movies

I participated in the 48 hour film making session last weekend at my filmschool. I shot a 2 minute B-zombie homage with two classmates (Timo and Alexi) and a few folks who played the zombies. The film is online at vimeo, so I embedded it here in SD quality (but you can see it in HD directly on vimeo).

Spur des Verderbens from Daniel Bachler on Vimeo.

As I wrote above, it is a short film that was entirely done in 48 hours (that includes coming up with the idea, writing/planning, shooting, editing, effects), so it is pretty short and has some rough edges, but I'm quite happy with the result.

We shot the whole thing with my new Panasonic Lumix LX-3 Photocamera in HD Movie mode. The LX 3 lacks some important controls (shutter time, full manual control in movie mode, no focusing and zooming while shooting) but it did a pretty decent job nonetheless. I was especially surprised by the quality of the sound (of course it is not nearly good enough for anything serious, but it is interesting how usable it still is). We shot everything with available light only, and the camera handled it rather well (the 2.0 max aperture at the wide end is a great thing - go Leica!). The sound you hear is all from the camera, except for the music and a few Foley sounds.

The noise is pretty strong and we softened it a bit by processing the entire film in after effects with a slight glow (by adding a blurred version of the edit on top of the original and adding it with screen mode and about 40% transparency), but for render-time reasons we did not use any degraining solutions. If anyone is interested in the original material send me an e-mail and I will upload some of the original material to vimeo.

The music we used is Cellule from the Band Silence who were kind enough to put their song on Jamendo under a very liberal license (Thanks for the nice song)

We also used some sounds from freesound.org (see the credits for details)

The film is released under a creative commons license:

As some of the people who read this blog may know, I study directing at the filmschool filmArche in Berlin. Over the last year I have been asked to colour correct a number of movies since this is one of my favourite steps in filmmaking and I think I have become quite decent at it by now. I love to see my fellow filmmakers faces when I show them how much a shot can be enhanced / altered with subtle changes to the colour of the film.

But the workflow for high quality colour correction is in many cases pretty poor, especially at our school were almost everyone edits on a different system & editing software - some use avid, some final cut pro, and then there is the odd vegas or premiere user in between. I recently described our various setups and the solutions that are available today for solving this in a post to the rebel cafe: my post (the rebel cafe is a forum website for readers of Stu Maschwitz' DV Rebels Guide, a book about very low budget action filmmaking).

I usually had two choices: do the colour correction in the editing software that was used to edit the film, or import the final movie into after effects and do it there.

Working in After Effects is the better option quality wise. It can work in 32bit per channel (not 32bit per pixel!) floating point which means that no matter how many colour operations you stack ontop of each other, you will never loose any detail in your image. You can also make complex selections, use a number of very nice plugins etc. It's not realtime, but if you want the highest possible quality, it's the way to go.

Working in the editing software has some other advantages: one of the biggest is that each cut is still there and you can start grading right away. If you work in after effects, usually the first thing you have to do is split your layer at all edit points so that brightening up at one point in the film because that shot is too dark does not brighten up the whole film, only that shot. In the editing software you have all those edit points and so there is no additional work there. What's also nice is that it is (mostly) realtime. But, as I said, the quality is not the best you can get.

Usually this meant that if there was little time and/or only slight corrections required, I would do the grading in the editing software, and only if I had the time to re-set all the edit points would I go for the whole thing and do it in After Effects.

But, *drumroll* with this new script I just wrote, you can export your movie from your edit software of choice, then export an EDL (Edit Decision List) as well, import the movie into AE and then run my new script to split your layer at all edit points given in the EDL. Nice. If you want to give it a try, download the script here and let me know how it worked for you. 

Last week I shot my alpha project (the film you have to make after the first semester at the filmarche filmschool), starring Anne von Keller and Cyrus Rahbar, DOP Inga Pfafferott, Producer Florinn Bareth, directed by yours truly. We went for both the dolly and the M2 35 mm Adapter, knowing that it was a bit of a gamble given our timeframe, but everything worked out nicely. We had a great team and I think the film will turn out to be beautiful. I know I sound like one of those lame hollywood making-ofs, but somehow I think everyone really put a lot of effort into this film and they deserve the praise :). Postproduction will take at least a month now and of course I will post more details as they emerge.

At my film school we are currently finishing a project called "Koks und Cola" (Cocaine and Coke). It is a project were each filmmaker does one episode - black & white, 16:9, max 3 actors, all shot in the same toilet - that we are cutting together now. Since I am responsible for finishing the movies and compiling a dvd, I want to use this opportunity to write something about all the little details that come up in a mixed platform, highly distributed independent film making environment. So, unless you are into the technical details of film making, this post will bore the hell out of you ;).

First off we had to come up with a way to get the edited films to my computer (a PC running Win XP) so I can finish them in After Effects. For miniDV Footage this is no big deal since QT/Avis with DV Codec can be saved from most editing software with a minimal amount of recompression (if you switch off "recompress" or "recompress all frames", only the frames that change have to be recompessed, e.g. the fade-ins and -outs) and even recompressing the movie again is not that bad. However, quite a few of us shot using the Sony FX1 HDV Camera, and the one thing you don't want to do is recompress HDV Footage with the HDV Codec just to get it to After Effects. Since it does not store each frame on its own but a keyframe every 12 or 25 frames and then only the differences, even a simple hard cut leads to recompression, and since the resolution is about 6 times bigger with the same datarate, even a 2nd generation can copy can get pretty ugly.

So, what we do is we use the quicktime container and the PNG Codec (which is lossless but compresses the movie quite significantly) to get the HDV Movies into AE. Some of my fellow students were quite surprised to see export times of a few hours for 3-5 minutes of film, but considering the amount of data the poor computers have to munch through it's not so bad - high resolution comes at a price and the PNG Compression, while great for image fidelity, is certainly not the fastest.

Now after they rendered out the movie there comes the next little problem - how do you get files of 14 GB from a mac onto a pc? The easy way would be putting them onto an external harddrive, but my pc cannot read mac formatted disks and a mac cannot read NTFS (Win xp) formatted disks. Which leaves the possibility of a FAT32 formatted partition. Luckily I thought of this case when I bought my last external harddrive and kept a 40 GB Partition in FAT32. However, and this one is really annoying, FAT32 cannot store files bigger than 4 Gigs. So, we have to split them up. But, how do we do that? By opening a Terminal under Mac OS X and writing the command:

tar -c -L 4000000 --file=/OUTPUTFILENAME INPUTFILENAME

This will create a new file outputfilename and stop when it reaches 4 gigs. Then it will ask you to insert a new tape (stupid tar), so you rename the file to make room for a new 4 Gig junk and so on until you have several 4 Gig junks that you can reassemble on your pc.

Why go through all this trouble instead of using a network? Well, that means reconfiguring a Mac which is something I don't really like doing since I don't know them a lot and I hate to be responsible when things don't work anymore.

But, there is another alternative of course that I am considering at the moment: Getting MacDrive 6  . This lets you Windows PC access Mac formatted disks - quite useful when this case comes up more often.

So much for my current adventures of data wrangling. More to come soon! Yeehaaa!