#162 Say yes

I thought I would give you an update on my busy schedule. In last weeks, last year's show I give you a list of things that I learned last year that were important to me, to my work and my career in digital video.

How busy I currently am is directly related to degree to which I'm engaged with other people. In other words networking. I don't have time to go into great detail, but I try to make the point that you won't get very far in meeting your goals if you don't say yes to people who ask for help, even if means getting little or no money in return.

Also, I want to plug a podcast I started producing - recording and editing, back in late November. The Post Movie Show is a conversation among Boston film critics about movies. I like it, not so much because I want to know about the movies, though they do cover a wide range of films, but because I appreciate their insights into what makes a movie a good movie to watch. This isn't a show about the latest coolest movie - opinions run high and are often hotly debated, but if you interested in listening to informed opinons in humorous doses, I think you'll like it a lot.

#159 New Podcast

I've been busy over the holidays producing a new podcast. It's called the Post-Movie Podcast and it's a conversation between two film reviewers on recent films. Radical right?

I've also have a lot of irons in the fire production-wise and I hope to tell you more about it in upcoming shows. I'm going to be busy for a while.

#126 I Am Intern

I am starting a 3 month internship this week. I'll be a production assistant at a production company in Boston, so there'll be a lot to say about that in the next few months.

The big news is that I finally have enough of a website of the film to put online. Still rough and incomplete, it felt good to put it out there, sort of draw a line in the sand.

You can find it at handmadeinamerida.us, there were no more.com's available. Send me any suggestions, really, I'm not looking for congrats here, I think it's very rough and really only in phase one. Still I would like to know if there are things I can do to make it easier to use, or I've overlooked some content I should be displaying.

It's tricky because it's not just a website, it's a website for a movie, so if it doesn't pique your interest, or satisfy it, it's not working.

There's a trailer you can watch on the Trailer page. If you're really fast it will load slowly. I'm going to be recompressing the file and uploading it to Vimeo, the hosting site I"m using, then updating the link in the next few days.

By the way, if you're curious about that process, let me know, I can spend a show talking about that too.

#125 Stanford Documentary Film Program

In this week's show I talk with Jamie Meltzer, filmmaking instructor at Stanford University. Stanford has a separate film program for documentary filmmaking and Jamie was generous with his time to tell all about it.

Stanford University Documentary Film Program

#121 Ruff Cutz Film Conference

I recently attended a filmmaker's conference that included screenings of independent films. My film was included and while that was gratifying, I found the real value was attending the filmmaker's panels and viewing other people's reactions to my and other films. I picked up a lot of valuable information about ways to navigate the independent filmmaking process and I've included highlights in this show.

I am preparing a number of changes on this site and an upcoming video podcast, as well as completing my film, so, from now on for an indefinite period of time, I'm going to post shows twice a month instead of every week. Once I get a few new projects running I'll return to a weekly show.

Here are the links to people and sites I"ve mentioned in the show.

Ruff Cutz Film Conference

Jim Jermanok - Producer, Writer, Director

Steven Jermanok - Writer

Dale Carnegie - How to make friends and influence people

Michael Corrente - Federal Hill

Ed Sanchez - Blair Witch Project

Michael Phillips - Academy Award winning Producer

Patrick Smith - Animator

#109 How the days run down

A really long, typical, frantic day

Arrive early at school to pick up equipment and I trigger the alarm

Once back at work I quickly set up for the shoot at 1:00, so the shoot in short order, quickly tear it down and capture it before I run off to school to return the equipment

I'm trying to squeeze in a little editing and hand off copies of a rough cut and end up wasting most of my time.

Really, the day is an example of how lack of time leads you into making stupid mistakes that waste more time.

After wrapping up the day I include a few comments about coping with the stress and allowing the film to work itself out in the moments between getting things done.

#108 Editor's Confessional

Countdown to final project delivery. Days 11 & 10.

A lot of hand wringing, but there's hope too!

#107 Roughcut on the run

Day 14 Editing
Day 13 Shooting
Day 12 Driving home through heavy, sticky traffic

I'm still pulling together the entire story of my film, still in rough cut mode. I'm just beginning to set boundaries and eliminating individuals wholesale, because the film isn't long enough to include more than a certain number of faces and voices. I don't know what that number is, but I've already eliminated 1 of 4 key interviews I did with potters. I found that when I introduced each person at the beginning of the film, one individual didn't fit. It was an odd experience that I had never had before and I it hit me like a vague itch as I was assembling the cut. It was completely apparent when I saw it full blown, along with my class, during the screening I reported on a few episodes ago.

It's one of those gut feelings you need to cultivate. As painful as these choices are, I know that hanging on to scenes, footage or characters that don't move the story ahead is like driving full speed ahead into a mud-hole. And nobody wants that.

Wise or not, I chose to give up a night I would otherwise be editing, in order to attend a series of talks at school by professional editors and filmmakers. Jay Rose was one of the highlights, as was Michael Phillips of Avid. The main message was geared towards the younger students, about finding your way into the media business, even if it means being a coffee toting intern. The critical thing to achieve is contacts and develop a set of work references that will lead you to your ultimate goal.

Five speakers, they all said the same thing: Be persistent and persevere.

The next day I used my evening to take some hirez stills at Sawmill Pottery, Dot Burnworth's studio. I have great interview footage of Dot, but I had to leave early the day of the shoot and got very little B-roll, particularly of her work.

One of things I realize I must, must, must do going forward, whenever I finish a shoot, is right away, within 24 hours at the most, review the footage. I didn't and a lot of time passed before I reviewed it. When I did and realized I had little to no B-roll (poor planning and poor execution) and by then it was too late to arrange a 2nd shoot. The best I could do was take digital stills and use them in a pan and zoom effect. I haven't tried this in HD before, so I will have to see how well it works. It better work, because I'm counting on B-roll to hide a lot of jump cuts.

#81 Wk61 Shooting

Lots of episodes this week and not a lot of time to write notes.

In this show I run down the film project status of each person in class. I also managed to get in two days of shooting for my own film and I try to describe the lighting work I did over the weekend for John's film.

#68 Wk49 On Location

This week we spent preparing for our first weekend of shooting.

I've got some comments to pass along about how to work with the talent, especially if you're crew. We've also made our lives more difficult by not having put more time into preproduction. Everything is connected, from Producer to production assistant. Things go all bass ackward if you don't communicate .


We're going to be using a Panasonic HVX200, which is an HD camera that has many benefits over the camera we've been using up to now, the Panasonic DVX100.

The first thing is that the menu controls and switches on the outside are mostly the same, so the learning curve is limited to working with the media. The HVX can record to tape, but only standard definition. To record high definition you record to solid state memory cards, called P2 cards. Here are a few reasons on why HD is a better format:

• Images are 2 to 4 times the size of standard definition
• There is more color in the video
• It captures real slow motion and accelerated motion
• The format is easy to transfer to drive, and easy to edit

Disadvantages include:

• You can't capture to both tape and P2 card at the same time
• There is no archival medium in HD, you wipe the card and reuse it after you transfer it to your drive
• The P2 card is expensive
• The life of a P2 card is unknown
• HD footage takes up 2 to 3 times more disk space

In this episode I take a shot at explaining the difference between HD format and HDV format and frankly I don't think I made anything clear. It's useful to know, but not critical, so I'm going to lay it out here. If you need to know more, do some research on your own, otherwise, skip the next three paragraphs.

HD and HDV are capture formats. They're good formats for compressing data so you can fit as much data as possible on what ever medium they require, HD requires P2 cards, HDV can use MiniDV tapes, same as for standard definition. Both HD and HDV record the same resolution, and for all I've been told, the same 4.2.2 color space. Standard definition video records in 4.1.1 color. What qualifies as high end digital video, approaching film quality, is 4.4.4 color. I don't need to explain how it works, it's enough to understand that the capacity to capture all the available color is limited as you move from film, to HD, to SD. By the way, film is a poor second to the color capture capability of our own eyes.

HDV cameras are less expensive than HD cameras for the reasons already mentioned in the advantage list above, real slow motion, etc. HD is easier to edit immediately after capture compared to HDV due to the different compression formats they each use. HDV captures footage in groups of 15 frames, called GOP - Group Of Pictures. The first frame contains all the picture information inside the frame, then each frame following that contains only those pixels that have changed. Take a picture of a wall with HDV and the first frame contains all the info, each of the following frames have no new information and so have no additional data. That keeps the file size down so it will fit on the the tape. If a person or even a fly moves through the frame every frame that records changed information has to record it, because it's not on the first frame. But only the pixels that changed need to be recorded.

And thats fine until you need to edit the video. Then you find you can't cut inside the GOP sections, they're like a single unit. To get past this problem you need to convert the digital video to an intermediate codec that reconstitutes each frame, completely restoring the data to each frame. This of course makes the files larger, but that's the price you pay for editing this format on a digital nonlinear editor like Avid or Final Cut Pro.

Next week we shoot the bar scene Saturday and Sunday.

# 49 Wk34-5 Intro to Avid

I'm running to keep up again. I spent a lot of time recently on a non-class film project for the Huntington Theatre in Boston Mass. We did a promotional film for a play that is running through next week called the 39 Steps, a comedy based on the Alfred Hitchcock spy thriller. It was a lot work in a short time, but I, along with classmate Laura got it in on time and made the client happy, so it was good all round.

This is the end of the Module on the introduction to Avid, but there's another 3 weeks of Avid that follows where we edit our own film. I'm going to spread my comments about Avid over the next few weeks. This week I'll give you a general overview of the program and talk specifically about the user interface and how important it is to organize your files properly in Avid, as opposed to to Final Cut Pro.

We edited the 39 Steps promo in FCP, but it's really difficult to use one program on a job while you're learning a different one in class. There's a lot of lessons we learned, like how difficult it can be for two people to edit one film, dividing up production tasks and working remotely.

I thought you would be interested in the process of setting up for the shoot, so I included that as well as described the equipment we used and why. Towards the end of the podcast I've included a list of things I would do differently, or pay more attention to if we have a chance to do this again, which I believe we will.

Some of the highlights of the post production process was doing color correction, creating and working with a soundtrack and setting the compression values to optimize file quality for posting on Youtube.

#12 Wk6 - Lighting

I'm way behind so I'm posting this fast and short. This show is less than 5 minutes long.

This week we finished the lighting module. We did an exercise with 3 point lighting on 2 people and another exercise outside using daylight and reflectors.

Saturday and Sunday I shot video of a reception and awards ceremony at Brandeis University for their annual film festival, Sundeis.

Here are some links mentioned in the audio:

Matters of Light and Depth
American Film Institute
Vision of Light
Cinematographer's Style
All That Jazz
Roy Scheider

#10 Wk4 - Special Topic

Documentary A-Z
This is a special mid week episode of the Video StudentGuy podcast. Thursday night we had a special topic presentation by Franco Sacchi, a filmmaker and instructor at CDIA. He presented his documentary, American Eunuch, as an example of how to create a documentary.

The class covered every step of the production process beginning with finding the idea, preproduction, the shoot, post and promotion. Check out IFP.org for help marketing your film.

Franco briefly referred to the Long Tail marketing concept which I try to explain in a nutshell. This was a term popularized by Chris Anderson of Wired and he went on to write a book about it as well. He also has a blog on it. I believe this business model has significant impact on all content producers and will continue to gain mind-share over the next several years.

Everything about the film should be rolled up into a website for promotional purposes. Include budget, proposal and treatment to demonstrate your organizational skills. You should contrast the earlier American Eunuch site to the more current This is Nollywood website to see how he is using the web to create buzz about his movies. Nollywood is a documentary about the growing film industry in Nigeria. That film is currently in post.

Towards the end of the show I present a few of my thoughts about the movie. Keep in mind I only saw a portion of the film. All the same I give it a thumbs up. I close out with some production notes about this podcast.

Chapter Titles

• 00:08 This Week
• 01:25 Franco Sacchi
• 01:50 Costs
• 03:44 Find the story
• 06:31 Preproduction
• 07:41 The Shoot
• 08:43 Post
• 10:03 Promotion
• 11:40 The Long Tail
• 13:36 Websites
• 15:23 Film Commentary
• 18:10 Close - Production Notes