Daughter of God

Brooklyn, New York

I’ve started translating DOG from FCP to AE. I’ve found a free script to do this, which saved me from having to spend $500 bucks on Automatic Duck. Much as I would like to own AD, I’ll have plenty of other chances to spend money in the weeks ahead.

I’ve got act 1 in AE now.

In a previous episode, I discussed relighting the red corridor. I’ve done several tests so I know that there is a look I’ll like, that this effect is going to work. Following Stu’s order of operations, (see below) I’ve stepped back to fixing image flaws and adding visual elements like box labels, posters etc. The red corridor requires significant motion graphics intervention, so it’s a good place to start.

I’ve applied my limited knowledge of After Effects to rebuild the reaction shot of c as she opens the door for j. This shot is flawed in that the cabin window behind her did not have CTO applied to match the tungsten lights used in the shot, so there’s some blue light bouncing around. Also, though a polarizer was taped to the glass, the waves outside are slightly overexposed. Multiple NDs would have done the trick.

Here’s the original shot before repair. The waves outside the window are hard to see, they are about 1 to 2 stops over exposed.
Also, the reflection from the window on the cabinet is very blue. That will be adjusted when I color correct.

My approach to this situation may not be ideal, but it seems to work for now.

I’ve broken the image into 5 layers. The unaltered image is the background. On top of that are three layers pre-composed – the new waves, the window opening with surrounding wood trim and on top of those two is the shoulder of christina that passes in front of the window. Finally on top of everything is the door frame, (which eventually will have some red light falling on it when I get to re-lighting).

Here’s the shot after. Notice the brass door latch (lower left) which has a bit of christina’s dress showing through.
As she moves to the right, we see the waves through it. That’s part of the top most door frame layer.

Here’s the pre-composition showing the three mid ground layers. Black areas are transparent when placed over other layers.
The black lines are masks for rotoscoping the shoulder as it moves across the window. As the shape of the dress and position of
the shoulder change over time, these masks must be animated. That’s the time consuming part. The blue latch mask shown
here is not needed, it’s been applied to the doorframe layer discussed above.

The waves I’ve composited are not the most exciting, and maybe that’s ok. There is actually a lot going on in this scene already what with the dead uncle showing up bathed in hellish red light and all. Because I’ve done all the heavy lifting with the animated masks, I could just as easily slip in one of the subtle apocalypse shots such as the cliche flooded empire state building or wrecked cruise ship. We’ll see.

I have 5 of these reaction shots to roto and reconstruct. C’s hair is not a trivial issue by the way, that also has to handled if it passes in front of the window. Most likely I’ll just trim out the loose strands from the whole scene so no hair ever passes in front of the window. Otherwise I’ll have to recreate them from scratch because the original hair that passed in front of the window is totally blown out from the blooming light.

Stu Maschwitz suggests onlining in After Effects and provides the following order of operations…

1. remove DV artifacts (DOG was shot in HD, not DV)
2. Add any visual effects elements (you are here)
3.  optimize the shot (technical wizardry involving color and contrast)
4. relight and change object colors (red hall, enhance soft focus with light tricks, etc.)
5. gradients, diffusion and other on-lens effects (may not applicable to DOG)
6. vignetting and other in lens effects (maybe not)
7. perform color correction (a big deal)
8. simulate film stock (maybe)
9. dissolves, fades and transitions, with titles (lots of these)
10. perform specific color corrections, resizing and sharpening for specific output formats (DVD for now, but could try a film out too after all this work).

Currently, we are at step 2 on this sequence. Some of the steps we can skip, that leaves us with about 5 major steps. I’ve also got to master the sound, so that’s 6 (major) steps to finishing.

So why write about this process, why not just dedicate all my energy to doing it?

Doing these posts is an attempt to slow down time. When I can consistently articulate what’s happening, I feel more efficient. Not only am I taking stock of my own progress, but I am clarifying what’s most important, what has to happen next. After writing my report, the time I spend working is focused and productive. I am then working super fast, which is in effect slowing down time.

Got a call from my brother and he likes the blog style, thinks it would be of interest to other filmmakers. I think so too and I wouldn’t mind including a “making of” micro-documentary when DOG is finally released. These posts are a start on that. At this stage however I am not quite ready to expose my completion process to the general public. Finishing this project is not exactly a cake walk, so I’ve only invited my top supporters and allies to tune in. Knowing that my peeps are with me week to week keeps me going.

With luck, many of us will collaborate on future projects. Sharing these concepts builds our collective knowledge of what’s possible.

Stay tuned…

Dan Kelly

Brooklyn, New York

It’s actually 7/23 today, but I want to make a entry for 7/22, so here it is.

I got up and jumped into re-calibrating the Matrox MXO so I could count on the color. As a bonus, I am able to down convert the HD so I can see it on my little JVC NTSC field monitor at the same time. After tweaks and tweaks, the color on these two reference monitors is close-ish, so i feel prepared to move forward with effects and color.

The monitors. On top right is Apple Cinema Display (ACD) and top left is the JVC field monitor, both running off the Matrox MXO.
Notice the difference in color between the (hopefully) accurate top monitors and the laptop screen on the bottom. $1000 well spent!

Now cue the DV Rebel book. I can’t say enough good things about it, however it’s pulled all the wind from my sails.

Here’s a bit of background. There’s offline editing and online editing. Offline means cutting the picture and sound to the point where it’s about right. Mock-ups are used where more complicated motion graphic effects are going to go and there’s some initial color correction. Online is finishing – mixing the sound (often with professional ears to help), finalizing all effects, turbo charging the color correction to get the look desired and then rendering out a master finished movie.

I wrapped my offline in the spring or thereabouts, I found a email to Jonathan who’s doing some 3D FX work for the project that I locked picture on March 21. I had thought that I had done some of the online work as well. I started going for sound lock, recording foley and generally getting ready for the effects work by giving myself a crash course in After Effects. I was also doing my usual editing and production to pay the bills, imagine that.

Fast forward to yesterday. The DV Rebel book has some sage advice about onlining in AE and not FCP to maintain the fidelity of the original footage. I’m trying to figure out if it applies to this project. If so it means a significant retooling effort. I am pretty fluent with FCP as one would expect after 6 years with it. If AE were an airplane and I were attempting a landing, I might not survive. I can fly it sort of but don’t expect me to pull any barnstorming just yet. So the prospect of moving the entire project to AE is a little scary, seeing as I am already 45 years old and DOG has taken up the last two. So I’ve got to think about this more, yes indeed. Specifically my HVX footage was shot direct to disk as Quicktime through FCP and as MXF files to P2 cards. Did FCP ding the image at recording time? Does the codec of my files (DVCPRO HD) get compressed on rendering in FCP?

If you are still reading this, congrats! I am sorting out the geeky issues here because I have to be clear when I post questions to the 4 or 5 on-line communities who deal with this esoterica. It should be clear by now that making a movie is more than having great ideas. It’s work! A frothy soup of diverse disciplines. Persistence. Madness even.

So that was yesterday and a little bit of today. I have framed the questions and now it’s time to find the answers. I just want to get back to the rotoscoping I started monday. With luck I’ll be there this afternoon.

Brooklyn, New York

Many of you know I’ve been working on a short movie for the past couple of years – DOG or Daughter of God. Many of you are part of this project.

Director’s friend: “So, how’s the movie?”

Director: “It’s great, shut up!”

This question is basically a horror show for someone who hasn’t camped in over a year. It creates an immediate impulse to return to the dark cave of my studio and light the cold fire of flat screens once more, to summon and commune with the characters that populate the only reality that matters.

Over the past 3 months I’ve been setting and missing deadlines for finishing. It’s not only doing the work required but discovering what that work might be. Along with the daily stack of creative decisions, I’ve got to identify, acquire and implement resources like gear, software, techniques and workflow. Simultaneously I’ve got to maintain a positive attitude and avoid distractions like friends and family.

” It’s great, shut up!” is no longer satisfying to me, it lacks a certain detail and depth.

I’m into documenting the birth of DOG to share the discovery and to enhance my focus. This process is fascinating and highly weird to me. If you have no idea what the heck I’m talking about but are curious, this is for you!

Every week or so I’ll be posting fireside chats. To get and stay on this list you have to follow the rules. 1) I am really, really busy so don’t reply with chatty emails or call me. We can catch-up later. 2) Don’t offer helpful suggestions or opinions unless you know what the heck you are talking about. I don’t care about your brother-in-law’s sister who dated George Lucas.

This is a hard boiled narrative, straight up. You must confirm your subscription by replying.

Ok, it’s your move.

Much love,

Brooklyn, New York

Ok so this week I’m diving into rotoscoping. That means isolating moving things from the background so that they can be independently manipulated. It’s the red hallway effort, that is changing the lights in the hall between cabins to a red submarine type color. Here’s why…

1) Red lights were used to indicate night time aboard submarines, to maintain dark adaption and for running on batteries (before nukes). Red light is hard to see from a distance. The halls in the DOG boat are darkish even in daytime so they would need to have lights on 24 hours. The engineer has only energized the emergency circuit to conserve power, which uses red lights.

2) Red is a swell color for our first look at joe, and for gerry’s visit from christina. it suggests the red smokey wombs of low birth which hooks into buddhism somewhere as referenced by PKD. it suggest blood and crisis. it’s sexy!

3) Red helps the speedup of c’s knocking at g’s door.

There are about 18 scenes that include the hall, 8 that need heavy frame by frame roto work, 6 that need a simple doorframe mask and 4 that need an animated mask to cover the grid of a screen door.

Here’s c meeting j at the door. Notice the colored lines, those are masks defining which part of the image is transparent.
As the characters move, the masks have to move too, sometimes frame by frame (24 frames for each second of video).

As I was laying out roto splines in After Effects sunday, I started thinking about color correction and how to get my 3 way color correctors from FCP into AE. I have completely color corrected the entire movie in FCP, but the motion graphic work requires that I bring clips into AE and handle the color correction there. Yesterday I cranked on research and discovered a couple of things. FCP 3 way color correctors can’t be translated to AE. So I am going to have to redo some color correction (perhaps all of it – yikes!) There’s a well reviewed corrector that works in AE and FCP, called Colorista from Red Giant ($200). Apple’s color is also an option, but the learning curve is not one I am willing to deal with at the moment. One thing also seems apparent, before I go to any farther with color correction, I had better get an accurate monitor solution. Last spring I was thinking about Matrox’s MXO which allows an Apple Cinema Display to display HD accurately ($900). I already own two ACDs, and the new Panasonic monitor that I like is around $5k, a budget breaker in these low income times. The Matrox has great reviews, so that’s what I picked up yesterday at BH. I also stopped off at Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of Stu Maschwitz’s hilarious DV Rebel Guide. I burst out laughing a couple times reading Stu’s book while waiting for the author of Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein to speak, but by 7:30 I realized that I had the date wrong and she had already been there a week prior.

Anyway a good day of discovery all in all. Stu’s book rocks but his movie “Last Birthday Card” which is included on a DVD with the book is awful – except for the amazing homebrew special effects. No matter, his ideas are sharp and techniques super useful, he even has another option for my color correction dilemma.

I fired up the Matrox box this morning and it seems to be working. Not a moment to soon… If I set this sucker up correctly, then my earlier color treatments are way dark. So it’s all good! Betterer and betterer.

Fuzzy shot of the new gear. The mxo is the box on the table with the blue light.