built on and improved the scenes as written. We've certainly gotten adept at cutting out the non-essential and for allowing the room to come up with new and better things.

Our shooting style, in terms of film grammar, has really evolved since we worked with Andrew Currie. We always had what I'd call a theatrical preference for wide shots over closeups, probably from our stage origins. A singular failure we've had in our older projects was a lack of closeups, and a really limited film grammar in terms of framing action and composing shots. AC's shooting style opened our eyes to a new (and better) approach, and I think the lessons we learned were enhanced by our long delay between projects and my involvement in NeutrinoPlex this summer. I should explain.

We haven't shot much since we did fragments of a short called Temptation almost 2 years ago. We were trying to shoot 22 minutes (a broadcast half-hour) with 4-5 shorts, but with the rise of YouTube, we scrapped that idea and focused on 2-5 minute shorts, which we've completed shooting for 2 scripts (Can and Bags), with 4-6 more to go. Coming back after a long break makes it easier to incorporate new ideas, I think, so we've changed how we shoot more easily than if we'd continued to shoot.

With Neutrinoplex, I've been exposed to hand-held improvised filmmaking shot with a hard deadline of minutes. The shooters and their teams of improvisers rely upon quick shots, closeups, and existing light sources to do their thing. In less than 30 minutes, they produce 3 scenes on 3 tapes using the area around the Bad Dog as their locations. My role is "technical director," which means I run the tapes for the audience, using 2 camcorders and a portable DVD player linked to a video projector via a Radio Shack switcher --very low-tech, but it's worked (the only glitches are human ones, mine or the shooters). The show starts at 10 p.m., so the shooters use the light from streetlamps, store windows, the marquee from the Music Hall across the street, etc. Even with 3-chip cameras, the images aren't very bright, so closeups are necessary in most situations.

So, the closeup is our friend now.

This coming Saturday, we are doing my half of the dressing room scenes now that I've regained my voice. I'll try to get another post up next week....

Second shoot is in the can!

2007-06-24T12:07:00.001-04:00

I've been really tardy in getting posts up. I wrote one in April after our first shoot but didn't realize I hadn't posted it until I finally logged in to write this post. Yup. Been one of those months....

After having an all-star director the last time, this time we went back to me directing, and my fellow Ryerson film certificate student, Jeff Brown, helping out (basically by setting up the shots, shooting the scenes, and throwing bags at us --more about that later). Jeff is in the middle of post-production for his Production 3 project.

Ryerson's Continuing Ed program is really good. The film certificate is geared towards getting you some core courses (the 3 Production classes being the centrepiece of the program) plus a long list of electives to customize your training. I've taken 2 electives thus far, the introductory producing class (with Jim Murphy, a long-time Canadian film veteran), and Directing Screen Performance (with Robin X, who teaches the Meisner technique over 8 months in a demanding but rewarding class). The program runs in a specific order of prerequisites, so if I were to aim to do Production 3, I'd have to start with Film Technology 1 and then do Production 1. I haven't done so, nor am I thinking about doing so. Making these homemade shorts instead of doing the certificate certainly saves me a lot of money, gives me hands-on experience, but I'm probably missing out on things I should know. I might take another elective, the Film Theory course, or maybe Image Theory over in the Image Arts program. I'm trying to compensate for not having a great visual arts education, which I think affects how I choose and set up shots, as well as in planning and editing.

So, Jeff, fresh from work, came over to my apartment, where he joined Mullet and I as we shot a scene from a short with the working title Dressing Room. I picked up a cold this week, and by the time Saturday noon rolled around, I had full-blown laringytis. So, we dropped my closeups (I'm not skilled or experienced enough to sync looped voicetracks in post) and shot a sequence that takes place in a small space.

On paper, I broke the sequence into 3 scenes, but when we were setting up the shots, Mullet was aggressive in trimming a lot of stuff, and it's really merged into one scene. The space was smaller than what I'd had in mind when I wrote it, so there wasn't the room or, in hindsight, the need for a lot of the gags I'd put in (including Mullet in a Santa suit --it wouldn't have been visible given the narrowness of the doorway and the position we were forced to put the camera in. As I type this, I haven't seen the rushes yet, but I'm sure it'll end up a much tighter and funnier sequence as a result.

Like with Can, what was on paper didn't automatically make it to tape. There was judicious cutting, based on location, lighting, etc. Am I comfortable with this? Sure. We've come up with better stuff than what was written. It's a collaborative process, and the accidents caused by different people, surroundings, and random events of the universe can create magic.

Clown training, like that of improv, prepares you for just about anything to come your way in performance. With creating these projects, I've had the same approach. There are times where this has created crap on tape that seemed better in the room at the time (and those are, guaranteed, the moments where you wish you'd shot alternative footage without the gag to make the editing easier), so there is danger as well as reward in dropping the script and finding something else. So, as we were cutting the 3 scenes down, I kept thinking about how I would cut from one shot to the next. Once I capture the footage and watch the rushes, I'll have a better idea of anything we missed.

Given that the location is in my apartment and we're going to shoot my closeups later on, anything that's missing when viewing the rushes will be quite clear. I'll put together a rough assembly of what we shot just to see how the scene plays.

With other locations, we don't always have the option of revisiting and reshooting, especially if it's a rented space, so in those situations, I need a lot more time to think about changes to the script, just for safety's sake.

I've gotten so far way from my biweekly updates that I'm going to start posting whenever I come up with something to say. Hopefully that's every two weeks....

Finally something in the can!

2007-05-15T21:24:00.000-04:00

We finally have something in the can!

After all these months of moaning about preproduction and rewriting, we actually went out with camcorder and director in hand and shot stuff.

This past Saturday (May 12), Mullet and I were joined by Andrew Currie, esteemed grad of the Second City mainstage company, one half of the Devil's Advocates, blogger extraordinaire, and producer of the late Second Cine video show which played a couple of videos we did. AC is also a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, so he actually knows what he's doing.
This was our first experience with a pro, and it was a good learning experience for us.

We shot it on location on a side street one block north of Queen West, between Spadina and University. Behind the Rivoli, really. In fact, we used their garbage cans for a few shots, much to the dismay of some tired-looking cooks and a bemused manager. The street had these great alleys and laneways, strewn with garbage, brilliant and mundane graffiti, and that big city grunge that can't be craeted by art directors (unless they have a lot of money or use the real thing...).

AC wanted to work chronologically as he was basically editing in camera with minimal coverage. He didn't need the slate as he'll be editing it himself, but I did grey-card the first tape just to make sure I can get colour-balance done later on. I brought along my usual continuity log sheets, but they weren't needed, either. This was one difference between how AC shoots and how we did it, but with a 5-page script, I guess the usual slate/log stuff is probably borderline overkill. We have shot stuff without logging it or slating it, like our Aristocrats DVD contest entry which was 5 takes of the same story with 2 cameras, so I only changed the take number on the slate to mark the start and end of each take.

We did a number of takes for each set up until he got one good one and one safety in the can. This is basically what we do, so this was nothing new --though he did apologize when making us do another take when hunched over or fumbling through garbage (not necessary --we've made ourselves do a lot worse for a lot more takes...). With the lines being minimal and me not having to do more than perform, I was more focussed on the performing than I usually am, so I believe I sucked less than usual.

Mullet was good, too,

The Final 3 Scripts Are Done

2007-04-27T11:25:00.000-04:00

April is coming to a close, and the need to start prepping for our May-June shoots is growing. I’m moving this weekend, so I won’t be able to do much for a few days, likely the first week.
The 3 scripts we’re going with for May-June are called “Can,” “Drugs,” and “Dressing Room.” We both feel these are the strongest scripts out of the 12 I wrote. The other 9 go back into the trunk for now.
“Can” is mostly physical, not much dialog, and should be a lot of fun to make. A very simple story with clear character motivations, and the only prep involved is the acquisition of some props. There are no other actors, only one location, so it’ll be a less-than-one-day shoot, to be sure.
“Drugs” is the most elaborate, and it will require us to find a choreographer, which is new to us. There are 3 other characters, so we’ll have to do some casting, and there are some props to prepare. We’ll likely need to shoot it in June as it’ll need the most prep time to get ready.
“Dressing Room” (a working title given our preference for one-word titles) will likely be shot in my apartment given that most of the action takes place in a dressing room. Some exteriors and other locations are involved, but there is only one role to cast, and I have most of the props in my collection.
“Can” and “Drugs” are pretty much ready, although I never lock a script until after we’ve shot it. We’ve always shot the same way: the first few takes we stick to the script pretty closely (maybe changing a line if it doesn’t work), then do a few alternate, improvised takes just in case we come up with something better. And we do run into the problems that plague all who try to capture moving pictures: problems with locations (unexpected background noise for dialogue scenes, construction, accidents, etc.), actors not showing up (emergencies, miscommunication, etc.), lines that made sense and read well earlier not making sense or reading poorly on shooting day, etc., etc. So we’ve rewritten before and between takes. I try to remember to go back to my computer and lock the original shooting script and do a transcription of the finished short, just to see how much we “drifted” during production and post-production. Again, if something works better than what’s there, there’s no sense in staying with what’s written.
Between packing boxes, I went through all 3 scripts to start working out the directing beats. Where does the scene change? Where does the emotion of the scene change? Where do the characters change their emotions and when do those emotions blow up? Action-Reaction. I’ve ignored all that sage advice from writing teachers, books, etc., and I think I’ve paid for it with mediocre results in the past. Hopefully, by doing my homework, I’ll be much better prepared for the next 3 shorts, and, hopefully, these shorts will turn out much better than previous efforts.
“Dressing Room” is close to being finished, but it needs a new ending. The current one feels flat, but I can’t think of anything new. Mullet’s doing a read of all 3 scripts this week, so maybe he’ll come up with something better. I’ve used a similar ending in "Can," and I’d like to avoid using it twice on the same DVD. Maybe I won’t be able to avoid it –it is a classic comedy ending.
I call it the Laurel & Hardy ending, because, quite often, Ollie would chase Stan into the distance as the camera irised into black, but it’s used in a lot of other comedy, too. It dates back to the chase movies of the Keystone Kops and the earliest silent comedies. It got regular use on Gilligan’s Island and other TV classics I watched as a child. Today, it’s not as prevalent, but if I were to think for a bit, I’m sure I could come up with a few that work that way. It’s much stronger than some other often-used endings. So why am I trying to avoid a classic ending?
In 2 of these 3 scripts, Mullet is chased away by Miller. With Laurel & Hardy, Ollie is the dominant one, and Stan is really passive towards Ollie (most of the time). In our duo, it's not a pure Joey-and-Auguste relationship (or double-Auguste like L&H). Miller is in charge, but he's not completely in charge and Mullet is not afraid to attack him for any transgressions. Mullet is impulsive and aggressive at times, so the odds of him running away from Ed are not good. The odds of Miller running away from Mullet are about the same, and the most common result is hand-to-hand combat rather than running. So, for me as the writer, I don’t want to see Mullet run away from Miller very often –it’s not how the character would respond very often. Maybe in the larger scheme of 6-7 shorts on the DVD, it’ll make sense to have 2 end with the L&H ending, but I’d rather limit it to one.
I end “Dressing Room” with the L&H chase, but I can’t end with a fight –the audience wants to see how the fight ends and what the consequences are. I can’t think of any good comedy fading out on a fight. Maybe if it were set up as a punchline, like it was the 3rd fight as a result of some action (like the old Susquehanna Hat routine from vaudeville), but I haven’t written “Dressing Room” to have a payoff like that one.
Maybe I’ll try it out and see how it works….

Now an update on the producing side of things.
I’ve sent e-mails out to some potential directors, and I’ve heard from one who may be interested in shooting Can for us. If he agrees to do it, we’ll be really lucky to have him help out as he is an accomplished filmmaker and comedian known across Canada.
I haven’t heard from the other two people, but I don’t expect quick responses for e-mails asking for free labour. We have another person as tentative crew who has helped us in the past, but we won’t contact him until we have the schedule figured out.
The rest of our crew will likely come from Craigslist, which can give you a lot of responses but not much action. I may have to post an ad on the bulletin board at Ryerson U in the film dept to get some experienced hands.
Our next step is to find a choreographer for “Drugs.” We’ll try the friends and friends of friends route, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll post an ad on Craigslist. We’ve already got the 2 other roles in “Drugs” tentatively cast through Mullet’s involvement in Theatresports, so we should have enough time to interview choreographers, rehearse with the cast, and then shoot it.
Now, it’s back to the boxes…. God, I hate moving!

2007-04-11T11:12:00.000-04:00

I can’t believe it’s almost been a month since my last rambling missive. How time flies when life steps in with a few crises….

Well, bad news came last week. The letter from the San Diego International Comic-Con arrived at Mullet’s place, telling us not that we are going back to Small Press but that we were on the waiting list.

Our decision, then, was to decide what to do next –to proceed as usual in case the waiting list is shorter than we imagine and we’re invited back, or to assume that we’re not going back this year? We’re proceeding both ways, actually, after consulting with our comic book artist, Kam and looking at our options for both the DVD and the comic.

What are we going to do? We’re going to proceed with the DVD and with issue #2 of the comic book, keeping the same deadlines, just in case. But we are altering our plan for the DVD slightly, too, given that we have, potentially, a year to prepare them.

Instead of 4-5 shorts as originally planned, I’m going ahead with just 3 for May-June production. This means just 3 Saturdays of shooting (Sundays being the rain dates), so it’s not a large commitment that will require a lot of commitment from cast and crew, interfere with Mullet’s work on the comic, and avoid shooting on those hot days in June and July. I’ll also have enough time for post in case we do end up going to San Diego. In the fall, after it cools down enough to run around in makeup and polyester costumes, we’ll shoot 3 more shorts, giving us the winter for any missing interior shots, post-production, and DVD production.

So, if we go to San Diego for 2007, we’ll have a DVD with 3 new shorts, plus a 2003 short called Stalls, and then, in 2008, a second version of the DVD with the next 3 shorts added to the existing disk. Plus, we’ll have a second version of both DVDs, with the electronic press kit stuff for the industry types we hope to meet.

If we don’t go to San Diego in 2007, there won’t be a DVD until this time in 2008, but it’ll be packed with 6 new shorts, Stalled, and whatever other goodies I can dig out of the archives (that aren’t too painful to include), plus the EPK version.

We’d also put low-res versions of the shorts on our website and sell the current version of the DVD there as well.

Meanwhile, I haven’t had much time with the screenplays in the last month. A family crisis, impending move to a new apartment, and a busy period at work all contributed to this lack of writing time or energy (I have played a lot of video games and watched a lot of TV, though). This week, I’m planning on revisiting the scripts, to edit them down to a five-minute-or-so running time, fix the usual problems (structure, exposition, better jokes, character arcs, etc., etc.), and hopefully have a fresh batch of second drafts for Mullet to read.

Our routine lately has been for me to give him the scripts and then take his notes (he’s only reading them each time, once just to determine what his first impression is) and re-read them myself. I’ve incorporated most of his suggestions, plus my own ideas, each time –we’ve done this at least once for each script, twice for a few of them.

We’ve already picked the first short to go, called Can (our shorts have one-word working titles because the full name will have “Miller & Mullet in”). of the remaining 11 scripts, there are some leading contenders for the remaining 2 production slots.

I’ve also started to send the emails out to past crew to let them know our plans in case we can get more free labour out of them. I’m hoping to find 2 directors to take over 2 of the shorts, leaving me with just one to direct myself. I like the idea of having a different director for different shorts, just to keep things from becoming too similar.

The one thing that I realize I didn’t appreciate enough until I took a producing class at Ryerson is how much time and energy producing takes for indie productions like ours. Even when you’re writing, performing, directing, or editing, you’re still the producer, and there’s always something to be done. That’s the moral of today’s lesson, I suppose….

Script Deadline Day, Inspiration for Writing

2007-03-16T11:44:00.000-04:00

Blog Mar 16/07

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by”
--Douglas Adams

My self-imposed deadline for having the scripts done, March 15th, has come and gone. Are the scripts ready? Nope. But I have started 4 more since the last blog entry, so I’m still, sort of, on track to get to my goal of 12 scripts by March 15th. I have 11 first-draft scripts done.
Did I slack off? Not much, but with a live appearance, our first 30-minute gig, an impending move, a stubborn chest cold… the scripts fell by the wayside. The gig has renewed our interest in doing live shows again, so after we see how San Diego is going, we’re adding a variety show to the list of things to do.
Meanhwile, with the shorts, I’ve had several sources of inspiration in the last couple of weeks. First, I’ve been rewatching my small collection of Laurel & Hardy shorts. Second, I bought a book, DV Rebel’s Guide, by Stu Maschwitz. Third, I’ve been reviewing my favourite videos online, particularly Channels 101 and 102.
The L&H shorts are great, and it’s been instructive to see how they build a gag, top it, top it again, and then build to the next gag, forwarding the plot as they go. If there’s anything that seems dated by today’s standards, it’s the pacing, but comedies even 10 years ago aren’t as fast as they are now, much less those from the 1930’s.
The DV Rebel’s Guide is designed for the no-budget, “action flick” filmmaker, but most of it applies to any no-budget filmmaker. It’s a solid book, and I realize I need to buy AfterEffects given all the enhancements Maschwitz explains you can do to a DV short with AE –there goes the postproduction budget…. I’ve been stumbling through Apple’s Motion lately, but I do have an ancient copy of AE 3.0 I got to know when I first got into video. That AE 3.0 has followed me from my original Mac, an 8600, through my G4 and now in my trusty G5. Good thing I still have Classic mode and didn’t go for a new Mac yet again.
In any event, DV Rebel’s has inspired a space capsule script called “Space” (I’m maintaining our tradition of keeping to one-word titles, although the eventual title will be Miller & Mullet in Space, should it be one of the lucky scripts put into production, so the one-word working title keeps it easy).
The videos I’ve been watching from the wonderful world of the internet are mostly from Channel 101 and Channel 102. From 101, I rewatched the Cosby shorts, Laser Fart, the ‘Bu, Classroom, Yacht Rock, Fire Guys, the 2 Magic Touched Me series, and Ringwald & Molly, plus the various David Hartman shorts (Magick Haus being my favourite).
From 102, I’ve downloaded Gemberling, Cakey, and Jesus Christ Supercop, among others. Channel 102 has a higher rate of attrition than 101, and the shows are much more uneven from month to month –101 is more consistent with 2-3 really good shows each month. Maybe 101 benefits from the concentration of writing/performing talent in L.A., but I’d think that New York could match them in no-budget video. But, if our shorts turn out as well as they do on either 101 or 102, I’ll be happy.
One problem I’ve run into when trying to write is that I just don’t want to, at some level, write for a character that was developed largely through improv and clown techniques. I’ve never mastered memorizing lines, and I usually have flashbacks to horrid French classes where I struggled to conjugate and translate… by trying to memorize.
So, now armed with self-knowledge and some renewed inspiration, I have blocked out some new plots. Despite being behind schedule, I’m only pushing into time I’d set aside for preproduction, which means rewriting.
The weather’s still too unpredictable (and cold) to shoot outdoors, so we’ll likely end up shooting in late April, May, and June. I’ll need July to do post and put the DVD together, which is okay because shooting in July in Toronto means trying to shoot in the hot muggy weather that plagues Great Lake cities in the summer. Our interiors are easy enough to schedule, and I think I recall thinking we should shoot one in March, but Mullet’s still slaving away on the script for issue 2 of the comic book, so it’s probably best that we don’t go until April.
As of last night, I had 11 scripts, all first drafts. For the next 2 weeks, I’ll be writing, rewriting, and polishing (hopefully turds into diamonds, or something like that).

A brand new blog

2007-03-01T11:11:00.000-05:00

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I've futsed around with a blog at Myspace , but I've decided to chronicle the making of the first Miller & Mullet live-action DVD. Since the internet is full of all sorts of weird and wacky stuff, I thought I'd contribute with my own rantings.
Who am I? I am half of Miller & Mullet, a comedy duo based in Toronto, Canada.
So far, we've shot a 74-minute "boot camp" video, shot a 5-minute short, completed issue 1 of a comic book (with the help of a great artist named Kameron Gates), and took the comic book to the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. Now, we're turning our attention to both issue 2 of the comic book and a self-published live-action DVD, with a return to San Diego (assuming they'll have us back...).

At this point, the project is basically a dozen first-draft scripts, most of which I've abandoned and will not polish into second drafts. In 2005, when I started writing scripts, we were aiming at filling a broadcast half-hour (22 minutes in Canada, I think 20 minutes in the U.S.) with a no-budget pilot for a sketch show starring... Miller & Mullet. The plan was to shoot 3-4 sketches and edit them down into a cohesive show. But before we started shooting, we met industry people in Toronto who told us the half-hour wasn't necessary --just concentrate on 5-minute shorts. People in San Diego told us the same thing, so our 2007 plan is to do a DVD with 4-5 5-minute shorts. The 10-20 page scripts have gone back into the trunk, and now I'm working on making the magic happen on less than 6 pages.

I started brainstorming ideas last August, writing stuff into a notebook I started carrying with me all the time (or my trusty Palm if I'm going where no backpack has gone before). Stories began to appear in my head, and I dutifully put them down on paper where most of them died quick, painless deaths (the cold light of the written word tends to spike the weaker ideas quickly, I think).

Then I got writer's block. Back when I was in college, I wrote for about 2 hours a day, making great leaps forward in my writing. I lost that daily exercise, so now I've had to work hard at getting back to an hour session 2-3 days per week. The goal is to get back to an hour a day, 7 days a week. I'm not there yet....

I've found the writing process liberating and frustrating in equal amounts. You don't have a lot of time to play with, so the diversions we're so fond of doing with the characters have gone by the wayside. There's not a lot of room for other characters, either, so the end result is the stories have to be more direct than they have been in the past. But I find that it takes me 3 pages just to set up the situation, so once I've written out the script in a rough first draft, I go back and trim the beginning down.

In the next week or so, aside from brainstorming new ideas and getting them down on paper, I'm going over the stuff I've already shown Mullet and pickign them apart to make sure I can't do things better. Checking for internal logic, making sure the writing beats are set up properly, trying to find a better setup for gags, trying to find better payoffs for gags --that's how I'll be spending my weeknights, TV be damned.

Our budget for these shorts is pretty low, probably in the $100 (Canadian) range for each production day (1 short per day is our goal), so I can't include exteriors we can't use for free or include too many characters as we'd have to feed them.

For inspiration, I've been watching the shorts I have on tape and DVD at home, like Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, etc. --mostly to see how they economized on the story and character development to fit one or two reels. These were the people and shorts that inspired me to get into comedy. They had a much better budget than we can scrounge up, but when I watch them, I'm paying more attention to how they're telling the story.
I've got a collection of shorts from the late, great Second Cine, a show that Andrew Currie ran at Second City Toronto a few years back. When the show ended, Andrew brought in a big collection of submission tapes which were eagerly grabbed as potential dubbing tapes. I haven't erased any of them, and with the mix of good and bad, I've watched a few to see what I like and don't like. My favourite shorts from Second Cine were those from HotdogBoy.
And there's Channel 101 and 102, which I visit every month to see what the L.A. and NYC videoheads are doing. I've spun 101 alumnus David Hartman's DVD a few times this week, too, just to marvel at his freaky and violent little opuses (opi?) --will I ever have excellent gun flashes like he does? I have saved a lot of favourite 101 and 102 videos to my hard drive just to watch whenever the mood strikes me. Originally, I saved just my favourites, but about a year ago, I started saving all of them, even the rejected pilots. Some I can't sit through, others have that magic to them.
It's good to study the good with the bad. I paid money to see Dude Where's My Car 2 weekends in a row (at the gone but not forgotten Eaton Centre cinemas, which cost all of $5, making the study of bad comedies cheap). I think I learn more from my own mistakes than when I succeed, and other people's mistakes are a great help, too.

We're prepping for a live appearance at the 2007 Ad Astra con here in Toronto (30-minute show to fill time before the Masquerade starts), so I've put the scriptwriting aside this week.
I think I need 4-5 new stories to add to the 7 I've already done first drafts for. Of the scripts I've done so far, "Can" is my favourite and the first one I've shown to anyone other than Mullet. Another script was actually a clone of "Can," so I've discarded it after I realized what I'd done.
So, after the Ad Astra show, it's back to finding new stories to write. Mullet is slaving away on the script for issue 2 of the comic book, so he's my sounding board rather than writing partner for the next few weeks.

It's still too cold and crappy outside to do any exteriors, so I have about a month to work on the scripts before we have to start the more commitment-heavy parts of preproduction: crew, casting, scheduling.

Keep writing,

Ed