Color is a fantastic tool. But it also works like a broken down wheelbarrow half the time. When it does work, it’s a thing of beauty. Effortless color correction on a desktop mac. When it doesn’t work properly, it sucks time like you wouldn’t believe out of your day. I can color correct an entire act in about 3 hours. But it often takes about 3 hours just to get one or two bugs ironed out and worked-around. I’m currently trying to figure out why it won’t let me render in my original settings for one particular sequence, whereas it would for 2 identically created ones. No real reason is given, it’s usually a problem with some file on your timeline… which you then have to hunt down and find.
In this case, it was a few clips of animation compressed footage that was throwing it off. Simple stuff, but it takes a lot of time to make sure it doesn’t do something crazy.
Continue ReadingWell, we’re entering a brave new world here at Postbrooklyn after a few months of silence. We’ve been a little busy putting together a few shows for PBS, but more importantly, we’ve added another edit suite and some more storage — this time, it’s networked! That’s right, we’ve jumped into the great world of SAN. After much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, we settled upon a solution by ATTO Technology which allows a pretty impressive amount of expansion and the use of off the shelf storage arrays, but still packs a powerful punch of throughput over fibre channel. The box is a FastStream and it connects a small series of workstations (4) without a switch and negotiates that with an SAS RAID array. So, we’ve added 13TB of networked fast storage and are using it now to post the sequel to last year’s Brain Fitness Program as well as training videos for corporations and other independent projects that slide through our doors. And that’s the great equipment update, thus far…
Continue ReadingWe’ve got some lovely new hardware upgrades in the edit suite. Most impressively is the client monitor/second monitor in the MacPro suite, which gives a nice 42″ second monitor for graphics and playback for clients in offline. We’re slowly moving everything to all HD and hope to add an HDTV set to the friendly confines to help monitor our programming for the near and far future.
Most importantly for how things work around here, we’ve added some new SATA capacity for both of our suites. So, now we’ve got a 9TB array (which theoretically can read almost 3 streams of HD uncompressed on the MacPro, have yet to see that in action, though I fear that Final Cut will limit its abilities), as well as two small 700GB SD arrays of fast storage. That gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of working between the two suites (all the storage can be swapped to either computer) as well as a lot of speed and storage for taking on longer and more intense HD jobs in the near future… hopefully, we’ll continue to grow as the new year blooms.
Continue ReadingWell, it’s official — The Brain Fitness Program is a hit across the country. We’re all very excited here because we poured hours and hours into making it as good a show as possible and to find that audiences are responding to it is exceptionally gratifying. Check out your local listings, and keep apprised of that on the schedule page here.
Continue ReadingHere’s the report from the Pitch Meeting at the Paley Center for Media DocFest session…
The ground rules were explained (5 minute pitch, 5 minute sample clip) and the panelists were introduced. They all gamely climbed onto the stage and gave a few words about what makes an effective pitch and a few other hints. To whit:
Susan Werbe: Passion and get to the key kernel of your project quickly.
Cynthia Lopez: Clever, concise, contaminated by your idea (and able to infect the listener).
Molly Thompson: Know who you’re pitching to.
Lauren Lazin: Can I see your movie by hearing the pitch?
Diane Holtzberg: Make sure your story should be told visually and isn’t just a book.
The first pitch: “The House that Herman Built,” Angad Bhalla, dir. He seemed very practiced in his pitch, the story is about an artist who is working with a black panther who has been incarcerated for 35 years to create what would be his dream house. It feels a little bit esoteric – and (IMO) not necessarily a feature film that will garner a huge audience, but it’s an interesting mix of political and artistic and a couple of technical things in the trailer kind of bothered me (wireless audio mic noise on a piece that made me wonder if there was a better clip or bit to use – note to Angad, have your subject turn their cell phone off so it doesn’t interfere with your wireless mic). The panelists loved this pitch and it looked like this contest was over before it began. They really liked the lyrical/poetic nature of the project and the different point of view of it as well as the humor in a story that could be very bleak (man in solitary confinement talking about his “dream house.”) I wasn’t as sold on it, but it’s not my $5,000… The first critique from the panel that was echoed in nearly every pitch following: “The most interesting part of your pitch was near the end and probably should’ve been at the beginning.” This was an almost universal comment which I found interesting. It seemed that everyone needed to run their pitch by someone else to make sure that they were getting the most important and interesting thing out first. None of the presenters were successful at this one seemingly crucial thing.
Second presenter: Begging Naked, dir. Karen Gehres. Doc about: Artist who went through narrative arc of being a runaway, sex worker, then finally homeless. Seems very bleak in the retelling. The sample clips wasn’t so much a trailer as pieces from a longer film and confused the panelists a bit. Karen’s own presentation style was very apologetic and stumbly as if she had never told anyone what her film was about before. I found myself trying to re-organize her thoughts to try and understand what the film was really about (and failing). Maybe she was nervous, but it showed a lot. Also, she made comments at the end of the pitch indicating that the film had already screened at several film festivals which made me wonder why she was there in the first place. The sample clip rolled and the footage is technically unimpressive and there are several *very* rough edits which is weird to show in a place where they’re definitely going to be looking for that, and for something that has already showed at film festivals? The panelists respond:
Susan: Disorganized pitch, begin with your ending.
Lauren: Why are you pitching if it’s in a festival?
Cynthia: How is this different from other homeless people? What is it that you want by pitching? Money for a sound mix? Not a lot of incentive for a distributor if the film is already done.
Diana: Make things clearer.
Molly: Hopeless films don’t have much of a marketplace and your film seems very bleak.
Diana: I’m very concerned about the welfare of this woman.
Lauren: With a pitch you need to own the room and not apologize for it.
Diana’s comment was something I always think of when I watch any documentary of this nature where someone is clearly suffering greatly — as a human being, why are you documenting this? Get this woman into therapy or a shelter or something?!? I always think that. Anyway…
Third victim: “Stroller,” John Henion, dir.
Energetic open to the pitch that tries to tell the story of a complex relationship between disadvantaged kids in Cape Town and the organizations that give aid to them. He spends some time going over the relationships between his three main characters and it’s not exactly clear what role they have going in to it. Unlike Karen, he asks specifically for what he wants from the pitch and makes very concrete declarations about what the final product will be. Roll the sample clip… and the panelists react:
Diana: Start the pitch with the hook that you had at the end of your pitch.
Molly: Felt that his beginning hook of “Imagine if you will…” was very stagey and forced.
Susan: Still unclear on the focus of the film and seemed to be doing too much with the pitch.
Lauren: Took awhile to understand the film from the pitch.
Molly: Set-ups in the sample reel can get cut and you can go directly to the interesting hook at the end.
Cynthia: There are a lot of Africa/S.African films — what is the context that sets this one apart?
Diana: You need to be able to describe the film in 1 or 2 sentences and everyone should understand from that description what your film is about. Visually things need to be compelling at the beginning.
Lauren: Enter a pitch session knowing what you can or are willing to change based on the comments you receive.
#4: “Smart,” dir. David Sampliner
He starts off very rocky and Diana says, “I’m sorry, can you do that again,” I think partially to give him another chance and partially because she didn’t hear what he said. Smart is a coming-of-age with smart kids at the CTY center summer camp at John’s Hopkins University (something my brother attended, as it turns out). He adds somewhere that it is *not* “Spellbound meets Summer Camp” which struck me as a bad idea — telling people what it isn’t is negative and also makes me think about those other movies instead of his own. Makes the important point of “this investigates what is it uncool to be smart? And why do we not revere intellect in this country?” This is, again, buried in the pitch instead of leading it. He makes some point about how there are only rich, white kids in the show, but that they’re going to try to diversify it some. I wonder if it would be better for him to omit that and then address it if it comes up, but that’s neither here nor there. Roll sample clip… which is one of the best edited ones; clearly, he’s got a good editor (or is one). The kids are engaging and quirky-weird enough to keep you guessing and also to endear to an audience. Says that he’s producing it for a TV hour (50 minutes), which seems odd considering the wealth of material that is apparently there in the sample clip and how well that could sustain a longer length. Reactions:
Susan: Clip was fantastic. Pitch was a mess.
Diana: You buried the pitch. Why are there only rich, white people in the show? (Because that’s who can afford a $5000 summer camp…)
Molly: A producer we work with failed to produce this same idea for us, so congratulations, you’ve done a great job and gotten incredible access. Why are you ruling out feature length?
Cynthia: With a clip reel as good as this — you should let that speak for you, and then pitch to explain later. Also, watch language that makes assumptions as to what the person you’re pitching to might feel or think.
Lauren: What do I see of the camp? How is this structured in the show? Is this a film about Aspberger’s Syndrome? (some of the clips make it seem like it’s about someone with Aspberger’s…).
And the last one: “Outside the Box,” dir. Lacey Schwartz.
She seems very (overly) composed as she presents her pitch. I think she relies heavily on her notes and after awhile it seems more like I’m reading a proposal than listening to an impassioned plea for someone to hear a story. But, her story is intriguing — it’s a personal doc about growing up Jewish and finding out when she’s a teenager that she’s the product of an extramarital affair between her mother and a black man (she’s biracial)… and that no one ever said anything about it to her for her entire life! It’s a fascinating and crazy story, really. She describes it as a road trip journey as she visits with other black jews and explores that aspect of her identity (which is by far not as interesting as the whole family secret…and how crazy it is for someone to not notice something like that!). She presents everything very matter-of-factly, which is doubly weird considering how personal and intimate the subject matter really is. Roll the sample clip — which was well assembled, but seems to wander around a bit with a bunch of stuff about the Black Jewish experience, which sucks a little of the emotional punch out of a fascinating story. And the reactions:
Diana: How much is about Black Jews in America? That’s the least interesting thing. And music (she uses some very prominent music in the trailer) is expensive, so be careful about including it.
Lauren: I liked the Black Jewish part. But, I met you awhile ago when you were just starting and very involved in the story and seemed much more emotional and invested. Your pitch was very cold/filmmaker-y this time and you have to find that balance between passionate about it and storyteller.
Cynthia: I was still looking for the hook.
Molly: Family secrets are the most universal and you should go deep and make the intimate film.
Diana: Universal appeal is important — think about how this might appeal in an international market and what might make it universal. You don’t have to focus on that, but it’s important to think about whenever anyone is pitching.
And the winner is… Angad Bhalla! Final comments from the panel:
Diana: Open with a bang in your clip, and in your pitch.
Susan: All were terrific, each unique. Freshness of perspective is what we ended up looking for.
Molly: Pitch, then clip reel, then potential of film project were the criteria.
Lauren: All films were great.
Diana: If some of the suggestions we’ve made are used by any of the filmmakers, please feel free to get in touch and re-show your work at a later date to any of us.
Cynthia: Yes! Please show them to us again. They were all great.
Diana: Filmmakers are not always the best pitchers. If you’re not the best, try to get training or practice or find someone who is and learn from them.
That’s the gist of it, anyway. I was surprised by how often my own internal comments mirrored those of the panelists. I agreed that every pitcher buried their most important point or detail or part of the pitch that set them apart. I guess it’s hard to figure out what headline is the winning headline in all of the ideas that you might be trying to put out there. In any case, it was very educational and also very inspiring to see everyone and their projects on display. All of the films looked really interesting and I can’t wait to hear more about them in the future.
Well, we’re laying back now. The Brain Fitness Program is almost out the door (finally) after nearly 300 hours of post-production. Actually, I have no idea how many hours of post we’ve ended up doing. But it’s crazy. Between compositing nearly 2/3rds of the show, 3D animating another 8 or 9 minutes and then comping it all together, it’s been a monster of a project.
I’ve already learned several things — Shake, Cinema4D, noise reduction. SG Music created 5 themes of varying length which layer throughout the entire program in the background (always backgrounding) and all on a dime.
Also interesting was to witness the differences (and similarities) between the F900 and HVX200. Most notably to my mind is the footage shot outdoors on a beautiful fall day in Brooklyn — bright sun, well exposed — shot with the HVX200. Looks great. Then some shots done with it simultaneously with the F900 in a lower light (sunlight, but indoors, probably 4-5.6 without an ND). A little underexposed and when you bring it up with a color corrector and the noise goes crazy. Good to know.
I’ll get to put the HVX through some more paces this weekend when I go to shoot the leaves of Vermont. Kind of excited about this, actually.
Continue ReadingI was never really sure how to use this filter until today — working on this program with about seven different interview set ups in different parts of the country, different noise environments. Thankfully, most of them are pretty quiet, but each one has just a little bit of buzz or hum or whine in the soundtrack. Apply the BNR filter, and that’s usually where I get lost. But this time, there’s enough of a pause in most of the dialogue tracks to highlight just a piece. Click on “learn.” Hit play and then stop. A little waveform appears. Super fit it and then drag the fit below the existing waveform. Then adjust the response and release down. Bring the noise reduction down, too — maybe -10 or more, but listen while you do it and you’ll hear slight alterations and a bit of flanging if you go too far. Increase the smoothing to iron out some of the flange and then tweak the frequency just a bit (probably bringing the gain up a little). Keep listening and eventually the settings will coalesce and you’re done. And the change is very dramatic, especially in headphones.
Continue ReadingPro Tools imports .m4a files directly. Who knew? All this time I’d been converting them into AIFs like an idiot… ah well, now I can skip the clunky iTunes conversion and get back to work.
Which I really need to do…
Continue ReadingJust taking a break as we approach deadline on the Brain Fitness Program. What’s left to do? Well, nearly everything. I’m throwing together random compositions to buck up an overly quiet pledge break set, rendering fixes to 3D animations on another computer and hoping that sometime tomorrow all of the pieces will come together to make a coherent whole so that I’m not laying things back for final masters ten minutes before the FedEx deadline on Monday. So far, I’m not optimistic since there’s a ludicrous amount of sound mixing to be done and a very finite amount of time to do it. I’m thrilled, though, with the overall sound quality of the pledge breaks which are mixing almost in real time because the source is so clean. The full length program, though, features sound sources from ten different interview locations all over the country and will require quite a bit more finesse. And there’s still no music to go with it so far. Not to mention the sound effects that need to appear.
And I won’t even get into the captioning of it…
I still find it remarkably cool that I can flip open my laptop and knock out a quick riff on a tiny desk sized keyboard (the versatile Ozone keyboard) into GarageBand and create rough mixes of music that could pass for library music… except it’s even subtler and more useful than library music ever is. I do like that.
Continue ReadingWe shot a 3 camera shoot with a digibeta, and F900, and an HVX200. All of this gets downconverted to a SD timeline and sent out to digibeta for final release. Why the crazy mix and match formats? Well, two of the cameras the company owns and the third was the best bet for getting a high enough quality image without breaking the bank on a rental. As it turns out, we might’ve been better served shooting it with the HVX. The results were very surprising — I expected the HVX’s downconvert to compare favorably enough, but I was blown away by how well it matched the F900s downconvert (there’s some difference in it, the 900 has way better detail resolution, but going from wide to tight it’s hardly noticeable). What was noticeable, though, was the digibeta intercutting with the F900. The detail was all skewed, the color seemed flat and overall it hardly looked good, let alone matching the 900. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to use an HVX the next time instead, as long as it’s recording to HD…
Continue ReadingColor is a fantastic tool. But it also works like a broken down wheelbarrow half the time. When it does work, it’s a thing of beauty. Effortless color correction on a desktop mac. When it doesn’t work properly, it sucks time like you wouldn’t believe out of your day. I can color correct an entire act in about 3 hours. But it often takes about 3 hours just to get one or two bugs ironed out and worked-around. I’m currently trying to figure out why it won’t let me render in my original settings for one particular sequence, whereas it would for 2 identically created ones. No real reason is given, it’s usually a problem with some file on your timeline… which you then have to hunt down and find.
In this case, it was a few clips of animation compressed footage that was throwing it off. Simple stuff, but it takes a lot of time to make sure it doesn’t do something crazy.
Continue ReadingWell, we’re entering a brave new world here at Postbrooklyn after a few months of silence. We’ve been a little busy putting together a few shows for PBS, but more importantly, we’ve added another edit suite and some more storage — this time, it’s networked! That’s right, we’ve jumped into the great world of SAN. After much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, we settled upon a solution by ATTO Technology which allows a pretty impressive amount of expansion and the use of off the shelf storage arrays, but still packs a powerful punch of throughput over fibre channel. The box is a FastStream and it connects a small series of workstations (4) without a switch and negotiates that with an SAS RAID array. So, we’ve added 13TB of networked fast storage and are using it now to post the sequel to last year’s Brain Fitness Program as well as training videos for corporations and other independent projects that slide through our doors. And that’s the great equipment update, thus far…
Continue ReadingWe’ve got some lovely new hardware upgrades in the edit suite. Most impressively is the client monitor/second monitor in the MacPro suite, which gives a nice 42″ second monitor for graphics and playback for clients in offline. We’re slowly moving everything to all HD and hope to add an HDTV set to the friendly confines to help monitor our programming for the near and far future.
Most importantly for how things work around here, we’ve added some new SATA capacity for both of our suites. So, now we’ve got a 9TB array (which theoretically can read almost 3 streams of HD uncompressed on the MacPro, have yet to see that in action, though I fear that Final Cut will limit its abilities), as well as two small 700GB SD arrays of fast storage. That gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of working between the two suites (all the storage can be swapped to either computer) as well as a lot of speed and storage for taking on longer and more intense HD jobs in the near future… hopefully, we’ll continue to grow as the new year blooms.
Continue ReadingWell, it’s official — The Brain Fitness Program is a hit across the country. We’re all very excited here because we poured hours and hours into making it as good a show as possible and to find that audiences are responding to it is exceptionally gratifying. Check out your local listings, and keep apprised of that on the schedule page here.
Continue ReadingHere’s the report from the Pitch Meeting at the Paley Center for Media DocFest session…
The ground rules were explained (5 minute pitch, 5 minute sample clip) and the panelists were introduced. They all gamely climbed onto the stage and gave a few words about what makes an effective pitch and a few other hints. To whit:
Susan Werbe: Passion and get to the key kernel of your project quickly.
Cynthia Lopez: Clever, concise, contaminated by your idea (and able to infect the listener).
Molly Thompson: Know who you’re pitching to.
Lauren Lazin: Can I see your movie by hearing the pitch?
Diane Holtzberg: Make sure your story should be told visually and isn’t just a book.
The first pitch: “The House that Herman Built,” Angad Bhalla, dir. He seemed very practiced in his pitch, the story is about an artist who is working with a black panther who has been incarcerated for 35 years to create what would be his dream house. It feels a little bit esoteric – and (IMO) not necessarily a feature film that will garner a huge audience, but it’s an interesting mix of political and artistic and a couple of technical things in the trailer kind of bothered me (wireless audio mic noise on a piece that made me wonder if there was a better clip or bit to use – note to Angad, have your subject turn their cell phone off so it doesn’t interfere with your wireless mic). The panelists loved this pitch and it looked like this contest was over before it began. They really liked the lyrical/poetic nature of the project and the different point of view of it as well as the humor in a story that could be very bleak (man in solitary confinement talking about his “dream house.”) I wasn’t as sold on it, but it’s not my $5,000… The first critique from the panel that was echoed in nearly every pitch following: “The most interesting part of your pitch was near the end and probably should’ve been at the beginning.” This was an almost universal comment which I found interesting. It seemed that everyone needed to run their pitch by someone else to make sure that they were getting the most important and interesting thing out first. None of the presenters were successful at this one seemingly crucial thing.
Second presenter: Begging Naked, dir. Karen Gehres. Doc about: Artist who went through narrative arc of being a runaway, sex worker, then finally homeless. Seems very bleak in the retelling. The sample clips wasn’t so much a trailer as pieces from a longer film and confused the panelists a bit. Karen’s own presentation style was very apologetic and stumbly as if she had never told anyone what her film was about before. I found myself trying to re-organize her thoughts to try and understand what the film was really about (and failing). Maybe she was nervous, but it showed a lot. Also, she made comments at the end of the pitch indicating that the film had already screened at several film festivals which made me wonder why she was there in the first place. The sample clip rolled and the footage is technically unimpressive and there are several *very* rough edits which is weird to show in a place where they’re definitely going to be looking for that, and for something that has already showed at film festivals? The panelists respond:
Susan: Disorganized pitch, begin with your ending.
Lauren: Why are you pitching if it’s in a festival?
Cynthia: How is this different from other homeless people? What is it that you want by pitching? Money for a sound mix? Not a lot of incentive for a distributor if the film is already done.
Diana: Make things clearer.
Molly: Hopeless films don’t have much of a marketplace and your film seems very bleak.
Diana: I’m very concerned about the welfare of this woman.
Lauren: With a pitch you need to own the room and not apologize for it.
Diana’s comment was something I always think of when I watch any documentary of this nature where someone is clearly suffering greatly — as a human being, why are you documenting this? Get this woman into therapy or a shelter or something?!? I always think that. Anyway…
Third victim: “Stroller,” John Henion, dir.
Energetic open to the pitch that tries to tell the story of a complex relationship between disadvantaged kids in Cape Town and the organizations that give aid to them. He spends some time going over the relationships between his three main characters and it’s not exactly clear what role they have going in to it. Unlike Karen, he asks specifically for what he wants from the pitch and makes very concrete declarations about what the final product will be. Roll the sample clip… and the panelists react:
Diana: Start the pitch with the hook that you had at the end of your pitch.
Molly: Felt that his beginning hook of “Imagine if you will…” was very stagey and forced.
Susan: Still unclear on the focus of the film and seemed to be doing too much with the pitch.
Lauren: Took awhile to understand the film from the pitch.
Molly: Set-ups in the sample reel can get cut and you can go directly to the interesting hook at the end.
Cynthia: There are a lot of Africa/S.African films — what is the context that sets this one apart?
Diana: You need to be able to describe the film in 1 or 2 sentences and everyone should understand from that description what your film is about. Visually things need to be compelling at the beginning.
Lauren: Enter a pitch session knowing what you can or are willing to change based on the comments you receive.
#4: “Smart,” dir. David Sampliner
He starts off very rocky and Diana says, “I’m sorry, can you do that again,” I think partially to give him another chance and partially because she didn’t hear what he said. Smart is a coming-of-age with smart kids at the CTY center summer camp at John’s Hopkins University (something my brother attended, as it turns out). He adds somewhere that it is *not* “Spellbound meets Summer Camp” which struck me as a bad idea — telling people what it isn’t is negative and also makes me think about those other movies instead of his own. Makes the important point of “this investigates what is it uncool to be smart? And why do we not revere intellect in this country?” This is, again, buried in the pitch instead of leading it. He makes some point about how there are only rich, white kids in the show, but that they’re going to try to diversify it some. I wonder if it would be better for him to omit that and then address it if it comes up, but that’s neither here nor there. Roll sample clip… which is one of the best edited ones; clearly, he’s got a good editor (or is one). The kids are engaging and quirky-weird enough to keep you guessing and also to endear to an audience. Says that he’s producing it for a TV hour (50 minutes), which seems odd considering the wealth of material that is apparently there in the sample clip and how well that could sustain a longer length. Reactions:
Susan: Clip was fantastic. Pitch was a mess.
Diana: You buried the pitch. Why are there only rich, white people in the show? (Because that’s who can afford a $5000 summer camp…)
Molly: A producer we work with failed to produce this same idea for us, so congratulations, you’ve done a great job and gotten incredible access. Why are you ruling out feature length?
Cynthia: With a clip reel as good as this — you should let that speak for you, and then pitch to explain later. Also, watch language that makes assumptions as to what the person you’re pitching to might feel or think.
Lauren: What do I see of the camp? How is this structured in the show? Is this a film about Aspberger’s Syndrome? (some of the clips make it seem like it’s about someone with Aspberger’s…).
And the last one: “Outside the Box,” dir. Lacey Schwartz.
She seems very (overly) composed as she presents her pitch. I think she relies heavily on her notes and after awhile it seems more like I’m reading a proposal than listening to an impassioned plea for someone to hear a story. But, her story is intriguing — it’s a personal doc about growing up Jewish and finding out when she’s a teenager that she’s the product of an extramarital affair between her mother and a black man (she’s biracial)… and that no one ever said anything about it to her for her entire life! It’s a fascinating and crazy story, really. She describes it as a road trip journey as she visits with other black jews and explores that aspect of her identity (which is by far not as interesting as the whole family secret…and how crazy it is for someone to not notice something like that!). She presents everything very matter-of-factly, which is doubly weird considering how personal and intimate the subject matter really is. Roll the sample clip — which was well assembled, but seems to wander around a bit with a bunch of stuff about the Black Jewish experience, which sucks a little of the emotional punch out of a fascinating story. And the reactions:
Diana: How much is about Black Jews in America? That’s the least interesting thing. And music (she uses some very prominent music in the trailer) is expensive, so be careful about including it.
Lauren: I liked the Black Jewish part. But, I met you awhile ago when you were just starting and very involved in the story and seemed much more emotional and invested. Your pitch was very cold/filmmaker-y this time and you have to find that balance between passionate about it and storyteller.
Cynthia: I was still looking for the hook.
Molly: Family secrets are the most universal and you should go deep and make the intimate film.
Diana: Universal appeal is important — think about how this might appeal in an international market and what might make it universal. You don’t have to focus on that, but it’s important to think about whenever anyone is pitching.
And the winner is… Angad Bhalla! Final comments from the panel:
Diana: Open with a bang in your clip, and in your pitch.
Susan: All were terrific, each unique. Freshness of perspective is what we ended up looking for.
Molly: Pitch, then clip reel, then potential of film project were the criteria.
Lauren: All films were great.
Diana: If some of the suggestions we’ve made are used by any of the filmmakers, please feel free to get in touch and re-show your work at a later date to any of us.
Cynthia: Yes! Please show them to us again. They were all great.
Diana: Filmmakers are not always the best pitchers. If you’re not the best, try to get training or practice or find someone who is and learn from them.
That’s the gist of it, anyway. I was surprised by how often my own internal comments mirrored those of the panelists. I agreed that every pitcher buried their most important point or detail or part of the pitch that set them apart. I guess it’s hard to figure out what headline is the winning headline in all of the ideas that you might be trying to put out there. In any case, it was very educational and also very inspiring to see everyone and their projects on display. All of the films looked really interesting and I can’t wait to hear more about them in the future.
Well, we’re laying back now. The Brain Fitness Program is almost out the door (finally) after nearly 300 hours of post-production. Actually, I have no idea how many hours of post we’ve ended up doing. But it’s crazy. Between compositing nearly 2/3rds of the show, 3D animating another 8 or 9 minutes and then comping it all together, it’s been a monster of a project.
I’ve already learned several things — Shake, Cinema4D, noise reduction. SG Music created 5 themes of varying length which layer throughout the entire program in the background (always backgrounding) and all on a dime.
Also interesting was to witness the differences (and similarities) between the F900 and HVX200. Most notably to my mind is the footage shot outdoors on a beautiful fall day in Brooklyn — bright sun, well exposed — shot with the HVX200. Looks great. Then some shots done with it simultaneously with the F900 in a lower light (sunlight, but indoors, probably 4-5.6 without an ND). A little underexposed and when you bring it up with a color corrector and the noise goes crazy. Good to know.
I’ll get to put the HVX through some more paces this weekend when I go to shoot the leaves of Vermont. Kind of excited about this, actually.
Continue ReadingI was never really sure how to use this filter until today — working on this program with about seven different interview set ups in different parts of the country, different noise environments. Thankfully, most of them are pretty quiet, but each one has just a little bit of buzz or hum or whine in the soundtrack. Apply the BNR filter, and that’s usually where I get lost. But this time, there’s enough of a pause in most of the dialogue tracks to highlight just a piece. Click on “learn.” Hit play and then stop. A little waveform appears. Super fit it and then drag the fit below the existing waveform. Then adjust the response and release down. Bring the noise reduction down, too — maybe -10 or more, but listen while you do it and you’ll hear slight alterations and a bit of flanging if you go too far. Increase the smoothing to iron out some of the flange and then tweak the frequency just a bit (probably bringing the gain up a little). Keep listening and eventually the settings will coalesce and you’re done. And the change is very dramatic, especially in headphones.
Continue ReadingPro Tools imports .m4a files directly. Who knew? All this time I’d been converting them into AIFs like an idiot… ah well, now I can skip the clunky iTunes conversion and get back to work.
Which I really need to do…
Continue ReadingJust taking a break as we approach deadline on the Brain Fitness Program. What’s left to do? Well, nearly everything. I’m throwing together random compositions to buck up an overly quiet pledge break set, rendering fixes to 3D animations on another computer and hoping that sometime tomorrow all of the pieces will come together to make a coherent whole so that I’m not laying things back for final masters ten minutes before the FedEx deadline on Monday. So far, I’m not optimistic since there’s a ludicrous amount of sound mixing to be done and a very finite amount of time to do it. I’m thrilled, though, with the overall sound quality of the pledge breaks which are mixing almost in real time because the source is so clean. The full length program, though, features sound sources from ten different interview locations all over the country and will require quite a bit more finesse. And there’s still no music to go with it so far. Not to mention the sound effects that need to appear.
And I won’t even get into the captioning of it…
I still find it remarkably cool that I can flip open my laptop and knock out a quick riff on a tiny desk sized keyboard (the versatile Ozone keyboard) into GarageBand and create rough mixes of music that could pass for library music… except it’s even subtler and more useful than library music ever is. I do like that.
Continue ReadingWe shot a 3 camera shoot with a digibeta, and F900, and an HVX200. All of this gets downconverted to a SD timeline and sent out to digibeta for final release. Why the crazy mix and match formats? Well, two of the cameras the company owns and the third was the best bet for getting a high enough quality image without breaking the bank on a rental. As it turns out, we might’ve been better served shooting it with the HVX. The results were very surprising — I expected the HVX’s downconvert to compare favorably enough, but I was blown away by how well it matched the F900s downconvert (there’s some difference in it, the 900 has way better detail resolution, but going from wide to tight it’s hardly noticeable). What was noticeable, though, was the digibeta intercutting with the F900. The detail was all skewed, the color seemed flat and overall it hardly looked good, let alone matching the 900. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to use an HVX the next time instead, as long as it’s recording to HD…
Continue ReadingColor is a fantastic tool. But it also works like a broken down wheelbarrow half the time. When it does work, it’s a thing of beauty. Effortless color correction on a desktop mac. When it doesn’t work properly, it sucks time like you wouldn’t believe out of your day. I can color correct an entire act in about 3 hours. But it often takes about 3 hours just to get one or two bugs ironed out and worked-around. I’m currently trying to figure out why it won’t let me render in my original settings for one particular sequence, whereas it would for 2 identically created ones. No real reason is given, it’s usually a problem with some file on your timeline… which you then have to hunt down and find.
In this case, it was a few clips of animation compressed footage that was throwing it off. Simple stuff, but it takes a lot of time to make sure it doesn’t do something crazy.
Continue ReadingWell, we’re entering a brave new world here at Postbrooklyn after a few months of silence. We’ve been a little busy putting together a few shows for PBS, but more importantly, we’ve added another edit suite and some more storage — this time, it’s networked! That’s right, we’ve jumped into the great world of SAN. After much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, we settled upon a solution by ATTO Technology which allows a pretty impressive amount of expansion and the use of off the shelf storage arrays, but still packs a powerful punch of throughput over fibre channel. The box is a FastStream and it connects a small series of workstations (4) without a switch and negotiates that with an SAS RAID array. So, we’ve added 13TB of networked fast storage and are using it now to post the sequel to last year’s Brain Fitness Program as well as training videos for corporations and other independent projects that slide through our doors. And that’s the great equipment update, thus far…
Continue ReadingWe’ve got some lovely new hardware upgrades in the edit suite. Most impressively is the client monitor/second monitor in the MacPro suite, which gives a nice 42″ second monitor for graphics and playback for clients in offline. We’re slowly moving everything to all HD and hope to add an HDTV set to the friendly confines to help monitor our programming for the near and far future.
Most importantly for how things work around here, we’ve added some new SATA capacity for both of our suites. So, now we’ve got a 9TB array (which theoretically can read almost 3 streams of HD uncompressed on the MacPro, have yet to see that in action, though I fear that Final Cut will limit its abilities), as well as two small 700GB SD arrays of fast storage. That gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of working between the two suites (all the storage can be swapped to either computer) as well as a lot of speed and storage for taking on longer and more intense HD jobs in the near future… hopefully, we’ll continue to grow as the new year blooms.
Continue ReadingWell, it’s official — The Brain Fitness Program is a hit across the country. We’re all very excited here because we poured hours and hours into making it as good a show as possible and to find that audiences are responding to it is exceptionally gratifying. Check out your local listings, and keep apprised of that on the schedule page here.
Continue ReadingHere’s the report from the Pitch Meeting at the Paley Center for Media DocFest session…
The ground rules were explained (5 minute pitch, 5 minute sample clip) and the panelists were introduced. They all gamely climbed onto the stage and gave a few words about what makes an effective pitch and a few other hints. To whit:
Susan Werbe: Passion and get to the key kernel of your project quickly.
Cynthia Lopez: Clever, concise, contaminated by your idea (and able to infect the listener).
Molly Thompson: Know who you’re pitching to.
Lauren Lazin: Can I see your movie by hearing the pitch?
Diane Holtzberg: Make sure your story should be told visually and isn’t just a book.
The first pitch: “The House that Herman Built,” Angad Bhalla, dir. He seemed very practiced in his pitch, the story is about an artist who is working with a black panther who has been incarcerated for 35 years to create what would be his dream house. It feels a little bit esoteric – and (IMO) not necessarily a feature film that will garner a huge audience, but it’s an interesting mix of political and artistic and a couple of technical things in the trailer kind of bothered me (wireless audio mic noise on a piece that made me wonder if there was a better clip or bit to use – note to Angad, have your subject turn their cell phone off so it doesn’t interfere with your wireless mic). The panelists loved this pitch and it looked like this contest was over before it began. They really liked the lyrical/poetic nature of the project and the different point of view of it as well as the humor in a story that could be very bleak (man in solitary confinement talking about his “dream house.”) I wasn’t as sold on it, but it’s not my $5,000… The first critique from the panel that was echoed in nearly every pitch following: “The most interesting part of your pitch was near the end and probably should’ve been at the beginning.” This was an almost universal comment which I found interesting. It seemed that everyone needed to run their pitch by someone else to make sure that they were getting the most important and interesting thing out first. None of the presenters were successful at this one seemingly crucial thing.
Second presenter: Begging Naked, dir. Karen Gehres. Doc about: Artist who went through narrative arc of being a runaway, sex worker, then finally homeless. Seems very bleak in the retelling. The sample clips wasn’t so much a trailer as pieces from a longer film and confused the panelists a bit. Karen’s own presentation style was very apologetic and stumbly as if she had never told anyone what her film was about before. I found myself trying to re-organize her thoughts to try and understand what the film was really about (and failing). Maybe she was nervous, but it showed a lot. Also, she made comments at the end of the pitch indicating that the film had already screened at several film festivals which made me wonder why she was there in the first place. The sample clip rolled and the footage is technically unimpressive and there are several *very* rough edits which is weird to show in a place where they’re definitely going to be looking for that, and for something that has already showed at film festivals? The panelists respond:
Susan: Disorganized pitch, begin with your ending.
Lauren: Why are you pitching if it’s in a festival?
Cynthia: How is this different from other homeless people? What is it that you want by pitching? Money for a sound mix? Not a lot of incentive for a distributor if the film is already done.
Diana: Make things clearer.
Molly: Hopeless films don’t have much of a marketplace and your film seems very bleak.
Diana: I’m very concerned about the welfare of this woman.
Lauren: With a pitch you need to own the room and not apologize for it.
Diana’s comment was something I always think of when I watch any documentary of this nature where someone is clearly suffering greatly — as a human being, why are you documenting this? Get this woman into therapy or a shelter or something?!? I always think that. Anyway…
Third victim: “Stroller,” John Henion, dir.
Energetic open to the pitch that tries to tell the story of a complex relationship between disadvantaged kids in Cape Town and the organizations that give aid to them. He spends some time going over the relationships between his three main characters and it’s not exactly clear what role they have going in to it. Unlike Karen, he asks specifically for what he wants from the pitch and makes very concrete declarations about what the final product will be. Roll the sample clip… and the panelists react:
Diana: Start the pitch with the hook that you had at the end of your pitch.
Molly: Felt that his beginning hook of “Imagine if you will…” was very stagey and forced.
Susan: Still unclear on the focus of the film and seemed to be doing too much with the pitch.
Lauren: Took awhile to understand the film from the pitch.
Molly: Set-ups in the sample reel can get cut and you can go directly to the interesting hook at the end.
Cynthia: There are a lot of Africa/S.African films — what is the context that sets this one apart?
Diana: You need to be able to describe the film in 1 or 2 sentences and everyone should understand from that description what your film is about. Visually things need to be compelling at the beginning.
Lauren: Enter a pitch session knowing what you can or are willing to change based on the comments you receive.
#4: “Smart,” dir. David Sampliner
He starts off very rocky and Diana says, “I’m sorry, can you do that again,” I think partially to give him another chance and partially because she didn’t hear what he said. Smart is a coming-of-age with smart kids at the CTY center summer camp at John’s Hopkins University (something my brother attended, as it turns out). He adds somewhere that it is *not* “Spellbound meets Summer Camp” which struck me as a bad idea — telling people what it isn’t is negative and also makes me think about those other movies instead of his own. Makes the important point of “this investigates what is it uncool to be smart? And why do we not revere intellect in this country?” This is, again, buried in the pitch instead of leading it. He makes some point about how there are only rich, white kids in the show, but that they’re going to try to diversify it some. I wonder if it would be better for him to omit that and then address it if it comes up, but that’s neither here nor there. Roll sample clip… which is one of the best edited ones; clearly, he’s got a good editor (or is one). The kids are engaging and quirky-weird enough to keep you guessing and also to endear to an audience. Says that he’s producing it for a TV hour (50 minutes), which seems odd considering the wealth of material that is apparently there in the sample clip and how well that could sustain a longer length. Reactions:
Susan: Clip was fantastic. Pitch was a mess.
Diana: You buried the pitch. Why are there only rich, white people in the show? (Because that’s who can afford a $5000 summer camp…)
Molly: A producer we work with failed to produce this same idea for us, so congratulations, you’ve done a great job and gotten incredible access. Why are you ruling out feature length?
Cynthia: With a clip reel as good as this — you should let that speak for you, and then pitch to explain later. Also, watch language that makes assumptions as to what the person you’re pitching to might feel or think.
Lauren: What do I see of the camp? How is this structured in the show? Is this a film about Aspberger’s Syndrome? (some of the clips make it seem like it’s about someone with Aspberger’s…).
And the last one: “Outside the Box,” dir. Lacey Schwartz.
She seems very (overly) composed as she presents her pitch. I think she relies heavily on her notes and after awhile it seems more like I’m reading a proposal than listening to an impassioned plea for someone to hear a story. But, her story is intriguing — it’s a personal doc about growing up Jewish and finding out when she’s a teenager that she’s the product of an extramarital affair between her mother and a black man (she’s biracial)… and that no one ever said anything about it to her for her entire life! It’s a fascinating and crazy story, really. She describes it as a road trip journey as she visits with other black jews and explores that aspect of her identity (which is by far not as interesting as the whole family secret…and how crazy it is for someone to not notice something like that!). She presents everything very matter-of-factly, which is doubly weird considering how personal and intimate the subject matter really is. Roll the sample clip — which was well assembled, but seems to wander around a bit with a bunch of stuff about the Black Jewish experience, which sucks a little of the emotional punch out of a fascinating story. And the reactions:
Diana: How much is about Black Jews in America? That’s the least interesting thing. And music (she uses some very prominent music in the trailer) is expensive, so be careful about including it.
Lauren: I liked the Black Jewish part. But, I met you awhile ago when you were just starting and very involved in the story and seemed much more emotional and invested. Your pitch was very cold/filmmaker-y this time and you have to find that balance between passionate about it and storyteller.
Cynthia: I was still looking for the hook.
Molly: Family secrets are the most universal and you should go deep and make the intimate film.
Diana: Universal appeal is important — think about how this might appeal in an international market and what might make it universal. You don’t have to focus on that, but it’s important to think about whenever anyone is pitching.
And the winner is… Angad Bhalla! Final comments from the panel:
Diana: Open with a bang in your clip, and in your pitch.
Susan: All were terrific, each unique. Freshness of perspective is what we ended up looking for.
Molly: Pitch, then clip reel, then potential of film project were the criteria.
Lauren: All films were great.
Diana: If some of the suggestions we’ve made are used by any of the filmmakers, please feel free to get in touch and re-show your work at a later date to any of us.
Cynthia: Yes! Please show them to us again. They were all great.
Diana: Filmmakers are not always the best pitchers. If you’re not the best, try to get training or practice or find someone who is and learn from them.
That’s the gist of it, anyway. I was surprised by how often my own internal comments mirrored those of the panelists. I agreed that every pitcher buried their most important point or detail or part of the pitch that set them apart. I guess it’s hard to figure out what headline is the winning headline in all of the ideas that you might be trying to put out there. In any case, it was very educational and also very inspiring to see everyone and their projects on display. All of the films looked really interesting and I can’t wait to hear more about them in the future.
Well, we’re laying back now. The Brain Fitness Program is almost out the door (finally) after nearly 300 hours of post-production. Actually, I have no idea how many hours of post we’ve ended up doing. But it’s crazy. Between compositing nearly 2/3rds of the show, 3D animating another 8 or 9 minutes and then comping it all together, it’s been a monster of a project.
I’ve already learned several things — Shake, Cinema4D, noise reduction. SG Music created 5 themes of varying length which layer throughout the entire program in the background (always backgrounding) and all on a dime.
Also interesting was to witness the differences (and similarities) between the F900 and HVX200. Most notably to my mind is the footage shot outdoors on a beautiful fall day in Brooklyn — bright sun, well exposed — shot with the HVX200. Looks great. Then some shots done with it simultaneously with the F900 in a lower light (sunlight, but indoors, probably 4-5.6 without an ND). A little underexposed and when you bring it up with a color corrector and the noise goes crazy. Good to know.
I’ll get to put the HVX through some more paces this weekend when I go to shoot the leaves of Vermont. Kind of excited about this, actually.
Continue ReadingI was never really sure how to use this filter until today — working on this program with about seven different interview set ups in different parts of the country, different noise environments. Thankfully, most of them are pretty quiet, but each one has just a little bit of buzz or hum or whine in the soundtrack. Apply the BNR filter, and that’s usually where I get lost. But this time, there’s enough of a pause in most of the dialogue tracks to highlight just a piece. Click on “learn.” Hit play and then stop. A little waveform appears. Super fit it and then drag the fit below the existing waveform. Then adjust the response and release down. Bring the noise reduction down, too — maybe -10 or more, but listen while you do it and you’ll hear slight alterations and a bit of flanging if you go too far. Increase the smoothing to iron out some of the flange and then tweak the frequency just a bit (probably bringing the gain up a little). Keep listening and eventually the settings will coalesce and you’re done. And the change is very dramatic, especially in headphones.
Continue ReadingPro Tools imports .m4a files directly. Who knew? All this time I’d been converting them into AIFs like an idiot… ah well, now I can skip the clunky iTunes conversion and get back to work.
Which I really need to do…
Continue ReadingJust taking a break as we approach deadline on the Brain Fitness Program. What’s left to do? Well, nearly everything. I’m throwing together random compositions to buck up an overly quiet pledge break set, rendering fixes to 3D animations on another computer and hoping that sometime tomorrow all of the pieces will come together to make a coherent whole so that I’m not laying things back for final masters ten minutes before the FedEx deadline on Monday. So far, I’m not optimistic since there’s a ludicrous amount of sound mixing to be done and a very finite amount of time to do it. I’m thrilled, though, with the overall sound quality of the pledge breaks which are mixing almost in real time because the source is so clean. The full length program, though, features sound sources from ten different interview locations all over the country and will require quite a bit more finesse. And there’s still no music to go with it so far. Not to mention the sound effects that need to appear.
And I won’t even get into the captioning of it…
I still find it remarkably cool that I can flip open my laptop and knock out a quick riff on a tiny desk sized keyboard (the versatile Ozone keyboard) into GarageBand and create rough mixes of music that could pass for library music… except it’s even subtler and more useful than library music ever is. I do like that.
Continue ReadingWe shot a 3 camera shoot with a digibeta, and F900, and an HVX200. All of this gets downconverted to a SD timeline and sent out to digibeta for final release. Why the crazy mix and match formats? Well, two of the cameras the company owns and the third was the best bet for getting a high enough quality image without breaking the bank on a rental. As it turns out, we might’ve been better served shooting it with the HVX. The results were very surprising — I expected the HVX’s downconvert to compare favorably enough, but I was blown away by how well it matched the F900s downconvert (there’s some difference in it, the 900 has way better detail resolution, but going from wide to tight it’s hardly noticeable). What was noticeable, though, was the digibeta intercutting with the F900. The detail was all skewed, the color seemed flat and overall it hardly looked good, let alone matching the 900. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to use an HVX the next time instead, as long as it’s recording to HD…
Continue ReadingColor is a fantastic tool. But it also works like a broken down wheelbarrow half the time. When it does work, it's a thing of beauty. Effortless color correction on ...
Continue Reading