Zen Films

Hi Ka-roomba! iRobot is cool.

My assimilation into San Francisco life is gain momentum. My new life is an amalgam of organic foods and and hi-tech wizardry :) I'm writing this while my Roomba vacuuming robot hoovers the bedroom and I chomp on "Broccoli Crunch" from the Whole Foods store!

The little robot worker is pretty neat. I particularly like the fact that it's short profile allows it to get under the bed - gently pushing past the bed skirting to do its job. I've experimented with a few different types of rugs - the heavier ones are best because the lighter ones can be flipped by it's horizontal rotating brush. Still, when this happens it's clever enough to back off and try again later from a different angle - this usually solves the problem. With thicker rugs the critter climbs over the edge and continues to suck the rug.

Banned from YouTube

Woke up this morning to an email from YouTube saying that the MindFlesh trailer has been pulled because a viewer complained it was "inappropriate". I wonder if they mean a couple of bare breasts or the blood? It's pretty disappointing actually given all the "inappropriate" other junk I think is on there like happy-slapping and the jackass-wannabees.

For those that like their access to media unfiltered, I'm pleased to say the trailer is still available at http://www.vimeo.com/285036 where it's in a much better quality format anyway.

Later this week I'll probably update the trailer with something suitable for the censors at YouTube but it's  shame I lose all the viewing stats :( Looks like I can't just replace the video file - I have to re-enter all the metadata..... oh well.

HDCAM vs HDCAM-SR

There's a fair description of HDCAM and HDCAM-SR on Wikipedia but I couldn't find a simple quick reference guide - so here's just the comparison table I needed:

                       HDCAM              HDCAM-SR
frame size    1440 x 1080           1920 x 1080
color space    8-bit 3:1:1            10-bit 4:4:4
audio            4 chans 48KHz       12 chans 48Hks

A-Bomb in Wardour Street

Wow - what a weird feeling. I'm sat in Starbucks on Wardour Street after having handed in my harddrive to Stanleys. I finally did it. It's going to cost about £600 to get the film transferred to HDCAM (£200+VAT) then the HDCAM transferred to DigiBeta (£200 + VAT) and then the digiBeta transferred to DVD so that I can watch it all back at home to check the transfer. Obviously I can't check the quality of the transfer, just that it has been transferred and both the stereo audio channels synced correctly.

Of course this isn't the end of spending... for the film festivals I'll have to get digiBeta and HDCAM-SR clones made (so that I retain the masters) and I'll have to get the same again in NTSC. My plan is to wait until I'm in San Francisco to get the NTSC transfers - popular rumour has it that it'll be cheaper. Stay tuned to find out.

The first chance I'll get to check the HDCAM-SR transfer is at the cast and crew screening in November - we're projecting the hidef tape via a 2k projector. Nice... I hope.

It feels strangely nostalgic updating the blog in this Starbucks. It was two years ago in this coffee shop that we discussed shooting MindFlesh in Thailand... how different the film would have been! :)

M&E (Music and Effects) Track is Good to Go

I know there haven't been many posts this past month and that's because we've been incredibly busy finishing MindFlesh and preparing for our move to the good ol' US of A.

Hopefully by the end of today we'll have finished the M&E soundtrack and that means all work on the actually film is finally over! Well, except to rip from the 1Terabyte hardrive to print to HDCAM tape.

The M&E (Music and Effects) soundtrack is what's required for foreign-language sales or at least in those countries that dub the dialogue into the local language (e.g. Germany, Spain). Countries like Sweden subtitle, which is much easier for us :)

The M&E for MindFlesh has been quite quick to complete actually - thanks mainly to the fact that there's so little dialogue! We also have quite a pragmatic approach which requires us to do our own foley in Matt the editor's backyard and kitchen :) It was a lot of fun. And we got a big kick out of seeing the film with the dialogue missing and listening to our "fake" footsteps and chair slides.

Now I have to turn my attention to the paperwork..zzzz... I have to timecode all the dialogue and re-write the script so that it matches what actually happens in the film we've edited. After that we should be good to go :)

ZenTV and Robot Football

I'm sorry I haven't posted much to the blog over the past month. I've been nose-to-the-grindstone hard at it trying to get MindFlesh finished. I'm pleased to say that the moment is due to come this week! Oh yeah!

Quick MindFlesh Update

Cinematographer Patrick Jackson was over here last week to finish the picture grading and now I just have the final soundtrack mix to go though (tomorrow) and we're done... kinda :) What we'll then have is some cool digital files that needs to be transferred to HDCAM and digiBeta for public screenings and to DVD for industry screeners.

Thanks to everyone who emailed their kind comments on the trailer!

Zen Online

As moving-picture entertainment technology strides forward we've been looking into online distribution (download and rental). There are quite a few sites now ranging from Amazon's Unboxed (USA only) & iTunes (only available to the big studios... and only in the US at the moment) to Jaman/CineQuest and my current favorite Brightcove. I like the fact that we can mount the player on our website and also have the content syndicated.

I ought also to mention that we recently signed a deal with start-up DreamTV in the USA for both the English and Spanish language rights to London Voodoo. DreamTV will deliver its channel to living rooms via Verismo, an IP TV provider (IP= Internet protocol TV= television :) Duh!).

Ok, finally, back to Brightcove. Here's a cool clip of Robots playing football for no other reason than I like robots :)

SpinExpress

I've just started using SpinExpress and it's great! It's a peer-to-peer secure file-sharing tool for distributed collabration :) Basically if you have large files to share, group members can do so by sucking the file right off your computer rather than have you upload the file first. Now that's a big time saving.

Checkitawt... SpinExpress

Automation & Machinima

Many cool things arrived in my sights this week but here's just a couple worth mentioning.

First, check out MovieStorm - a machinima-based filmmaking engine. I learned about it from the DP Buzz podcast and hurried over to their site to check it out. I not sure I completely believe that this is a good tool for pre-visualisation but I do think it's possible to make some pretty cool movies. I've downloaded the beta software and getting to grips with it is pretty easy - especially if you've used something like FrameForge, which I do use for storyboarding. I'm a bit snowed under at the moment to play with it like I'd like but stay tuned later in the year. I have a short film script that I think might work well with it....

Secondly, checkout these very funny clips from FoneJacker.tv I know it's not machinima but somehow the automation seems related :)

Render Jockey to MindFlesh Render Junkie

Good grief, these blog entries are getting fewer and further between – must have been busy these past months J I promise to do better in future. I have to confess to becoming a “render junkie” – sometimes waking up at

3am

to check on the damn After Effects render and starting again if it’s fallen over! It’s not always a fault of AE – on one occasion I managed to somehow get a corrupt Targa file that halted the render.

I’ve adopted a two-stage rendering process: first, render the composition to a Targa file sequence and the second render the TGA sequence to whatever format I need – Quicktime, MPEG2 etc. I think it’s a pretty good process because the rendering a 20min composition with all the layers and effects takes about 15 hours; rendering the Tga sequence to another format is about 5 hours. And that’s with the Nucleo plug-in. Without it render times are 3 to 4 times longer.

At this stage, all the effects and colour correction has been done to at least a “good” standard but now I plan to go back and refine further and elevate the work to “excellent” level. Why two passes? Well, the original clean footage is ok for the basic sound work of cleaning up production sound and adding regular scene atmos but for the extra-creative sound design work, the guys need to see what the picture will look like. Trying for excellent on the first pass would take too long. In this 2-stage process we can shorten the overall post-production time.

This week we added all the completed music and it’s awesome. I think (hope) audiences will be enthralled at the approach we’ve taken (he says with everything crossed!). The last reel (final 20 mins) is absolutely intense: we have only two lines of dialogue and the rest is a full-on orgy of adrenalin. Imagine Alien meets Viagra ;) Oh….. MindFlesh.

DNA Computing & Parallel Worlds..oh, and an Update on MindFlesh

Wow - it's already the start of July. This is a bumper update because I've had my nose to the grindstone for weeks...er.. and I went on holiday last week to Rhodes (the Greek island)...and there's lots to say. Here's the headings:

• MindFlesh update
• Books I've read recently

MindFlesh update

Picture progress...

Three of the four reels have now passed stage one (of two) - which means they've been graded and special effects added. They haven't been given an overall "look" yet and some SFX shots need to be tweaked but all-in-all progress is pretty good. I hope that by the end of July all the picture grading and SFX will be complete... at least to a really good stage :) I'm not planning to screen the film until Jan 2008 at the earliest so that gives me time to (a) improve any SFX I fancy and (b) find out how I'm going to get the hi-def image files off my PC and onto a HDCAM tape for screening! On the last point, watch this space.

Sound progress...

Matt the editor has now transferred all the Final Cut Pro (FCP) reels to ProTools where he's made a start at organising everything into tracks - vocals, production sound, sound effects, music, atmos etc.
Meanwhile Arban the composer has completed about 95% of the music so all that remains is a final (music) mix and then we can slot it into Matt's ProTools projects.

Books I've Read Recently

Did I mention I spent last week basking in the sun and I'm now a bronze Adonis? Oh... then that's probably because I was hiding in the shade with the redheads and babies :) Forty degrees...luvvly.

Anyway, at the airport I picked up two books, Genesis Machines: The New Science of Biocomputing and Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. Is it me or are subtitles getting longer? :)

Believe it or not I wasn't on the look-out for a book on biocomputing but it just happened to be the store and I thought it looked interesting. There's an important lesson in distribution there. Anyhow, despite what you might think, it's actually quite a riveting read and I couldn't put it down. It's not at all about living computers, computers made of flesh, stolen pregnant embryonic fluids or anything in the slightest ethically disturbing. It's about using DNA, enzymes and other microbiological chemicals to perform discrete computing tasks...or maybe not because it's all still theorize-build-trial-and-error. What makes the book enjoyable is the author's tone although I could have done with a few more diagrams. The author also has this tendency to provide examples for the easiest concepts and then skip over the more challenging. It reminded me of my school chemistry teacher who used to dictate his lectures - example: "use a 'deflagrating spoon'... thats spelt  's' 'p' 'o' 'o' 'n'". Amazingly the book inspired me to refresh my programming skills and while sunning myself by the pool I knocked-up a little program in Excel that plays Rummy using fuzzy logic. Yeah, I know it's a bit nerdy but it's not much worse than playing su doku all holiday.