New website

The film's website, with a trailer, is now online.

This is now ridiculously out of date. Our own website will be coming soon...

42 Tapes

Looks like I've got my work cut out for me: 42 tapes on the shelf and at least 3 more to come.

Camera woe

Out of my camcorders, only one of them - a Samsung - has a microphone port, which I use to connect an external microphone for (hopefully) better sound quality. Specifically, I'm using the Røde VideoMic. Imagine the panic, then, when the Samsung camcorder suddenly comes up with an error message with the eject symbol and a letter 'D'. Of course, I eject the tape and even try inserting a new, blank one, but the error message persists.

I need a camera with a microphone for the location filming in France - tomorrow. I frantically search for a camcorder on eBay that accepts collection in person and which has both a microphone port and a shoe mount... (It's very surprising how many DV camcorders fail to have either of these immensely useful features.)

But it turns out that the error message is documented in the manual in the troubleshooting section; apparently it indicates a 'mechanical fault'. Its advice is not only to eject the tape but also take the battery out and put it back in again. After doing this, the camera works. The question is - how can a mechanical fault be fixed by simply removing the tape and battery and putting them back in again?

Green Screening

Most people on the web are probably familiar with 'Photoshopped' images, where an element of one image has been cut out and placed onto another image. Achieving this effect with moving images, however, is not quite so easy, because you'd need to cut out the desired element(s) from each and every frame. What you need is a consistent way of knowing which are the elements you want and which are the bits you want to cut out, and the best way of doing that is to have the desired elements (usually actors) performing in front of a plain colour background. All you have to do then is get the computer to detect that particular colour and make it transparent, and then have the new background (which could be a video itself) placed behind. This technique is called chroma keying.

You can achieve a wide range of effects and solve quite diverse problems using chroma keying. You can make actors appear to be at places that you can't practically visit; you can show news footage or weather maps behind them; you can make them appear to be flying or falling; you can have two or more clones of an actor side by side; and you can create complex 'composites' by layering various elements together, which were shot separately.

There are several complications, however. Since one particular colour is going to be removed, it won't do to have the actors wearing anything of that colour; it also won't do, ideally, to have slight variations in that colour - something which could come about through having shadows or even creases in the backdrop.

I did some testing with a green screen yesterday. I had some green muslin cloth stapled to the picture rail in my dining room; I opened the French doors to let in some daylight and then did some filming in front of it. The cloth was extremely creased and unevenly lit: the top of the screen was in more shadow than the bottom. I had no lighting equipment. Obviously, I wasn't expecting good results. I imported the footage into Final Cut Pro and used its chroma keying features to see what I could achieve. The results surprised me. Fiddling with the settings - widening the colour range and introducing a luma key - allowed me to get pretty good results despite the non-ideal conditions. There were a few difficulties: small amounts of shadowy green on the edges of me - but this can be rectified using the edge thin feature or with an extra 'matte choker' filter; an unusual 'shimmering' effect in the hair - which can be rectified by not keying on very dark luma; and the fact that I accidentally got the rest of the wall in shot (the bit above the picture rail) - but this can be solved with a so-called 'garbage matte'.

When we do green screening in the film, we will have soft box lighting so hopefully it will be even easier to get a good effect.

Production Looming

Hello,

The film will enter the production phase tomorrow, and Matthew is suitably and understandably busy, so he has asked me to keep the blog updated, and bring us back to the topic of film-making to counter the travel posts he's had recently.

I am Justin; I was originally only going to have primary responsibility for the editing of the film and a comparatively minor voice part, but my roles have expanded and I ended up helping to improve the ending of the script, and giving quite a bit of production assistance.

Land Ends Here

[non-serious point]
I discovered *to my horror* while attempting to drive to the Americas to visit, say, Colombia (as one does), that when I reached Land's End there was a body of water large enough to fill over 3,595 quadrillion [short scale] bath tubs in my path, and, upon phoning the Emergency Gargantuan Number of Bathtubs Hotline I found that the delivery charge was 68p more than I could reasonably afford.
[/non-serious point]

So anyway, I was in Land's End 'location scouting' (as spying on places you intend to film is referred to in the business), and was rather surprised by how much less commercialised it was, when compared to the impression I had been given by their advertising. Now, it just so happens that in the scene at Land's End, the characters reference the extent to which the place is commercialised. Whoops. Also potentially problematic is that the characters decide to leave essentially on the basis that there are far more people there than they were expecting. Yet when I got there, I could count the number of others around using only my fingers and toes (of which I currently have the average number). Whoops again.

It is worth mentioning that the part of Land's End beyond the (much less extensive than expected) commercialised part rivals Bangor in beauty. It would have been lovely to have my friend Sara (who, it so happens, has a minor role in the film) and her camera equipment with me when I was driving along the A30, at Bangor, and at Land's End, as I am sure the (excellent) photographer could have recorded the beauty of the places in an awe-inspiring manner. This is especially the case with the phenomenon on the A30 as, since the period before sunrise each day is transient, there will not be any further opportunities to record the event.