Red room master and crane [video]

The title of this post sounds like a kung fu movie, but describes what we did today. We're back after a brief hiatus (Gracie just got married to Ben's brother). Erik's on a vacation so it was just Ben and me trying to get the red room master shot [VIEW]. It took Ben three hours to get the spinner working. Keep in mind that there's no motor this time. It took that long to simply hang the spinner from the ceiling so it could be twirled manually. We've all grown to hate working with the spinner and that invisible thread. However, here's a tip I can pass on. This time we did use the wooly nylon instead of the official Magic store-bought "invisible thread." It's the same thing. Only you can get wooly nylon at Joanne's fabric and it costs the same price for a LOT more--like literally a thousand times more. (I think I may have just put myself on the magician suppliers union hit list.) Just be aware that when you get the wooly nylon, it looks like ordinary thread. Then look closely and you'll see that the thread is made up of tiny fibers stranded together. You use just one of those tiny fibers to hang your item. Yes, ONE! Anyway, the shot and its variations came out nicely, but it was tiring. It took a couple of hours yesterday plus the three hours today to get about 10 minutes of the one shot that will be whittled down to about 10 seconds in editing. The video on the TV set at the left is from Cabiria. You may remember I was doing a search for public domain witch movies awhile back. That's the result. Also note that there is now so much crap on the walls that the room is really no longer red!

Also, I finally succumbed and bought a camera crane today over the internet. It's the 8-footer from bargain-camera.com and cost $300 including postage. They do a lot of sales on Ebay. I'll let you know how it works when it comes in.

Recently, Sean has taken to imitating Daddy making a movie. He says "I'm making a movie!" Then he waves his arms around a lot and says "OK guys, OK guys. OK guys!"

Still working on rewriting the dining room scene. I'm always game for testing all kinds of approaches so I did the test composite below. The idea was to see if changing the shot would somehow make the scene work better. Answer: no, but it was worth a try.

Technical note: I've found it works best to capture and edit in Apple's Intermediate codec. Editing in native MPEG2 was difficult. It just didn't look good and seemed a little slow although I'm sure in the long run you get better quality. The intermediate codec takes a tiny bit of extra time to capture, but edits almost as quickly as standard DV. On my machine you have to preview at 25% but that's OK.

Editing, freaked-out electricians and more public domain video

Killers from space, 1954

The last third or so of the film is edited (with a lot of temp video) so now I have a better idea of how where we stand. Some of the difficulties in making the dining room sequence come from the way it was written. It covers too long an expanse of time too quickly with too much spatial ambiguity. So I'm rewriting that now.

Saw Dan yesterday. Went through the current edit. He had lots of good ideas as usual. We mostly discussed transitions and structure. His six year old daughter was deconstructing the visual effects in Episode II. She had decided that Yoda was computer generated because the sense of weight and gravity in his big fight scene looked too artificial. Good analysis. I told her that maybe Yoda was using the force. She just ignored me in one of those "adults are so stupid" kind of ways.

Ben told me that an electrician came to his house the other day. "What's going on down there?" he asked after seeing the red room. "Looks like a psycho killer's room." Ben and Erik told him it was for a film but apparently he didn't seem convinced.

Been looking at more public domain video to find something that can be playing on TV near the dining room sequence. I was looking into Via Voice or ilisten. It would be great to run a soundtrack through a program and get a text transcript. But neither program has a demo. My notes...

Killers from space (1954)
> stars a young, pre-white haired Peter Graves!
> early tale of alien abduction
> cutout airplane composite
> scary floating eyes
> great fingerprint matching scene
> ping pong eyed alien hot dog barbecue!
> alien speaking alien language on alien TV
> incredible alien viewing screen with flying saucers, city of the future and space stations!
> burning cockroach

Phantom from space (1953)
>Nice LONG billowing clouds and lighting in b/w

The Brain Machine (1977)
>All sorts of weird meandering God talk by crazed priest
>Big IBM 360 with tape drives & teletype machines
>Awful abstract wallpaper
>Weird ramblings about technology, science, truth, faith
>nonsensical dialogue: "They'll have to kill me before I die!"
>[while holding a dead body] "You answered one question for science. Here's your truth. Did you learn something!?"
>simulation of overpopulation by using a computer to mathematically decrease room size.

Phantom planet (1961)
>Great POV opening sequence of spaceflight
>Great space model effects
>Spaceship executes hairpin turn
>Nicely lit spaceship interiors and sets
>Astronaut drifts away in space while reciting the Lord's Prayer
>Everything on the instrument panel is labeled
>Phantom asteroid populated by a pageant full of beauty queens!
>Really nice planetary liftoff sequence

Planets and metals

Another note to myself for the red room sequence.

And as anyone familiar with astrology (and medieval alchemy) knows, these 7 metals are linked to the 7 Ptolemaic planets: Iron-Mars; Copper-Venus; Silver-The Moon; Tin-Jupiter; Gold-The Sun; Mercury-Mercury; and Lead-Saturn.

When birds commit Harakiri & shooting notes

I've been spending all my free time doing and redoing the bird scene in Cinema 4d. It's not only directing around the visual effect that's hard, it's trying to get the feel while preserving a certain narrative sequence. The effect should be more like Lewis' sehnsucht or like the Romantic sublime than out and out horror. At least I came to that conclusion.

Watched Harakiri the other night. It was good, well worth seeing. Gave me the idea to treat the bird scene as more stylized, more implied.

I've included my shooting notes for the desert scene for my own future reference.

Cinema 4D previs and The Birds

I've been spending a lot of time previsualizing the bird attack sequence using CInema 4D. It's proving to be a great tool. It feels a lot like word processing for film and I've been trying out all sorts of alternatives.

Watched Hitchcock's The Birds to get ideas for the bird attack sequence. I'm not much of a Hitchcock fan, but it was worth a try. It's an odd film that doesn't date well in many ways. When we were in elementary school, all the kids would try to stay up late to watch this on the late show after the 10:00 news. I remember thinking it was scary--not super scary but scary enough. I don't think it would even scare Sean today. ("Are those pretend birds daddy?").

I don't know anything about its visual effects but the makers seemed to use a kind of blue-screening or matting process to get a lot of the bird effects. Plus there are a lot of superimpositions. Laughable: the animatronic birds. One of them looks like those elves at Christmas time bobbing up and down as it attacks a kid. Also funny: the Tippi Hedren look right, cut, look center, cut, look left sequence.

There are some interesting sequences where they cut directly from outdoor location to studio. I guess this sort of thing didn't stand out much in those days. Certainly not on our 12" black and white TV anyway. The entire film has a hodge podge look, like it was collaged together out of different pieces and places. I wonder if this is what the current crop of visual effects films will look like in the future?

For help in setting up bird attack scenes: F. For seeing Tippi Hedren look flawless while battling birds: A+.

Desert locations by Google Earth

This morning we went to the desert to shoot the shrine scene. It wasn't too hard to find a location. We found a secluded empty lot on Eucalpytus and Tamarisk surrounded by brush with a nice view of the mountains. People had been using it as a garbage dump so we were continually having to move trash out of frame. It was windy and cool and we were able to get our shooting done efficiently. The camera batteries held up just long enough to get everything done. I'm glad I put the dangling medals and crosses in the shot. They provide some movement and layering to the shot and may give Dan something to play off. The wind also gave me some ideas for the ripping-off-the-papers shot. It's still difficult to monitor on the tiny camera LCD. I may have to do some touch up FX to get rid of a few phone lines. And I wish I had shot some of footage telephoto to get more visual compression. But--especially considering we went out there with no idea of our location--it was a good day topped off by pho and butter mints at Vietnam House.

The story of the green shrine

Erik made the green shrine structure out of old wood I found on trash day, old wood from Gene's house and wood he had at home. The structure is based on the white shrine in the earlier post. He did a beautiful job with it. I learned a lot by aging it. Originally the screen was installed on the front of the door and I tried aging and painting everything at one time. I sanded here and there, wiped on white paint as a stain and painted on the rusting solution. It looked terrible. I realized that you can't just generically age something, what you do has to make sense. Duh. After some trial and error here's what I learned.

1. These things look better if you start with a dark undercoat because it simulates dirt collecting in the cracks. The dark undercoat seeps into the seams. Using several different undercoat colors also helps to create variation in the look of the paint.

2. I had to deinstall all the metal elements, esp. the screen, and rust them separately before installing them again. You would think that rusting them while installed would look good, as if the rust was dripping into the paint or something. Maybe I was too sloppy, but it didn't look good. It looked OK to rust the nails in place, however.

3. You can't just sand randomly or else the result looks faux finished. In my second attempt I sanded in two places--the wood at the latch opening and at the bottom, two places where it makes sense. That came out good I thought.

4. The dripping rust looked good. That comes from using an overabundance of rusting solution on the nails.

5. I probably made this thing too detailed, especially considering how far away we're going to shoot it.

Making the shrine was really educational. It helped me to realize that these props are performers, just like the actors. You even have to think like an actor to make one of these things. Ben was saying that in film acting you have to consciously try to withhold emotions. The same thing is true with the shrine. One of the reasons the first attempt looked so bad is that the shrine looked as if it were saying "look! I'm old!" The more I covered things up, the more I tried to withhold the appearance of age, the better it looked. Sounds so much like Heidegger's idea that entities withhold themselves. I should look that up. You can see the green shrine in the desert pre-vis.

Desert scene pre-vis [video]

Here's the pre-vis for the desert scene. With temp music. Sean makes a guest appearance. [VIEW]

Rusting solution reference for Erik

I put the name of the rusting solution I use in the props post [VIEW]

Episode III, pirates & the colonialist impulse

Rats have nothing on the ability of a preschooler to carry disease into the home. Sean has a low-grade fever so we have to delay today's scheduled desert shoot.

I've been reading The Making of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith. It's much better than the typical "Making of..." book. We're all burned out on reading "gee whiz, green screen!" titles so this one takes the much more interesting approach of following the production from beginning to end paying particular attention to creative processes and conversations.

Lucas starts working with the production designers long before the script is done, giving him a world to play in. A very artistic approach. The book also shows Lucas as not so hermetically-sealed off from feedback and criticism as you might think. Didn't do much for the end product however. I tried to watch Episode III again, but was only able to get through a few chapters here and there. It really is unwatchable. It screens like a parody of the Star Wars films. Yoda's verbal dyslexia seems to have gotten worse and in the opening space battle, R2-D2 screams four times. It worked great twice in Episode IV so why not do it again? And again. And again. And again.

It's also strange how UNgrundgy in the film everything looks. I remember that people used to talk about two approaches to sci-fi. You either had clean utopias like Star Trek or distressed worlds like Star Wars. The new Star Wars movies look too clean, like they were designed by the same people who design Hyatts. Even the scuffed-up, battle-scarred storm troopers look clean, a problem that stems from their CG origins. The whole production looks like it was created by people who are afraid of getting dirty. It's like those costumes in which designers simulate ragged clothing by cutting neatly with scissors.

This sanitizing of Star Wars extends beyond costume. In the recent films, Lucas no longer references the colonial worlds of the early films. In Episode I Lucas repurposes the chariot race from Ben Hur for the pod race. But the characters here are simply generic bad guys. In Episode IV, the characters in the Mos Eisley cantina were exotic characters, the riff raff you'd find in a colonial desert outpost. The romance of the early Star Wars films was their ability to conjure up images that positioned viewers as expatriate Americans; Mos Eisley as Casablanca. They reflected a nostalgia for a time when everything was simpler and black was black and white was white. Well, I guess there IS Jar Jar Binks, but that's a story for another day.

Red room test footage [video]

Here's more test footage of the red room. I'm still not very conversant in standard film grammar so it takes a lot of testing and retesting to get something that looks approximately right. And even then, you can tell that I'm framing using a small viewfinder because everything is shot so close. Maybe on the next project I can use a giant Plasma monitor. Right. Only the Gracie footage is the actual footage. Everything else is just temp stuff I shot quickly this morning. No, that's NOT Dan's audio. Just something I grabbed from a sampling CD (oddly enough, a Drum -n- Bass sampling CD). [VIEW]

Tomorrow we shoot in the desert using Erik's beautiful shrine.

Wow, marketing! Free poster!

I took the transparencies from the red room final exposition pan and combined them into this image. Print this high resolution jpg out and hang it in your room! Yay!

When the clue hits your eye like a big pizza pie

Some random notes and not well-thought out thoughts. I looked at the crazy room page quite a few times after I put it up, soaking in all of those dark dreary rooms. The rooms felt like people trying to be dramatic by wearing serious expressions, or like artists wearing black or like people using big words to be taken seriously. Those rooms are SO serious, you know they must be dramatic films about important topics!

I was watching Raiders of the Lost Ark the other week, another clue movie. There is so much underlining in that movie: figuratively and literally. The directing is stagey and artificial which I actually like. There's the typical hero walking from darkness into light stuff. Also, when Harrison Ford creeps up to the statue at the beginning of the film, I remember how the statue seemed to glow. This time, I noticed the bright light projecting out from the statue base. Vulgar, obvious cinematography, but it works just fine.

Harrison Ford literally points to and underlines things as he works on the light clue scene (where the light shines through the staff and shows where the ark is hidden). I remember that scene as if we could see the shaft of light move from left to right. Actually the light shaft is instantaneous. What happens is that its glow gets thicker and thicker. Then, when we see Harrison Ford, they slowly turn up the light on his face. The brightness change reads as time change.

Then I was watching the end of Titanic. The ending is a bit like ours, with all that panning over photos to provide exposition. It's a lot more poetically shot than I remember it with the shots of the sinking jewel and the dissolve to Rose sleeping. Also, I remember the photo scene being one long shot, but it was actually several moves dissolved together. When the old Rose gets on deck, there is the sound of a gust of wind when she takes her first step. More underlining. Both Raiders and Titanic are marvels of underlining, pointing things out, making sure you don't miss things.

As I mentioned, I sort of like the artifice of it all. I think that perhaps, this is the way that theatricality is truly translated into film. But I guess I do object to the way that the plots and meaning are so heavily underscored.

Saw David last week who has much artier tastes than I do. It got me wondering why I seek inspiration in the mundane rather than the artistic. Part of it probably comes from that B-movie sensibility of mine. But I think it goes beyond that. There's something about some films that makes them endearing.

Filmmaking is hazardous to your health

Went to Ben's today to continue working on the red room. I realized it was there where I was getting all of those flea bites. I immortalized them a few days ago in a transparency of my bites that goes in the red room [view]. I can't believe I was letting Sean roll around in that carpet! I went home. Ben is going to flea bomb it tonight. The room stills smells, by the way. I put in 11 pine air fresheners last week. Got the idea from Se7ven. It was kind of a joke I think--dozens of pine air fresheners in a room with the putrefying half dead corpse man. I thought the air fresheners looked nice, but it never occurred to me that their smell would be so strong. Duh. So I painted them with Mod Podge last week hoping to seal them up. It worked only sort-of. Between shooting in cigarette smoke, the haze in a can, the halloween fogger, mega-doses of air freshener, and fleas, this is turning into our own Apocalypse Now. We're already way behind schedule for June. I'm not sure whether Ben is Martin Sheen or Marlon Brando in this metaphor.

Final exposition plan

Plan for part of the final exposition section of the red room wall.

If my posting becomes erratic in the next few weeks, it's because I'm forging ahead trying to get most everything shot before July. Ben and Kris are expecting their first baby in September, plus there's a wedding coming up, the trip to Hawaii + visitors so we have to get a lot done this month.

Ben stopped by to pick some stuff up. He saw my room which is a mess, totally dark, and told me that this is the REAL red room. I think he is right...

Gracie sees the red room

Last night we shot Gracie entering the red room. The take above is a little soft but I love the performance. Can you tell she's not happy about this whole perpetual motion obsession thing? The lighting is one 500 watt omni in the background aimed at the ceiling in the back room and one 500 watt omni umbrella-ed toward Gracie. We also reshot the dining room sequence. I white-balanced off some pinkish underwear to make the room look a little greener, shot wide angle and reframed. Works a lot better I think. Unfortunately, Ben and Gracie had to eat the TV dinner again.