Racing the Season

Last year about this time I wasn't "overselling" my cabin because I was trying to save it as a location for shooting Jack vs Lanterns.  I figured March wasn't really much of a time for us to have visitors anyway, so no loss of revenue by closing it to shoot. Well, much like this year, the weather was unpredictable and we lost a lot of those nights to rain or freezing temperatures anyway, so the shooting didn't get done.

Michelle Prenez Kicking bad guys in my "Blue Cube" for Jack vs Lanterns

Seasonal Work.

This past week I had planned to film out there, but we got a last minute booking.  I'm not so rich that I can turn down a few hundred dollars (like I did last year), so I decided to finally bite the bullet and shoot the remaining the scenes in my blue cube that I use for the Inside HFP episodes.

Having another  job that's basically seasonal causes a bit of a race at the end of winter.  I should only have two days of real work when someone stays.  Before check-in and after.  If there's very little turn around between guests, that drops to one day because cleaning up after one guests also involves checking the place out for the other.

Last weekend was our first guest of "the season", so when I got out there, the place needed some fixing.  A wind storm had destroyed a screen door and so we had to get it put back together with some new parts before the guests were due to arrive.  That guest managed to break a chair.  Fortunately, my next group is small and fine being down a chair because Nancy and I prefer to buy either Made in the USA furniture and/or sturdy used.  (This chair was one that came with the original set which came with the house.)  Newer stuff doesn't seem to be made to the standards we grew up with and buying used at least helps local charities or entrepreneurs and upcycling efforts. Things like this, however, eat into time that in the winter I would have had free for just editing and writing.  Unfortunately, I never seem to be as inspired when there isn't sunshine outside of my window.


The Solution?

I'm really  hoping to find a manager to take over this little unit here (we have one for our place in Florida), but I know from experience that they probably won't tackle small issues "in the moment" like I do and I like to be able to do that. I think it makes for a better guest experience.  It's just interfering with other projects too much at this point.  I spend a lot of time "on call" and I don't book the cabin as often I could if I didn't worry about not being on hand to deal with little issues that may crop up.  It takes a lot Nancy's time too.  At least a good portion of that time we're working together, so while other couples golf or whatever, we fix stuff and shoot movies.

New Projects.

I started the new podcast this week, right after our last guests checked out. You can read about it in the Cult Goddess Magazine blog.  Tina Berg is working on the next episode as I type this. We're sort of in "Pre-Launch" mode with it right now, doing some pilots while I get my feet wet, but it should become a regular thing soon.  I look at it sort of like an expanded version of "Cult Goddess TV" from a few years back.  If you are an independent director, actor, writer, special F/X artist, make-up artist, jack or jill of all trades or any other independent artist and think you'd like to be on the show, contact me with a DM.

If you have a guest you'd like to hear from on BCinemaTalks, comment below and we'll see if we can make it happen.

Last week I also released the movie, X-24, to Amazon. It's a short film, which we shot in one day just after Halloween last  year.  I'll tell you all more about it in another blog.  I need to go shop for chairs now.
Our UK readers can watch it on Amazon Prime in the UK here.

Look for this photo for the blog on the production of "X-24"

Editing When It's Your Second or Third Job

Filmmaking may be your passion.  It may be the most important thing in your life aside from eating and breathing, but if you're getting tips from me, there's a good chance that it's not the thing paying all, or even most, of your bills.  That eating thing you need to do requires  you to have another job, so filmmaking sometimes takes a back seat to (gasp) RESPONSIBILITY.

Well, I'm currently editing a movie that it's taking me a year to finish up the shooting on. Read some other of my blogs and you'll see the myriad of excuses, causes, reasons and whatnot that has gotten me to this point.  But all of this has taught some things about organizing my time, now that it's mostly under my control again, and I'm going to pass these little tricks on to  you.

Know what requires the computer's time, but not yours.

In digital editing there are tasks that require very little of  your time, but a fair amount of the computer's time.  For example, transferring footage from CF or SD cards to  your computer's hard drives. The larger the cards you shoot with, the longer it will take to transfer your footage and back it up to a second source.  This time can be spent doing other things, but  you will want to keep a semi-clear head so that you know you've moved and backed up every shot you may ever want before you format that card.  I miss tapes in this regard because the transferring of footage from a digital tape to a hard drive was an opportunity to trim footage and not capture all of the "garbage".  Sometimes you wouldn't even bother transferring takes that had no value in the movie and no comedic value for outtakes, plus you got to name them during the process.  Also, the tape itself acted as the "back up" unless you planned to erase it to shoot on it again, which I never did.

So, what was the downside?  You couldn't always leave the computer alone while the footage moved over.  Batch captures were a thing, but they didn't always work very well and you lost other benefits, such as unique names for each clip.

I transferred the footage for Jack vs Lanterns long ago, but currently I'm importing files to a project and it's going to need to "conform the audio".   That takes awhile, so I'm writing this blog.

Renders are another good time to step away and get something else done, although shorter scenes may only leave you room to go to the restroom.

Always back up your work, but maybe do it efficiently.
Okay, a hard drive crash can ruin any editors day.  RAID systems help and backing up all of your settings, your computer, etc, etc.  Some of these things take a lot of time and others take a good amount of money.  Two things not every indie movie maker has.  For cloud editors this may seem moot, but I would suggest backing up your cloud based work to a hard drive in your possession, when possible, because any single location can become a problem.

Here's an old trick that won't allow you to salvage every project, but will at least make your day suck less should a drive crash.  At the end of your scene edit or  your day of editing, export all of your final cuts to a different hard drive.  So, here's how this works.  You just edited scenes 23, 27 and 29.  You export them to drop into the larger movie project timeline.  Instead of exporting them to the same drive you're working on, you export them to a different hard drive.  Preferably external.

Now, if the drive you're editing on crashes, you do lose the projects for 23, 27, and 29, but the final cuts  you had are still there, sitting on another drive.  And vice verse.  If you lose the exports,  you can always export them again because the edited projects are safe on a separate hard drive.

Take advantage of the digital copy of your script.

I don't care what software you used to write  your script, it will come in handy during editing.  I used to edit either from memory (for shorts) or from a paper script.  This edit, I'm mostly using my digital copy of a revised version of the shooting script.  For one thing, I have no  desk real estate to give to a binder with 98 pages in it.  I'll still refer to my notes now and then, but I don't have the script next to me all the time.

For another, all this time later and how we shot a bit rushed, it can sometimes be tough to figure out on the face of it which scene the footage I'm about to edit is from.  Sure, I may have shouted out the number and it should be on my slate, but cuts, recuts, rewrites, etc, moves pages and scene number around.  If I can't find a scene by number, with the digital script, nearly any keyword will allow me to find it in a minute or two. (Usually less.)  It also makes it quicker to skip around to all of the scenes shot in one location or on one set. "INT. LAB" was my search term for 3 days of editing.

Use multiple smaller projects.

It can take awhile to load a project with a lot of clips, audio, special F/X layers, etc.  Breaking your movie down into smaller projects makes each one easier to load and easier to manage.

Some will make sense to compile into one project.  For example, all of those Lab scenes were a single project.  It let me import the backgrounds to be keyed in once and I could also reference the lighting and chroma key settings from previous timelines for the next scene very easily.  

Plan breaks.

One of the biggest problems with time managing your passion is knowing when to stop.  Your other job, your spouse, your kids or pets will all need  you to have some energy left for them.  Plan interruptions that will make you stop every few hours, especially if you're tackling a very big edit.

Whether it be dinner, walking the dog, or just some down time before bed, decide before  you start editing about when you'll stop and why.  Set an alarm if you have to in order remind yourself.  Also, being your own boss on this project, know that you can ignore that alarm if you're really in a groove, but try not to abuse that privilege.

Happy editing! 

Stock Footage, Don't Knock it.

I bought some very expensive, at least by standards, stock footage way back when I was working in Digital 8 and miniDV.  Even now I occasionally use some of the more impressive, hard to get, realisitic standard definition clips in my HD productions.  I think of it like the old T.V. shows that used to cut 16mm military footage into a show shot on 35mm filmstock.  The quality isn't the match I'd like, but it's the only way a $15 episode of "The Simplest Things" is going to have a convincing shot of the planet Earth from space.  Using the footage as backgrounds helps a bit too, because you can play with the focus.  A softer focus on something that isn't the focal point of  your scene works pretty well.

Lately though I've been picking up a LOT of HD stock footage from a few sources.  There are companies that give it away for "free" on DVD.  Actually they charge about 3x what shipping costs and make their money by sending you the DVDs, but it's still very affordable and useful stuff.  Mostly I get CG iconic images, particl F/X or light and energy F/X from them.  Can I do a lot of these things myself?  Probably, but to be honest, I'm not really a graphics guy, so even the stuff I can do takes me longer than it should.  If I can save 3 or 4 hours of work and have the machines rendering stuff I'm being paid for rather than some abstract HD graphic I may want down the line and all for less than 10 bucks, it's worth it to me.

I also shoot the heck out of the world around me in HD to gain as much as useful footage as possible.  You've got to be in a public place, try to keep faces and logos out of it and not cause a disturbance, but you'd be amazed at the stuff you can get, especially if you travel.  Wildlife, planes, landscapes, construction equipment at work and weather are all things to have your arsenal.  I carry a small (slightly bigger than pocket) HD camera with me at all times and download a few great clips every month.  The stuff my Dad filmed while we were on our flight lesson has already made it into two features.

This past week I was capturing footage from a company called "Videoblocks".  Short clips and under the agreement you have to "change them significantly" to use them in your project.  Basically, screening people or objects in, editing them to music and using them within a bigger project should cover you. 

I've been planning on doing a "bloody" version of our HFP logo for awhile.  It consisted of shooting syrup blood dripping onto plexi at an angle in front of a white background and keying that into the existing three frame film logo.  Or I thought about pouring fake blood onto a printed version of the logo upisde down and running it backwards to make it look as if it filled with blood.

Between client work, trying to schedule my own projects, shooting the episodes of the online shows and writing, I hadn't gotten around to that for the past 4 months or so.  Then this week I capture a cool new set of flickering film frames as stock footage.  I went through my other clips and realized I had everything I needed to make this work.

The finished product uses almost all stock elements, including library music, which we'll get to in another blog.

I thought this version worked really well, but decided some clients may not want this opening a video of their family pictures or business's last big event.  I also figured shows like "The Simplest Things", which are more family oriented shouldn't open this way, so I made a second version.  You can see that on the main page of my site: http://www.hocfocprod.com/