"An Orange Rose" by J. Van Auken

Hans, I couldn't agree with you more about all your actor stuff. I definitely agree with everything you have said and its awesome knowing a filmmaker with as much talent as yourself!
 
Very very nice exposition here. Seriously. Once you start providing useful info like this, people will most definitely begin gravitating to your threads whenever you are participating in a fest here. Basically, you can get thread buzz by either 1) posting useful and interesting stuff; or, 2) hosting a virtual "frat party" where anything goes. We, obviously, take the latter route. Our thread is sort of like a bad frat party without any cute girls. You pretty much stay for the beer.

It would be nice if you can continue to carry the torch for a serious discussion of techniques and work-arounds, such as your discussion of the flower shop scene. I know a LOT of people here appreciate that.
 
I'd be more than happy to talk at length (out my arse) about technique. 30 grand a year on filmschool's gotta be worth somethin to somebody.
 
Ok, here's a quickie:

So you've got your film all ready to go, and now you need to get it under 50mb.

the problem is that your NLE doesn't do it right, or does a crappy job, or (in my case) it just can't do it at all.

Let me suggest a lil free program called MPEG streamclip.

This is the greatest little app ever. Not only does it let me do "questionable things" to dvd's I rent, but it also has a very, very intuitive and easy to use encoding feature.

When you watch rose, try and look for artifacts. You wont find em. The multipass encoder on streamclip is beautiful.

I forget where I downloaded the program from, but you can google it easily.
 
Hey man, love the thread. Fun and excited about seeing this one. The poster's deceptive. Looks dramatic, and then there's your signature, which is awesome. Nice work with the CC, looks subtle. Can't wait to see this one. What film school did/are you going to? Oh, and congrats on getting approved. Now I get to watch it. AND, the wait begins.
 
Thanks guys - As more things come up, I'll detail my process more. I'm always happy to help.

Daniel - I'm currently going to Columbia College in Chicago. Highly recommend it.
 
Lesson 3: So your movie sounds like you hired Stephen Hawking to do the mix

DISCLAIMER: I am not a sound designer. This is not my field of expertise. :Drogar-Mark-08(DBG)

Sound is one of those things. You know, one of those "I know it's important, but I'll ignore it anyway" things.

I wont go over how to record good audio. You know damn well how to do it. You get a microphone, place it as close to your talent as possible, and just outside the path of their breath. Turn off the paintcan shaker in the background (which every location seems to have one of for some reason). That's it. I'm done.

So now you have a pretty clean audio track. great. now what. Well, unless you have the dough for a sound designer, which you don't, you have to toy with it yourself. Not hard. The first thing you will want to do after you edit the whole movie is to lay a quiet track of room tone under the WHOLE THING, crossing all your edits. This will hide the rampant splicing you did without checking levels on set, which I know you didn't. Don't lie to me. Room tone is 30 seconds (or more) of good 'silence' you recorded at you location. If you were too lazy to do this, what you can do instead is find a good chunk of silence from one of your dialogue tracks (5 seconds or more) and paste it a bunch of times under your dialogue. I'd avoid this because the repetition might become obvious to listeners.

Anyway, so now you have your basic dialogue track, with a nice tone under it. Time for foley. I suggest not overdoing this. For one, only put in sounds that matter. Character walks in a shop door, make the door ding as he passes through. This is a meaningful sound effect. Foley'ing in every movement he makes including the swishy jacket he's wearing and the squeaky shoes he's got on, is going to be distracting. Like anything in filmmaking, there better be a reason for that sound to be there. The other side of this is do not UNDERdo this part. If there's not enough sound going on, your scene will sound empty and therefore amateurish. Find a happy medium.

As another tip; don't try to cover up audio recording mistakes with creative foley. In Rose, there are 5 seconds of poorly recorded audio. I admit this. The mic was poorly placed. I own up to that. I'm not going to jam in a dumptruck soundeffect and some michal bay smashcuts to distract from it. Audio is the one thing you can't gloss over, and cant really mess up the first time around. Sound design is its own Oscar for a reason.

Ok, so now your track sound much more full. There aren't obvious quiet spots, there's good foley, it sounds like the place should.

Oh crap; music...

A few choices that you have are: royalty free stuff, actually free stuff, stealing, doin it yourself.

Royalty free: I'm not in the business of spending money. You can if you want, but I only would if you find the PERFECT track on a royalty free site. I'd recommend some sites, but I've never gone to any. I hear freeplaymusic is good.

Actually free: I get my 100% free loops from a little program called soundtrack pro. It's great. Highly recommended. Also got a heavy FX library. The place I got my loops (and custom compositions from) was flashkit.com. Here's what you do; find a loop you like. Download it. presto. Some guys on there require you to ask permission to use it. I've never been turned down, not once. Now let's say there's a track that's really close to what you want, or an artist whose style you like a lot. Remember the saying "flattery will get you everywhere" ? It's dead true. I had a short film a few years ago fully, beautifully, scored, for FREE, by finding a cool track on flashkit, and e-mailing the composer, telling him how great it was (it really was) and then asking if he would want to score a film that'd be in festivals for credit. Most guys who put their music on free sites like that one are smaller time dudes who would LEAP at the shot for exposure like film festivals. It's worth a shot, you can get really nice music this way, and make good friends and connections for the future. This is called networking in the real world.

Stealing: This is where you find a song from an obscure album of an obscure band and use it without permission. Sometimes guys don't put up the effort to steal an obscure song and get a very mainstream track (see: 'Whitewood entertainment'). How many people on here do you really think you'll fool? Half these guys have worked in a music store. Some of us actually have albums out there. If you took something I wrote, I'll come for you in the night. Don't steal.

Do it yo' DAMN self: Done this one before. Just find one of your friends who plays guitar. You have one. Trust me. Everyone does. Have him sit down and strum out some chords that sound like what your film should sound like. Sad film? strum some D minor chords for 30 seconds. boom. done. Happy film? C major chord in 4/4. boom. No stealing, no money, and you have a 100% original track to your film. If your guitar playing friend is hit by a train, what do you do? Go get his guitar from his room while his family's grieving, and do it yourself. Google image "guitar chord chart" and try em out. Work out a chord progression. It takes about 5 minutes to become comfortable with it. I learned the mandolin in 2 weeks, and I'm JUST smart enough to not have to wear a helmet when I leave the house.

So there it is: you have nicely recorded dialogue, smooth room tone and edits, and nice, original music. Now we aren't distracted from your poorly written dialogue by a bad soundtrack.
 
Lesson 4: Keyframes and the mobile camera

Or:

"this isn't a play. Move around a little or something."


One thing I touched on earlier but i realize that I didn't spend nearly enough time describing was the moving camera.

This is important, because if you plan to advance in your filmmaking, you're going to have to find ways of making your frame mobile. Scientists say 90% of monkeys can compose a static shot according to thirds, but making a visually interesting and technically well done shot move within a scene is what is going to make you grow as a filmmaker and an artist.

"But Joe!" you whine, "I don't know when to move the camera, and I think my shots look fine already!" Shut it. Thats como-talk.

This is where the idea of keyframes comes in. I'm not talking about the timeline markers in your NLE. That's for smelly editors to worry about. The keyframes I am referring to are the specific stops, pauses or bits that you want to capture in a single continuous shot.

If character A enters a room, walks to the sink, washes his hands, walks to the fridge, and prepares himself some ludafisk, there is zero reason that has to be five different shots with five different setups and multiple takes each time. What you can do, is find the five 'keyframes' within that little sequence that you would normally capture with multiple shots, and connect them with movement. You can set up a dolly by the door to follow him in, curve it to the sink, tilt to see the water on his hands, then tilt back up, and dolly with him to the fridge. There. boom. One mobile shot where we saw everything we would have in 5. It's like the megazord of shots, and all he did was make a sammich.

"But joe!" you snivel, "I don't have a dolly, or the initiative to make/rent one!"

Fine. But you do have a tripod. Fluid head or not, you have one. I've won awards using a photographic tripod circa 1920, so don't give me crap about you not having a cartoni on hand.

With a tripod, you still have to mobility to pan and tilt. This is where the magical art of blocking comes into play. Before, with the dolly, we could move all AROUND and OUTSIDE or character as he moved. Now that we are stationary, we can move our camera INSIDE our character's action, and block him around us. So we start in the middle of the kitchen, close to the sink. We see him walk in, we pan as he passes us, tilt to the sink, tilt bak, and pan to the fridge, and then follow him on his way to the table. Easy stuff. The only hard part was sitting down first and thinking about it.

You'll find that by deciding on everything that needs to be seen in a scene, and connecting those elements with movement, you'll have a lot more success with fluid camera segues, as opposed to interjecting contrived steadicams into sequences of static OTS shots.

Everything I refer to is cover EXTREMELY in depth by the hollywood camerawork dvd set, which I would highly recommend taking a look at.
 
So finally got BTS shots. MAN that took a while. It was too much of a guerilla thing to have a designated set photographer, but one of the cast snapped a few while on set, and facebooked em. Here you go, for your enjoyment. See if you can pick me out ;)

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