Tag: filmmaking

• downstream

  

  The disc for the Windows 95 operating system shipped with two music videos: Edie Brickell’s Good Times and Weezer’s Buddy Holly. These two videos were included to demonstrate how much digital video technology had advanced. Squinting through the pixels today to attempt to discern the image, it’s a wonder anyone thought digital video worth developing beyond that point.

  One of Peter McKinnon’s latest videos demonstrates how you can bring a multicam setup into Premiere Pro and then edit between all cameras in real time. Vision switching has been a thing in live (and even recorded TV) for quite some time, but I find it crazy that processors can now handle real-time 4K video mixing.

  Twenty years is a long time, but it’s also no time at all.

• scopeX

  video experiment…

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD79cCD9f1Q]

  part of research, I guess?

  It’s a process.

   

• The world is so unutterably boring

  

  Sometimes it’s the movement. Just the movement. As the light hits a blade of grass, or a leaf — something that’s completely out of a cinematographer’s control.

  Sometimes it’s the perfect placement of a vaguely recognisable object — like a syringe, or a coin, or a calendar page — just below the surface of a liquid such that it shimmers ethereally.

  Sometimes it’s the way you’re cued to recognise each of three craniums at varying stages of baldness.

  Sometimes it’s the crease of a wrinkle, the way a brow furrows, the tiniest glimmer of a smirk.

  It’s a character breaking the fourth wall an hour into a film and it somehow feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

  It’s rain falling completely out of nowhere, indoors, for no reason.

  It’s a little girl, apropos of nothing, moving a couple of glasses with her mind.

  And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s all of these things.

• That’s a wrap!

  That’s a wrap!

  Words that I’ve not had the utter, utter privilege and luck to utter in what is rapidly approaching six years.

  We have shot our little short film, and it was such a joy to see it come together. The crew were superb, and professional, and I look forward to working with them again very soon.

  My cast were absolute professionals, and lovely, lovely people to boot. This shoot, I was able to just focus on them, and their wellbeing; not to mention the emergence of their characters, that they fleshed out and to which they gave life from my pitiful typed text.

  I am incredibly happy, and satisfied, and humbled. Dear film-gods, let’s not leave it this long until next time.

• Making

  In a few weeks, I’m making a short film again.

  My last short was made in 2011, and I feel like I’ve learnt a ton since then, but have struggled to find time to put it into practice.

  It’s something of an irony, given that since my last film, I’ve taught around 350-400 students how to conceive, develop, shoot, and edit their own media projects.

  The script is short, simple; a single location. I’ve been obsessed with single-location drama for some time. In part, because it’s close to theatre, but also because it’s a challenge for the writer, the director, and the cinematographer.

  A lot of ideas are converging on this little film of mine, and I can’t wait to get stuck in.