HD DVD / Randomness... : Film

First European HD DVD Title is Open Source

ptorr — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:03:00 GMT

Well, this should get the Slashdot folks on our side :-)

Andrew pinged me this morning about the Elephants Dream HD DVD relea s e in Europe. The name was familiar to me, but I didn’t know why... had it won an Oscar(R) or something? No, it’s because Elephants Dream is the world’s first “open source” movie that lets anyone download the source materials to re-create (or modify) the movie as you wish.

From the looks of things on their web site, the release uses a lot of the cool HD DVD features that just don’t exist in Blu-ray, like animated menus and picture-in-picture commentaries.

Anyway, check it out on their website!

(More real tech blogs to come... yes it’s been a while... what can I say...)

More Interlaced / Progressive Info

ptorr — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 02:12:00 GMT

Seems not everyone believes me when I say that for filmed content (24fps), 30i gives the same end result as 30p. Well, check out the latest review of the Samsung BD-P1000 player for a bit of a hint.

The review very clearly states (and you can confirm for yourself if you search the web) that the Samsung's "True High Definition" 1080p output is produced by, wait for it, decoding at 1080i in one chip and de-interlacing back to 1080p in another chip... which is exactly what your TV will do with the Toshiba output! They even use exactly the same 1080i decoder chip that the Toshiba HD DVD players use; the only difference is that the wire between the two chips is longer :-)

You can also find comments from reviewers that switching the Samsung from 1080p to 1080i produced no difference in visual quality... surprise, surprise (or not).

Don't let the "True High Definition" marketing fool you -- there is no difference for motion picture content. Sony even calls their 1080i equipment "true high definition", so it must be true (check the HDV Recording Format section).

The place where interlaced versus progressive really matters is when you are capturing footage. Footage captured at 30i (60 fields) will not look as good as footage captured at 60p, and will look "differently bad" than footage captured at 30p (the 30i might flicker and the 30p might be blurry).

But for 24p filmed content being output back on a TV from a 1080p source, there's no difference.

Oh, and the review of Blu-ray isn't very favourable... :-)

[Jim: Sorry if this seems like too much of a "marketing" post, but I think educating people about the facts around interlaced output is important and can save consumers a LOT of money]

Dead Man's Chest

ptorr — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 06:52:42 GMT

Just a quickie tonight -- I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest last night. Brilliant movie! It's a little slow to start, but it soon picks up with pretty much more of the same fun and adventure from the first one. The soundtrack is again brilliant, this time with Hans Zimmer taking Klaus Badelt's original Pirates themes and turning them up to 11. I think my favourite musical cue is near the start when Captain Jack Sparrow first appears; it's like the movie winks at you as you are re-united with an old friend.

If only it were "Coming soon to HD DVD"... <sigh> I think I'll be seeing this one again :-)

In other soundtrack-related news, I see that Halo 2 Volume 2 was finally released back in April... that took a while!

You MUST see this film!

ptorr — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 14:34:00 GMT

If you only see one movie this Valentine's Day weekend, you must see Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior.

This incredible film from Thailand is an exhilarating chase / stunt / fight movie about a poor kid from a remote village who must travel to Bangkok to recover a stolen Buddha's head. Imagine a pre-Hollywood Jackie Chan film crossed with a less-violent version of Bloodsport and you'll have some idea of what this movie is about. I won't go into details (read the summary on IMDB), but suffice it to say this was the first time in a long time where I went to a movie and the entire theatre was laughing and cringing and clapping throughout the whole movie.

It's truly impressive stuff.

How many hours does it take to film a lightbulb?

ptorr — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 11:51:00 GMT

A lot.

As you may know, I like to work on independent films as a hobby. I am currently working on another project as an Assistant Director, but I'll leave out details of that project until it's done.

Anyway, this blog post is not about my weekend hobby, but about shooting a video for work. Every few months, we have a "Product Unit Meeting," which involves getting everyone in the product unit together for a few hours to talk about what's been happening over the past few months, what's going to happen over the next few months, see some cool product demos, hear about customer feedback for the product, and so forth. There's a lot of information in the meetings, but management tries to keep them fun, too.

A while ago I was roped in to helping Andrew Clinick and a few other PMs do an impromptu video for a PU meeting, which had some semblance of a plot (ha ha ha) and was mildly interesting. It got a few laughs -- which was good -- but it wasn't really much to write home about in terms of filmmaking.

This time, our GPM (Group Program Manager) had recently returned from sabbatical and had the crazy idea that all the PMs should sing "Busy Busy Busy" from the Philadelphia Chickens book. Yeah right! Since she insisted that we do something, I offered to "take one for the team" and said I'd shoot a video clip for the song.

So how long did making the movie take? The song itself is less than three minutes long, but here's some rough guesses on the time it took to put the video together:

First, I spent almost a week just running over ideas "in the background," letting them sink in, getting a "vision" for the project, etc. The basic theme was to cut together footage of PMs doing real work (in meetings, on the phone, etc.), PMs running around the hallways like silly cartoon characters (my best piece of direction on the shoot was to tell people "Run that way... now back the other way... it's 'Scooby Doo!'"), and PMs goofing off doing nothing related to work at all. I also spoke with another PM, who had an interesting idea for the video: shoot a re-enactment of the meeting where the GPM announced we should do the song, then cut to a "dream sequence" of us doing the song, so that we did it but didn't actually have to do it live. The final idea was a combination of the two -- an initial meeting where the idea was unveiled, and the actual video clip of PMs doing various things.

Next, I spent a few hours storyboarding my ideas for shots (a "story board" is where you draw little pictures of what you want each particular shot or sequence to look like when it is filmed; kind of like a detailed comic strip to accompany the script). There were a couple of key sequences that I knew I wanted (and I wanted them to look a particular way), but there were also a bunch of other things that I just wanted basic footage of and I could try random angles etc. on the day.

After the planning had been done, we set up a couple of meetings with the PMs to actually do the shooting. All in all, I probably spent about three or four hours shooting -- including direction, brainstorming for additional scenes, goofing around, location changes, etc. -- for a total of about forty-five minutes of raw footage. Now that might sound highly inefficient -- taking four hours to get forty-five minutes of footage for a three minute video -- but it's actually quite good. Now I didn't have any lighting or set decoration or makeup or anything else to worry about... but still ;-). The "average" rate of shooting for a real movie is to shoot five minutes of screen time per day.

Now on to the hard part -- editing! They say a film is made in the editing room, and that's often true. The editor can set the tone, the pace, and even the plot of the film. They can make a scene suspenseful, or dramatic, or funny, or action-packed, just by the way they cut different angles together and shake up the dialogue. They can change the way a story is told by omitting (or just re-arranging) dialogue or other points of exposition. Anyway, my measly forty-five minutes of footage took upwards of twenty-five hours (yep, hours) to cut together the way I wanted it. The main reason it took so long was that the song is very fast, and I wanted lots and lots of very rapid cuts -- most shots last for four seconds or less -- and that took a lot of frame-by-frame tweaking in some areas, and just some very time consuming arrangements in others. I also wanted it to match the beat of the song (of course :-) ) and I added some other background music to the intro / credits as well. Oh, and something that probably no-one appreciated, but I took some time working on -- during the song, all the "live" audio from the original footage is muted, except for five key shots where I left it in. And one of those is cunningly timed with the music, although no-one will even know it ;-)

The final video -- including a Star Wars-like scrolling text intro, the meeting re-enactment, the video clip, and an epilogue -- weighed in at 4:57 and included approximately 130 different cuts (whew!). It was put together using Windows Movie Maker 2.1 (free with Windows XP Service Pack 2), which was actually much better than I had expected. It's obviously not a professional-level editing tool, and it has issues with frame-by-frame cuts and so on, but it does do the basics quite well and lets you do stuff like overlay audio and speed up / slow down footage.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the video. It seemed to be a crowd pleaser -- which was of course the purpose of the film -- and some of the sequences turned out how I wanted them to, but it could have been so much more ;-). It's just like when we ship a product to customers -- if we've done things reasonably well, customers love the product and think we've done a great job, but all we tend to focus on is all the cool things we had to cut from it and how we're going to make the next version so much better. Software development (and movie production) is no job for laurel-resters. Of course, I had a wonderful cast to work with :-) and they had some great ideas for scenes as well... and I'd like to thank my parents, my agent, my friends, my Expobar, ...

I would like to post the video for all to see, but unfortunately it is set to music which I obviously don't have permission to distribute.

And it would be pretty silly watching it without the sound.

Romance in Movies

ptorr — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 13:35:00 GMT

So today is "Let's-Make-All-The-Single-People-Feel-Bad-About-Themselves Day," but I'm not about to get upset over a simple chemical imbalance (courtesy of Slashdot).

An interesting thought: People get upset about violence in film and how it supposedly affects children and makes them think that violence is the answer to all problems. But what about sappy romantic films affecting children and making them think that the socially inept but good-natured friend always gets the girl / guy in the end?

Hollywood has been lying to us for years, and if we don't do something about it soon it's only going to get worse!

Gandalf is Dracula!

ptorr — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 04:12:00 GMT

Many of you probably know that Sir Ian McKellen played both Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Magneto in X-Men. But did you also know he plays Dracula in the Pet Shop Boys' 1988 music video Heart? I didn't, at least until I listened to the commentary on the new Pop Art DVD. You can check the video out for free on the Pet Shop Boys site -- go to the Pop Art Player page, click Videos, and then click Heart. It requires Flash and either Windows Media Player or Real Player.

As for the DVD, it contains all the Boys' videos (except for the newly-released track Miracles which you can see on the same website as Heart). Unlike their music (which is uniformly brilliant <g>), the videos are a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. There are the outstanding ones such as Being Boring, Domino Dancing, Single/Bilingual, and the award-winning Liberation (featured in the 3-D IMAX film Cyberworld (atrocious Flash-only site... grrrr)), but then there are the experimental / artsy ones like Left to my own Devices or Home and Dry that are truly only for the fans (or suitably interested film students). At one point Chris even jokes about how the video must have been designed to get heavy rotation on MTV. Not.

The commentary is pretty good at the start -- although it consists mostly of naming the labels of the clothes Neil is wearing, laughing at their poor dancing / acting skills, and pointing out how many videos feature them in cars -- but by the end the comments are pretty few and far between. The DVD is well worth it though if you are a fan, as it supersedes both Videography and Various and adds some new stuff in to boot.

Now I'm waiting for the Flamboyant single to be released...

Making Movies

ptorr — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 10:31:00 GMT

[This post is for "Da G-Playa" -- you know who you are ;-)]

There are two types of people in this world -- those who know what you mean when you say "Azeeeez!", and those who don't.

I'm currently working on my third independent film. (I say "my" but it's not like I've written or directed or acted in them... I just help out). Don't bother asking what they were called, because you won't have heard of any of them.

Yet :-)

The first film I worked on was shot in Melbourne, Australia and was entitled "The Thief." It was a short film directed by a friend-of-a-sister-of-a-friend as a way to get into film school (The Victorian College of the Arts, like many schools, likes you to have a "portfolio" of work to prove that you have enough talent to take up a place in the course). I got involved because my friend's sister had a computer problem one night, and when I went around to fix it the director (Yen) was there working on his script. We got chatting about the script and stuff, and I'd always wanted to work on a film "one day," so I got involved in the shoot with the initial role of handling continuity. Well one thing led to another and I ended up actually being a runner and a grip / lighting technician for the shoot.

[Note that I'll be providing links to the IMDB Glossary for many terms here, but they mainly apply to large productions; independent films tend to be staffed with smaller volunteer crews who may not actually have any professional experience. The roles are less clearly defined and people just end up doing whatever needs to get done.]

As a grip I was basically responsible for taking orders from the chief lighting technician (gaffer). Put up a light here; run some cable there; strike (turn on) a light, turn it off, turn it on again, move it left, up, back where it started; go get some ND or a gel (things you put in front of lights to change their colour or reduce their intensity). That kind of thing. I didn't have any kind of artistic input into the film, but I did a lot of leg work and helped to Get Stuff Done.

The second film I worked on was Bullfights and Blackmail (working title: The 18th Suspect) where I was billed as the Assistant Director. Most people know that the Director has overall artistic control of the film, but while the director is working with the actors to get the best performance, or with the Director of Photography (cinematographer) to get the right shot composition or other crew members on the current shot, the AD is doing stuff like getting organised for the next shot (making sure actors are ready; sets are dressed correctly; etc.) and (at least in this small production) doing things that a script supervisor might do such as making sure that all the angles for each scene have been shot; that no lines of dialog have been skipped; and so on. Again there is no real artistic input into the film, but it's grunt work that has to be done to let the artistic people (director, actors, DP, etc.) get their jobs done, and without it there'd be some pretty nasty holes in the final cut of the film ;-)

Of course, because this was a short film I also did a whole bunch of other stuff, including operating the camera crane, "dressing" sets, and doing more grip work (including, for instance, sticking lots of black plastic bags to the windows of a house to simulate night time, along with all the stuff mentioned before -- unpacking, setting up, moving, and taking down lights; putting up gels or scrims, etc.). I also did random silly stuff like:

Hide behind (and catch) a door that the leading actress slammed open so that it didn't bounce back and hit her or make a loud noise
Wrangle a large plant that obscured an actor's face when shot from the front door of a house to the car on the driveway
Applying duct tape to the main actor's sweater so he didn't get carpet burn when dragged across the floor

I learnt a lot from the DP and the gaffer on that shoot, and it was great fun working with the cast & crew.

The film I'm working on at the moment is actually a feature-length action movie, which is a big change from the previous two (short suspense / dramas). And I'm actually in charge of lighting (for some definition of "in charge" :-) ) as well as the usual hands-on stuff like operating the crane or being a dolly grip or doing other random stuff. I even had a short speaking walk-on role in one scene where I witness a crime and get knocked out by one of the bad guys... very interesting and funny stuff happened after that, but you'll have to wait until the movie is finished before I can tell you any more ;-).

But now I actually do stuff like decide where to put the lights and how to mess around with creating depth and definition and other artsy things. Of course I muddle through it for the most part (just like the JScript engine), getting input from the director and another crew member who has some formal training in lighting (but who is currently on vacation) but it's kind of cool. I have some idea of what might look good and can play around with the (very limited!) resources we have to try and get the best lighting for a given scene.

At the most basic level, you want to use contrast to differentiate foreground objects from background objects. Close one eye (so you lose your stereoscopic vision) and look around you. Notice how "flat" everything looks, unless there is a noticeable difference in brightness between objects? (Try this when you're a passenger in a car -- NOT the driver! -- and notice how scary it suddenly becomes since you can't tell how far away the car in front of you is). One common trick is to give actors a "halo" effect by shining light on them from behind (more-or-less facing towards the camera), called a "back light." If you look for it in TV shows or movies, you'll see it all over the place. Another trick is to have foreground lighting on the actor fade (eg) from left to right, but have the background lighting fade from right to left, so you get contrast on both sides but with some more variety (light-on-dark and dark-on-light). Maybe one day I'll actually take some formal classes on the subject.

And that's it! I just thought I'd write this up since enough people ask me what I do and now I can point them to this blog. I might even send a link to my parents! :-)

...And for those who don't know where "Azeeeez" comes from, it is a reference to the brilliant movie The Fifth Element. An archaeologist is trying to decipher some ancient hieroglyphics inside a temple, and he has with him a child named "Aziz" who is supposed to be reflecting light into the work area. Whenever Aziz falls asleep and lets the reflector fall down, the archaeologist says "Azeeeez - LIGHT!" Eventually he gets more light than he bargained for...