The Times are a-Changin' (part 1)

So I thought I'd throw together a bit of a segment on my blog to discuss my thoughts on changes that are going on in the cinema-making industry these days. Note most of this will come from an "indie" perspective - after all that's the world I'm currently in and I'd be pretty big pompous turd if I pretended to be making observations from an ivory tower. As per usual, my thoughts are just thoughts and definitely open to critique. But first, a little website business!

FUZZY IDEAS?

For a while now I've been calling this blog "LDLA," an acronym for my personal filmmaking creedo: "Live Digital, Love Analog." Unfortunately I often found myself trying to fit my content into the philisophical context of that ideal. Not working so much for me. The problem with that is that it's just the root of a personal philosophy and that's awfully muddy ground. Sometimes I stopped myself from writing about something because it was hard to be coherent in this context. Somehow, probably through self-criticism, it occurred to me that my ideas are often fuzzy. Well, a great man once said a thing about fuzzy ideas and I use that thought as a filter sometimes - if an idea is fuzzy I might be reluctant to talk about it. But then I thought a little about the Hegelian Dialectic - thesis, antithesis, synthesis - and realized that the only way to overcome fuzzy ideas is to put them through the forge of dialog. Even if that dialog is really just a schitzophrenic inner monolog. To which anyone who's ever read my ramblings can attest is mostly the case. So in the spirit of actually writing a little more often, even if what I have to say is complete and utter bullshit, I have re-christened my blog "Fuzzy Ideas," with much thanks to Jean-Luc Godard for the idea.

And now... On to the meat of this post:

Post-Production Wonderland

Last week was the 2011 NAB Show and there's much to talk about. I've waited a while and weighed my thoughts on what some of the offerings meant, but I think I can say that my initial feelings were true: 2011 is a landmark year for independent filmmakers in terms of post-production. There's a lot to be excited about, but the main thing is that the barrier to entry has been lowered.

The first big piece of news for me was that Adobe is offering a subscription model in CS5.5. If you're an Adobe fan (and I've spoken here before about my Adobe advocacy), this is very cool. Essentially, what cost $1,700 two weeks ago can be had for $85-129 now, depending on the subscription model. You can have Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium for as little as $85 a month with a year-long commitment. If you consider that Adobe has a product cycle of about 18 months this means you're paying $1,530 over that period. Of course, that's where the downside kicks in because if you own the suite outright, then it's only a few hundred dollars to upgrade you and keep you up to date for another year and a half. Or, if you're like some people and upgrade every other release, that gets you even farther. So, to be clear, the subscription model isn't cheaper in the long run; but for a filmmaker starting out $85 a month is a whole lot more digestible than $1,700 outright. And to be honest, Production Premium is the only way to get everything you need in one package (plugins and whatnot notwithstanding).

But there's more! And there may even be a reason here not to get a full subscription to CS5.5.

Another big piece of news was Apple's preview of FCPX (we don't say "X," it's "Final Cut Pro Ten"). Apple finally showed the world the complete, ground-up rebuild of Final Cut, built for 64-bit multiprocessing, etc., etc. It looks beautiful. Like it's made of Jolly Ranchers. I want to lick it. To a lot of people it also looks like it should be called "iMovie Pro" and that's not an unfair assertion. But if there's one thing that Apple does well (and actually there are several), it's user interfaces. OSX 10.7 is borrowing from iOS because there are some very natural things about iOS that translate to a better all-round user experience. Likewise, there are some things about iMovie that can probably be borrowed for an improved user experience. Yes, this means a learning curve, and No, I don't believe in change for change's sake; but evolution as a process is a good thing and sticking with old interfaces, models, and paradigms simply because we understand them is not good. Hopefully some good will come of this and Apple should be applauded for taking a bit of a risk. What is most concerning about FCPX though is how much we don't know. There's still no truly solid information about whether any of the suite survived and if it did not, how much of that functionality is integrated into the core application and how deep is it. Are Apple pandering to enthusiasts at the expense of the Pros? We'll soon find out I suppose, but one thing we know for sure is that the price for the core application is great. $299. Again, assuming - even if it isn't a full suite - that FCPX is a pro-level NLE, the barrier for entry has been lowered. Rejoice!

I love color. I like playing with it. It's one of my favorite things about post. It's one of my favorite things about cinema. I often use After Effects for color grading and recently I've picked up Apple Color. Last year, Black Magic came out with Da Vinci Resolve for the Mac at a cool Grand. That was awesome and I've been wishing I had the resources to use it ever since. Well, now they've come out with Resolve Lite! And it's free. As in free beer. It's limited, of course, but definitely not crippled. You can color SD and HD footage (no 2K or 4K, but if you're shooting on these professional formats be professional enough to fork out a little money for the real thing) and have a maximum of 2 nodes - which takes care of your primaries and secondaries; OR you could always use a 3-way corrector in your NLE for primaries and then use this for the heavy lifting. Anyway, once again on a professional platform, the barrier to entry is lowered.

Now none of these things will make you a master. There are a ton of people calling themselves editors, colorists, or even cinematographers because over the past few years it's been easier to approach parity with the pros in terms of provisioning. (I'm occasionally among these people). But having access to Resolve won't make you a master colorist and a cheap version of FCP won't make you the next Walter Murch. But you can get started on it and that's the point. Will the structure of the industry break down because of things like this? I doubt it. While the barrier to entry is lowered (sorry I keep repeating myself) the shit flows the way it does on a $100M movie for a reason and that won't change any time soon; but the paths into the business, and, more importantly, to expressing your own creativity, are growing.

The Trifecta

So I think there's a great, cheap, post-production suite setup now that can be had for chump change and I want to put it out there and get some feedback on it. Apple is very hard to ignore with their $299 price tag even if that doesn't include everything that's now in the suite. (By the way, the Total Cost of Ownership for a Mac-based editing system just went less than a PC. A $2,000 Mac with $300 of software is cheaper than a $1,000 PC with $1,500 of software). I love Adobe CS but the price tag is a bit hefty in comparison. There are things that you get for that though. For one you get After Effects which is a staple of my workflow. It beats Motion hands down for motion Graphics and is a great all-round compositing app. If you have to worry about anything in those realms that AE can't handle, then this budget filmmaking talk probably doesn't concern you. That said, I personally use After Effects 80% for color work, and not a lot of heavy lifting. It's nice to have when I need it for those things, but it's a big price tag and, as we see, I can do a reasonable amount of that color work for free now.

So my budget post-production suite is FCPX - Resolve Lite - and AE (as needed).

To me that makes so much financial sense. $299 for FCPX, $0 for Resolve Lite, and on the occasion that I really need it, After Effects on a monthly rental for $75 (which, unless it's a personal project, the client should pay for). These products will be out early this summer and I'm looking forward to trying this out. I may end up with a full-Adobe workflow in the end - after all, it is a really great suite - but I think this is a great and workable budget-minded combo. 

Heralds of Armageddon

Even though I don't think that any of this really spells doom for the filmmaking establishment, a lot of people talk as though it is. And honestly, while production is its own world and has a lot to deal with these days, the executive end of this industry really does need to wake up to the 21st Century. There're a lot of things changing that can't be stopped. In this spirit I give you this photo, aptly titled "Heralds of Armageddon."

A Word About Music and Licensing

Music has always been an important storytelling tool for movie makers. I'm not just talking about a score here. A score is a great thing because it is focused and tuned in to the emotional heartbeat of the moment. It engages the audience to believe in the world being built on screen and can enhance the performance being delivered. But a musical soundtrack is important as well. I know that in recent years the soundtrack has become more and more involved in the marketing of a movie - which I don't always see as a bad thing - but in the post-MTV era, musical montage is simply a part of our cultural thinking. While the worst case of this might be the latest jock rock hit playing on the new episode of some CW teen drama, the best case is something like "The Graduate," which just wouldn't be the same movie without Simon and Garfunkle.

When it comes to the 52 Weeks Project, stories I'm trying to tell in less than 3 minutes, a good song in the background  is important(or the foreground since there's generally no sound shooting Super 8). And, though I've done it before, and there are quite a few gems to be found, I don't want to spend a lot of time combing through Creative Commons libraries to find a song that kinda-sorta fits. I want to use songs that I know and love and have influenced who I am, how I think, and therefore the movies I make. I also want something the audience can identify with. This became abundantly clear while editing the first 52WP film when I put a great Guns n' Roses song under the video as a temporary track. It was really the ideal song for the film and I didn't want to take it off.

So I did some homework.

ASCAP, who license most music and have a huge repertory of licensable songs, apparently has a new media license that, all things considered, is quite reasonable. It may not be the right fit for every film project, but given that the main venue for these movies is going to be my website and I can measure how much gets played, it works out. It does somewhat limit me in terms of distribution (of course I can re-license appropriately if my needs change) and there is a little cost involved, but these facts are totally outweighed by the fact that for these 52 movies (and anything else only on my website, such as perhaps a web-only reel) I can use "real" songs (for lack of a better term). And the expense? Well, considering I'm not making any money, I'd have to get somewhere above half a million views for it to cost me much more than film, processing, and transfer for just 4 of these films. In other words it'll work out to about $5.50 a movie for the year. 

There's kind of an ethical point in this too. I could rant all day against the intellectually bankrupt concepts of intellectual property that we hold in this country and around the world, but I've always held that if the business models evolved to something reasonable we should support them. ASCAP notes that this new media license of theirs is an experimental license. I can already see ways in which it could use improvement (or perhaps I don't yet understand every aspect of it), but I do see an effort to be reasonable and I'm happy to work with it.

(Photo courtesy Flickr user Almogaver)

The Camera

Since I announced the 52 Weeks Project my mind has been occupied over which camera to use. My first thought, and my wishful thinking, had me immediately considering a refurbished camera from Pro8mm or Du-All camera that I knew would be well-serviced and modified with crystal sync. A camera running crystal sync would allow location sound and that seems like a good thing at first. But, Super 8 cameras tend to be a bit noisome and, given the constraint of straight-8 shooting there's enough that can go wrong in a take, especially with sound, that considering I only get one take, just doing all post in audio seems smarter. I'll record reference sound of course, but dialog will be ADR. Those cameras are also expensive. They're probably worth it, but I don't really have the excess to spend.

So I started looking at reasonably-priced but solid cameras. I decided to save money by looking primarily on ebay and doing my homework on the cameras. there were a couple of must-haves in a candidate:

• Manual Exposure - I plan to rely heavily on fast emulsions, like Kodak's Vision 3 500T, which weren't available when these cameras were made and so cameras with only auto exposure won't work right.
• A good zoom range with decent optics - I generally prefer shooting with prime lenses, but that's not so easy to do in the realm of consumer cameras, which Super 8 cameras are, albeit of another generation.
• 24 Frames Per Second - A lot of these cameras were manufactured in Europe and have 25fps but not 24. Something to be wary of. A note here - you can get away with shooting at 18fps and make a cartridge stretch. Generally I won't be doing that; mainly because it increases the cost of telecine and I'm trying to work out a package deal based on the mainstay which is 24.
• Single-Frame Exposure - Most of these aren't built for automated time lapse but a lot of them were built to do single frame for animation and whatnot. Over the course of 52 weeks I may get bored and decide to do a stop-motion holiday special, or decide I'm the next Ray Harryhausen. More likely I'll decide on a manual time-lapse for a film. In either case I'd like the option.
• A useful filter threading - Since I'll be using fast film to cover my indoor bases I'll need to rely on neutral density filters in daylight situations. While I may at some point endeavor to rig a mattebox or something, I'll probably start off with circular screw-on filters.

The camera I was first drawn to, the Leicina Special, is a beautiful camera but doesn't have manual exposure. I began looking at the Canon 1014, which is nice but doesn't really justify the price increase over its little brother. So I started looking at the Canon 814XL-S which is a very well spoken-of camera and, being from the early 80s, a relatively new model. In the end, I compromised on a deal I couldn't pass up - a slightly older Canon 814 Autozoom that I found for under $100. I've shot a little with the 814 before and, assuming the one I just bought is in good condition, it's a really good camera; not the best Super 8 out there, but it meets my needs and should hold up to the task before it.

I should receive it next week and I'll run a test roll through it. As soon as I get that back I'll be posting it here, unless it turns out to be total trash. Until then, I'll be continuing to look at labs to handle the project; and that should be the topic of my next post.

(photo courtesy of flickr user Callum Rice)

Introducing The 52 Weeks Project

I've been thinking about some things. For a lone filmmaker, shooting analog can be expensive. I'm not making a general statement that shooting film is too expensive or that digital cinema cuts acquisition costs because on a production of any real budget that's simply not true. But, since my deep preference is to shoot film, it's not so easy to just pick up the camera and go shoot something. At the end of the day, though, I'd rather shoot Super 8 than HD. It's as simple as that. Super 8 film, when you include processing and transfer, still isn't the cheapest thing on the planet, but if you're smart about it you can shoot over two hours for under $2500. Now, a lot of people will look at that and say, "I can get a DSLR for that and shoot two hundred hours, or two thousand." Well, that's a big part of my problem with digital cinematography: people shoot too much. I understand that practice makes perfect, but the more there is of something, the less value it has. Shoot too much, and there's a commoditization effect that begins to creep in that really devalues the work. But, if you can shoot judiciously, deliberately, distilling each moment to your creative will - not whim, but will - then I reckon you're doing something right. So the question becomes, "How do you shoot the least as much as possible?"

The 52 Weeks Project is my challenge for 2011. Each week I intend to produce a  2 - 2 1/2 minute movie. If that sounds suspiciously like the duration of a Super 8 cartridge, well, that's because that's my film budget. How do you make a 150 second movie with 150 seconds of film? You shoot 1:1, in sequence, and edit in camera. So these will be short, concise, and probably very imperfect movies. But they will challenge me to think things through, shoot deliberately, and get to the heart of things in very short order.

The Ground Rules:

• 1 Movie will be shot each week and released as quickly as possible - no excuses
• Each movie will be no more than 1 cartridge long
• No chapters - no stringing movies out across multiple cartridges
• Editing is done in-camera - no cutting
• Digital post processing such as titles, color grading, and VFX are allowed
• I will produce, direct, and shoot each movie; but it is acceptable to have other writers
• I will try to make each movie unique, covering a variety of subjects, genres, styles, etc.
• I will break all of these rules, including this one, but never more than once in a single movie.

That's it. More news and updates will be coming on this blog as I progress towards shooting. I'll release the movies on this website as they complete. And finally, I invite other filmmakers to join me in this challenge. I think it's going to be very difficult and very rewarding.

(Photo courtesy Steven Kamenar, Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution License, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunroom/with/3277145747/)