I started this journey of independent production before digital had become nearly as accepted as film, especially for feature movies. Even television shows were separated into the categories of "lesser" sitcoms and talk shows that used a 3 camera, shot on video, mixed "live" and tweaked in editing format vs. those that were shot on film and transferred to video for editing, more like a theatrical movie. Usually film was reserved for serious dramas, but some notable sitcoms, such as "Cheers", were shot on celluloid for atmospheric effect.
Especially back then, film was a much more expensive affair than video. It not only cost more as a format, but took longer, was more "light hungry" and didn't allow for live switching from one camera to the next while recording a master tape.
Back in my day!
Even way back when I used to ride my Brontosaurus to college classes I knew that video "was the future". I knew it would eventually rival and likely replace film as the go-to format for production.
What I didn't see coming until about sophomore year was the "digital revolution". Someday, digital editing would make doing movie like F/X super affordable for everyone. The 90s became a golden age of cheesy glowing visuals all over television thanks to devices like the "Video Toaster"
Chroma-key (Blue Screening and Green screening ) were put into the hands of everybody with enough cash for a fast computer or a decent home "switcher". I had a Videonics that I used on my first few films. I wonder what Joel Wynkoop every did with that.
The Early Days of Production.
I shot my first few films when SVHS was still the format of the masses, but finally, just before I produced "The Lunar Pack", I received my first Digital Video camera, a Sony Digital 8, as a Christmas gift from my wife. I was AMAZED at the quality (looking back now that makes me sad) and shot with it immediately, producing two shorts and eventually the Anthology movie, "The Lunar Pack". The first few things were still transferred to SVHS for editing, but finally, for the werewolf anthology, I sprung for a Sony VAIO with a whopping 16GB hard drive (you read that correctly) and did my first digital edit. I recently backed that entire computer up to a thumb drive I bought for about 10 bucks.
I LOVED the "lossless" video editing. Compression was still a thing, but the idea that what I shot would look nearly the same when it got to the final tapes astounded me. (DVD was just coming around. The laptop could burn "VCDs".) We used to lose so much quality during edits because every effect took a "generation" of tape to get and those cost quality.
I LOVED the effects I could apply. My vampires exploding into bright white lights were certainly an improvement over my attempts at making this happen on my previous movies.
And I LOVED the ability to adjust audio levels in post, although I abused this privilege terribly at the time and clearly had no real idea of what I was doing.
What I HATED was the memory consumption. Still do. As memory has gotten cheaper, digital photography and video has gotten more prevalent. Quality has gone up, and so has the amount of memory needed. Everything we do now is digital and there are precious few hard copies of anything. We live in a digital world with monthly subscriptions for "gigs". When was the last time you looked at a "developed" photo?
Gone are the days of video tapes and rummaging through tiny little cassettes to find old masters. Now you have to keep transferring masters to new hard drives or cloud spaces and hope they don't crash or get lost.
Which brings me to my current situation.
Kids Today.
"Jack vs Lanterns" is being composed from over 7200 files shot over the course of about 720 days. (Not nearly that many shoot days, just spread out that long. We probably had three shoot weeks total with principal photography being about two. ) The amount of digital information is massive.
While working on it last night I noticed a lag in my laptop. This has happened before, usually when a scan decides to start while I'm working, but a quick check showed that my operating system hard drive was filling up fast. I had never emptied the thing. So, now I'm sitting here waiting for the 4000 files I'm moving over in order to clear space to finish copying, so that I can delete them and get back to work, hopefully on a quicker machine.
Old guys get nostalgic.
Not seeing the physical copy of stuff I'm about to send into the ether causes me distress. It's silly, I know, but I grew up in a tactile world of film and then video. Neither of these were ever as "sure" or indestructible as my memory makes me imagine. I had entire rolls of film lost to leaving them in closed cases on a window sill in college. I remember cameras used to back up a tape about 2 to 5 seconds every time you "stopped" recording in order to keep a constant signal and so you might lose the end of a scene if you weren't careful. Magnets were terrifying and 800 ISO film was susceptible to airport X-Ray machines no matter what the TSA agents said.
Tape was far from perfect, but you could hold onto it. Capturing footage from tape automatically backed it up. The tape was the original and now you had a digital copy. It was time used to pre-edit and log footage. The process has changed a lot, but with HD and 4K looking as good as they do, having access to DSLR cameras and affordable lens options and being able to do so many visual F/X in my home office, I wouldn't give up the advances for anything. I feel like today's filmmakers are spoiled, but really, they're bogged down with so many options that being able to just tell a simple story and learning how to use camera angles and music to set the mood are getting lost in the shuffle.
It's a brave new world and the people born into it will hardly notice.
Anyway, this was mostly the result of my other computer being held up. I guess I'll catch up on some outdoor time while it finishes.
Especially back then, film was a much more expensive affair than video. It not only cost more as a format, but took longer, was more "light hungry" and didn't allow for live switching from one camera to the next while recording a master tape.
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Snapshot of some old film cameras given to me over the years.
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Even way back when I used to ride my Brontosaurus to college classes I knew that video "was the future". I knew it would eventually rival and likely replace film as the go-to format for production.
What I didn't see coming until about sophomore year was the "digital revolution". Someday, digital editing would make doing movie like F/X super affordable for everyone. The 90s became a golden age of cheesy glowing visuals all over television thanks to devices like the "Video Toaster"
Chroma-key (Blue Screening and Green screening ) were put into the hands of everybody with enough cash for a fast computer or a decent home "switcher". I had a Videonics that I used on my first few films. I wonder what Joel Wynkoop every did with that.
The Early Days of Production.
I shot my first few films when SVHS was still the format of the masses, but finally, just before I produced "The Lunar Pack", I received my first Digital Video camera, a Sony Digital 8, as a Christmas gift from my wife. I was AMAZED at the quality (looking back now that makes me sad) and shot with it immediately, producing two shorts and eventually the Anthology movie, "The Lunar Pack". The first few things were still transferred to SVHS for editing, but finally, for the werewolf anthology, I sprung for a Sony VAIO with a whopping 16GB hard drive (you read that correctly) and did my first digital edit. I recently backed that entire computer up to a thumb drive I bought for about 10 bucks.
I LOVED the "lossless" video editing. Compression was still a thing, but the idea that what I shot would look nearly the same when it got to the final tapes astounded me. (DVD was just coming around. The laptop could burn "VCDs".) We used to lose so much quality during edits because every effect took a "generation" of tape to get and those cost quality.
I LOVED the effects I could apply. My vampires exploding into bright white lights were certainly an improvement over my attempts at making this happen on my previous movies.
And I LOVED the ability to adjust audio levels in post, although I abused this privilege terribly at the time and clearly had no real idea of what I was doing.
What I HATED was the memory consumption. Still do. As memory has gotten cheaper, digital photography and video has gotten more prevalent. Quality has gone up, and so has the amount of memory needed. Everything we do now is digital and there are precious few hard copies of anything. We live in a digital world with monthly subscriptions for "gigs". When was the last time you looked at a "developed" photo?
Gone are the days of video tapes and rummaging through tiny little cassettes to find old masters. Now you have to keep transferring masters to new hard drives or cloud spaces and hope they don't crash or get lost.
Which brings me to my current situation.
Kids Today.
"Jack vs Lanterns" is being composed from over 7200 files shot over the course of about 720 days. (Not nearly that many shoot days, just spread out that long. We probably had three shoot weeks total with principal photography being about two. ) The amount of digital information is massive.
While working on it last night I noticed a lag in my laptop. This has happened before, usually when a scan decides to start while I'm working, but a quick check showed that my operating system hard drive was filling up fast. I had never emptied the thing. So, now I'm sitting here waiting for the 4000 files I'm moving over in order to clear space to finish copying, so that I can delete them and get back to work, hopefully on a quicker machine.
Old guys get nostalgic.
Not seeing the physical copy of stuff I'm about to send into the ether causes me distress. It's silly, I know, but I grew up in a tactile world of film and then video. Neither of these were ever as "sure" or indestructible as my memory makes me imagine. I had entire rolls of film lost to leaving them in closed cases on a window sill in college. I remember cameras used to back up a tape about 2 to 5 seconds every time you "stopped" recording in order to keep a constant signal and so you might lose the end of a scene if you weren't careful. Magnets were terrifying and 800 ISO film was susceptible to airport X-Ray machines no matter what the TSA agents said.
Tape was far from perfect, but you could hold onto it. Capturing footage from tape automatically backed it up. The tape was the original and now you had a digital copy. It was time used to pre-edit and log footage. The process has changed a lot, but with HD and 4K looking as good as they do, having access to DSLR cameras and affordable lens options and being able to do so many visual F/X in my home office, I wouldn't give up the advances for anything. I feel like today's filmmakers are spoiled, but really, they're bogged down with so many options that being able to just tell a simple story and learning how to use camera angles and music to set the mood are getting lost in the shuffle.
It's a brave new world and the people born into it will hardly notice.
Anyway, this was mostly the result of my other computer being held up. I guess I'll catch up on some outdoor time while it finishes.
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