The Little Things

 Recently made another one day short, "Visitor's Day" and wrote in some scenes I wasn't quite sure how I would work out.  The big one was the prison scene.  Shot in a corner of my garage, I pictured it at a table, with the concrete block wall in the background.  Simple and easy, but I wanted a touch more of "something" to add to the prison feel.  I had hoped for a stock footage shot of a prison exterior to establish the location, but I don't have one in my library and couldn't find any public domain shots that were contemporary enough to work.

Finally, I settled on the idea of filming "through a fence" to five a caged look.  As if bars were offscreen.  On the day, however, exposures and lighting in a garage being what it is, I was having trouble getting the distance and shadows as I wanted them to register on screen.  They just weren't selling on my monitor and I wasn't convinced it would do enough in the finished product.  While setting it up with Actor, Jeffrey James and my wife, Nancy, we came up with the idea of having the gate "slide" open and closed.  We worked out the timing and I would put in a sound effect in post.  Nancy commented that we could use a sound like the one in the opening of "Porridge", a British comedy that takes place in a prison and uses the sound cue in the opening segment.  It was exactly what I had in mind, so I knew we were on the same page.

After a few tries, Jeffrey, Nancy and I got the timing to a point I was VERY happy with.  In post, it was just a matter of finding the right sound.  I didn't have anything marked "prison gate" or "jail cell door", but thanks to Fresh Music Library, I did have "metal work table rolls across floor".  It was just what I needed.  The final effect was exactly what I was hoping for and the picture I had in my head while coming up with the idea of transforming my garage into a prison visitor's room. (I should have put bars on the window, but some things slip by).  A scene coming together, even in a small way, is a big victory for a zero budget short and it often depends on people who roll with the punches and take in changes quickly. Some actors have trouble with this, and that's fine, but then I need them to just trust the process and do as directed.  When they see the end product they see where we were going.  The crew I had that day, however, helped me work out the kinks, which is even more helpful.

In the end, it's a very little thing and something most people won't consciously notice, but in the backs of their minds it's a touch that adds to the idea that this little corner of block wall is a room with bars, and guards, etc.

Finished product below.

Enjoy.

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! 

Hello

I'm trying to expand my blogging and I noticed that a few my friends use blogspot, so I thought I'd give it a try.  My Blog over at FearNet has been kind of random and I'm going to try and keep that one more horror related.  Since my next few projects are sci-fi and only a few cross into horror, I figured my production diaries might need a home of their own.  This is it.

This is where I'll update you guys on what I'm working on now and what I hope to be shooting soon.  The magazines we're putting together and so on.

Of course, being me, I'll probably go off topic a lot, so that "Production Diaries" title may change, but for now, that's what I'll be doing here.

My blog under "Adom" over at FearNet will  still be updated on Wednesdays/Thursdays as regularly as possible.  This Blog, however, will probably be updated pretty erratically, so I suggest subscribing if you can figure out how.  I'll be linking this to the "About Us" page at http://www.hocfocprod.com/, so you can always find it there too.

So, today Nancy helped me shoot the "Premiere" of  our new sub-web series, "The Simplest Things".  I put "Premiere" in quotes, because while this will the first episode of the show a short film many of you have seen, "Alien Doors" is likely to be recut into an episode as well.  It was, after all, the inspiration for the show.  I call it a "sub-web series" because "The Simplest Things" (let's call it TST) will be part of "The Weird World of HFP".  Around every Wednesday we'll be posting a new episode of that.  Sometimes it will be "Cult Goddess Magazine - TV", sometimes it will be and archived episode of  "Jason's Jungle" and when possible it will be a short episode of  TST.

TST follows a stranded Alien as he tries to figure out how things work on our planet.  He'll have run ins with several people as the show develops, but he'll be spending a lot of time in my house baffling a character I'll play.

The episode that will go online next week deals with the hazards of texting and driving.  How does that fit into our format of an Alien fish out of water?  You'll have to watch to find out, but seeing me in the mulletish wig on an alien examining table should be reason enough to watch.

After that the next episode or two of  "Weird World...." will be a CGM-TV interview with Debbie Rochon.

I'm trying to build  up a few episodes ahead of time because I have some 3D conversions in the pipeline, a three weekend shoot of  "File Error" to schedule and the third installment of the "Alien Vengeance" features to finish writing, fund and shoot.  More on that later.

Meanwhile, check out the latest episode of "The Weird World of HFP" here: http://www.blip.tv/file/4649572

Oh, and for a limited time, you can check out the first "Alien Vengeance" free right at the website: http://www.alienvengeance.com/ .  It's important for people to catch up with it because a new web series is coming the middle of this year that will pick up after the first feature, but before the second.

Lots more to come, so subscribe.