Should I turn 'Afterlife' into a novel?

[jls4]

Well, here's a link to the 'Afterlife' trailer on YouTube. Not the best quality, I know. But I need to make a better version for Vimeo, and that will take time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A92ZurHvyRQ

Enjoy!

Cool.. I finally got to watch it. The quality of the compression is a little rough, but you can tell a lot from it. So that's cool. It'll be interesting to read the rest of the script, now that I see something.

I may email you about just buying a copy of the movie though. It may take a while for me to read the script. I've been so busy.

 

[David W. Richardson]

Cool.. I finally got to watch it. The quality of the compression is a little rough, but you can tell a lot from it. So that's cool. It'll be interesting to read the rest of the script, now that I see something.

I may email you about just buying a copy of the movie though. It may take a while for me to read the script. I've been so busy.

You're better off reading the script. The movie's still in post, so DVD's aren't available yet. Besides, the script is a fast read. You could probably read the script in the 90 minutes it would take to watch the movie.

When I get a better copy of the trailer on Vimeo, I'll let you know.

.

 

[jls4]

You're better off reading the script. The movie's still in post, so DVD's aren't available yet.

How long have you guys been in post? I thought this was shot years ago.

my first movie had a post run of 5 months, the new one is pushing 5 right now so it maybe will have 6 months.

Do you have someone else editing for you? Generally it takes about 1 to 2 hours to edit 45 to 60 seconds of footage. So you can get a rough cut of a 90 minute movie in about 90 hours 12 Days if editing 8 hours a day, 24 Days if editing 4 hours a day (part time). The second cut - finished cut, will take another 12 or 24 days, then you need audio clean up, audio mix, foley, score - all which take about 20 days part time. Generally 30 minutes for audio clean up per minute, about 4 hours per "reel" in audio mix (for an indie film), foley is generally less than 2 days (16 hours) since you shouldn't have much to foley. And score can be done while the others are being finished.

I'm not beating you up, I'm just wondering who is doing your post because they may be trying to get over on you. And any computer with Dual 2.2GHz processors and 2GB of RAM can easily edit HDV footage.

 

[David W. Richardson]

How long have you guys been in post? I thought this was shot years ago.

my first movie had a post run of 5 months, the new one is pushing 5 right now so it maybe will have 6 months.

Do you have someone else editing for you? Generally it takes about 1 to 2 hours to edit 45 to 60 seconds of footage. So you can get a rough cut of a 90 minute movie in about 90 hours 12 Days if editing 8 hours a day, 24 Days if editing 4 hours a day (part time). The second cut - finished cut, will take another 12 or 24 days, then you need audio clean up, audio mix, foley, score - all which take about 20 days part time. Generally 30 minutes for audio clean up per minute, about 4 hours per "reel" in audio mix (for an indie film), foley is generally less than 2 days (16 hours) since you shouldn't have much to foley. And score can be done while the others are being finished.

I'm not beating you up, I'm just wondering who is doing your post because they may be trying to get over on you. And any computer with Dual 2.2GHz processors and 2GB of RAM can easily edit HDV footage.

Yeah, unfortunately you ARE beating me up -- without knowing it -- because I'M the one doing post. I tried to get someone else to take it over, with very little luck -- mainly because nobody with skills wants to work on a deferred-pay basis. So it's been a steep learning curve for me.

We've also had challenges. Poorly lit greenscreen scenes -- which cannot be re-shot. A 'ghost' that wasn't very ghostly looking. And some sound issues. And I took a big chunk of time away from the project due to serious illness.

Now I'm trying to get it finished, but it's still a challenge.

.

 

[jls4]

Yeah, unfortunately you ARE beating me up -- without knowing it -- because I'M the one doing post. I tried to get someone else to take it over, with very little luck -- mainly because nobody with skills wants to work on a deferred-pay basis. So it's been a steep learning curve for me.

We've also had challenges. Poorly lit greenscreen scenes -- which cannot be re-shot. A 'ghost' that wasn't very ghostly looking. And some sound issues. And I took a big chunk of time away from the project due to serious illness.

Now I'm trying to get it finished, but it's still a challenge.

.

No worries... I've had to do all the post for my last 2 features. It's a great learning experience for you. Because by doing it once yourself, you at least learn and appreciate those who do the work for you in the future.

For me it was easy to say, "Oh well this person only deserves this small amount of money." But when you do their job for a while you come away with "D&mn that's all I'm paying you, it's worth more than that!" And it's because you've done - or tried to do - their job.

I had a couple of times on my last shoot that I took over Audio, because my audio guy was busy that day (working deferred so he needed to make some money to eat and pay for gas), and boy a huge difference in the audio!

What I will tell you from going through this process is after a certain amount of time, just get it done. If you've learned, then you've already won. You can sell the movie as long as you didn't put much money into it and it's very hard to get any movie (especially if you shot Mini-DV - but I'm not sure what you guys shot) to make a considerable amount. So just count your losses, learn, try to sell and move on to the next project. And even if your Deferred people don't make any money - hey that's life too.

The reason I don't have any links or even say the name of my first major project (the one that got distribution) is because it has a lot of production problems, and I don't want anyone defining me by that movie. Once I get my new website organized, I'll easily give links to the new work because while it's not perfect, it's definately 10x better than my last one.

So just get it finished, and do your best.

As for the poorly lit greenscreen. Here's a tip.

Bring the greenscreen files into Premiere or Final cut (Only what you need for editing, not every take). Ask the editor to Save As but select Tiff Sequence and make a directory to save it into. It'll look something like GreenScreen/Ghost_0001.tiff

The go into Photoshop. Open one file in the middle of the stream. Say GreenScreen/Ghost_0150.tiff . Make sure you can see your "Actions". (Window->Actions) Then create an action by selecting new Action (it's an icon at the bottom of the actions window). It'll ask you to create a name. Do so, and at that point the "Action" is "Recording" your every move.

Go to "Change Color" Select the "green" from the image. Then change your green to a more greenscreen green. By adjusting the saturation, lightness, and hue. Generally most cameras pick up a "brown-type green". If you have this you may need to add a step before the Change color. but I'll get to that in a minute. Get it as close as possible, without effecting the person.

You may have to Change color several times. Most of the time I find I have to do it at least 3 times to get most of the area, generally my tolerance is set to 30 to 45.

If you find you had a brown green, BEFORE you Change color. Go to Image->Variations. Make the image more RED (also maybe a little blue). You can slightly change it or aggressivly change. The reason for more RED is you want to go opposite of the green and make sure your people stand out from the Green areas. You'll have to tweak this for your shoot.

After your action is set. Stop the action (Stop button on the Actions Window). And Close the image that you are working on, but DON'T SAVE IT!!!!!!
Go to File->Batch Processing. What you want to do is Batch all the files in that Folder so that they "look like" the one image. The reason you don't want to save the one image you worked on, is because you'll rework it in the batch process.

If you made a mistake in your action, just delete it, go to File->Revert to change the image back to when you opened it and start over. It may take 2 or 3 times to get the right action.

I did this on some green screen that I was foreced to shoot outside in bright sun. This fixed over 80% of the problems I was having. I fixed the rest, by isolating a piece of the screen at a time.

Also After Effects has a program called "Keylight" in AE CS3, it's a great program and takes most of the pain out of keying. So if you are on older versions, it's a good reason to upgrade. And will take a lot of headache away.

 

[David W. Richardson]

Interesting ideas, jls4. Thanks!

Right now I've got a friend working on the greenscreen compositing using CompositeLab Pro from FXHome.com. It's slow going, but we may get decent results.

Besides an unevenly lit greenscreen, we also had a lot of green light spill onto the actors and car interior. That's making it harder. And also some white streaks where (I assume) the greenscreen wasn't completely flat. So it's a challenge all the way around. (It was our fist attempt ever at doing greenscreen.)

Thanks for the help.

.