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What is the safest way for a film maker to become a millionaire?

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1. Save on food
   Budget properly for catering. The more so if your crew is underpaid. The more so, the longer the shoot is.
   Doesn’t cost much more, but does wonders for crew morale.
2. 16 hour days, 5 days a week
   Just because this film is the No.1 priority for you, doesn’t mean it is for everyone else on set. Not only does the crew have a right to a life as well, and not only do they need to be able to work on their next film, but overworking the crew makes you liable for accidents that may – and eventuall will – happen.
   If all these arguments don’t count: My experience is that 6 days with 16 hours are not more productive than 5 days with 10 hours.
3. Concentrate on the money shots
   While nice for marketing and your show-reel, the audience will only sit through your film if it is good in its entity, not just some scenes.
4. Who needs a DP – I can buy a camera instead?
   An experienced cameraman will free you to concentrate on telling the story by giving your actors good instructions. An experienced cameraman will speed up the production by knowing what to shoot, what will work visually, which lenses to use, which stock to use, and many more things that you have never heard of. more…

For the financially challed film producer, Good Music often is out of reach. There are many so-so sources for CDs full of royalty free music (we own a huge library of those and hardly ever use it – unless we need something cheesy).

Then there are places where you can preview and download music for a fixed fee per piece (Shockwave Sound and Q Music being my preferred ones), and then there is our dear Kevin MacLeod. He offers his collection of music free, as long as he gets credit in the film. If, for some reason, you cannot or do not want to credit him, you can pay a little fee (30 USD).

And now music artist Moby has made his own mini-website where he published over 60 tracks that can be used free of charge for non-commercial productions (commercial productions have to pay a standard fee, the full amount of which will be donated to a good cause). Here’s the incredibly blurry announcement:

One thing I do and will miss when editing video/digital film are those flash frames. The few frames that are exposed when the camera gets up to speed, and when it stops again, the gate is checked, the mag is changed, the film is laced.

As a side line, we do conversions of 8mm films and videos. The other day I transferred a roll that consisted almost entirely of flash frames. Add some Mussorgsky to it (via Q-Music) and we have my very first YouTube upload:

And if you need that video in full quality, drop me a line…

Another thing of the past are burned frames – sometimes the film would get stuck in the projector, and the projector´s lamp being quite strong, would burn the film. Here are two examples from the past:

It’s probably been in the cards for a while, but we have ordered our Red One camera. Sometime before the end of the year (fingers crossed), we’ll be able to churn out pictures at such high resolution that they can be used for digital cinema. We’ll be able to use variable frame rates. I’ll be able to chose from many different lenses. We’ll be able to tell our stories better.

Just to give you an idea of the firepower of this camera, look at this picture, showing proportionally the full size of the Red picture, and in comparison that of Standard Television 4:3. It is about 6 times the resolution of even High Definition Television. And it meets or succeeds the specs for digital cinema (Norway is aiming to become the first country in the world to be completely digitized in cinemas.)
But it is not stopping here. Red One is also a very low-noise camera. Here is a 1:1 crop from an image exposed at ISO 2000. Click on the image to see it in full. (Read more about this here.)

This is nothing short of amazing, and will enable us and many other documentary makers to tell stories that simply couldn’t be told before. Brace yourself for a whole new world of clarity.

For comparison, here is the same 1:1 crop at a modes 320 ASA/ISO:

And for further comparison, here’s a framegrab from our current camera, a Sony DSR-570, which is the best DVcam money can buy. Properly exposed. You’ll see noticeably noise in the background. More than the Red even pushed to the extremes.

(Framegrab from our Documentary “Words and Shadows” with the former prime minister of Norway, Mr. Odvar Nordli.)

Here’s an interesting example of what you can do with high-speed filming (though I would have used more fill- and eyelight):

Action Figure slow motion video from Stig Nordas on Vimeo.
I am looking forward to learning, and to push myself to new borders.

Doug writes a very interesting post on how his company lost a bid by not using a video.

While I have to agree that video is a powerful tool, I would like to make some remarks:

For that video to be powerful, it has to be well made. A badly made video hurts more than a badly written text. But a well scripted, well executed video can convey information – and emotion – more efficiently than written text can.

Rather than Video >= Images + Stories I would suggest a formula along the lines of value of a video = min (story; technical quality; execution). It’s the weakest link that defines the potential of your video.

There are many companies that call themselves “video production”, and even more people with a video camera. Video cameras can be had for little money, simple editing programs come with all modern OSes. While it may be tempting to go for a cheap in-house solution, as always quality costs.

Different clients need different presentations

Not all clients appreciate “meat”. One of the first bids we did was for a state controlled company. After the presentation we were told (unofficially), that our presentation was the most creative, most exciting. But, in the end they went with a production company that is used by most other state companies. They got an alright, off-the-shelf video, that is watchable. But not memorable.

While our solution promised to actually excite the audience, it also would have been a non-standard way of presenting. Our client was not prepared to take the risk of doing something unusual. So, they got a run-of-the-mill presentation, well executed, passionless. Something our client could safely show to his boss and say that he o.k’ed it.

Reading in the web time

I don’t think that people read less than before. It is just that the amount of data people have to process has exploded. I actually think that we read more, but we skim also more than before.

Derek Powazek has written a great post on how to work on events. While written for stills cameras, the piece also applies to video shooting. (via) Just replace “flash” with “on-camera light”.Talking of which, I try hard to avoid using them. They just kill the lighting mood, and the light comes from the same angle as the camera, removing any texture. In the past 5 years I have used a on-camera light on 1 occasion, for about 3 seconds.If you have to use on-camera lighting, try to soften it. Either with a gel in front of the lamp, or use a softer fixture, such as a miniKino, or a Litepanel.

What is a career in TV likely to look like?

In case you didn’t know, the Hollywood writers are on strike. For those of you who are unclear exactly why (like me) This 5-minute video lays out very clearly why.

So, there is not really a reason to get angry. They are simply trying to protect their future.
(via)

Sometimes you have to produce photographs from films, so-called frame grabs. In Final Cut Pro this entails several clicks for each frame, something that becomes tiresome after a while. Also, if your material is anamorphic, you have to resize it in a separate programme, adding yet more clicks.Enter Movie Frame Grabber, a simple programme for the Mac.You drag a QT into the blue window, then you chose the frame you want, hit “Save Frame” and you are done.Much easier than using QT or FCP.One thing I noticed – and I am torn between calling it a feature or a bug – is that each frame gets exported in the same size as your windows is sized. I.E. When you have a 600×400 QT file, but your window is, say 605×605, you get a square picture. The good thing is that Movie Frame Grabber does a decent job of uprezzing. So if you need some quick framegrabs, this is a big time saver.

Wishes

What I would love are the following future features:

• De-interlacing
• Automatic naming and numbering of exported frames.
• Option to export in native QT size (with option of having 16:9). Option of having 25%, 50%, 200%, 400% sizes. Throw in some advanced resizing calculations, and this could become a powerful tool that people would spend money on. This reviewer included.
• Display of current window size.
• A Text saying “Drop QT file here” instead of the blue screen — this threw me off at first; blue screen to me suggested that I would have to plug in a DV source.
• Support for keyboard control. Space = start/stop. Arrow left/right = one frame advance/back.

That said, great little – and free – program.(Review at Macupdate.)