Since I got my CineAlta, I always wanted to shoot something that required a lot of CGI, pushing the limits of the 4:4:4 footage. The only problem was the lack of support for almost everything required for such a shoot. No proper green screens, no proper lighting for green screens and more importantly no proper animators. I've seen some stuff that the so called animators have conjured up, but the final product was almost always.......mediocre.
Recently however, I met a free lance animator, Miss Moushumi, who has since changed my views on Bengali animators. She does what she is told and does it well. A real oddity in the local market.
Old friend and director Zonayed (aka the "Z-Man" as a good friend nicknamed him) came up with the idea. Basically, just a smaller version of the Iron Man 2 "JARVIS" interface, kinda borrowed from Spielberg's Minority Report, where RDJ and Tom Cruise respectively end up using a 3D Holographic Interface. Given a multi-camera environment this is kinda easy to do, leaving it all up to the VFX peeps to take care off. But with a single camera, a one woman VFX crew and limited materials, it was gonna be a challenge. Then again, why else wouldn't I undertake such a risk??
As always, it started up with the set. We wanted it simple. A desk and a chair. The props were just lab stuff like petri dishes, beakers and other apparatus I forgot the names of. There was only one actor. Everything else would be animated. When we shot the footage without the CG, it looked like the most ridiculous thing ever and the grips were quick to crack jokes. Even amongst the fun, I had to make sure about the positioning of certain shots and the "interaction" with the "interface". So if the actor was pulling up a screen that was blue, I needed a blue key/fill light on his face, so on and so forth. I also wanted the camera moving on every single axis available, since static shots would just be boring. That meant that tracking would be a big issue since the actor was pulling out holographic screens from thin air. All this meant, a lil bit more hard work for lil ol' me.
In the end though, I was happy with the results. Check it yourself.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Grading the 7D footage
If you've read the previous posts about me raving about the Canon 7D, (and I know you have) then you'll probably enjoy this little short I put together with color graded B-Roll footages from various projects I was busy with during the last few months.
2 different Picture Profiles were used for the short. The streets of Dhaka was shot with Marvel Film's gamma setting, while the "latrine" shoot (ie shots of the blue uniform garbed school children) were done with my own custom gamma settings. Both ended up being pretty good.
The last post I put up had the ungraded screen caps from the school shoot. How do the graded cuts hold up?
Notes on the grade itself. I wanted a saturated, gritty and cool tone. Sorta like Fincher meets saturation land. Some of the shots were graded with a yellow diffusion (I kinda wanted an angelic warm glow) over the street children. The wide shots had some sort of gradient applied to them, like a grad filter added in post, mostly for a stylistic effect and somewhat for a way of taking down blown out highlights.
The shots are all jerky run n' gun, no time for checking focus marks, no time for steady cams. Capture the moment as they come, all improvised. So for all you Michael Mann fans.......cheers.
I do apologize for the low quality. But thats the only way I could get the short to upload on YouTube, without eating into my monthly download/upload cap of 12GB, thanks to my ISP.
2 different Picture Profiles were used for the short. The streets of Dhaka was shot with Marvel Film's gamma setting, while the "latrine" shoot (ie shots of the blue uniform garbed school children) were done with my own custom gamma settings. Both ended up being pretty good.
The last post I put up had the ungraded screen caps from the school shoot. How do the graded cuts hold up?
Notes on the grade itself. I wanted a saturated, gritty and cool tone. Sorta like Fincher meets saturation land. Some of the shots were graded with a yellow diffusion (I kinda wanted an angelic warm glow) over the street children. The wide shots had some sort of gradient applied to them, like a grad filter added in post, mostly for a stylistic effect and somewhat for a way of taking down blown out highlights.
The shots are all jerky run n' gun, no time for checking focus marks, no time for steady cams. Capture the moment as they come, all improvised. So for all you Michael Mann fans.......cheers.
I do apologize for the low quality. But thats the only way I could get the short to upload on YouTube, without eating into my monthly download/upload cap of 12GB, thanks to my ISP.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Shooting Shit (no....literally) with the 7D
Calm down, get your mind out of the gutter, this is Bangladesh. Shooting latrines for NGOs, for Dr Richard Cash is commonplace here. Especially when its free work during a free day (those are hard to come by). Sara Liza Baumann was upto her MPH ways when she decided to shoot some promos about the latrine systems that local NGO BRAC decided to put in public schools across rural areas. Although I was promised a home cooked meal (which I didn't get) for doing this, I decided to do this since I wanted to try out a new picture profile for the 7D and new ingenious idea of using a DIY webcam mic to record interviews.
Firstly, the ingenious idea of the mic. I hate to toot my own horn but I think I'm gonna make a lot of indie HDSLR filmmakers happy and a lot of mic makers angry. I got a Chinese made Logitech copy of a goose-neck webcam mic, about $5, from a local computer store. Then I stripped the entire mic from the base and cut off the wire. I searched my tool shed and found some old Creative Sound Blaster AWE 32 speaker connectors (same as the stereo 1/8" jack as the mic) and attached those to the mic. Thus I ended up with a goose-neck directional stereo mic with a 10m long jack. Attaching it to the camera, perfecto. Clear sound, perfect for interviews. I didn't know my director didn't want the mic to be in the shots, so for future projects I'd hang the mic from a DIY boom pole. I know, I know, I'm awesome and you're welcome.
Next, the new Picture Profile. This one was built for maximum latitude with minimum lighting. The skin tones (mids) were also bumped to give more of a yellowish tone off even in overtly green/blue settings. Since the school where we were shooting did not have electricity, ie lights, we had to shoot with ISO's upto 3200. The results?? Here are some screencaps.
Firstly, the ingenious idea of the mic. I hate to toot my own horn but I think I'm gonna make a lot of indie HDSLR filmmakers happy and a lot of mic makers angry. I got a Chinese made Logitech copy of a goose-neck webcam mic, about $5, from a local computer store. Then I stripped the entire mic from the base and cut off the wire. I searched my tool shed and found some old Creative Sound Blaster AWE 32 speaker connectors (same as the stereo 1/8" jack as the mic) and attached those to the mic. Thus I ended up with a goose-neck directional stereo mic with a 10m long jack. Attaching it to the camera, perfecto. Clear sound, perfect for interviews. I didn't know my director didn't want the mic to be in the shots, so for future projects I'd hang the mic from a DIY boom pole. I know, I know, I'm awesome and you're welcome.
Next, the new Picture Profile. This one was built for maximum latitude with minimum lighting. The skin tones (mids) were also bumped to give more of a yellowish tone off even in overtly green/blue settings. Since the school where we were shooting did not have electricity, ie lights, we had to shoot with ISO's upto 3200. The results?? Here are some screencaps.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Capturing Slow Motion with the 7D
I've had the EOS 7D for a while now, but rarely did I get to play with the DSLRs video. I only shot the World Concern promo (using it mainly as a B cam during interviews and for capturing the city streets of Dhaka) with it, but I was thoroughly impressed by the quality of the images I got.
It made my job easier, since I didn't have to lug the ginormous CineAlta rig around with me, serving as a great "run-n-gun" option. Recently, since I've had some time off, I've been using a custom picture profile setting with the camera that a good friend of mine had cooked up. On closer look, the setting, based on the Canon Neutral setting, provides a slightly altered curve, made to preserve luminance linearity in the 65-75% (skin tone) range. So I get a good latitude (highlights and shadows) and some great skin tones (mids) from the camera. The next thing I got was the new Twixtor plugin so I could use it for the 60fps stuff from both the 7D (720p) and the CineAlta (1080p) modes.
So I decided to try em all out. The 7D @ 720p60, 1/1000 and 1/1250 shutter speed, variable ISOs (ranging 100-320) and recorded some friends of mine playing cricket. Then I took the footage and used the ol method of conforming to 24fps via Cinema Tools from Apple's Final Cut Studio 3. Then used the footage on a 720p Pro Res HQ 23.98fps setting. The final timeline was a PAL 25fps, since I wanted to output the stuff to a DVD for some prospective "clients". The Twixtor plugin, was set to reduce speed a further 50% with the "Motion Weighted Blend" and "Smart Blend" settings on (I found out that this gave the least amount of "blurbs" (some artifacts caused by frame blending). I also tried out Motion's "Optical Flow" frame blending, but clearly, the Twixtor plugin for FCP was a winner.
Here's the final result:
It made my job easier, since I didn't have to lug the ginormous CineAlta rig around with me, serving as a great "run-n-gun" option. Recently, since I've had some time off, I've been using a custom picture profile setting with the camera that a good friend of mine had cooked up. On closer look, the setting, based on the Canon Neutral setting, provides a slightly altered curve, made to preserve luminance linearity in the 65-75% (skin tone) range. So I get a good latitude (highlights and shadows) and some great skin tones (mids) from the camera. The next thing I got was the new Twixtor plugin so I could use it for the 60fps stuff from both the 7D (720p) and the CineAlta (1080p) modes.
So I decided to try em all out. The 7D @ 720p60, 1/1000 and 1/1250 shutter speed, variable ISOs (ranging 100-320) and recorded some friends of mine playing cricket. Then I took the footage and used the ol method of conforming to 24fps via Cinema Tools from Apple's Final Cut Studio 3. Then used the footage on a 720p Pro Res HQ 23.98fps setting. The final timeline was a PAL 25fps, since I wanted to output the stuff to a DVD for some prospective "clients". The Twixtor plugin, was set to reduce speed a further 50% with the "Motion Weighted Blend" and "Smart Blend" settings on (I found out that this gave the least amount of "blurbs" (some artifacts caused by frame blending). I also tried out Motion's "Optical Flow" frame blending, but clearly, the Twixtor plugin for FCP was a winner.
Here's the final result:
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Shot on 35......the real story
For the last few months I've been getting a few requests to shoot commercials on 35mm. I usually answered in the usual jaded manner....NO.
Rather than getting the expected annoyed response from my clients, most of them seemed amused. However, like most things in my life, I finally said yes to an old director friend of mine. After about what seems like an eternity since my last 35mm experience, (where I spent all night before the last day of a shoot fixing the gate/claw of an ARRI 435 ES) I finally decided to work on a project with celluloid.
Its not that I'm against 35mm (well, maybe a little) but I find it overkill, especially when the final product is an interlaced 720x576 image @ 25fps. Then, I started looking into the finer details. Thats when things got interesting.
35mm is in reality the best scam most media personalities have come up with and it just continues to grow. Celluloid is the best in terms of quality, exposure latitudes, etc. However, for a 30 second commercial that is going to air for about a year max on PAL only channels, is it really required? Most directors here will convince clients that the answer is absolutely yes. The client, who has a pocket that rivals with Donald Trump, will oblige since money is really no object for him and the director would go on shooting on 35mm.
Now lets talk about the reasons why and how the directors choose 35mm.
1) The myth here is all about one thing - Only the best work on 35. Drawing examples from Hollywood and Bollywood counterparts, the Bengali hotshots aren't far behind. It's a way of boosting your showreel (and your paycheck) by proclaiming you don't shoot anything but 35. Local DPs aren't any better. They'll proclaim that 35 requires "a lot of skill and talent", which is true is you're lighting a scene from Amelie, but about 90% of the stuff shot here looks umm......lacking. I'm currently editing a commercial shot on 35mm and the lighting is flat, no real contrast.....dare I say, almost a video look.
2) Digital is good, but we don't have the facilities here. This is true. One particular company here owns a Sony EX1 with a lens converter. However when they rent it out, they call it a "CineAlta" (which it is), the camera used to shoot Hollywood blockbusters where the CineAlta cameras are used (which it is not) ie saying its in the same league as the F35 and the F23. So when the clients, who have know idea about anything really, rent this camera they expect images to look exactly like Tron or the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. When they get to the editing stage and see the 8 bit, 4:2:0, 35Mbs XDCAM EX codec in all its glory as opposed to the 4:4:4 Uncompressed 10-bit images, that the big CineAltas churn out, they are appalled. Also, the guy grading the footage to "make it look like film" (which is difficult to do in the first place with a camera having about 8-9 stops of exposure latitude, is made near impossible), is some dude who is really an editor and toys with Apple Color ($1000, bundled with FCP), not having any formal education on color correction. Yet, when you shoot on 35, your footage gets handled in Singapore or Bangkok or Malaysia or India (since Bangladesh has no film transfer stations) and gets graded by a Pandora or a Da Vinci (about a million dollars) by a guy who is well trained in grading. So, you can tell how the graded in Bangladesh "CineAlta" footage will differ from the footage massaged in Singapore. What about shooting a commercial on the EX1 and then taking it abroad to be graded by a pro? Is that possible? Directors here will laugh that option off.
3) The complexities of digital shooting. When you don't have a professional color grader under you, the best option is to shoot your pictures are best as possible so it doesn't need much love in post. I myself tried introducing Dhaka to the glory of 4:4:4 10-bit production. Some companies have bought a few REDs (not the best in digital cams imo). Still, the business of digital cameras fail to flourish. Why? Most DPs here have no ideas what to do with a digital camera. I saw a DP toy with the Picture Profile settings on an EX1 once. It was sad. One DP turned off the 180 degree shutter "to get more light". If you ask the DPs here about what kind of LUTs they'd like, the usual question is "What's a LUT?" So you can throw as many 4s and Ks and bits/bit rates out there, but the guy using your camera will have no idea what to do with em. My production manager keeps telling me that I should rent out my camera as well. The only problem being what happens when a DP shoots something with the wrong LUT activated? He'll probably shoot something 5 stops overexposed and won't even know about it. Scary isnt it?
When shooting 35mm, there are no LUTs, no picture profile settings and no electronic rolling shutters to worry about. See whats in front via the optical viewfinder, take a few readings with your light meter, figure out your f-stop, shoot. The Kodak film stock and the ARRI camera will take care of everything else. Of course, if you expose incorrectly, someone in Singapore will save your ass. But then again, 35mm requires a "a lot of skill and talent", doesn't it?
So when I looked at all these factors and I was asked to shoot on 35, I said no......at first. Then I looked at the positives again. Fatter paycheck (cause using a film cam automatically means I'm skilled and talented), a professional grading suite abroad (cause you can't do a transfer here), which also means I have a tension free-environment (since I have a pro color grader and I'll be shooting whatever I "see" without making LUTs or a picture profile setting that'll match the look the director wants, eliminating hours of pre production work, that can be applied to perfecting my Madden skills) and hopefully, (if I can persuade the director) a free all expenses paid, 3 star hotel room trip to Singapore (cause my client has deep pockets). Should I still say no?
Robert Rodriguez on the matter
Rather than getting the expected annoyed response from my clients, most of them seemed amused. However, like most things in my life, I finally said yes to an old director friend of mine. After about what seems like an eternity since my last 35mm experience, (where I spent all night before the last day of a shoot fixing the gate/claw of an ARRI 435 ES) I finally decided to work on a project with celluloid.
Its not that I'm against 35mm (well, maybe a little) but I find it overkill, especially when the final product is an interlaced 720x576 image @ 25fps. Then, I started looking into the finer details. Thats when things got interesting.
35mm is in reality the best scam most media personalities have come up with and it just continues to grow. Celluloid is the best in terms of quality, exposure latitudes, etc. However, for a 30 second commercial that is going to air for about a year max on PAL only channels, is it really required? Most directors here will convince clients that the answer is absolutely yes. The client, who has a pocket that rivals with Donald Trump, will oblige since money is really no object for him and the director would go on shooting on 35mm.
Now lets talk about the reasons why and how the directors choose 35mm.
1) The myth here is all about one thing - Only the best work on 35. Drawing examples from Hollywood and Bollywood counterparts, the Bengali hotshots aren't far behind. It's a way of boosting your showreel (and your paycheck) by proclaiming you don't shoot anything but 35. Local DPs aren't any better. They'll proclaim that 35 requires "a lot of skill and talent", which is true is you're lighting a scene from Amelie, but about 90% of the stuff shot here looks umm......lacking. I'm currently editing a commercial shot on 35mm and the lighting is flat, no real contrast.....dare I say, almost a video look.
2) Digital is good, but we don't have the facilities here. This is true. One particular company here owns a Sony EX1 with a lens converter. However when they rent it out, they call it a "CineAlta" (which it is), the camera used to shoot Hollywood blockbusters where the CineAlta cameras are used (which it is not) ie saying its in the same league as the F35 and the F23. So when the clients, who have know idea about anything really, rent this camera they expect images to look exactly like Tron or the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. When they get to the editing stage and see the 8 bit, 4:2:0, 35Mbs XDCAM EX codec in all its glory as opposed to the 4:4:4 Uncompressed 10-bit images, that the big CineAltas churn out, they are appalled. Also, the guy grading the footage to "make it look like film" (which is difficult to do in the first place with a camera having about 8-9 stops of exposure latitude, is made near impossible), is some dude who is really an editor and toys with Apple Color ($1000, bundled with FCP), not having any formal education on color correction. Yet, when you shoot on 35, your footage gets handled in Singapore or Bangkok or Malaysia or India (since Bangladesh has no film transfer stations) and gets graded by a Pandora or a Da Vinci (about a million dollars) by a guy who is well trained in grading. So, you can tell how the graded in Bangladesh "CineAlta" footage will differ from the footage massaged in Singapore. What about shooting a commercial on the EX1 and then taking it abroad to be graded by a pro? Is that possible? Directors here will laugh that option off.
3) The complexities of digital shooting. When you don't have a professional color grader under you, the best option is to shoot your pictures are best as possible so it doesn't need much love in post. I myself tried introducing Dhaka to the glory of 4:4:4 10-bit production. Some companies have bought a few REDs (not the best in digital cams imo). Still, the business of digital cameras fail to flourish. Why? Most DPs here have no ideas what to do with a digital camera. I saw a DP toy with the Picture Profile settings on an EX1 once. It was sad. One DP turned off the 180 degree shutter "to get more light". If you ask the DPs here about what kind of LUTs they'd like, the usual question is "What's a LUT?" So you can throw as many 4s and Ks and bits/bit rates out there, but the guy using your camera will have no idea what to do with em. My production manager keeps telling me that I should rent out my camera as well. The only problem being what happens when a DP shoots something with the wrong LUT activated? He'll probably shoot something 5 stops overexposed and won't even know about it. Scary isnt it?
When shooting 35mm, there are no LUTs, no picture profile settings and no electronic rolling shutters to worry about. See whats in front via the optical viewfinder, take a few readings with your light meter, figure out your f-stop, shoot. The Kodak film stock and the ARRI camera will take care of everything else. Of course, if you expose incorrectly, someone in Singapore will save your ass. But then again, 35mm requires a "a lot of skill and talent", doesn't it?
So when I looked at all these factors and I was asked to shoot on 35, I said no......at first. Then I looked at the positives again. Fatter paycheck (cause using a film cam automatically means I'm skilled and talented), a professional grading suite abroad (cause you can't do a transfer here), which also means I have a tension free-environment (since I have a pro color grader and I'll be shooting whatever I "see" without making LUTs or a picture profile setting that'll match the look the director wants, eliminating hours of pre production work, that can be applied to perfecting my Madden skills) and hopefully, (if I can persuade the director) a free all expenses paid, 3 star hotel room trip to Singapore (cause my client has deep pockets). Should I still say no?
Robert Rodriguez on the matter
Michael Bay, who stated his disdain of digital cinematography using a Sony F35 for the new transformers movie
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Pro bono cave dives, concern for the world and a new director
Right, so....I finally thought I'd get a few days off to go chill in Bali and shoot a small doc. Yet, as all good things in life, this too got cut short. I spent less than 40hrs in Kuta Island. Landed, shot, ate a feast, cave dived, got a massage and got back on a plane back to the homeland. Wish I had some pics, but was too busy freakin shooting to do anything else. I did get some snaps with the ol iPhone. Tryin out the Hipstamatic app.....hey, a camera app thats actually cool.
Now moving on to the business side of things. My friend Sara Liza Baumann, director of the now infamous and critically acclaimed short "Botomul" recently decided to try her hand in directing stuff here. Since she kinda got screwed with her last crew, so I tried my best to make her feel more at home during my first project with her, a promo film for World Concern. This is the first time I had a director not only direct, but edit the footage in FCP and become the first director ever to be the 1st AC and pull focus like a champ (which btw is ridiculously difficult, since I was shoulder mounting a full on HD cam with a 50mm prime and moving around taking closeups of stuff......oh, and this was her first time as well).
Working with talented and lively peeps like Baumann is really something that you don't get to experience here much and it finally pumped some new life into what I thought was slowly becoming a monotonous and "regular" job. I can only hope I find other directors who share her enthusiasm.....and on the other hand, I'm hoping she can hold onto that enthusiasm once she's worked with some of the agencies, clients and the like. The director also felt obliged to take some pics of the set, and me. Sadly, I was to busy to take any of hers, but we forgot to cut the roll on the last shot of the day and we ended up of like a second worth of footage with her in it, so here's a pic.
You can follow Sara on her website: www.oldfanfilms.com
Sunday, January 30, 2011
First Directing Gig
So, the new year brought some surprises. Lack of nicotine, new clients and oh yeah.....a gig as a director.
I never thought my first paid would include 10 Justin Beiber fans, a CEO and a news anchor all in a kindergarden class.
Nevertheless, the shoot went on kinda smooth. The script wasn't anywhere close to what would be considered good, but worked out in the end. Unlike the multi-million sets I'm accustomed to, this was absolutely nothing. 4 hours, 12 shots, 5 man team. Job done, period.
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