Krinkle's guide to film-making

[PredBabe]

Awesome idea for a thread Krinkle! Some good advice in this thread so far, still have two more pages to catch up with later. 

[Henry Krinkle]

It'd be an even better idea for a thread if I'd posted anything in it in the last couple of months

Sorry for ignoring this thread guys. I did have a huge post typed out and nearly ready to stick up here, but I lost it in a hard-drive crash. I'm going to have to re-read this thread to see what's been covered and what hasn't.

In the mean-time, SM you're totally right about the mic in. I was assuming a standard TRS mini-jack, where it's wired:

TIP: Left
RING: Right
SLEEVE: Return

but of-course that'd be far to useful. Seems retarded, since Mini-DV always records 2 channels of audio (it's capable of supporting 4 channels, but at a reduced bit-rate - which is shit and should never be used FYI) that camera audio inputs on handy-cams only support single channel. Bastards.

Anyway - I plan to resurrect this thread soon, I've just been really enjoying not spending every moment telling people how to do filmy stuff.

[Henry Krinkle]

A short lesson on planning and team work:

If you read the Music boards here, or have followed the link to my website in my profile, you'll know I do a lot of club visuals. Or rather I used to do a lot of club visuals - it's not been happening lately because of broken gear, uni's being on holiday and blah blah blah - anyway, noinput - the name we work under is made up of 3 people. Me and two of my ex-students.

The group dynamic works after a fashion, but it's not without it's problems. I'm an opinionated bastard (you may have noticed) and so it one of the other guys. He's a short-tempered crazy ginger guy (you know how some ginger people just seem to be a little, well, mental - he's one of those.) The other guy is a little too easy going. So every now and then we all piss each other off a lot. However, I've always found groups of 3 work - every time one person pisses you off, you can unload to the other and everything tends to stay mellow.

So, big preamble - now to the point. For the last few months we've been working on a music video. There's an artist called Vector Lovers who we've done visuals for a couple of times. Crazy ginger guy got chatting to Mr Vector and the upshot was we'd do a promo vid for his forthcoming single. We started with all cylinders firing and a clear deadline. All was good. Deadline got pushed back because the release got pushed back. Everything slipped, and then over the last 2 weeks we've been rushing to finish it.

The original idea was just to throw something together for online delivery, but now the record label's A&R are involved, they like the vid and want to push for TV. This is a double edged sword - on the one hand, fantastic - proper exposure and backing from a label which means way more promotion than we can offer. The flip-side of this horribly mixed metaphor I've just created is that we have to transfer the vid onto DigiBeta, 'cause that's what most UK TV stations want. Obviously we are just 3 guys with laptops - we don't have a DigiBeta machine, so we have to outsource the transfer.

Thankfully, I do freelance work for a production company that does, so I fired off an email and got a quote for the transfer. £90 ex. vat. Quite steep, but they said they'd get back to me on Tuesday because they'd almost certainly give me a discount. Awesome, that's why I went to them - I thought they'd be able to.

But the problem is, now it's going to probably hit TV, we're all thinking 'shit - it's not good enough' - so we're going to have to do a bunch of last minute tweeks to it. Now, I have no problem with that - I'll go an extra mile for the sake of getting some air time, but needless to say it's sparked an argument about who pays for the transfer.

Other guy: The label should pay for it.
Me: the label should be paying for the whole thing, but they aren't - we're doing it as a favour, and since we're the video team the delivery format is our problem. Normally we'd include the transfer cost in our budget - since we have no budget, we have to absorb the cost ourselves.

But of course, he doesn't want to pay to get the thing transferred, so I have to pay for it (with money I don't have, since I'm about a month away from having to grant sexual favours to fat men for cash)

Moral of the story - it doesn't pay to think small. Always discuss what will happen if your work goes further than you intend.

Still, £90's worth it to add some air-time to your CV/resume.

[SM]

'ken oath.

Excellent point.  Ran into a similar issue recently when I got picked up for the Atom Films Star Wars thing.  In order to protect themselves, they needed all sorts of release forms.  Fortunately for me this was pretty straight forward.  There was no cast to speak of.  I composed and performed the music myself, etc.

However I needed to tell them where I sourced the stills I used for backgrounds.  Some were shot out of a 747 window by the First Lady, but the one major one for the punchline was done in Terragen which is freeware.

For personal use - and as I made this a couple of years ago for nothing other than personal use it wasn't an issue.

Commercial use - which this qualified as, as there are advertising revenues involved - requires a license.  $99 US.  Me = skint.

Anyway, long story short, contacted Planetside software to quiz them about waiving or deferring payment so I could still enter the comp.  They came back and said others had posted videos online who got revenue from advertising and not to worry about it.

But the problem is, now it's going to probably hit TV, we're all thinking 'shit - it's not good enough' - so we're going to have to do a bunch of last minute tweeks to it.

Why was it not good enough?  There's an awful lot of excreble music videos around; I'm sure you could've gotten away with it.

[Henry Krinkle]

Why was it not good enough?  There's an awful lot of excreble music videos around; I'm sure you could've gotten away with it.

Because I'm a pragmatist - I don't see the actual video any more, all I see is the poor texturing and the aliasing/ghosting problems.

It's not a major re-working, just minor shit - but it's enough that I don't want to put it out in it's current state. Needless to say, that's my next 2 days busy with re-renders and tweeks now. Still, regarding the fee - one of the others is chipping in so it's not all that bad. Hopefully soon I'll be able to post a link and show you what I'm talking about for now, tweeks to be done...

[SM]

Shall look forward to it.

Speaking of 'renders', I'm in the middle of going back and re-rendering all my 3D stuff for a film, using Radiosity lighting.  One 75 frame shot is taking over 7 hours per frame... 

[Henry Krinkle]

Speaking of 'renders', I'm in the middle of going back and re-rendering all my 3D stuff for a film, using Radiosity lighting.  One 75 frame shot is taking over 7 hours per frame... 

That sounds like a whole bunch of fun. I remember the first time I ever animated a 3d scene. Basic stuff - it was a camera travelling through a trench a-la starwars. I was using a pretty early version of 3D studio max on a slow shit heap of a computer, and all the surfaces were reflective. 72 hours to output, and the first thing I did when it was done was delete it 'cause it looked so crappy.

That day I learnt an important lesson about test renders, proxy files and place holder graphics!

[SM]

Oh yes...

Odd thing is, the closer you put the camera to the model, the longer the render takes.  Woulda thunk less polygons to be rendered would = shorter render times.  This bad boy is going to take weeks...