Starting the next section

Well, last night it was raining and I was tired, so I didn't go to Gardel's. Hopefully I can round up a few people to go with me next month. Instead, I actually spent 1/2 hour exercising, which was something I hadn't done since my back got messed up last year. Here's hoping that my energy level will start to rise with regular exercise.

Anyway, I did start on "Mother In-Law Zombie", as promised. The noisy night footage in "Corporate Zombie" still didn't look that great, but I'll come back to it later.

I finished color correcting the first scene of MILZ, and it looks pretty good. I spent most of last night trying to come up with the "look" for this section of the film. Each section has a different look to it: Rock Zombie is super-saturated and bright, like an 80's music video. Corporate Zombie is diffused and has a two-strip technicolor look. Mother In-Law Zombie seems to work best as a 70's 16mm warmish/magenta desaturated bleach-bypass look. It's kind of bleak looking, but seems to work well with the dark comedy tone of the piece. In trying to increase the 16mm look, I actually added some film grain to the first scene. Looking back at the render this morning, however, the grain just looks like noise, so I took it out and started a re-render before I left for work.

Tonight is band practice for The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad, so I probably won't get much done on the movie. Tomorrow we play our CD release party at The Patterson Bowling Alley, which should be fun (come see us play!!!!). But, again, I won't have much time to work on the movie, since we're meeting at around 4PM to practice one last time and get all of our equipment loaded up. But Sunday should be productive, hopefully.

Ryan

Small fixes

I didn't get home until about 7:30PM last night, and then had dinner. Started working on the movie at about 8:30PM.

All I really did was go over the renders from the day before and fix up a few small things.

The night shots in Scene 11 were still too grainy. I messed with the levels some more, and then tried a different denoiser that seems to have worked better. I also added some "film grain" back into the shots so that there would be a uniform amount of fine grain in the shot, instead of some small grain and some big clumpy stuff that is left over after the denoiser process. It seems to look much better now.

There were some other minor color corrections that needed to be made, and also a shot that had been film-looked incorrectly. I hadn't specified After Effects to not deinterlace this shot (which is does by default), so it was double-deinterlaced by After Effects and the film motion plugin, which made it look really jerky.

Started rendering at about 10:30PM. Didn't get a chance to look at the footage this morning, but to be honest, I'm pretty burned out on this segment, and if it still doesn't look right I'm just going to leave it for later and move on to "Mother In-Law Zombie".

I haven't decided whether to go to the networking event at Gardel's tonight. Judging by their menu and the 360-degree quicktime on their website, it seems like a fancy restaurant, and I'm not sure if I feel like getting dressed up tonight. I guess I'll see how much energy I have left when I get home from work.

Ryan

As expected....

As expected, last night I ended up tweaking all of the stuff I'd done over the weekend. Bits and pieces of each scene weren't quite right. I also didn't get home until later because of various errands that I needed to run.

--There was something in the background coming in and out of the mask in the "Rock Zombie" overexposed shot. So I had to tighten up the mask in that area.
--A night shot in scene 7 of "Corporate Zombie" wasn't dark enough, and didn't match up with the rest of the shots.
--The night shots in scene 11 that I de-grained looked too blurry, as a result of using too much "temporal correction". I ended up reducing the brightness of these shots to get rid of some of the grain, and then removed most of the "temporal correction" and just used the regular noise reduction.
--Scene 14 was too bright overall. It's supposed to be an intimate dinner, but it just didn't look atmospheric enough, and the red in part of the backdrop was really grainy as a result of it being too bright. I dropped the gamma down on the entire scene, which got rid of the grain and made everything look more shadowy and atmospheric.
--The closeup of the character in scene 15 that I mentioned in the previous entry didn't quite mesh with the rest of the shots. I ended up changing the color slightly and also increasing the gamma and decreasing the brightness. A few other shots needed work on that scene, including closeups of the zombie, which were too bright (his pasty white face was overexposed). I'd also tried putting a steadi-shot plugin on some handheld shots at the end, but the plugin ended up making it shake in a different, more distracting way, so I just took it off.

These are all rendering right now. I had to start the render later than usual because of a lightning storm; I always unplug my computer during intense lightning storms, just to be safe.

I also won't get home until much later than usual tonight because of a call I have to go on in Reisterstown. This is the only client from my days as a roaming field tech that I still visit. They're an older couple, and they didn't want anyone other than me to help them with their computer problems, so I still go out there once a month. They're nice enough, and I get paid overtime on top of my salary, but it's a long drive, and I probably won't get home until 8PM, which sucks. Plus, by the time I get home I'm hungry and tired, and usually not too motivated to start working on the movie. But at the very least I should be able to check the renders and fix up anything that still doesn't look right.

Tomorrow evening there is a film/TV networking event at Gardel's Supper Club, followed by a screening of a locally-made film. The place seems pretty nice. Is anyone else thinking of going to this?

Ryan

4th of July Weekend

Just to reiterate, I'm only updating this blog on weekdays during my downtime at work, so as to not take away from time I could be spending on "Livelihood".

On Friday evening I helped out Brock Fanning with some post production work on his short film, "Bullet Clowns". Nikc Miller and I acted in this film, and it was fun to see us ham it up in the early cut. We might very well be the two best actors in Baltimore.... or not.

Brock, always the considerate gentleman, brought over dinner, and we sat around and ate and talked music for a while (he's an amazing classical/jazz guitarist). After dinner I gave him a brief primer on After Effects, and then we sat down and brightened, darkened, and tinted various shots from his film.

Brock left at about 9PM, after which I spent about an hour working on "Livelihood".

Other "distractions" this weekend:

-- Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad practice with Nikc on Saturday night. Our CD release party is this Saturday at the Patterson Bowling Alley (come see us - free Pabst Blue Ribbon!), and it seems like the set we're playing is going to be pretty solid (a set which includes my solo rendition of the "Facts of Life" theme song, an overly-dramatic version of "Golden Slumbers", and a death-metal song about a killer unicorn). My drumming is slowly getting better, and at this rate, I might actually not suck in a few months!
-- A late birthday dinner with Dad, Julia, Heather, and Brendan on Sunday evening at John Steven's in Fell's Point.
-- Finally getting to see "Land of the Dead" with Tracey on Sunday afternoon.
-- Fireworks and a cookout with Tracey and her friend Tracey Sunday evening.

I also bought a new editing chair after seeing "Land of the Dead" on Sunday. I stopped into Staples with Tracey, and saw a $200 chair on clearance for $60. My neck and elbows had been hurting lately from sitting too long in the worn out chair I'd been using (which was purchased at Maryland State Surplus about three years ago for $15). I'd been looking for one with padded armrests for a while, but they were always too expensive. Not only does this one have nice padded armrests, but it also has a lumbar support design, and all sorts of fancy adjustment options. Plus, it's dark gray, and it looks vaguely like a chair you'd find on the bridge of a Starfleet ship.

--

I got a lot done this weekend, in spite of the holiday activities. I managed to complete the color correction and special fx work on "Corporate Zombie". Most of the work went pretty smoothly, but there were a few hangups that really slowed me down:

1. There is a scene (scene 10) where the main character's head gets punched off, and he's crawling on the grass looking for it while the other two characters in the scene are yelling at each other. I had originally intended to green-screen this, but realized before shooting the scene that the grass would be too close to the color of the greenscreen fabric, and thus would also key out. So, we just had him crawl around without anything over his head; I assumed that I could key out the back of his black head fairly easily with a luma (brightness) key. This turned out to be an incorrect assumption. In the end, I had to go frame-by-frame and rotoscope out his head, which was extremely tedious.

2. The next scene consisted of some night shots of the main character sneaking back to the house. We actually shot this at night, and as a result, the shots were pretty grainy and slightly underexposed. So I spent a lot of time trying to boost the brightness and clean up the grain without losing any detail in the shots. I've since discovered that given our limited lighting package (i.e., not having huge floods like they do in Hollywood) it is much easier to shoot an outdoor night scene during the day and then make it look like night than it is to actually shoot the scene at night.

3. In the final scene, there was a wide shot of one of the main characters that just looked like crap, mostly because of bad lighting. During editing, I used this shot instead of a better-lit closeup because the camera was on the right side of "the line of action", while in the closeup the camera was on the wrong side. After trying for at least an hour to make the shot look decent, I finally went back to the original edit and tried the closeup again. And, even though it is technically incorrect, it looked fine. So, I just dumped the wide shot and used the closeup.

4. In one of the previous entries, I mentioned some shots in "Rock Zombie" where the background was massively overexposed. As I said, I managed to edit out all but one of them, but the remaining shot could not be taken out and was going to have to be keyed or rotoscoped so that the background could be replaced with some non overexposed background. I went out on Sunday at about 3PM and shot the background, which was basically the parking area in "downtown" Hamilton as seen from the doorway of The Top Floor. After shooting this at various exposures, I went home and began the work of keying out the shot. Unfortunately, all attempts to key out the bright white background also removed parts of one of the actors' foreheads, which was also overexposed. So, once again, I had to go frame-by-frame and rotoscope out the two actors in the shot. This took about three hours, and was extremely frustrating work. But, at least now it looks good.

All of this is currently rendering on my PC at home (as it has been all night). Hopefully it will all look good, and "Corporate Zombie" will be complete. Unfortunately, one of the main problems with "After Effects" is that you can only preview a small amount of your footage in real-time. It basically renders the footage to RAM, so the more RAM you have, the longer your real-time renders will be. I have 1GB of RAM, and can usually get about 10 seconds of full-quality video to play in real-time. There are two problems with this:

1. I can usually only see two or three shot sequences in real-time, depending on the length of the shots. This gets to be a problem when color correcting, because there will often be more than two or three different shots in a row, which makes it hard to match everything up. Even though I can toggle between still frames of each shot, for some reason this sometimes isn't enough; still frames from three or four shots might look great in sequence, but then when the shots play in real-time, something jumps out that just doesn't look right.

I also have the option of rendering to RAM in draft mode, but this reduces the quality by about 1/2, obscuring a lot of the fine details, and making it fairly unreliable (especially considering that this will be shown on a big screen, so that every little detail, and every little mistake, will be much bigger and much more more obvious than it would be on a small TV).

2. It takes just as long to render something to RAM as it does to render it to the hard drive (about 1 hour per minute of video). So it is often completely counterproductive to sit there waiting while a sequence renders to RAM. A lot of times I just get it looking good with single-frame or draft-quality previews, continue on with my work, and then let it render overnight and hope it looks good. Often it doesn't, so I have to make note of what looks bad, go in and fix it, and then render it out again. On complex shots, I often go through three or four renders before it finally looks right.

So, "Corporate Zombie" might or might not be done. If it is, I'll start up on "Mother In-Law Zombie" tonight!

Ryan