I’m still hard at work on the storyboards. It’s become necessary to do the full layout of the drive-in theatre. I found that I had to cheate the size of the drive-in a little bit. At an accurate scale the scene is a bit unmanageable. It’s too far from the car to the projection booth. There are too many cars over too large an area. I think the action would be diminished and get lost amid all of the real estate. Lastly, I wanted to get the sign, the ticket booths, the concession stand, and the screen all into the first shot of the theatre. I’ve compressed the whole scene. I think it works visually. If I keep the camera low, or at least not try any wide aerial shots it will read as intended. If I really need to, I can squeeze in twice as many cars, or angle the screen away from the entrance. We’ll see how this all plays out as I orchestrate the scenes.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Originally, I intended to do all my editing in Sony Vegas Pro. Of all the non-linear editors I’ve used, it’s my favorite. It’s very straightforward and once you’ve learned a few keyboard shortcuts it’s a very fast and intuitive editor. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a few problems. First, I’ve been using the same license of Adobe Photoshop 7.0 since around 2003. I the last 8 years or so Adobe hasn’t added any must-have features to Photoshop. That is, until now.

On my primary workstation I don’t have any drives under a terabyte and it turns out that Photoshop 7.0 doesn’t recognize drives that large as a scratch disk. It errors out on startup everytime. So I needed to upgraded to Photoshop CS 5.1. I didn’t have many positive experience with the CS versions of Photoshop when I was at Treyarch. Each session would eventually slow to a crawl after a few hours of use requiring a restart of the software. I don’t know whether it was the speed of the computer or that I was running it under Windows Vista, but on a faster computer with Windows 7 I don’t have any of those issues. read more

I thought I would be clever and use Poser for the storyboarding. It seems like it would be the perfect match, after all posing characters is exactly what the software is designed to do. Unfortunately, as I discovered, Poser is a terrible piece of software. The UI is dreadful. I thought we had pretty much standardized 3D camera controls years ago. And what’s that? Only special clothes are deformable? There’s no good export pipeline to 3DSMax and importing props while maintaining scale is nearly impossible.

I decided to go old school, a combination of Max renders with a toon shader and drawing everything else in Photoshop with a lot of layers. I’ve grown a little weary of drawing Brad and Susan over-and-over again. So far I’ve had to draw 17 boards to get to the bottom of page one. Only 11 more pages to go. read more

Attack of the Tropes, being set at a drive-in, cars are important. I have a small collection of De Espona 3DS models of cars from the period, but they aren’t models that work under close scrutiny. Particularly for the hero car. Originally I intended to use a 1962 Chevy Impala convertible. I like the look of the car and it had the added benefit of being from the year as The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Not terribly important, but an additional homage in the film. After a bit of research, I realized that the Impala wouldn’t work. For one, I couldn’t verify that the 1962 Impala had front bench seats, which is important for the story. Some of the pictures I found online showed a split front seat. Additionally, I couldn’t find an Impala for rent. All of the shots that have direct interation with car need to use a practical car shot against a green screen with the actors.

A bit more poking around on the internet and it looked like the 1959 Cadillac convertible fit the bill. It has front bench seats (the seat back is split, but not in a way that wouldn’t work) and, more importantly, I found one for rent in the area at Cinema Vehicle Services. Also, the homage remains intact. It turns out that The Brain That Wouldn’t Die was filmed in 1959 under the title The Black Door, but wasn’t released until 1962. read more

I finally got around to hooking up the Okii FC1 Focus Controller to the camera today. It works every bit as well as advertised. I read that there is some noise from the auto focus motors, but I couldn’t hear any. I actually had to look at the focusing ring the first time to make sure that it was working. The focus controller lets you set four focus stops. A near limit and a far limit so that you don’t over work the motor and two preset focus stops that work much like the hard stops on a follow focus. There are a lot of buttons and modes to figure out. It’s almost like learning the camera settings all over again.

I don’t want to just post about equipment, but I haven’t found many resources online where people talk about the gear that they are usig and their experiences with them. This is, after all, meant to be a chronicle of my experience shooting the short and equipment is a big part of that.

There are a lot of moving parts to keep track of and stay on top of during the pre-production and I hope to post more about the actual work that I’m doing. I need to shoot some test footage either this week or next to be sure that my plans will actually survive contact with reality. Expect some interesting adventures coming soon as I wrangle with lighting, shooting on the green screen, attempt camera tracking, and comping the whole thing together.

When I’m working, I often listen to podcasts. In particular I’ve been listening to older episodes of fx guide. In the episode about Real Steel, I was surprised to hear that they approached their image based lighting in a “new” way. They shot a number of HDR light probes on set and the interpolated between them for IBL on the CG elements. I put new in quotes because this is remarkably similar to a system the Pete Brubaker and I developed for lighting in GoldenEye: Rogue Agent at Electronic Arts back in 2004.

For the in-game lighting we used a series of light probes that were placed in the level by the lighting artists and then gathered the lighting data from a radiosity solution. That lighting data was then encoded into spherical harmonics (which were all the rage in games back then) using 27 coefficients. Those light probes were then connected to each other using a Delaunay triangulation that was editable by the lighters. At run-time the barycentric coordinates of the object to be lit were used to blend between the three connected light probes. This resulted in a pretty spot-in match between the pre-rendered lighting in the level and the dynamic objects that were lit in realtime. read more

Getting a new piece of gear is a lot like Christmas. There are boxes to be opened and hours of assembly and instruction ahead of you. That was not the case with the ProAm DVC250 Camera Crane/Jib. It comes with all the difficult bits like the tilt-brake and the bearing assembly already put together. It took me less than an hour to unpack all of the boxes and assemby the jib the very first time.

In the picture you can see it with the 8-foot assembly, but there is another 4 feet that can be added allowing for a lot of reach with the camera. It’s not really visible in the photo (the trouble with taking pictures of the camera is that I have to shoot them with my camera phone), but there is a 7″ HD monitor attached where the jib arm meets the tripod. This will let me track the shot and the focus while the camera is 10 feet away on the end of the rig. I’m still waiting on delivery of an Okii Systems FC1 USB Focus Controller. The FC1 is an electronic remote that connects to the camera via the USB port. You can use it to adjust the camera settings like the ISO, but it’s also uses the auto-focus motor of the lens to control the focus from as far away as the USB cable that is attached.

I’ve decided to go back to my original concept for the music and score for Attack of the Tropes. So I’m returning to the idea of a more “classical” musical similar to “Going Through the Motions” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s episode “Once More with Feeling.” As a musical, it’s going to live or die based largely on the songs. So it’s off in search of a new composer. Nicole has someone in mind to try out on the opening number. If that doesn’t pan out, we’re going to look at the USC music school for a student who can, I think it was Captain Beefheart who said, “play the music that’s in my head.”

Nicole Williams joined the production today as a co-producer. Nicole is going to help secure filming locations, finding the right composer for the songs and score, and, perhaps, most importantly Nicole will also be helping with the casting. Frankly, I don’t know the different between an alto-soprano and a lyric-baritone. Those are vocal ranges, right? With some experience in vocal performance, Nicole should prove invaluable finding the right cast. Nicole has also agreed to take on the part of the ticket girl, which makes her the first performer to join the cast.

The first draft of the script is finished. I’m pretty happy with the opening number, but the other two songs still need a bit of work, in paticular “Afraid of the Dark.” In a musical, especially a short film, the character development really needs to happen in the musical numbers and, quite frankly, there isn’t much in the second song. This draft clocks in at 12 pages, which is about right. I’m shooting for a 15-minute running time and that should just about do it.

I tried to approach the script without worrying too much about how I am going to manage shooting it and focused instead on what I wanted to happen. I can already see a few places where I may have painted myself into a corner, but I’ll deal with those later when I can better tell if can make them work or not. The cast is a little larger than I had originally anticipated, though I’m not sure why I thought it would be smaller. So far the cast includes: Brad, Susan, Dr. Semiotic, the Assistant, the 50 ft. Woman, The Creature from the Murky Depths, the Ticket Girl, and the chorus of Movie-Goers. It’s the number in the chorus that I hadn’t really thought about. It should be at least 6 and I’d be happier with 10. With the excepion of the Assistant, the Creature, and the Giant Woman, all of the are singing parts. Casting this should be…fun.