Last week we did the final sound mix for ‘Be Heard’ at a top facility in central London, inside a state of the art dubbing theatre. I have been present at the mix of many films now, features and shorts, and there are certain patterns and things you can do to get the most from […]
I just bought a kindle, not because I wanted one (though it is of course very nice), but because it’s time to migrate the Guerilla Film Makers Handbooks onto digital platforms. This has been in the planning for some time now and I have just needed time to breathe to actually take steps to make […]
Santa came a little early this year. My first generation BluRay player that I bought to test the Blu-ray of ‘Gone Fishing’ finally gave up the ghost last week. And so Lucia, my lovely girlfriend, bought a new Sony BDPS370 player for me. For Christmas. Unable to wait six weeks (I did after all discover […]
It’s that time of year again, when I look to the digital assets created in the last year, and consider the data archiving needed. I know from experience the utter terror and anguish caused by a data loss or a hard drive crash – I had a bad on in the late nineties, and since […]
For some time now I have had a stack of DVD’s piling up on my desk, disks with clips on them that I need to rip and edit, usually from stuff from other festivals where I did some PR or the like. It’s just a big archiving job really. But getting the data of the […]
I had an interesting mail today from another film maker complaining about Quicktime – apparently the trailer for Gone Fishing would not play on his computer. And this is not the first occurrence of this, so if you have had problems playing back the Quicktime trailer, drop me a line – it would be useful […]
Now the trailer has been up for a little while, I thought I would let you know how it’s doing and how I managed the infrastructure. When we decided to put a trailer up, we wanted it be world class quality, which meant using the Apple trailers website as a template. In turn that meant […]
Yesterday I completed the PAL DVD for ‘Gone Fishing’. This DVD is for showing to festival co-ordinators and people who may be interested in the new features I am writing. For now, it won’t be available to anyone else, not even my family! (as I explained on the blog before, we need to keep tight […]
And in fact, proof of workflow too! Yes tonight, I burnt my very first BluRay test disk of a clip from ‘Gone Fishing’ – AND IT WORKED…! PROPELLOR HEAD ALERT! READ ONLY IF YOU ARE A GEEK LIKE ME! I can report that the high definition does in fact make a HUGE difference when viewed […]
So I have now committed to BluRay (did they not realise that if you are not clear when you say BluRay it sounds like you say Blurry, not to mention Blurry is what my spell checker wants to change it to!) after several studios jumped camp and ditched HD DVD. The word from up top […]
Six days to go…(blimey) And still the film is not complete! I spent this morning back at Midnight Transfer, completing the picture grade. Editor Eddie Hamilton came in to take a look and some very minor tweaks were made – one frame here, two frames there, shaved of shots – mainly because we could see […]
I have just sent off the premiere invites to the printers, and hope to get them back before Xmas. We have all sorts of stuff planned for the evening, and I just hope we have the time and energy to get it all done! It’s staggering how much is involved. All the technical completion elements […]
Russ Wharton, VFX whizz in Wales, has just completed three shots for Gone Fishing. Two were kind of image fixes, removing small cosmetic problems from the shot, but the third was a full blow VFX shot with a worm enlargement. In the story, Old Bill recounts the tale of how he needed the biggest worms […]
I asked Russ Wharton to detail exactly how he has gone about increasing the size of the worm in one shot from Gone Fishing. Here’s what he has said… Interesting if you are into digital VFX…Anyway, here are his words… If you know you need a bigger worm before you film, then film the actor […]
I have spent the whole day on Storyboarding again – not working with Gabrielle this time, but planning the shots and ordering them so that next time we meet, I am clear about every single shot and how it will cut with each shot on either side. I am used to doing a shot list, […]
