We have decided to put our latest August 2010 Reel online for everybody to see! Normally, we only share the reel with potential clients and friends via DVDs, but this time round, we’re going the polar opposite and are releasing it for all to see on YouTube.

The reel was cut together by our very own Jacqui Hocking, and features footage from a range of our previous productions – from Happy Sundaes to Superb Menura, SAKOOZ to SHOTGUN!, the TOPtoTOP documentary to some of the 3D work we’ve done. It really showcases the mix of productions we work on!

The soundtrack was provided to us by the AMAZINGLY talented Lovers Electric. If you have never heard of them, we highly recommend you take a look at their website and have a listen. They are currently working on a new album, which should be out very soon.

We hope you enjoy the reel – and please, leave any comments, suggestions, etc. on our YouTube page! We can’t wait to hear what you think…

It gives me great pleasure to announce that we officially have a new logo for LateNite Films (as we have also decided to write “LateNite Films” instead of “latenite films” as a tribute to Peter Jackson’s WingNet Films).

We have been trying to come up with a new logo that really reflects what we stand for, for months now. We tried doing it ourselves – but just never really came up with anything solid. After officially giving up, we decided to post something on Twitter. Within minutes, we suddenly started receiving emails, Facebook messages  and Twitter DMs and Replies from all over the world. After looking through all the messages, we eventually came across a reply from an amazingly talented UK-based Graphic Designer René Ellis. She had a really solid range of work behind her – but more importantly, even though we only communicated via email and Twitter, I must say, she was an absolute joy to work with. She was fast, incredibly inspiring and creative, and made the whole process a lot of fun, as we tried out various styles and formatting until we came up with something we actually all agreed on. If you ever need a Graphic Designer for any project – I highly recommend getting in touch with her! You might as well add her on Twitter – just for future reference!

If we take a trip down memory lane, the first ever LateNite logo was put together by the amazingly talented Eloise Loxton (one of the founding members of the LateNite team – but has since moved away from production to the magical world of film make-up!) in the labs of Swinburne University late at night during the post production of Happy Sundaes. Hand drawn and then brought into Photoshop, it was quick, simple, but incredibly effective. It was black and white – only because it was mainly going to be used for the closing credits of Happy Sundaes, and we wanted something simple. However, in retrospect, although the hand-drawn moon does represent us very well (i.e. we love to get down and dirty, and just make films with our own two hands!), the font choice wasn’t ideal and the lack of colour made it a tad boring.

Our next revision of the LateNite logo was put together by Isaac Egan (another LateNite founder, but has since moved on to other things), for the credits of Superb Menura (a documentary we shot whilst still at Swinburne). It was thrown together in Macromedia Flash, and animated to have the eye blinking. It was the perfect fit for our documentary (as the whole film was about looking into someone else’s world), however as a company logo, it just never really fitted. Lots of people had trouble working out if it was a face or the front of a Knight in Shining Armour! Again, although this abstract quality was great for an art-house company, it didn’t really suit us.

Then for the pre-production of the SAKOOZ promotional teaser/trailer, Isaac went back to the drawing board, and came up with something new. Sticking with the the black and white eye theme, he developed another logo that could be easily animated to have the eye blinking. Slick, sharp and with nice text, we actually all really liked this logo. It looked great on printed documents, and was really bold and impressive, but at the end of the day – it didn’t really have the LateNite spirit.

And so, we went back to the drawing board for SHOTGUN! With Alistair A E Marks potentially joining the LateNite team as a partner, we initially thought of changing the whole company name entirely! However, this was short lived – as after consulting many friends and expects, it was clear that we shouldn’t throw away all the hard work we have put into getting the LateNite brand up and running. However, for your viewing pleasure, below are some of the research notes we came up with. I must say, it’s INCREDIBLY hard to come up with a new name – all the good ones have already been taken! So if you like any of the names that are listed as free below – I recommend you jump on to the MD Webhosting site (our recommended host), and grab some domains!

• The Mutineers – Free (mutineerfilms.com)
• Sortie Films (army term – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortie) – Free (sortiefilms.com)
• Rebel Arts & Technology (one of George Lucas’ ideas for ILM) – Free
• Filmsiege – Free (filmsiege.com)
• Skirmish Films – Free (skirmishfilms.com)
• Rebelart Films – Free
• Rebel Backlot – Free
• Rushing Rebels – Free
• Rebelat (.com taken but others free)
• Backlot Rebels – Taken
• Pocketfilms – Taken
• Phalanx Films (an army formation term) – Taken (http://www.phalanxfilms.com/)
• Rebel Attack – Taken
• Kasplat – Taken
• Kaboom – Taken
• Riot Films – Taken (http://riotfilms.com/) – In fact every variation of Riot is taken! Riot Cinema, etc.
• Dissent Films – Taken (http://www.dissentfilms.com/)
• Radical Films – Taken (http://www.radical-films.com/ and http://radicalfilms.co.uk/)
• Rad Films – (Taken http://www.radfilms.com/)
• Insurgent Films – Taken
• Insurgency Films – Taken
• The Insurgents – Taken
• Revolutionary Productions – Taken
• The Revolution – Taken
• Revolution Productions – Taken
• Revolution Films – Taken (Has an AWESOME website photo – http://www.revolutionfilms.net/)
• Advant Films – Taken
• Leading Edge Films- Taken
• Cutting Edge Films – Taken
• Cinematrix (what George Lucas wanted to call Pixar originally) – Taken
• Landmark Films – Taken (http://www.landmarkfilms.com/)
• The Skeleton Crew – Taken
• Half Track – Taken
• Film Bomb – Taken
• Groundsmash Films – Pretty crap…

After deciding to stick with LateNite Films, we jumped into Photoshop and started experimenting. We also looked at what other film companies have got, and came up with a list of our favourite websites (and believe me – we looked at hundreds of sites and wrote extensive notes on all of them – but we’re not going to post that here, as sometimes we didn’t say very nice things):

• Launch Pictures
• Roar Film
• Goalpost Pictures
• Exit Films
• Couch Media
• In Pictures
• Matchbox Pictures
• December Films
• Revolution Productions
• Rebel Films Australia
• Rebel Films Facilities
• Riot Cinema

After much mucking around, here is my favourite concept I came up with. I still like it – but it’s just a bit too childish and comic-book like to be our official company logo!

We also tried all kinds of fonts, text layouts, and trying to get a light bulb in there!

Eloise also came up with some cool ideas – but none of them really stuck unfortunately. Here are some of them below:

We needed something that was “us”. We’re a group of young independent filmmakers. We love movies. We love making films. We love to blow stuff up. We love pushing boundaries. We are fearless. We are regarded as “rebel” or “guerrilla filmmakers”, as we make stuff that has low budgets, utilises skeleton crews, shoot at whatever locations we can find and use simple props using whatever is available. We respect filmmakers like Spike Lee, Robert Rodriguez, Darren Aronofsky, Peter Jackson and George Lucas. Our attitude to filmmaking is tough, exciting and unique – our productions are slick, compelling and innovative, and we needed a logo to reflect this. We think our logo should look a little high-tech, have elements of war/military in it (to suit the rebel/guerrilla theme), and at the same time has a slight professional edge.

When we gave this pitch to René she addressed this straight away with a range of options. To be perfectly honest, all the logos she came up with were amazing. I would have been quite happy to use any of them for our logo. But in the end, we almost did a complete circle, and decided on a logo that was basically an extension of Eloise’s first creation – the hand drawn moon. Although René gave us options that perfectly matched our pitch (i.e. rebel but professional), in the end the hand drawn moon just felt the most LateNite. And so, we stuck with it, and we’re all very happy with the decision!

So now, we have quickly thrown the new logo into our blog and website – however, we are planning to revamp both sites very soon! We still really love the look of of our main site – so it probably won’t be a complete redesign, but there are a few things that we think we can improve upon, and we are even considering merging the content from the Melbourne Rebels site into the main site just to keep everything centralised. We may even consider bringing the blog into the main site as well. Time will tell – but at the moment we’re concentrating all our web design efforts on getting the SHOTGUN! site and blog up and running! We should be making it public VERY soon, so stay tuned!

As I always say… exciting times certainly lay ahead! It’s already been a big year – but the best is yet to come!

Onward & Upward!

Chris!

Apologies for the lack of blog posts recently. For those of you that have been keeping an eye on the site, you’ll know that I’ve been overseas since February and have only just arrived back (you can see some photos of my travels here). But now I’m back, and things are seriously busy at the office! We are working full steam ahead on our first feature film, SHOTGUN! – so things are certainly go, go, go! Stay tuned for details, but in the meantime…

Tonight was my first screening for the year, and I was fortunate to go and see an amazing film called “The Disappearance of Alice Creed”.

Written and Directed by J Blakeson (who has done a couple of other short films that I’ve never heard of, and no feature films that I’m aware of), this low-budget thriller is about two men who fortify a nondescript British apartment so it can serve as a prison, and then kidnap a woman and tie her to a bed. Then before there’s even time to react, as an audience we’re plunged into a very nasty situation, but certainly not a simple one. This film is amazing – it’s simple in terms of production values, only has a very small cast of three characters, and only a handfull of locations, but seriously keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time, as has so many completely unpredictable twists and spins. It looks great (I presume it was shot on 35mm), sounds great – but it’s the cast and the killer script that makes it such an incredible film.

It’s also incredibly inspiring for young up-and-coming filmmakers like ourselves. It really highlights the fact that you don’t need a million dollars to make a really good film. You just need a great idea, an amazing script and an incredible cast. No easy feat – but certainly achievable. Although I’m sure this film had a fairly decent but still low independent film budget, it could have been shot on a mobile phone and the end result would have been the same. It did look good, and it had a great soundtrack (although the use of music was minimum), but that just only added to the extremely well crafted plot.

It’s always a bit of a mixed bag when you go to a film festival. I’m just extremely lucky that the first film I went to this year was actually really good.

You can watch the trailer here:

You can watch a trailer of the short film below. Enjoy!

I can’t believe that this is my first post for 2010! It seems as if I’ve been trying to put together this blog entry in my head for months now… and the fact of the matter is, I have! Lots of things have been happening, and I’ve got lots to tell… So from the offset – please let me warn you that this post may be a bit all over the place, with lots of random ideas, and no particular direction. But, hey! If you actually read this, then this is the kind of thing you’ve come to expect by now!

The end of 2009 was crazy busy on both personal and business levels for everyone. After wrapping “Handle With Care” (our very successful 24-hour film festival entry – for those that don’t know, we picked up the “Best Script” and “Best use of Character” awards), we began proper post production on “One Flu North” – a Tropfest Entry Script written and directed by Nick Colla. Although we shot One Flu North earlier in the year, “real life” got in the way of things (as usual), and we kept on putting off the editing stages of the short. But, as always happens, time crept away, and before we knew it, December was upon us, and time was running out for the January Tropfest deadline! So after a crazy period of editing around the clock for several days, then suffering a massive hard drive crash (hint: always have several backups of everything in several different locations! I know, I know – you already know this – but come on!) and having to re-do all the visual effects, rendering and conversions (from 30P to 25P!), we eventually got there in the end. Despite the obstacles, the short film turned out exceptionally well – even though it didn’t make it into Tropfest this time round. We will be submitting it into several festivals over the coming months, so stay tuned! The end of 2009 was also busy for our friends at Pocketbonfire, who are still deep in post production for “There’s a Hippopotamus on our Roof Eating Cake” – which we have been assisting with.

However, what made everything just that little more busy, stressful, and exciting in December 2009 and January 2010, was that I was planning a four month adventure away overseas! In fact, I’m writing to you now from a hotel room in remote Vietnam!

I have been planning this holiday adventure for a while now. Although I’ve been overseas plenty of times before, most of the time it’s been for business – so this is my first really massive overseas holiday holiday! Starting in China, I then travelled to Thailand, then Cambodia, then Vietnam. From here, the next stop is Laos, then Thailand again, then over to Egypt, and then down the North/East coast of Africa. I am travelling with my girl friend Karen, who’s keeping a blog of our journey at Melbourne To Moshi, if you’re interested in seeing any photos!

The lead up to the holiday was insane, because not only did I have to plan for over four months away (which was a challenge in itself), but I also had to train up a new staff member at The Butchery (a leading editing post production facility that I was working at full time last year – “i.e. my day job” which allowed me to devote so much time to no-budget latenite films projects!), and tie up heaps of loose ends so that both The Butchery and latenite films could run smoothly without me (you’ll be pleased to hear that both companies are running exceptionally smoothly – thanks Andrew, Jacqui & Nick!).

Originally I had planned to take these four months “properly off” – meaning no mobile phone, no e-mail, no contact. That lasted for a little while – but as Karen was keeping a blog updated, she had a computer with her, so it wasn’t long before I was checking my e-mails again. Luckily, Jacqui and Nick are getting all of my important business e-mails – so I haven’t had to do any real work whilst I’ve been away – just the occasional fun thing – like writing this blog!

So anyway, the reason I’m writing this blog is because something motivated me recently. I actually ended up in hospital in Vietnam. Nothing too serious! Like a lot of travellers, I ate something dodgy and got your typical food poisoning. After a few days of “bad things coming out of both ends”, I took some medication to help stop me spewing up. It worked for a couple of days, but then after one meal when I thought I had finally recovered, I got an allergic reaction to what I presumed was the food – but was actually the drugs. My body started freaking out, my throat started closing up, my tongue grew bigger, and I had serious trouble breathing. I hate hospital. No, seriously, I really hate hospitals. Nothing scares me more than needles. But, given that I couldn’t breathe, I had to be rushed to the doc by a very scared, but very calm and wonderful girlfriend, and an amazing Intrepid tour guide (which was handy as he spoke the local language – something Karen and myself haven’t mastered yet!). Luckily, after a scary few hours, the incredible doctors and nurses at the hospital fixed me up, and after two days, I was good to go on my way. Now… why am I telling you all this personal stuff? Because… and I hate saying this because it’s so cliche… but life is short! You never know what’s around the corner, so you really need to make the most of it. You need to make the most of every single opportunity. You need to push boundaries. You need to try new things – but not get scared when things go wrong. In life you just need to keep “bashing at it” – and film-making is exactly the same.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading droidMAKER – the story of George Lucas, and the digital film revolution. If you need motivation – read this book! It’s INCREDIBLE! Almost every single person featured in the book is inspiring. Each talented individual was presented with a seemingly impossible (or at the very least, extremely challenging!) task – but instead of just giving up, they push boundaries, invented new things, and just “made it work”.

But making a film is not just about “bashing your way through” by yourself. It’s all about team work. It’s all about working with like-minded people to achieve a common goal. The thing I love about this book is not only the technical that’s being discussed, it’s not only about the art that they were all trying to make, it’s the relationships. It’s the people. It’s the friendly competition. It’s about working with people – not against people.

I was so lucky that I ended up in hospital with such a good team behind me. In all seriousness, if I wasn’t travelling with such amazing people, then even such a simple thing as taking some dodgy medication that doesn’t agree with you, could have caused me fatal problems (to put it lightly!). Having a good team, a good family, behind you in vital.

When you travel through rural places in Cambodia, where large families have very little income, and as a result little food, but still survive and smile, you realise how important belonging to a supportive community is. It’s hard to get through things by yourself sometimes. But if you’ve got a group of people beside you, who are going through the same issues – the same problems – then you no longer feel alone. The old look after the young – and the young look after the old.

When you learn about the Vietnam War, and how the Viet Cong defeated the American Soldiers with the assistance of complex tunnel systems, and deadly & horrific (but also scarily ingenious) bamboo traps – you realise that power and brute strength isn’t everything. Sometimes you need to just think outside the box. You need to get together a team of like-minded people, and come up with new ideas. You need to innovate. Experiment. And educate – so that others can learn from your mistakes.

Ok… so this blog entry is really going a bit all over the place, so apologies if you’re completely confused as to what exactly I’m trying to say. I guess my point is the same as it always is. Film-making is all about working as a team to achieve a common goal. It’s about pushing boundaries. It’s about trying new things. It’s about failing, but then getting up and trying again. It’s about enthusiasm and excitement. It’s about the thrill of the chase! But it’s all very well to just say this – it’s another thing to truly believe it.

One of the biggest problems I found at film school was that the majority of the students weren’t motivated. They wanted to make movies, but didn’t want to join the film-making community. They wanted to get their ideas on the big screen – but they didn’t have the passion to really push boundaries. Which brings me to my final point (I promise).

Travel. I have never believed it before now. Everyone always says travelling, and exploring the world is one of the most important and brain-expanding things you can do. I never thought it was true. I always thought I was “worldly” because I’d been to several different countries, and experienced “local” things. But the more travelling I do, the more my mind is becoming active. It’s seems cliche (again!), but travelling helps makes everything clearer (and I’m only in the few stages of my holiday adventure!). It gives you time to relax, and rejuvenate. It gives you time to consolidate all the ideas you have in your head.

I’ve always known that team-work and community was important, in both film-making and life in general. Hell – it seems like common sense. However, it’s not until now that I really UNDERSTAND that importance.

So in summary. I highly recommend working your butt off for a while, then go travel. Go somewhere far away. Go somewhere new and exciting. I highly recommend Cambodia! Leave your phone. Set up an e-mail auto reply. Escape. Relax. Enjoy. But also don’t be scared to jump straight back on the bandwagon when you need to. Because, at the end of the day, as much as I needed a holiday, doing stuff like writing this blog isn’t just a job. It’s a way of life. I enjoy what I do. In fact I love it. It’s not just a job. It’s not just a passion. It’s a way of life. Film-making, technology and the PEOPLE behind both is the reason I get up in the morning with a smile. It’s the fuel that keeps me going right through the night.

A few months ago I read a great article on Chris Jones blog discussing separating work life from home life. That although film-making can become addictive, it shouldn’t become more important than living. I now tend to disagree. Please stop me if I’m getting a little too deep and meaningful – but there are lots of people on this Earth, and they are all going to be doing different things. I believe that if you have a passion for film-making (and lets be honest – in the scheme of things, only a few select people truly have the passion and the drive), then you should just go for it. If you love doing it – then do it. There’s no reason to stop for breaks. “Shop till you drop” I say!

Anyway, that’s probably enough discussion for today! Let’s wrap things up by looking at what’s in store in the months to come…

Well… despite my absence… lots! Nick Colla and Jacqui Hocking are seriously full steam ahead on several exciting projects – including “Shotgun”, a feature film concept that’s been floating around outside of latenite for years now. Nick also has some serious acting jobs in the pipeline, as well as his radio show. Jacqui is about to head overseas, and has been knee deep in post production on several projects. Her new blog should be up again shortly, so stay tuned for that.

As always, things are busy. Things are exciting. Every day brings with it new challenges, and new adventures. Despite the fact that I’m personally far away from the latenite bunker, I can honestly say that I’m probably in a better head space for film than I’ve been in years (which is both surprising, and wonderful!). I’ve already started planning several special projects that will kick start as soon as I return to Australia in late June.

So don’t despair – the latenite camp is not sleeping. Things are happening. Things are busy.

Well… that’s all from me today. I’ll be in Vietnam for the next couple of weeks, and then I’ll be heading off to beautiful Laos. The adventure continues! However, while I’m away, make sure you keep an eye on the latenite site, as things are certainly going full steam ahead in my absence!

Onwards, Upwards and always spinning, spinning, spinning…!

Best Regards, Chris!

Like a lot of low-budget productions – in fact any film production for that matter – this one had a lot of hurdles. For instance:

• A rouge pyro guy let off fireworks without a permit and blew off his hand meaning the council closed down all pyro for the first day of shooting.
• As a result of last years horrific fire season, the production team were worried about total fire bans – however, the day before the scheduled shoot, the weather turned bad and Melbourne had the biggest thunderstorm it has had in ten years!
• The production lost half of its crew due to re-scheduling.
• The director had a baby! (Congratulations Rhett!)
• Only days after shooting, the director found out two of the most important shots in the video clip were in fact corrupt (yes, as you guess, it was the most important explosion shot!).

However, despite all these major problems, the team got through it all… and the clip looks great.

I was personally only involved in the post production stages, and I must say I was tremendously impressed with Rhett’s courage, determination and sheer talent. When he found out that two of the most important shots of the clip were corrupt, and even the expects (i.e. the people who actually make the camera!) couldn’t fix the problem, he still bashed his way through and in the end worked his way around the problem. By actually opening up the CINE files in a HEX editor and manually copying the headers from one working CINE file to the broken CINE file, after a lot of trial and error he eventually got it working. Not bad work considering how many people told him they the clip was broken and couldn’t be fixed. 

The point is, with all film-making ventures you need to think out-side-the-box, and just keep chipping away at problems. Rhett didn’t give up when things go too hard – as each problem presented itself, he and the rest of his talented team found a way around it.

This is why I love film-making… the people. The sheer determination to get things done.

Again, congratulations Rhett (Director), Ari Wegner (Cinematographer), The Butchery (Editing), Digital Pictures (Online/Grade) and Teenagersintokyo. You’ve done a beautiful job!

Well, as per usual, we’ve been busy. Very busy!

On top of all the exciting projects we have in development, we’ve been working with Pocketbonfire Production’s in both the production and post production stages of their short film, “There’s a Hippopotamus on our Roof Eating Cake”. Jaime Snyder, who wrote and directed the film is currently “stuck in the edit suite” cutting away.

We’ve also shot a Tropfest short film entry called “One Flew North”, on the Canon 5DMKII, which we are going to start editing within the next few weeks. It was written and directed by Nick Colla. We were lucky enough to score Benjamin Hidalgo on board as director of photography and the footage looks amazing! Stay tuned for more details on this film!

Jacqui Hocking has also been very busy jet-setting around the world capturing amazing footage on her TOPtoTOP adventure. She arrives back in Melbourne on Sunday for a brief period, then she’s off again.

We also recently worked alongside Draught Films to put together an entry for the Melbourne 48hour Film Competition, which was directed by extremely talented Thom Holt. Despite the tight deadline, we are EXTREMELY happy with the results of the film. We shot it on a HVX202. We’ve already made it into the top 12 and will find out whether or not we pick up any awards in the competition before the end of the month.

Both Nick Colla and myself have also been working closely on several other major concepts. More details to follow soon!

So yes, I know this blog post is a bit all over the place. But rest assured, the reason we’ve been a bit slow on update the site is not because we’re lazy – it’s because we’re busy what we do best – making films!

So stay tuned… Lots of exciting things still in store before the end of the year!

Happy film-making!

Best Regards, Chris!

One 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
4GB RAM (4 x 1GB)
640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB Graphics Card

And so, once it arrived, I open up the box, took out the tower, and hooked it up to some monitors we already had. It booted fine, and loaded Snow Leopard. “Ah, no” I thought to myself, and added a mental note that the first thing I will need to do it get rid of Snow Leopard. But, while it’s up and running, I might as well check out some of the new Snow Leopard features. Then I noticed it. Something was not right. For about half a second every five seconds the computer seemed to “stall”. It would just stop for half a second. It was almost as if it had a faulty heart and was missing a beat every now and again. I’ve never seen this before, so I was a little bit scared that maybe this brand new machine might had serious hardware problems. Either that – or Snow Leopard was causing the poor machine some major, major grief. So first thing I did after a diagnostics test (in which the machine passed all tests), was try and dump Snow Leopard and put on Leopard 10.5. I put in the Retail DVD of Leopard we have, clicked install, and waited for the machine to reboot. Then nothing happened. Ummm… Strange! Why wasn’t it booting? I tried another Retail DVD of Leopard we have. Same problem. Ummm… very strange! Time for Google. I hit my first major stumbling block – you can only install Leopard 10.5.6 or later on these new MacPro’s and all our Retail DVDs are 10.5. With no copy of Leopard 10.5.6 on DVD, and no dealers stocking 10.5.6 on the shelves, it was time to sent it back to the retailer so that they can install 10.5.6 and work out what’s going on with the strange freezing issue. We can always grab another copy of 10.5.6 on DVD from Apple’s discontinued software division later (as we’ll need to install the OS again on other partitions anyway).

And so, the Mac went back to the shop. The weird thing however was that the machine worked perfectly once they received it. No lagging, no freezing – it worked perfectly. So they installed 10.5.6, ran the diagnostics tool, swapped out the RAM as a precaution, and sent it back to us. They did say however that they have come across this issue once before, and put it down to electromagnetic interference in the room it was being used in – putting the machine in another room seemed to fix the problem. Very strange!

I got it back, plugged it in, and the same issue occurred. It would freeze for about half a second every five or so seconds. And so, as a test, I tried it in a different room. It worked fine. Very strange! So I tried it in another room. Same freezing issue. In another room. Same freezing issue. In another room. It worked fine! So it seemed that this silly machine would only work in specific locations, and I had no idea why!

Not convinced that electromagnetic interference would do this, I tried swapping out cables, the keyboard, the mouse, and then finally, I tried different combinations of monitors.

And then I found the solution. For some reason certain monitors connected via the DVI port cause the system to lag (i.e. literally freeze for half a second every five or so seconds) if connected via the DVI or Mini DisplayPort. However, all monitors seem to work fine over VGA using adapters.

I’ve tried every single possible combination of screen resolutions and refresh rates – so that’s not the issue.

I’ve tried Googling similar issues, but apart from finding a whole heap of issues with the 4870 graphics card, I couldn’t seem to find anything like this.

Here is a list of monitors I tried:

Works over DVI, Mini DisplayPort & VGA:

Samsung 205BW 16:9 LCD
Benq G2420 HD (Model: ET-0027-B) 16:9 LCD

Works over VGA:
Kogan X19WB 16:9 LCD
Sony LMD-2030W 16:9 LCD
Sony KLV-325200A 16:9 LCD
Sony KDL-2054000 16:9 LCD

Doesn’t Work over DVI or Mini DisplayPort:
Samsung 940B 4:3 LCD
Benq T2200HD (Model: W2108) 16:9 LCD
Benq G2200W (Model: ET-0016-N) 16:9 LCD

When I get the time, I’ll also try a few other monitors we’ve got lying around including some big old CRTs!

So, to cut a long story short, if you get a new MacPro and it looks like it’s lagging – try a different screen! If anyone has a reason as to why this happens, I’d also love to hear it!

Happy editing!

Best Regards, Chris !

However, I tend to do a lot more things that fall outside of the offline banner. Sometime there might be some visual effects elements I’ll throw together in After Effects or Shake, other times I might want to do some hardcore grading in Color, or maybe I just want to export out a really high quality DVD.

Unlike in Final Cut Pro, getting consistent images into and out of Avid seems to be kind of a black art. The RGB vs 601 terminology is at times confusing, and despite the wealth of information out there on the World Wide Web – there still seems to be a lot of misinformation and head scratching. Even creating a dead simple DVD via DVD Studio Pro using Avid footage seems to be a real challenge (the solution on forums normally tends to be use one of Avid’s Sonic products).

Well, rather than spend even more time trying to find answers on the various Avid forums, I thought I’d do some tests and see how things actually work in the real world. This isn’t a formal experiment, nor is it anything like a technical white paper – all I’m really doing is having a bit of a muck-around and documenting what I do for future reference. It’s more for myself than anything else, to try and help get my head around everything. So apologies in advance if this blog entry is a bit of a mess!

To start things off, here are my system specifications. Now, before you all drill me, yes I know I’m running an older version of Avid, and yes I know that technically speaking I’m running a newer version of Quicktime than I should be (as you can see by reviewing the Avid Version Matrix). But as more and more people tend to run Avid and Final Cut Pro on the same system, the more I see Avid running alongside newer versions of Quicktime that what the developers originally intended. As Avid is completely backwards compatible (which is both amazing and EXTREMELY handy!), the less often people tend to upgrade the Avid software. If it ain’t broke – why fix it?

Here are the system specifications of the machine I will be using for these tests:

System Specs:
Processor: 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Mac OS X: 10.5.7
Quicktime: 7.6.2 (1327)
Avid: 3.0.5
Final Cut Pro: 7.0
Photoshop: 11.0

For the purposes of these tests I will be using a 720 x 576 PAL test chart from Belle Nuit.

Once I had a test chart the next step was to convert it to a Quicktime file. To do this I opened up Final Cut Pro, and set up a new Sequence with the following settings:

I also set the Motion Filtering Quality to Best for good measure (in the Video Processing tab).

I then imported the test chart TIFF into the timeline and exported it as a Quicktime Movie.

To make sure something weird wasn’t going on, I then opened up the original TIFF file and the Quicktime File in Photoshop. Using the eye dropper tool I then double checked that all of the value were correct. They were…!

OK… So now I had a Quicktime file that identically matched the TIFF test chart.

The next step was to do some experiments with Avid. First up I created a new 25p PAL project. I then imported the Quicktime Test Chart, as well as the straight TIFF Test Chart a few different ways:

Method 1
Format: OMF
Video Resolution: 1:1 OMF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: Computer RGB (0-255)

Method 2
Format: OMF
Video Resolution: 1:1 OMF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: Computer RGB (Dither Image Colours)

Method 3
Format: OMF
Video Resolution: 1:1 OMF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: 601 SD or 709 HD (16-235)

Method 4
Format: MXF
Video Resolution: 1:1 MXF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: Computer RGB (0-255)

Method 5
Format: MXF
Video Resolution: 1:1 MXF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: Computer RGB (Dither Image Colours)

Method 6
Format: MXF
Video Resolution: 1:1 MXF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: 601 SD or 709 HD (16-235)

Now that the test charts were successfully in the Avid, it was already time to try and get them back out again!

To export out of Avid I used these settings:

For each method, I exported out a Quicktime movie using both the 601 and RGB Colour Levels.

Here are the results in regards to bringing in the Quicktime Files (with the Compression type set to None) and exporting them out of Avid.

Please be aware that to generate the images shown below I opened the exported Quicktimes in Photoshop, resized them to fit in with the blog design, and then saved them as a JPEG. They are only displayed here as a general guide.

Method 1

601:

RGB:

Method 2

601:

RGB:

Method 3

601:

RGB:

Method 4

601:

RGB:

Method 5

601:

RGB:

Method 6

601:

RGB:

Here are the results in regards to bringing in the original TIFF file and exporting it out of Avid:

Method 1

601:

RGB:

Method 2

601:

RGB:

Method 3

601:

RGB:

Method 4

601:

RGB:

Method 5

601:

RGB:

Method 6

601:

RGB:

OK… So now what? What’s the result of all of these tables and charts?

Hint #1: If you brought in your footage into Avid as RGB – then export as RGB. If you brought in your footage into Avid as 601, then export as 601.

If you look at all the different methods – this certainly seems to be the case. When using the same file pixel to video mapping setting for both import and export the file coming in is very SIMILAR to the file coming out – not EXACTLY – but very similar.

Hint #2: I hate to state the obvious, but Computer RGB (Dither Image Colours) only applies when you import still images. If you import a Quicktime movie using this option, it will just export as regular Computer RGB.

According to the Media Composer ReadMe file:

RGB (Computer RGB (0–255)): Select this option if the imported graphics file uses RGB graphics levels. Most computer-generated graphics use RGB graphics levels. The RGB color values are remapped to ITU-R 601 (formerly CCIR 601) or ITU-R709 video color values appropriate for the Avid system.

RGB, dithered (Computer RGB, dither image colors): Select this option if the imported graphics file uses complex color effects, such as a gradation, and you are importing at a high resolution (2:1). Do not use this option to reimport an image that has already been imported with dithering.

601/709 (601 SD or 709 HD (16–235)): Select this option if the imported graphics file uses video levels based on the ITU-R 601 (formerly CCIR 601) or ITU-R709 (HD) standard. These graphics include Avid color bars or images that include superblack (zero black) for keying purposes.

Now with this new found knowledge, it was time to do some further, more detailed tests. First up let have a closer look at what happens to an image if we import it in as 601, and export it as 601.

Original Test Chart:

601 to 601:

Apart from a few very minor differences where the values are off by one (highlighted in bold), the import is basically exactly the same as the output.

Interestingly however, if you use the DigitalColor Meter to measure the values directly from the preview monitors in Avid, the white (255) section reads exactly 255, despite the fact that the output file reads 254. Apart from that using the meter everything else matches the above table.

The only different is the resolution.

Original Test Chart:

601 to 601:

As the test chart was originally 8bit in RGB space,

So now we know that if you import footage as 601 and export as 601 the colours pretty much stay the same. But it’s one thing to do these kind of tests – it’s another thing to try it with real footage. So that’s what we’ll try next…

In Final Cut Pro I created a new sequence with the following settings:

…and everything set to best quality:

I then dragged in a FCP Bars & Tone generator for a second, then the test chart we’ve been using for another second, and then some 4K RED footage. I threw a quick 3-way Colour Correction filter on top of the footage to tweak it a bit and then exported out a Quicktime Movie. This Quicktime will become our test footage.

After I exported out the Quicktime Movie I then opened it up in Photoshop to have a look at the values on the chart:

Obviously all of these values had some kind of gamma/luma shift applied to them. Just to double check I then exported out the same timeline but with the Compressor set to None to see what would happen:

OK… so obviously Quicktime is doing something funky behind the scenes. This is something we’ll have to look into later, but for now the purpose of this test is to try and get footage into and back out of Avid without any nasty changes. As long as we know what the values are of the chart before the footage gets into Avid, it doesn’t really matter if the values aren’t “correct” (i.e. Grey 71 on the chart doesn’t have to equal 71 using the eye dropper).

I then brought the test footage into the Avid as OMF, 1:1, 601. Using the DigitalColor Meter, I then checked the values of the preview monitor:

Then I noticed that something wasn’t right. Turns out that for whatever reason the DigitalColor Meter tool and the Photoshop Eyedropper don’t match up!

After a slight panic, and a bit of hair pulling, I opened up Color Settings in Photoshop and changed the RGB Working Space from sRGB IEC61966-2.1 to my monitor working space. And with a quick click of the OK button, all of a sudden everything started working as per normal. It seems that I just completely forgot about display profiles for a second there! Thanks also to Cail Young at Inspiration Studios for his almost instant Twitter reply!

Hint #3: Don’t forget about display profiles!

I then compared what was in the Avid to the original file as viewed in the Quicktime Player. When “Enable Final Cut Studio color compatibility” was selected in the Quicktime Preferences, using DigitalColor Meter I obtained the following results:

When you turn off Final Cut Studio colour compatibility you obtain these results:

I then went to a specific frame on both Avid and Quicktime Player. I took a screen shot, and compared the two images side by side in Photoshop. So far so good – the image in Quicktime Player looks visually identical to the video in Avid when Final Cut Studio colour compatibility is turned on. So the media looks good whilst IN the Avid – what about when it comes out again? To test this I exported a “Same as Source” 601 Quicktime file from Avid.

I then opened up the newly exported Quicktime movie in Photoshop for review:

Interestingly, the Avid seems to have “corrected” the bars so that they more closely match where they’re supposed to be. At this stage I have no idea why this is or how it’s being done – but all I can assume for now is that the data out of Final Cut Pro was always correct – it just wasn’t being handled correctly in Photoshop or Quicktime Player.

Visually comparing the original file to the file exported out of Avid, what I can say is that they are identical in terms of colour and tone. You cannot tell the difference between the two:

OK – so it seems that it is possible to get footage into and out of Avid without the image being degraded.

Here’s an interesting bit of information I found on the Avid forum:

I have done some fairly extensive testing (with an oscilloscope and vectorscope….)…. It seems impossible to get certain footage with certain codecs to go through transparently through Compressor (or be imported correctly into FCP). A good test to do is the following: Import a testcard such as the one here:

http://www.belle-nuit.com/testchart.html

into Avid with 601 levels.

Export with your chosen codec then import the QT file into FCP. Observe the results in FCP’s waveform monitor, noting in particular the gray scale ramp which should be linear and have no curve. The patches marked 16 and 235 should be correctly positioned in the waveform.

DV footage with the Avid codec consistently has gamma issues (even though with RGB levels the black and 235 white levels are correct).

DV footage without the Avid codec works as from FCP 6.0 but had problems in 5.1.4 as Avid does not insert the image description extensions that describe the colorimetry (primaries, transfer fn and matrix). FCP 6.0 (and the version of compressor that comes with it) appears to deduce the correct primaries, xfer fn and matrix from the image size and codec (at least in the case of DV pal) if the ‘nclc’ QT extension is absent (which it always is from avid).

I have had little luck with the other codecs (prores, and native avid codecs) which are not transparent with a Avid->Compressor (or FCP) workflow. I think something is up with how Avid presents the image samples to the quicktime compression session. I suspect that given the absence of the ‘nclc’ extension which describes the colorimetry in the output QT file, Media Composer gives the codec no information as to the colorimetry of the samples, so the codec makes a best guess. Of course with the Avid codecs this works (the problem is with decode on FCP and not in the encoding), but with third-party codecs such as Apple ProRes there is a problem. As a result gamma correction is incorrectly applied to the source samples when it should not be. It would be nice if this would be addressed for greater compatibility with other software…..

This is also another interesting bit of information I found on the same forums:

Well the main difference between RGB and 601 color space is the ability to have super white and negative black.

If you were to create a black and white image in say Photoshop with the black being 0 and the white being 255 and then brought it into the Avid using RGB, the black part of the screen would be, in an analog world, 7.5IRE and the white would be 100IRE just what you’d expect. However if you brought it it in as 601, your levels would be about 0IRE and 107IRE.

An image created in Photoshop with “black” being 16 and “white” being 235 and then brought into an Avid in the 601 color space would then have correct black and white levels. Obviously this is very handy if you want to key something.

If you want to export a tiff sequence you can use either color space you want, just make note of which you use and make sure that whoever you give it to knows which you use. If you create it in 601 and bring it back into an Avid as RGB, it will look very washed out.

Here is some other information I found which is really interesting:

When I export your sample to Sheer Y’CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2:[4] with QuickTime Player, QuickTime Player feeds the images to the Sheer Y’CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2[:4] encoder in the RGB 8bf ‘ARGB’ pixel format. I find this odd, since the Avid Meridien Uncompressed (AVUI) codec purportedly stores the data in Y’CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2[:4] format. On inspecting the AvidAVUICodec, I see that ARGB is the only pixel format that the AVUI codec supports for input and output; it lacks the ‘cpix’ resource used to list other supported pixel formats.

For the last few frames in the movie (Silicon Artists presenta El Último Deseo), the “black” ARGB pixels passed to the Sheer Y’CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2[:4] encoder have the value:

ARGB = {0xFF,0×10,0×10,0×10} (hexadecimal)
ARGB = {255,16,16,16} (decimal)

When encoding to the Avid Meridien Uncompressed (AVUI) codec the settings dialog (‘Avid Meridien Uncompressed Codec Configuration – v1.8.0′) lets you specify the input color range as either ITU-R 601 video-range [16..235] or full-range [0..255]. However, QuickTime does not provide any mechanism to specify settings for a decoder. QuickTime unequivocally defines the ARGB pixel format as having full-range components, so the fact that AVID’s AVUI decompressor outputs video-range ARGB is just wrong.

OK… so now what I want to have a quick look at is the difference between the vector scopes in Avid and Final Cut Pro using the same source footage.

Avid 3.0.5:

Final Cut Pro 7:

With this knowledge, it was now time to try and bring the test footage that was exported out of Avid back into Final Cut Pro. Just to re-cap, I originally created the Quicktime Movie in Final Cut Pro, exported as a 10-Bit Uncompressed QT, brought it into Avid as OMF 1:1, 601 and then exported out as 601.

Amazingly, the export from Avid almost perfectly matched the original file that was sent from Final Cut Pro.

Original Footage (10-bit Uncompressed from Final Cut Pro):

Avid Footage (Avid Same as Source imported into FCP):

I then decided to have a look through the Avid documentation once again and found the following information in regards to how Avid handles Field Ordering:

Allows you to select the field ordering (sometimes referred to as field dominance) of the media you are importing. For 23.976p, 24p, or 25p projects, these options do not appear; all fields are automatically exported as progressive (still) frames.

When the field ordering (or spatial field position) of the imported media matches the field ordering of the project format, no special processing is required. For more information, see “Field Ordering in Graphic Imports and Exports” on page 499.

This setting does not apply to OMFI imports when the import resolution matches the OMFI file.

The following options are available:

• Non-interlaced (Properly ordered for current format): Use this option when the file to be imported has been correctly field ordered for the video format being used (ex: Even or lower ordered for NTSC, Odd or upper ordered for 1080i HD). This is the default option.
• Odd (Upper Field First) Odd (Upper Field First) ordered: Choose this option if the file was odd ordered and you are importing it into an even ordered format. For example, importing PAL DV into PAL.
• Even (Lower Field First) Even (Lower Field First) ordered: Choose this option when importing a file with even ordering into a video format with odd ordering. For example, importing NTSC into 1080i HD.

OK, so now that brings us to the final test of the day. For this test I will capture some standard PAL DV footage into Avid and then export it and try to bring it into Final Cut Pro, hopefully without introducing any strange artefacts, field dominance issues or gamma/luma shifts.

The Avid project is 25p PAL.The Media Type is OMF. We will be using a DV 25P 420 video resolution. I used the Software DV 25 Codec (which I later discovered is not so good for PAL footage!).

Here is a screenshot of the footage as it sits in the Avid preview monitor:

Here are the screen shots of exported footage from the Avid brought into Final Cut Pro:

Same as Source (601):

Same as Source (RGB):

Same as Source (Avid DV / 601):

Same as Source (Avid DV / RGB):

Quicktime Animation (601):

Quicktime Animation (RGB):

So it seems that if you want to get footage that looks right from Avid to Final Cut Pro, then Same as Source (Avid DV Codec / 601) or something like the Quicktime Animation Codec (601) seem like viable solutions. Given that, I did a couple more tests:

Avid DV (601):

Instead of exporting as “Same as Source” and selecting “Avid DV”, I exported as a standard Quicktime File, but used the Avid DV codec. It’s important to note that the Avid DV Codec has some additional options:

DV PAL (601):

ProRes HQ (Automatic Gamma Correction / 601):

Just to see what happens, I exported the footage both using and not using gamma correction.

ProRes HQ (No Gamma Correction / 601):

So, although no very scientific, and purely based on visual observation rather than mathematical fact, it seems that as long as you keep 601 checked, getting footage from Avid into Final Cut isn’t that big a deal after all.

As I said at the start of this blog entry – this was always going to be a bit all over the place as I did random tests and tried out new things. Apologies if you got to the end of this an realised that I didn’t answer any real questions or teach you something you didn’t already know. I really hope it was some help! The more time I have to spend with Avid, and the more time I have to work out viable workflows of getting stuff into and out of it, the more things will hopefully become clear in my head. I will certainly post anything I think is useful here. One thing’s for certain… after looking through so many Avid forums, and reading hundreds of articles randomly scattered on the web, it’s clear that I’m not the only one that’s confused. Like a lot of things these days, it takes a lot of patience, hair-pulling and vigorous workflow testing to get things right. Everything is so complex – and it just takes one little glitch to throw everything off balance.

Happy editing!

Best Regards, Chris!

You can watch Happy Sundaes here:

http://tr.im/happysundaes

You can watch the SAKOOZ Teaser/Trailer here:

http://tr.im/sakooz

As Happy Sundaes has been around for a while now, and has gone past it’s festival life, we have been considering for a while the best place for it to live online. After reviewing a few different options we ended up settling on IMDB (at least for now). The reason? IMDB is a very professional site with a great reputation. It’s also got an amazing resume database. As Happy Sundaes is now just a showcase tool for us, by putting it up on IMDB after people watch it they can then follow links to the IMDB pages of all the cast and crew. The hope is that if people like Happy Sundaes, they’ll click the link to our actors, and then get in touch with their agents.

SAKOOZ on the other hand is a bit different. We just want as many people to watch it as possible – hence the reason we decided to go with YouTube. Originally we intended to launch the SAKOOZ Teaser/Trailer to the web at the same time as the official SAKOOZ website, but that’s just taking far too long. So instead, we are going to put it up on YouTube exclusively for a bit and just see what happens. Hopefully we get a few hits. Then later this year we will launch the SAKOOZ website which will allow you to edit your own version of the trailer using the raw rushes. Hopefully that also attracts some attention! Again, it’s all about promotional and awareness – but for slightly different reasons.

We really hope you enjoy both Happy Sundaes and the SAKOOZ Teaser/Trailer!

Until next time…

But today I’m not going to talk about software. I’m going to talk about the other end of the spectrum… hardware.

Even since people started discovering that Apple has been applying for various touch-screen patients the Internet community has been going wild. The funny this is that most people think that they’re working on a Kindle Killer. Alex Lindsay from This Week In Media has been predicting a Kindle-like device that supports video and has a colour screen for months now. Geeks on Twitter, various Mac blogs, and all the Apple rumour sites have been going crazy in recent months predicting Apple Tablets.

Steve Jobs has explicitly said he doesn’t want to make a netbook and that “there are no plans to make a tablet” – so why is everyone so convinced that Apple is working on something that will go head-to-head with the popular, but hardly world changing, Kindle?

Personally, I don’t think Apple is working on a “bigger version of the iPhone”. What’s the point? If you want to read something on the train, you can use your iPhone or iPod Touch. If that’s not big enough, then get a laptop. If neither work for you, then just get a Kindle. That’s what they’re designed for. I don’t think there is a big enough need for Apple to create a tablet just to tackle the “digital book” market. I know it sounds silly – but I think Apple regard traditional books (you know, the paper variety) as dead. Text mixed with video and interactive multimedia is the new black.

Ok, lets be harsh for a minute. Kindle’s are geared towards older people. They’ve been developed as a “book replacement”. Older people love them because they are easy to read. You can change the text size. They’re simple to operate, buying digital books is fairly easy, and you can carry the Kindle around in your giant handbag. Lots of people over 40 really love their Kindle. They’re a great mothers and fathers day gift. That said of course, lots of younger people love them (a.k.a the amazingly talented, intelligent and witty Daisy Whitney), but most of them are “books nerds” from way back. I don’t think Apple wants to make a leap into the “book nerd” territory. Apple is all about being cool and innovative. As I said, I think Apple thinks print media is dead. I love books personally – you have no idea how many film books I have lying around in my house, or how much money I spent of film related books of all varieties! However, the though of buying digital books doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Just like I love having a whole pile of physical DVDs – I love having a book shelf full of books. I think that Apple has realised that people who just love books like I do, will never accept a digital equivalent. I think that Apple has realised that most young people who can be bothered reading, will be happy to read on their iPhone or iPod Touch. And I think that Apple has decided that although there is a market for digital books on a nice and simple digital book reader (like the Kindle) – it’s a market that they’re not particularly interested in.

OK… so the tablet idea is out… what about the netbook? Well I think that’s out too. As others have clearly said:

“One of the key selling points of a Mac lies in its usability, and a Netbook will not be able to deliver the full Mac experience with its small screen and slow single-core processor. Moreover, an Apple minilaptop will be unlikely to compete in price cuts and may cost as much as another premium Atom machine, the Sony Vaio P.”

I tend to agree. Apple isn’t going to make a laptop unless it can easily run the power-hungry applications in it’s iLife suite with ease. iPhone as they currently stand are basically just a more compact version of a netbook anyway. As cloud computing becomes more the norm, and as more people jump on board Mobile Me I think more and more people will start their job on their MacBook and automatically sync everything up to their iPhone. They’ll be able to put together their presentation in KeyNote on the MacBook, but then make changes before they step onto the stage on their iPhone. I don’t see the need for a netbook (after all who wants to cart around yet ANOTHER piece of technology), and I don’t think Apple does either.

So where does that leave us? Tablets are out. Netbooks are out. So what is Apple planning to do exactly?

Well… you’re going to call me crazy. You’re going to think that I’m out of my mind. But my prediction is that by the end of next year, every Mac will be touchable. That’s right. I think that every MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Apple Cinema Display and iMac will have a touch screen. I also predict that the MacBook and MacBook Pro will replace the Multi-Touch Trackpad with a fully functional multi-touch tablet.

Why you may ask? Because it will not only be really cool – but also speed things up dramatically. For instance, right now I have two screens sitting in front of me. I’m typing something in a web browser. But say I want to quickly open a document that’s sitting on my desktop which contains a whole lot of notes. To do that I’ll have to lift my hands of the keyboard, grab the mouse, move it over to the icon and click. How much easier would it be if I could just reach for the screen and double tap directly.

This is my crazy prediction… Apple is planning to kill the mouse. I think that when Apple releases it’s new Operating System (which already supports touch and some pretty cool character recognition), it will also update all it’s hardware to include touch screens, remove mice from the inventory list, but include a new “multi-touch keyboard” with each MacPro tower and Mac mini. The keyboard will basically be exactly the same as you’ll find on a 17″ MacBook Pro – touchpad included.

With Windows 7 coming out, which surprisingly actually works, and works quite well, and with PC hardware prices coming down, Apple needs more things to separate Mac hardware from PC hardware. The super slick operating system is not enough any more. Despite what Mac enthusiast may tell you, Microsoft is catching up again (admittedly by stealing most of Apple’s ideas and concepts!). Apple needs to push the boundaries once more, and having “touchable computers” seems like the logical step forward. They have the cool factor, but they also will help speed up everyday tasks. In the pro world of video and stills photography, I think it will be even more ground breaking. Most visual effects artists love their tablet, but imagine if they could combine their traditional Wacom tablet with two nice and big 24″ touchable LED Cinema Displays!

This changeover to touchable screens will bring the whole Apple product line, into, well, line! Everything from a MacPro to a MacBook to an iPhone and iPod Touch will be running MacOS and have a touch screen. It’s an advertising agency’s dream! Imagine the Mac vs PC ads now…

Will it happen? Yes it will. When, well that’s a bit more tricky. It all comes down to money and technology. I have a sneaky suspicion that we’ll see this kind of thing much sooner than anyone could possibly predict. I have a feeling Apple has been working on this for a while. Although I have no facts, or no evidence what-so-ever to base this on, hell, it’s just a good old fashion guess, but I can imagine that Apple might announce something at the same time as it’s Snow Leopard unveiling.

So that’s my prediction as of today. No Kindle Killer. No bigger-version-of-the-iPhone tablet. No less-powerful-than-a-MacBook netbook. I think Apple will just introduce “touch” to the whole product range. However, leaving the best till last, I also predict that on the MacBook Air, you’ll be able to “slide” the screen around, essentially turning it into a tablet. It won’t be called a tablet, it’ll just be a MacBook Air Touch (or something like that).

Will I be right? As always, only time will tell… I think we’ll find out if I’m crazy slightly before we find out if my FCX predictions are on track… Fingers crossed!

Jacqui Hocking has also started selling her short film on TOPtoTOP via the latenite films site which has also been quite exciting. Incidentally, she also just left last Wednesday to continue her adventure travelling around the world on a beautiful yacht filming her travels for part two of the TOPtoTOP documentary series, but also for Swiss TV. Make sure you keep an eye out on her production blog as I’m sure she’ll be posted lots of interesting things every now and again.

Unfortunately our three entries to MAFMAD did not get through, which is a bit disappointing. We thought we had three really fantastic concepts, but we must have been up against some serious competition. Oh well – there’s always next year!

The Sakooz website is still on hold at the moment. We haven’t touch it for a while now – but are hoping to get onto it soon.

This blog’s been attracting more and more visitors which is fantastic! Our FCP vs Avid article now has hundreds and hundreds of hits, and our FCP predictions post is well into the thousands! Thanks so much to everyone for all your support! Please keep the comments coming!

Our Twitter feed has also been very successful so far. We’re nearly at the 300 followers mark – which is pretty good. Obviously we’d much prefer to be in the thousands range – but each day another few people follow us, so we’re slowly getting there. If you have any comments or suggestions in terms of what we post, then please let us know!

And as always we’ve also got lots of other exciting projects and productions in the pipeline…

Finally, make sure you come along to the Pocket Bonfire Productions fund-raiser night to promote their latest film, “There’s a Hippopotamus on our roof eating cake”.  As you probably know, I’ve been helping them organise the photo-realistic hippo for the film, so this is a project very close to my heart! It’s certain to be a fantastic night, with free cake on entry, a book reading with the author, plus lots more! It’s at Loop Bar, where we ran our Sakooz fund-raiser last year – so it’s sure to be just as exciting and fun! For all the details check out their site:

http://www.pocketbonfire.com/

Well that’s it for today. Hopefully we’ll see you at the fund-raiser!

Best Regards, Chris!

Up until the end of February this year, I have been a Final Cut Pro man. But just to give you some background, as a young child, well before NLEs were available cheaply on personal computers, I did editing the old fashion way between two VHS domestic recorders. Sound mixing was done “on the fly” using a cool four channel Realistic microphone mixer.  It was a horrible system – but it worked. Many a Star Wars fan movie was thrown together in my grandparents back yard. As I grew older, and progressed through Primary School, I moved away from film making temporarly becoming more interested in electric guitars, amplifiers and concert lighting. Towards middle years of high school I had another bash at making films – this time I did all the editing on Premiere on a PC. We recorded everything using Panasonic handycams with VHS-C tapes, and then using one of those cool VHS tape adapters, we captured everything using a normal domestic VHS deck. Once again, I drifted away from films, becoming more interested in live productions.

For my brothers final year of high school, he decided to do Studio Arts, and produce two short films. As he’d never really done any film-making before, and I was working full time as a lighting designer (so I had money!), I decided to go on a bit of a spending spree and purchase some things. So one day we had nothing apart from a little Sony MiniDV camera – the next we had a portable green screen, boom pole, ME66 microphone, some basic tungsten lighting, makeshift steadicam, a few Lacie drivers, and a copy of Final Cut Express 2 and DVD Studio Pro (standalone) to put on a new eMac.

So, over the next couple of weeks, as my brother was in preproduction for his two films – I quickly got my head around both the Mac platform (as up until now we’d grown up with PCs) and Final Cut Express. To be perfectly honest, I feel instantly in love, with not only Final Cut, but also with Macs in general. They just… well, worked!

As so, with the help of Final Cut Express, my brother got his two films, God’s Handiwork and Hello Sunshine. With those now finished, and high school completed, my brother then also moved away from film-making heading to univeristy to study Arts/Science. But we now had all this gear, and the inventory was continuing to grow (we purchased a Sony Z1P as soon as it came out). And so, after working for two years as a lighting designer for live events – an amazing job which took me all over the country and many times overseas – I decided to head back to school, studying Film & Television at university.

The film school I went to was a Final Cut Pro facility, and so I upgraded from Final Cut Express to Final Cut Studio – and because I already owned a copy of DVD Studio Pro – the upgrade was incredibly cheap!

And so, for the past five years I’ve been using Final Cut Pro extensively. I’ve thrown all kinds of footage at it from DV to HDV,  XDCAM to DVCProHD, 10-Bit Uncompressed Telecine Transfers to RED. I love Final Cut Pro. It’s powerful, flexible, fast, and cheap. Plus, everyone knows how to use it.

Final Cut Pro has served me extremely well. However, when I took up an editing assistant job earlier this year, I discovered that I’d have to learn Avid. And so, for the past 12 weeks or so, I’ve been using Avid on a daily basis. And guess what… I love it just as much as I love Final Cut Pro.

And so, when my ex-film school peers ask me which is better, I reply… “I love them both, equally”. I hate to be the kind of guy that sits on the fence, but the reality is they’re pretty much exactly the same in my opinion. They both do the same things – just a bit differently.

Just for the record – I’ve used Vegas and Premiere in the past as well – but only for individual projects. I haven’t played with the latest version of either. I also haven’t played with the latest version of Avid – although I’m really looking forward to testing out the new AMA architecture within the next few weeks.

Ok… so, one of the most common things I hear is, “Final Cut crashes all the time… but Avid is bullet proof…”. Well, although I’ve had my fair share of Final Cut Pro crashes over the years, I have to say, from my experiences, Avid is far from perfect! Admittedly I’m using 3.0.5 at work – so it’s not the latest version, but that’s really no excuse.

Generally speaking, I think that Avid crashes just as much as Final Cut Pro – when you’re not doing “normal” stuff. For example, if I’m just doing a rough cut of DV-PAL footage on Final Cut Pro, with just simple cuts and simple dissolves, then everything will just work. No crashes, no stalls, no bizarre error messages. Everything will just work. Same as with Avid. However, as soon as you start pushing the boundaries a bit – things start going wrong. For example, in Final Cut Pro, if you’re working with heaps of different formats on your timeline, with thousands of hours of footage in your project file, and a bunch of image sequences, PSD files, etc. you’re bound to have problems. Things will go wrong. The project will take a long time to open. Obviously there are work arounds (such as splitting up your project into multiple projects, etc.) but they’re not ideal. Avid is the same. I’ve been doing some temporary visual effects compositions  in Avid for an offline for a television commercial. The reason they were done in Avid was so that when we hand the EDL over to the effects company – they know what footage they need to use. Avid is FANTASTIC for this kind of thing. I love the AniMatte effect – it’s far better than anything Final Cut has. However, once you have twelve tracks of video all with a colour correction and a couple of mattes – Avid starts to panic a bit. Strange errors start popping up. Things stop working normally. Having said that though – I’ve never had Avid crash (i.e. the program close) on me before. It’s crashed a couple of times on load due to a dodgy file in the OMFI folder – but it’s never died whilst I’ve been doing something important. It’s given me lots of cryptic error messages – but so has Final Cut.

Having said all that – Avid does seem a lot more stable. The timeline responsiveness is incredible. Final Cut Pro is generally pretty good when you wizz around the timeline, but at times it seems to slow down for no particular reason. Avid is fast. Always fast. I like that. I like that a lot.

Another thing that people generally always say is that the media management in Final Cut Pro sucks. Everyone seems to agree that this is the case – from film school students, to random people on Twitter to professionals. Everyone, except me. Personally, I think that the way Avid and Final Cut Pro handle files is pretty much the same – and yes, I know this is going to cause all kinds of arguments. When I set up a new Final Cut Pro project, I set up a new folder structure on an external hard drive (on an unrelated topic – I name all my external drives after pet dogs I’ve come across in the past):

For every single project I work on, I have a Final Cut workspace folder. This contains everything to do with the project – render files, caches, stills, graphics, audio, etc. The advantage of this is that when I open up the project on another Mac, everything is there, and ready to go. No need to re-render. No need to reconnect. Everything just works. The disadvantage is that I need to change the Capture Scratch and Cache paths every time I open a project. However, this only takes about 7 seconds, so it’s not that much of a pain. I very rarely open two project files at once unless it’s a massive film I’m working on such as a feature (and almost never open two different films at the same time, so I don’t get any nasty problems like render files being saved to the wrong project workspace).

Unless you’re working with a Unity – Avid pretty much works the same way. For each project you had a OMFI Media files folder (if you’re working with OMF files) or an Avid MediaFiles folder (if you’re working in MXF files). Sure you can store content for multiple projects in the same media folder, just like you can in Final Cut Pro – but that just makes life more confusing when the time comes to moving projects around. So, I much prefer to have a new OMFI folder for each project.

So in that sense – for my workflow – both Avid and Final Cut Pro work the same way. I keep the media in one place and never have any reconnection issues. Of course if I just drag a file from the desktop into Final Cut Pro without first moving it into my workplace – then I’m going to have reconnection issues if I move to another Mac. But I’m a fairly organised person, so I always put stuff in the right place. For those people who are too lazy or forgetful, then do yourself a favour an purchase a copy of Loader from Digital Heaven.

In terms of actual editing (i.e. the creative stuff) Avid and Final Cut are very different. It took me a while to get out of the habit of being able to quickly drag and drop like you can in Final Cut Pro, but within two or three days, I’ve quickly adapted to the new way of thinking. I really like the way Avid works and can see why editors love it (especially the more old school editors from the days were you had to physically “cut and paste” film). Avid seems hard core and industrial – whereas Final Cut seems more like a sexy new toy. That said though, I personally think a good Final Cut Pro editor can be just as quick as a really good Avid editor. I don’t think one method of working is better than the other – just different.

One thing that Avid wins hand down on is the default keyboard mapping. I’ve grown up with Final Cut Pro, so I’ve never really thought too much about it. Until I started working with Avid. The default Avid layout isn’t perfect – but it’s so much better than Final Cut! Make sure you check out the Keyboard Manifesto on the ProVideo Coalition site. Scott allows you to download a great “Avid-like” keyboard layout to “fix up” Final Cut Pro. However, that said, I can see why Apple have mapped the keyboard the way they have. It’s logical. Sure, it may not be fast. But film students can literally walk up to a Final Cut Pro workstation and have a fair idea of what everything does. When they walk up to an Avid – they have no idea. Avid makes the most sense once you’ve been shown once what everything is – but Final Cut Pro makes sense from the onset.

So what do I like about Avid much more than I do about Final Cut?

The colour corrector in Avid is amazing. It’s so powerful and so easy to use. Apple’s 3-way Colour Corrector is a toy in comparison. However, that said, Final Cut Studio comes with Color – which despite what some people may tell you, is amazing. Sure it has some bugs in it – but they’ll be worked out in time. In the meantime there is always workarounds. Most people hate the interface – but I think it makes sense. Sure it’s not very Apple – but who really cares. As long as it creates amazing looks – which it does.

The effects in Avid are a lot better than Final Cut. I love the AniMatte. It reminds me of After Effects. I wish Final Cut Pro had something like this without having to install some expensive 3rd party plugin.

I love the way Avid handles users and preferences. The fact that when you boot up Avid you’re presented with an option to select a project you wish to open, plus select a user preference is fantastic. It’s so simple, so logical, yet so incredible. Why oh why can’t Final Cut Pro introduce this? The only thing that I don’t like about Avid is the one thing that may people love about it! Whenever I change projects, I need to also change the OMFI folders around. It would be great if when you opened a project you could also select which “media folder” you wanted to use.

By far my FAVOURITE thing about Avid is the way it handles project files. The fact that you can simply copy and paste a bin on the finder level is so much better than the way Final Cut Pro handles things. Sure you can export out an XML file in Final Cut Pro – but it’s so much easier to just be able to copy and paste a bin. From an assistants point of view – this is invaluable! I can just copy and paste bins to the editor and the new bins magically appear in his project. Amazing!

My second favourite thing about Avid is the way it handles settings. You can easily copy and paste settings and rename them. For example, you might have a couple of different configurations for deck setups. Instead of having to change all the settings around each time you change decks, you can just uncheck one configuration and check the other. You can have multiple keyboard configurations in the one user profile. The Avid is amazingly customisable. You can basically change EVERYTHING to suit your needs.

So… if Avid has all these amazing features, why don’t I just change? Well, originally it was just a matter of price. Final Cut Pro is DEAD cheap whereas Avid WAS incredibly expensive. This is changing. But, personally, I think I’m going to be one of those annoying people who is constantly switching between Avid and Final Cut Pro. Why? Because they are both fantastic tools – and they basically do exactly the same thing – it’s just that they are both better at different things.

Final Cut Pro is like a Swiss army knife. You can basically throw anything at it and do things quickly. It can basically tackle any Quicktime file you throw at it, and within minutes you can get from the Final Cut Pro timeline to an exported DVD. It’s quick and sometimes nasty. Everyone knows how to use it (and even if they don’t know, they can learn the basics within hours) – so if you get sick someone else can take over the project with ease. As long as the project is set up correctly from the get-go, and you have some kind of self control in terms of managing files, then you shouldn’t run into too many (if any!) reconnection issues. Final Cut Pro is GREAT for short projects. It’s the perfect short film tool. However for longer projects it dies. It doesn’t handle masses of footage well at all. If you have 40 or so hours of footage in the project, it can take up to 15 minutes to boot up even on the fastest Mac. If you have hundreds of sequences within a project, you can run into all kinds of “Out of Memory” problems. Sure there are workaround – such as using a different project for each scene. But that’s a pain.

Avid on the other hand is a workhorse. It can handle feature films with ease. The boot up time is almost instant in most cases. It’s not bullet proof – but I’ve never lost media, render files, or work because of a random bug or error – in comparison to Final Cut Pro where I’ve lost whole projects temporarily (thank goodness for the Autosave vault!). If I know I’m going to be working with a lot of media, then Avid will always be my first preference.

Although the new AMA changes everything – as of Avid 3.0.5 and Final Cut Pro 6.0.5, both NLEs have the same limitation – although it doesn’t bother me that much. Avid converts everything to MXFs of OMFs whereas Final Cut Pro converts everything to Quicktimes. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest. People complain about the transcode times. Do it while you’re sleeping. People complain about requiring so much hard drive space. Hard drives are cheap now. I don’t think this is really a limitation at all.

Finally, I still stand by my prediction that the next version of Final Cut Studio will change EVERYTHING. I’m sorry, but there is no way in hell Apple is going to watch Avid dramatically improve their packages, lower the prices dramatically, and just do nothing. I’m extremely confident that Apple has something new and amazing hidden away in some dark and smelly room somewhere. But, that said, Avid is now a completely different company. They’ve changed. For the better. They are actually listening to their customers, and seriously improving their software.

One thing for certain is that I think Avid will eventually get rid of the EDL Manager and DigiTranslator, and put this functionality directly into the Avid application. I think integration between ProTools and Avid will also become almost transparent. But I also think that the integration between Final Cut Pro and ProTools will become better.  I finally think Avid has decided to stop fighting Apple and start working out ways to get their software in front of the eyes of Final Cut Pro fanatics.

So in conclusion… both Avid and Final Cut Pro are great tools that both can help achieve amazing works of art. Both are far from perfect. Both have bugs. Both needs improving. But I think every editor should have both on their system.

If you’re doing a long form project – unless you have an amazing assistant editor who’s extremely technically proficient and patient – I’d stick with Avid. It’s got an unchallenge amazing track record.

If you’re doing a short film – then maybe Final Cut Pro is the go.

If you’re working with lots of different editors, or if it’s a big project, then Avid is the winner, although you can do these kinds of projects with Final Cut Pro. Personally I prefer the ability to easily copy and paste bins than using XML files.

Either way, I know it’s cliche, but as every editor will tell you, it’s not the tools that make a great film – it’s the talented editor who’s TELLING A STORY. It’s easy to get bogged down in technology, and Final Cut vs Avid discussions – but at the end of the day use the tool that works.

Happy Editing! Feel free to leave your comments, suggestions, abuse, ideas, etc. below! I’d love to hear from you!

Best Regards, Chris!

For those that don’t know, Kaltura has developed the first open source video platform for video management, creation, interaction and collaboration. Kaltura’s platform enables any site to seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate advanced interactive rich-media functionalities, such as searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, and sharing of video, audio, and photo files. The platform also includes unique collaboration functionalities that allow groups of users to create together, and enables publishers to access and syndicate reusable content across the Kaltura Network of content and to enjoy aggregated hosted video services such as video advertising, professional editing, and DVD printing. Kaltura’s free open source code is available for web developers in the form of an extensive Software Development Kit, and as self-serve packages for publishers in the form of automatic extensions and plugins for leading content management, blogging and collaboration platforms such as WordPress, and MediaWiki.

We have been working with Kaltura to develop a site that allows you to cut together your very own version of the SAKOOZ trailer. Unfortunately this is still very much a work in progress – but we hope to have this online sometime soon. Once we’ve nailed down the SAKOOZ trailer, we may even allow users to remix some of our other projects, such as Happy Sundaes and Superb Menura – so stay tuned!

Directed by Sydney-based Shawn Seet – who traditionally has mainly done television directing and editing as well as being awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the 2001 Queen’s New Years Honours Lis for his services to Australian society and to Australian film production – this film is sure to be a hit, especially given that At the Movies gave it some a positive review. It will be very interesting to see how this film goes at the box office…

Ignoring the actual film for a minute – the thing that really caught our attention was their online presence. As well as the official movie site, they also had two other promotional sites. One of them teaches you how to throw a punch, and the other features a Cut Your Own Scene competition. It’s the latter that really got us interested.

On the site, you can download five scenes, and some sound effects and temp score and basically do what you want with it (under the condition that you link back to their site if you display it online). The footage is in “rushes” form – meaning the footage has a logo on it, isn’t colour graded and has timecode burnt into it. Although they don’t give you all the footage for each scene (and if they actually do, then they really shot VERY little coverage for each scene), and the “rushes” have been edited together to look like rushes (i.e. slates have been added in for the hell of it, random footage has been added, useful footage has been removed) – you’re still provided with some useful footage, and it’s great to play around with.

Although the competition has now closed – the general idea was that the public can cut together their own scene, and submit it for review.The best five scenes will be posted on Disney’s promotional site for the film (obviously this is a great opportunity for some exposure to high-profile people in the film industry). These five best scene cuts will be selected by Bill Russo head of Editing at the AFTRS and the creative team from the film. Interestingly, Director Shawn Seet, Editor Milena Romanin and Cinematogropher Hugh Miller are all graduates from AFTRS, Australia’s premiere Film and Television school.

If you haven’t already downloaded the rushes and had a play – I highly recommend you do! They’re great for practising your craft, and would also make a terrific training tool.

I downloaded the rushes a few months ago now, and used them to really get to grips with Avid (as I’ve done most of my cutting in Final Cut Pro in the past). Trying to cut together a real scene (as opposed to some dodgy video footage supplied with most books and tutorials), was really handy. Just getting on with the job, and learning as I went, was extremely beneficial.

For your viewing pleasure, here are some of the edits I threw together:

Scene A (Rough Cut 001)

Scene B (Rough Cut 001)

Scene C (Rough Cut 005)

Scene E (Rough Cut 001)

None of these edits are particularly amazing – although I did spend a fair bit of time on Scene C to try and get it flowing a lot nicer. The lack of coverage was a bit tricky – and really added to the challenge. I didn’t have time to really fix up the audio or grade the footage either – so you’re really seeing a first pass of an offline edit.

You can download my Avid Project for the scene here if you like. You’ll need to download all the media yourself though and re-link it. Originally I planned to log all the clips in Final Cut Pro as well – but never got around to it. If you edited the scenes in Final Cut and want to offer your project file on this site, let me know!

Overall – I think this campaign was a really good idea, and I’d love to see some statistics on how many people actually downloaded the rushes and submitted entries for the competition. Looking at YouTube search results, there doesn’t seem to be that many people that got into it which is a real shame. Although the fact that the site moved their rushes over to Amazon Web Services probably means that at least a lot of people were downloading the files. I guess at the end of the day any publicity is good publicity, and the most people that talk about the film the better.

It’s really interesting watching what other people have done. For example, I just watched this version – although it’s cut together OK, it seems a bit all over the place, and doesn’t really have a nice flow to it. Also, you don’t really get an insight into the characters at all. This version of another scene is a lot better – but it seems really fast. I also don’t really like the dissolve at the start. This version of the fight scene however works HEAPS better than mine. At the time of playing with this scene, I was too afraid to use jump cuts, and I really tried to make it flow naturally – but it never really worked. I used far too many instances of the one cutaway (the young worker looking through the window). In retrospect, I think the use of fast jump cuts and really making the action zip past would have worked a lot better. I’ve also been told you should never have characters both enter and exit a sense – you should either have one or the other. This is hard when you’re only cutting one scene, with no overall context – but I think the rule is still a good one, and may have helped me with some of the other scenes.

As we’re in the process of trying to build a similar campaign for the SAKOOZ trailer, this was a really great project to study. The fact that you could download the rushes (as opposed to editing the trailer online) is something that really interests us. However, I think by making people download large files and edit them on their own system (whether they use Mac or PC, Avid or FCP, Premiere or Vegas, Windows Movie Maker or iMovie…) as opposed to just being able to cut something together in the comfort of a web browser, means that the campaign attracts more to geeks and professionals, as opposed to just general movie goers. As a lot of geeks and professionals will probably go see the movie regardless, I’m not sure if this kind of thing will actually attract more audience numbers to the cinemas. What I’m now considering for the SAKOOZ site (and for future “cutting your own version” sites), it having the option – you can either edit online (we are currently working very closely with the team at Kaltura), or download and cut it together using your own tools.

Regardless of all this – we highly recommend you go and see the film at the movies and support Australian films! And when it comes out on DVD – buy that as well! I’m sure there’ll be some great special feature on that one…

Finally – if you edited your own version of the scenes, feel free to let us know via the comments system at the bottom of this page! We’d love to see your interpretation of the scenes!

Happy editing!

Best Regards, Chris!

I’m going to make this brief – as we’ve got lots happening at the moment. Here’s what’s been going on:

1. We are still busily working with the team at Pocket Bonfire productions on their exciting Hippo film. Nothing major to report as of yet, apart from the fact that not only are we handling the hippo, but we’re also in the process of putting together their new website. Busy! Busy! As always, if you’re interested in helping out on this one, please let us know! We’re still on the look out for animatronics gurus and puppet makers who are interested in bringing a hippo to life!

2. We recently threw together a last minute entry for the Dortios Competition. You can check it out here. OK, so it’s hardly a masterpiece, but considering how quickly we put it together from concept to upload, we think we did pretty well!

3. Nick has moved to Sydney temporarily. We’ll be setting up a new blog for him and his adventures shortly. Stay tuned!

4. We are in the process of doing the sound design for several MAFMAD entries.

5. We are currently working with a Melbourne-based director/producer team on two exciting online web show series. More details to follow.

6. As always we have a lot of cool film ideas in development – both short films and feature length productions. A few of them are really starting to take shape, so we may have some more projects in the pre-production stages shortly.

7. The SAKOOZ website is STILL under construction. No idea when we’re going to get it up and running. Hopefully soon!

8. We are going to be releasing Happy Sundaes and Superb Menura online for FREE shortly! Stay tuned!

Plus lots more…!

So as you can see, things are happening. We also have three blog entries sitting in the Draft folder just waiting to be finished – all of them discussing new technology, Avid vs FCP, etc. There’s just not enough time these days!

As always, thanks for reading, and for keeping an eye out on what we’re up to.

See you in the soup!

Best Regards, Chris!

I’ve been looking forward to watching this film for a long time. There are many reason for this. Firstly, I loved I Robot. The special effects were great – plus it was just a really fantastic film in general. Great score, great script, great acting… great, well everything. Well apart from the mass amounts of product placement – but we’ll let that slip. Secondly, Alex is an Australian. Like most Aussie’s, I like to support our own. Thirdly, most of the film was shot in Melbourne – my home town. And last, but not least – this film was shot on the RED camera. Having work with the RED on the Sakooz trailer, I have a very fond spot in my heart for this unique piece of revolutionary technology. I always planned to see Knowing when it first opened at the cinemas (last Thursday), but I’ve been caught up with heaps of other things. But, tonight, I’ve finally seen it. And I’ll tell you what – the fact that I’m blogging about it late at night just goes to show how much this movie has affected me. As I said… Wow.

For those that have been living under a rock – here’s the basic synopsis: John Koestler’s son gets the most chilling drawing from a time capsule. It contains numbers that predict deadly events that have occurred and that will occur.

Seems simple enough.

I watched this film in a VMAX (i.e. big screen at Village Cinemas) theatre at a big local shopping complex. I caught the 9:30pm session on a Sunday night – so I knew that it wasn’t going to be that crowded. There were about 30 people in the audience – so there were literally hundreds of seats free. Well before the end of the movie at least five people left and never returned. Throughout the movie people awkwardly laughed in various sections to each other saying “what were they thinking”. At the end of the film, one guy in the back row yelled out, “that was the crappiest movie I’ve ever seen”. Several people laughed, and started talking to themselves agreeing. I haven’t been to a movie that caused so many extreme emotions for quite some time – especially in the mainstream cinema. Personally, I think if you can make a film that stirs this many people up – and not simply for the sake of just stirring people up (i.e. there wasn’t extreme violence for the sake of extreme violence, or sex scenes for the sake of sex scenes – everything certainly seemed there to serve a purpose) – is doing it’s job. I don’t think anyone could have walked out of this film feeling as if they weren’t being glued to the screen. Yes, some people walked out – but I think that was more to do with the fact that it was late on a Sunday night, and that they simply didn’t appreciate how magic this film really was.

I loved the script. I’ve seen the trailer for the film lots of times before tonight. I’d seen and read a couple of reviews on the film. Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton from At The Movies, seemed to really like it – and generally speaking I trust at least one of their opinions at any given time. So,  I thought I knew what I was in for. I was completely wrong. This is not the kind of film were you can work out exactly what’s going to happen just by looking at the poster.

I loved the acting. I know I’m in the minority – but generally speaking, I think that Nicolas Cage generally always does a good job. Sure he’s done some bad films – but just look at Lord of War, Adaptation, Con Air, Leaving Las Vegas, Next and all the other great films he’s done. In this film, I think he was superb. I think he completely got into the character, and within seconds I completely forgot he was Nicholas Cage. The kids, Chandler Canterbury and Lara Robinson were amazing. Throughout the film I kept on wondering what the hell I’d seen Lara in before. Funnily enough, I’ve been cutting together someone’s show reel together the last couple of days, and she features in one of the films I’ve been getting footage from. That’s right – she’s an Aussie. A Melbourne girl. And an incredible little actress.

The other face that took me a while to place was the beautiful Nadia Townsend. She only plays a minor role in this film – sister to Nicolas Cage – but despite her small amount of screen time she really stands out. I used to watch her bright and early every Saturday morning on the ABC kids show, Head Start. That’s right – she’s another Aussie. Another exceptional young actress.

The female co-star in the film, Diana Wayland, played by the stunning Rose Byrne is also… yes, you guessed it. An Aussie – born in Sydney. I thought the chemistry between Nicolas and Rose was great – and she certainly has a lot of screen presence.

The best thing is, that as I was watching the film, I didn’t once notice that all these people were Aussie’s. It only dawned on me as the titles started rolling. I think this is important. I know most people already know this (especially after Heath won so many awards after his breathing performance in The Dark Knight) – but it just goes to show how much acting talent we have “down under”.

I loved the visual effects. From what I can gather from the end titles – most of the companies involved were Australian – I believe the principle VFX house was Animal Logic. Some of the sequences were absolutely amazing. The only shot I didn’t fully believe was the plane crash landing – just because I thought that the plane itself looked a bit “computery” – but apart from that, I felt that everything else seemed to fit in perfectly. I think if they’d had a Qantas plane crashing, that may have sold it for me, but anyway! Everything was realistic, and in a lot of cases, faultless. To be honest, I was impressed. I was a bit sceptical coming in to the film – because the plane shot featured in all the trailers and promotional videos, and a couple of the other shots looked a bit flimsy on face value – but watching it all in context, I think everything worked, and it worked really well.

I loved the look of the film. RED has done it. This film looked just as good as any other blockbuster film I’ve seen in the cinemas this year. Not once did I think, “wait a second, this is digital”. The image quality was exceptional. And that’s watching it in a shopping centre complex movie theatre, on a print that probably been played way too many times before it came before my eyes! For those that have been doubting RED, or complaining that it’s not “good enough” to compete with film – here’s your proof. The film looks incredible. Enough said.

I loved the fact that this was shot in Melbourne. It’s incredible to see locations that I’ve been to many times before, but are shown in a completely new and unexpected light. Now I know what people in The States must feel like whenever a big blockbuster is released. I think that fact that they made Melbourne look like America is incredible. Sure there were a lot of things that looked very familiar (even little things like that fact that they used “our” exit signs, “our road signs” in long shots, etc.) – but generally speaking, it certainly didn’t feel like the film took place in Australia. It felt American. It felt Hollywood. It felt blockbuster. But not in a tacky negative way. This film was good. Really good. ET and 3rd Encounters good. Hint. Hint.

From the moment this film started, to the very last title (how strange is it seeing the RED logo next to Fuji), I was engaged. I was scared shit-less in sections. I was glued to the screen. I felt the music section and score was incredible. Marco BeltramiI, was the man in front of the orchestra, who also did the original compositions for I, Robot. Michael McMenomy – an Aussie – did the sound design. From what I can gather, this is the first time he’s taken on the role of Sound Designer for a feature film – although he’s worked in the sound department for many successful Australian and Hollywood films in the past. I loved the whispering. In surround, in an VMAX theatre – well, it just sent chills down my spine. It moved me. Physically.

Simon Duggan was the DOP – a New Zealander – and another ring-in from I, Robot. It’s great to see that Alex brought together such a tried and tested talented team. The film just looked great. Forget RED for a second. The framing and camera moves were perfect. It’s not about the technically – it’s about visually telling the story. Simon certainly does that!

Richard Learoyd was the editor – yet again another I, Robot survivor! I knew this is probably getting old – but I thought the editing was exceptional as well. Why you may ask? Because, just as the sound did, the editing kept me on the edge of my seat. When I was expecting one thing, I was presented with something completely different. I was shocked. I was surprised. I was… most importantly… entertained.

Ok… so you get the idea that I loved the film. I loved the editing, the sound design, the cinematography, the script… I honestly thought it was a really great film.

But why has it go me so inspired and worked up? Because not only did it caught such massive reactions in the audience, despite the fact that it was a small audience. Not only is it a really great film. But it was shot in Melbourne. On a RED camera. With an Australian director. And it looked epic. It looked big. It looked as good as any other blockbuster film I’ve seen this year. Just, if not more, impressive as Watchmen. This is what excites me. It just gives me hope that one that I’ll be able to make a film like this. Massive, visually stunning films are not just restricted to America (although that said, I already knew this – I mean, just look at some of the crazy VFX driven films coming out of places like Korea and Russia!). It gives me hope. It inspires me.

I’ve always wanted to do what Peter Jackson has done in New Zealand, and set up a PROPER high end film making community in Melbourne. When you watch films like this, it just makes me think that it’s all possible. We have the talent. We have the technology. There are certainly people out there that have great stories to tell. It’s really only a matter of time.

How can we make this happen? We need to ensure that people watch Australian films. People need to watch films like Knowing so that they can help learn to appreciate the fact that we can make big blockbusters down under. As film-makers, we really need to support our “mates” just like Alex is doing. We need to keep making Aussie films (even if they’re not set down under) so that actors like Nadia can keep growing and improving their art – because she’s one talented girl that I’m sure will go far.

So, to be honest, I don’t care if you’ve already seen this film, and think I’m on drugs, because you hated it. At least you’ve seen it. This is important. But personally, I think this is a great film. Yes the ending is a bit “out there” – but luckily, no one spoiled it for me, so as I watched it tonight (or last night technically as it’s well past midnight), everything was new and exciting. I love a movie that really moves me. I love a more that inspires me. I love a movie that makes me want to make movies. I love a movie that makes me want to talk about movies. This movie does all these things.

If you haven’t seen it – go watch it. It’s an experience. If you’ve already seen it, then leave a comment and tell me what you thought! Am I crazy? Critics seem to be on both sides of the fence.

Thanks for reading! And sorry for getting a little carried away… But, hey! Movie making is exciting!

Best Regards, Chris!

But having said all this – despite my ongoing lack of time, I’ve got a huge amount of INCREDIBLE projects in the works. The Sakooz website has been put on a temporary hold yet again – I just need a few days free to get it up and running. This will DEFINITELY be done as soon as possible. I have also just recently come up with a completely new and improved angle for the story, so I will start going back to the drawing boards in terms of the Sakooz script shortly. I’m still on the hunt for a talented script writer to jump on board this one. But all things Sakooz aside for a second, I’ve recently been in discussing with two other writing/directing teams about to very different, yet both incredibly exciting projects.

One of them is a short film adaptation of the highly successful children’s book There’s a Hippopotamus on our Roof Eating Cake. I am currently working with the team to offer them some guidance in how exactly they can get a realistic hippo onto the big screen. This is an EXTREMELY exciting project to be involved in, and although this is not technically a latenite film, we will certainly be heavily involved in the production.

We are also in the early stages of helping develop an online television show about super heroes. Again, this is not technically a latenite film – but we’ll certainly be discussing the production on our site in great detail as time goes on.

So as always – things are certainly happening! There’s never a dull moment here! Our twitter account is slowly gaining momentum as we post relevant industry news, geared towards Melbourne film-maker, and our recent blog entry on Final Cut Studio 3 predictions has been getting a massive amount of hits! Thanks to everyone who has written down a comment! It’s extremely appreciated! If you aren’t follow us on twitter yet – make sure you sign up!

We’ve also recently uploaded a whole lot of old film reviews and articles onto this blog for you all to have a look at. We hope it’s of some interest to you. As always, feel free to leave a question of comment.

Thanks for reading – and well keep you in the loop as to all the exciting things we’ve got in the works!

See you in the soup!

Best Regards, Chris!

The good news is that we have been working closely with the team from Kaltura, and the online trailer remix function has turned out great! Thanks to everyone who has been helping us with that element of the site!

Also good news is that our last blog entry has been getting a great amount of hits! Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read it, and also for sending us comments via twitter, Facebook and e-mail. It’s always nice to know that people are actually reading this blog! We recently been slowly getting more followers on twitter which is always nice!

And that’s about it for today! Don’t despair however, despite all these other commitments, the cogs are definitely still turning here… Nick has been working hard on several exciting initiatives, and we’re also starting to put together several teams of other people to begin work on some other new and exciting projects that we haven’t yet talked about. So stay tuned! This is going to be an very cool year…

Some people are predicating the death of DVD Studio Pro, others are predicting that Blu-ray burning will finally become available. With Apple filing for new patents, some are predicting that Final Cut Studio will introduce some cool new storyboarding features.

People are hoping for better round-tripping support, better media management, unified solid state camera support, major bug-fixes in Color, 10-bit and 4K support, GPU Acceleration, true 3D in Motion, features from Adobe Premiere (such as searchable text), features from Avid (such as script sync), features from iMovie (such as an updated trim editor), background rendering, Spotlight support inside Final Cut… the list goes on, and on!

Regardless of what new and amazing features end up in Final Cut Studio 3, everyone wants to get their hands on it quick smart! Most people seem to think that Apple will showcase their new product somewhere between now and NAB (even though Apple have dropped out of NAB for the foreseeable future).

So, given all this, what are our predictions?

Well, we think sometime this year Apple will release Final Cut Extreme – a complete overhaul of the Final Cut Studio package.

The name Final Cut Extreme has been around since the lead-up to NAB 2006, after ThinkSecret, writing for PCMagazine, claimed to have additional details about Final Cut Pro 6, Final Cut Extreme, and long-rumoured display upgrades. Final Cut Extreme was said to enable the most demanding users to edit uncompressed 4K and 2540p video. Compatibility was said to include Red Digital Cinema’s Red, Panavision Genesis, Dalsa Origin, Thompson Viper, Sony Cinealta, Phantom HD, and Arri D20 cameras. After this article was released, the online film community went crazy, with heaps of blog posts being written adding to the hype. Unfortunately, the rumours were false, an no Final Cut Extreme was released at NAB 2006. However, in the lead-up to NAB 2007, everything started again. There was the occasional sensible article being written, but most of it was just hype and strong wishing.

However, we don’t think Final Cut Extreme will be designed for the extreme high-end market – we just think that they’ll rename the existing Final Cut Studio package to Final Cut Extreme and keep a similar pricing. It will still be marketed towards their current broad audience – but we also predict, that with a massive new collection of features and simplified workflows, that a lot of the high-end boys and girls will jump on board.

So what will make this new FCX so different? Well, it’s our prediction that most of the Final Cut Studio (i.e. Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Color, LiveType, etc.) will be merged into the one application. We predict a MASSIVE interface and workflow overhaul. No longer will you need to Send to Soundtrack Pro, or use XML workarounds to get your timeline into Color. Everything will be in the one “box”. In typical Apple style – we predict they’ll make things better, by making them substantially simpler.

So how the hell will this actually work? We believe the key is a new Universal Timeline and a set of different Rooms.

The Project Room will be the “hub” of your project. Taking media management to a new extreme, this will be were you can manage different versions of your project, keep track of scripts, storyboards, and other pre-production information. Taking on board features find in other packages such as Celtx, we predict that FCX will have a big focus on ALL stages of the film-making process, including Pre-Production.

User Management will be dramatically improved in FCX. Much like in Avid, you will be able to easily create and switch between user profiles when the application first loads, and also any time whilst you have the application running. You can easily customise the FCX interface to suit your own needs. Currently, managing user customisations in Final Cut Pro is a joke. Multiple users working on the same project will also be supported. Changes will be tracked and logged.

We predict that as an extension to their current MobileMe platform, they will release MobileMe Pro, which will easily allow you to share pre-production documents such as scripts and call sheets, as well as offer everything that Final Cut Server currently has to offer. You’ll be able to easily export rough cuts out of FCX, that will automatically be uploaded to the MobileMe platform, and then producers can access these videos on their iPhone.

The whole selling point of FCX will be making life quicker and easier. In typical Apple style – they’ll take features only found on extremely expensive and high-end products, and make them cool and pretty for trendy Apple users. The integration between FCX, the Internet, AppleTV and iPhones will be extremely important to the success of the product.

Project Files will also be quite different to the way they are currently handled in Final Cut. They will be an archive file, which when opened will contain a logical folder structure containing any pre-production information, scripts, etc. Each bin in the Edit Room will be an individual file (much the same as Avid), allowing you to easily copy and paste individual bins if need be.

The Media Room, will be a beefed up version of a mix between the Media Manager in Final Cut, and Final Cut Server. This will be were you keep track of all your video, audio, graphics and other assets. When you create a new Project, you will be asked to select a Media Collection. This will be the equivalent of your Capture Scratch, Thumbnail Cache, etc. In this file (which will be an archive, so you can right click on it and “view archive contents) will be ALL the assets for your project, all nicely organised in a logical folder structure. Each project will have it’s own Media Collection (similar to Avid’s way to dealing with things). If you delete a file from the collection on the Finder level, these changes are automatically detected by FCX (just like in Avid). You can have multiple version of the same file (ie. you might have a couple different versions of a musical score) – and this is all handled by FCX. One of the coolest features will be a video Face Recognition function, much the same as the one found in iMovie. Video clips will also be scanned, and using a new Speech-to-Text engine automatic transcripts will be written (just like in the new version of Premiere).

Unfortunately, we still predict that FCX will be heavily based around the Quicktime Architecture, meaning that you’ll still probably have to wrap R3D files into Quicktime files. However, this process will be all done in the background. For example, if you drag a MXF file into the timeline, this file is automatically copied, logged and transcoded or wrapped to the Media Collection in the background. You can still do other things while FCX is adding new media (similar to the way Final Cut Pro handles it’s new stabilisation features).

CinemaTools will also be integrated into the Media Room – allowing you to easily go from a ProRes offline, to a 35mm release print.

The Cutting Room, will be the Final Cut Pro replacement. Although Final Cut has come a very long way since it was shown in private room demonstrations as a 0.9 alpha at the National Association of Broadcasters exposition in 1998, it’s still not as “Apple” as it could be. Apple products are known for their slick interfaces, and features that “just work” – and although Final Cut is one of the more beautiful interfaces on the market, it’s still got nothing on the really cheap and friendly little brother, iMovie. It’s our prediction that the Cutting Room will have all the fantastic features of the current Final Cut Pro, but with some very major improvements.

The biggest and most important difference will be the Universal Timeline. This timeline will be common across all rooms. It will be very similar to the current timeline, except more powerful. Just imagine if you merged the Final Cut, After Effects, Motion and Soundtrack Pro timelines together. Audio will be vastly improved on the timeline – as you’ll be allowed to perform surround panning, etc. You’ll be able to group tracks, as well as label, colour code them, and even give them a thumbnail icon.

Although the interface will look much sexier, and modern – everything will function in a similar way to the current Final Cut Pro. Basically, if you can easily find your way around the current Final Cut application – this change over will be a non-issue. The biggest changes will be an improved Trim Tool and vastly improved Effects Engine.

After you’ve cut together your masterpiece, you can then jump over to the Audio Room. After you’ve clicked the Audio Room tab, your timeline stays the same, but the workarea section of the application changes. Building upon the features of both Logic and Soundtrack Pro, this is were you do all your audio mastering. Any simple audio effects you applied in the Cutting Room automatically transfer over to the Audio Room. There is a powerful real-time audio mixer (with all the automated faders and knobs you can handle), support of virtual instruments, plus all the plug-ins you’ve come to expect from Logic and STP. Plugins that work in Logic, also work in FCX. The sound effects library will no doubt be HUGE – and easily searchable via the Media Room.

Next is the Effects Room. After Apple announced the end of Shake, everyone has been eagily waiting for Apple to release the code-named Phenomenon replacement. However, this, so far, has never come about. That said, a lot of the amazing features of Shake have been included in Final Cut, Motion and even iMovie. We believe that the Effects Room will be the Shake replacement. We think that it will utilise a mixture of using the Universal Timeline – but also nodes (like in Shake). You’ll be able to do everything you can currently do in Motion and LiveType – plus utilise all the plugins that Shake has to offer, but the feature set will also be expanded upon. True 3D will be integrated into the package. Using the Media Room, you’ll also easily be able to import effects shots from other packages such as After Effects, and Nuke. The current Final Cut Studio has been very much designed to keep everything in the one package. Getting from Final Cut to After Effects is not a trivial task. However – in FCX, we predict that this will change. Just like MacOS can easily open and manage PDFs, we predict that Apple will try and make everything easier and simplier. Advanced 2D and 3D Trackers, powerful roto tools, etc. will all be stock standard. Masks that are created in the Cutting Room (which you can do using the new and improved pen tool) are automatically available in the Effects Room. Obviously, there will be heaps of amazing templates and “one click” options – all available via the Media Room.

The Grading Room will be the place to go for your final colour correction. Much as the same as the Audio Room, any colour correction effects you apply to clips in the Cutting Room will automatically be transferred over to the Grading Room. Based on Color, but with some added functionality from the Shake feature-set, this is were you can do all your grading. Tracking Data and Masks created in the Effects Room (or even the Cutting Room) are all available in the Grading Room.

Finally, you have the Finishing Room. This is the were you can export your timeline, clips, effects shots, etc. to web, DVD, AppleTV, iPod, etc. Taking on all the functionality of DVD Studio Pro and iDVD, plus all the power of Compressor – you can export things with one click, or customise the settings to the finest degree. Unfortunately, I suspect BluRay is dead – at least from Apple’s point of view (being a “bad of hurt” and all that!). In this room you’ll also be able to export to tape via a much improved and powerful interface.

Of course, all of this is great – but we predict that the biggest changes and improvements will be behind the scenes. There will be a change over from the 32-bit Carbon backbone to the 64-bit Cocoa. Everything will be GPU Accelerated. New low bit-rate versions of ProRes will be released. Less things will need rendering (for example, no more rendering if you simply “flip” an clip), and there will be better rendering management (i.e. if you drag a clip over the top of another clip, causing it to need to render, if you drag that clip away again, the old render files will be referenced – no need to re-render). There will be full meta-data support and Spotlight integration. You will be able to have multiple instances of FCX running – as you won’t be able to load multiple projects in the same application like you currently can. Every room will support distributed/cluster rendering as well as background rendering (this includes all plugins). Up to 4:4:4 4K will be supported, plus there will be better support for proxy files. It’s our prediction that FCX will be almost written from the ground up – so the code will be a lot cleaner and more streamlined, making everything more zippy!

There will also be heaps of little extra bug fixes and improvements, such as improved speed tools in the Cutting Room, better cutting and pasting of parameters, better and more interactive bins (you’ll be able to make your clips any size, and re-arrange them any way you want). The ability to “click and drag” to enable/disable or lock/unlock tracks, or check/uncheck filters (like various Adobe applications). One of the biggest improvements will be better error explanation (i.e. instead of “General Error”, FCX will explain exactly what went wrong and suggest ways of fixing it).

Cool new features will include a full screen bin browser (much like iMovie), new Titles, Transitions and Effects, Animated Travel Maps (available in the Effects Room – taken from iMovie), Advanced Particle Effects, Snap to Beat Markers (like iMovie), Multi-Touch Support (for laptop users), etc.

Customisation will also be a key. You’ll be able to design your own tool plugins for the Universal Timeline, which can be bought and sold as an application on the iTunes stores. If you open a project that has a whole lot of plugins you don’t have, then you’ll be given an option to download any of the free ones, or purchase any that aren’t free.

It’s our belief that FCX will focus on tying the professional application in with the rest of the Apple family of products. FCX will play nicely with the Xsan, Xserve, AppleTV, iPhone and iPod. It will have great connectivity with their new online “cloud”.

Finally – we have a hunch that Apple will release several hardware addons to FCX. This will speed up renders, and transcodes dramatically. But what makes this hardware so special, is that it’s design and source-code will be released as open source allowing 3rd party developers to take on board this technology. Companies like Blackmagic Design will be able to implement this technology in their own capture cards. They will also release a FCX control surface, that allows you to easily control all the various rooms in the application.

So, when do we predict this will be released? We have a hunch that Apple will release a minor update to Final Cut Studio within the next couple of months (fixing some of the bugs and adding some new codecs), but will release FCX towards the end of this year along with a new range of MacPro towers. At first, users will be extremely annoyed with Apple for completely re-designing the Final Cut workflow – but soon enough, people will start to realise just how powerful the new application is. As a result, Avid will dramatically reduce their pricing further, and start to offer Media Composer and ProTools as a single package.

We predict that the package will be AUD$1000.00, and you will not be able to upgrade to it from Final Cut Studio 2.

Will we be right? Only time will tell! Like most people, we do honestly believe that Apple is due for a major update – especially after we’ve just started using Avid for a couple of projects, and have realised just how fantastic the backbone behind Avid is (just the way it handles user profiles and project files is great). But we have “grown up” with Final Cut (in fact, that only reason we went to Apple was due to it!), so we do really want to support it. It will certainly be interesting to see what actually happens in the next few months (especially considering the state of the world’s finances). I don’t know how many people in the world are quite ready to spend a lot of money on new software…

Feel free to send us any comments about our predictions! We’d be really interested to hear what you have to say! But keep in mind, that all of this is just a big GUESS – we don’t have any insider information, nor do we have any connection to anyone at Apple. But after having a good look at Apple’s track record, we think that this is something that has a huge amount of possibility. As we said – only time will tell…

Best Regards, Chris!

On a happier note – 2009 is already looking very exciting! We have been working around the clock on the Sakooz website, and everything seems to be falling into place. If all goes to plan, we should be able to go live some time in February. In other Sakooz news, we are still negotiating away with various high-profile people in regards to getting someone on board to write the feature film script. We also have a lot of other projects in the pipeline for this year, as well as a few more unique projects. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be fixing up the website a bit, putting more energy into our Facebook presence, and also jumping fully on board the twitter bandwagon. This year is set to be the year of “new media” – so we are definitely keeping our ear to the ground, and eyes to the sky on the lookout for new treads, technology and, well, basically just cool stuff. We’ll continue to improve upon Melbourne Rebels, and also try and come up with other ways to help Melbourne-based film-makers get their ideas off the ground. This year is all about innovation and experimentation for us. We’ll be trying and testing new things, developing as much new content as we possibly can – and maybe even consider jumping into the wonderful world of professional podcasts. 

So, as always, exciting times certainly lay ahead – as we have very big plans for this year. Keep an eye out on this blog, keeping visiting our website and Facebook Group, follow our twitter, and keep in touch! If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or ideas, please, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us – especially when it’s about projects such as Melbourne Rebels. We love your input!

Until next time…

Chris!

On another note, originally we were planning to release Sakooz to the Internet community on the first day of 2009. However, we have since decided against this for a couple of reasons. The main reason for the delay is that we want to get the “trailer remix” function (a website which allows you to edit together your very own version of the Sakooz trailer and share it with the world) up-and-running from the very get-go. When we release the Sakooz trailer to the world, we want it to land with a bang – so as much as we’re so eager and excited to let it out of its cage, we need to contain ourselves, take a deep breathe, and release it at the RIGHT time, with everything ready to go. So for those that haven’t seen it yet – unfortunately you’re going to have to wait just a little bit longer.

Well… that’s all for now. Again, a MASSIVE thank you to EVERYONE that has supported us in 2008! We certainly can’t wait to see what fun and adventures lies for 2009… Exciting times certainly lay ahead!

Merry Christmas! Happy Festivus! Have a great holiday break and we’ll catch you again in 2009!

Chris!

In terms of Principle Photography, everything pretty much ran exactly the same as if we were shooting on film. We lit it exactly the same way, and Ben (our DOP) still had his light meter by his side. Because we needed to shoot so much very quickly (time wasn’t on our side), I decided against setting up a “video village” and even a directors monitor – preferring to be there in the action, behind Ben, peaking over his shoulder to watch the on-camera LCD. This worked really well.

Although the plan was always to shoot to card for safety reasons (we’ve all got disaster stories to tell about Firestore’s dying and hard drives being dropped!) – we decided to gamble and record straight to the RED-DRIVE (a special drive designed for the camera which can store 320GB in a RAID 0 configuration). Not only that – but we decided to leave the dumping to the end of the day. This was a HUGE risk, because if the drive died at the end of the day, we’d potentially loose a whole days worth of shooting. However, we didn’t have the crew available to have a dedicated “data technician”, nor did we have the hardware to dump the cards on a regular basis. This may seem really silly (I mean seriously – all you need is a Mac laptop and a card reader!), but we had neither of those things at the time, and it was just easier to use what we had available. Luckily – nothing went wrong, and the RED-DRIVE was faultless – it never dropped a single frame! However, to anyone else planning to shoot on RED – I strongly recommend you do the complete opposite to what we did! Record to CF card and dump as soon as the card is full.

Although in the end we didn’t end up using any of the sync audio – we recorded audio separately to a Sound Devices 744T, which was synced to a Smart Slate. Originally we had planned to sync the camera to the 744T as well, but for some reason we couldn’t get it to work on the first day of shooting, so we gave up. I believe the problem has since been fixed with one of the RED ONE Firmware Updates. We only had one microphone on set – a Sennheiser 416 on a boom. We basically just recorded sound to use as a guide track for when it came to adding sound effects later on.

At the end of each shooting day we dumped the RED-DRIVE and the 744T to two seperate 1TB SATAII drives. For the duration of the shoot we managed to borrow a brand new MacPro Tower from Julian at Eidolon Creative and used this machine to do all the dumping as well as the transcoding. We put the two 1TB drives directly into the MacPro. We ended up with 508.34GB of camera footage, and a couple of GB of audio. We ended up purchasing two additional 500GB SATAII drives to make another backup of all of the R3D files – which we then stored at two separate locations away from our master edit suite, just in case. We called the drives Pinky (Master Edit), Bluey (Backup of Master Edit), Tumbles (R3D Master) and Splash (backup of R3D Master), because that’s what the names of the Sakooz creatures are called. Anyway… Now normally, on a “proper” production, you would have RAIDs and RAID 5 protection, etc. But unfortunately, we simply didn’t have the money for that, so we just had to make do with what we had. We had to manually copy and paste the files for backup purposes – we basically did this at the end of each day. We also kept a copy of the Final Cut Pro project on two USB thumbdrives just in case. Just for laughs, here’s a photo of some of the drives from our rather odd-ball collection. The top right one is Pinky. We ended up taking the covers off the enclosures as we found they got too hot when in use all day and night long.

After principle photography was wrapped we set the MacPro to work trancoding the R3D files using REDrushes (a free application which can be downloaded from the RED site). We were transcoding the R3D files to Apple ProRes 422 HQ files at 1920×1080. We were using the full debayer quality, and REDSpace for both the Colour & Gamma spaces. This took a HUGE amount of time (almost two weeks of none stop processing), but at the end of the day we ended up with some terrific Quicktime files that we could throw into Final Cut Pro and start editing, plus we could also send these clips to the visual effects kids so that they could start playing. We did run into one slight problem after we THOUGHT that everything was done. On inspection of the transcoded files, we realised that all the Quicktimes for Day Two of shooting were EXACTLY the same as Day Four. I’m still not sure whether that was human error or REDrushes being annoying – but either way we had to re-transcode all of the day four footage. Unfortunately at this stage we had to give back the MacPro, so we had to do all of this on a stock standard first generation MacBook. It wasn’t quite as fast as the MacPro, but it got the job done. Eventually.

Offlining using such high quality media may seem a little silly – I mean, really, we could have done a quarter res transcode to DV, and save a huge amount of time and disk space. Also, considering we were doing the offline on a bunch of eMac’s over Firewire 400 drives (that’s right… really old school eMac’s!), it would have also made the whole editing process a lot more fluid. However! By editing at such a great quality, it meant that whenever we did test screenings or had to show potential investors or sponsors, we could easily burn off a high-quality 1920×1080 Quicktime Movie that looks simply gorgeous even before grading. Here is a photo of our main editing machine.

…and the other babies:

I’m not even sure how this is possible, but we were able to play one video track of 1920×1080 ProRes on the eMac over Firewire 400 in realtime without any issues. And so, we basically edited away for several weeks in Final Cut Pro 6. We ended up doing a very rough grade using the 3-way Colour Corrector just so that when we showed other people to get opinions, they were looking at something that looked half decent. We tried a huge amount of different things in terms of the edit – we used a lot of different music as guide tracks. We even copied the audio from other big Hollywood trailers (such as the Dark Knight) and cut our footage to their soundtrack just to see what we could come up with. It was a very painful, long, but fun and creative process that I certainly won’t forget any time soon!

Whilst I was trying to lock down the picture, others were playing around with the visual effects. Initially, tests and trials were done by the various VFX artists using the ProRes Quicktime files. However, once we had locked down the trailer in terms of the edit, we used REDCINE to export out 4K TIFF sequences and 2K/1K DPX sequences for the visual effects people to work on. Ashley Smart (who did the effects for the Shed Explosion Sequence) was using 4K TIFF Sequences in After Effects on a laptop (which is quite incredible). James Otter used 1K DPX sequences in Nuke, and After Effects to achieve a lot of the effects shots, on a PC. And I used a good old MacBook, running After Effects and Shake to do the remaining shots. I ended up using After Effect’s own tracker for most of the tracking work, although I did use PFTrack for one of the shots. I also used Syntheyes on an old Dell Laptop for a small section of another shot. For Pinky eyes, I ended up brining in 4K DPX sequences into After Effects – which was fairly interesting on the poor old MacBook! But it worked, and the shots came out OK considering…

We ended up with 16 visual effects in total (including graphics). Once a visual effect shot was completed it was exported as a 1920×1080 DPX sequence ready for grading. For your viewing pleasure, here are some photos of After Effects genius James Otter, working away! I have no idea what the cardboard cartons are for, or where he got them. Needless to say, these photos were taken at some ridiculous early hour of the morning, after James and I had been stuck at uni for AT LEAST forty hours STRAIGHT!

Once the offline edit was complete, we tidied up the timeline so that everything was on the one track (where possible) and printed off an EDL. This then became our bible. At this stage, all the audio had been done in Final Cut Pro, with the occasional effect being done in Protools LE and Soundtrack Pro, and then exported out as an AIFF. We were still using guide track music.

By printing off the EDL we now had a hard copy of the trailer’s edit – which is always a good thing! But more importantly, it allowed us to easily track and manage everything. Because we couldn’t afford to purchase software such as Crimson Workflow, and we didn’t have time to write up our own proprietary software, we ended up doing a lot of things manually. For instance, we ended up going down the EDL line by line, and exporting a 1920×1080 DPX sequence from REDCINE. We made minor adjustments in REDCINE to get the most clean image and exported away. We put each shot in a different folder based on the EDL number assigned to the shot. For example, the first shot in the trailer was called 001_000001.DPX. This kept things nice and simple. Once every shot was exported out of REDCINE as DPX sequence (which took a night), it was ready for grading!

Originally we had planned to do the grade at one of the major post houses in Melbourne, but due to a lack of time and money, we ended up getting a very talented film school graduate called Nick Reid to do the grade in Apple’s Color. Getting the DPX files into Color proved to be a bit more tricky than anticipated! We ended up purchasing yet another 1TB SATAII drive (called Gizmo) for the colour grade.

What we ended up doing was wrapping all the DPX files as Quicktimes manually using AJA’s free DPXtoQTTranslator utility. Once all of the DPX’s were wrapped (including all the visual effects), we manually re-created the Final Cut Pro timeline based on the printed EDL using the newly wrapped Quicktime files. We then exported out a XML file from Final Cut Pro. This XML file was brought into Color and grading could commence. Nick took a couple of days to do the grade, and once completed, he handed back Gizmo, ready for the final stages!

With the grade now completed, we exported out AJA 10-bit Uncompressed RGB Quicktimes. We then used the AJA QTtoDPXTranslator to unwrap the Quicktime Files back to DPX files. As the AJA tool simply “wraps” the files – it doesn’t transcode them or anything like that, this process is really fast, although you do have to do it manually. For me, that means I have to do everything 69 times which isn’t too bad. The only annoying thing is that you have to rename all the clips again, as Color names everything sequentially, and we wanted everything named as per the bible (i.e. the EDL).

Now with a whole heap of beautifully graded DPX sequences, it was time to do the online. I ended up doing this at University on a nice and speedy MacPro in After Effects CS3. I imported all of the DPX sequences, and then manually put them all in the correct places based on the printed EDL. Once that was complete I simply rendered out a Quicktime File using the Animation Codec. Here is a photo taken at about four o’clock in the morning after I’d been at uni for about fourty hours STRAIGHT working on Sakooz. You can see the insanity in my eyes.

The only thing left to do was sound! Once Frank (our composer) finished, he simply gave us a 24-Bit 48KHz Broadcast Wave File, which we threw into Final Cut Pro. After a bit of tweaking – adjusting the sound effect levels to suit the new score, the sound was ready to rock and roll! Originally we had planned to do a quite complex 5.1 mix just for fun – but at the end of the day, no one was ever going to listen to it in surround sound anyway, so we decided to skip on that idea (for now at least). Once the sound was done, we exported an AIFF and then merged the Animation Codec video and AIFF together to create the Final Quicktime Master!

From that Quicktime master we than could do any DVD, web, Blu-ray, etc. encodes using Compressor.

And that is the workflow we decided to use for Sakooz! At the moment we are just archiving all the project files to DVD, and keeping all the media on the SATAII drives. At some stage we will eventually put everything to LTO drives as a final backup – but we don’t have the money at the moment.

This wasn’t exactly the quickest workflow in the world (we did a lot of things manually that could have been easily avoided by using software such as Crimson Workflow, plus we used extremely old Mac’s and PC’s in a lot of cases), but a lot of it came down to money vs time. In some cases money won out, but more often than not, we decided to save money and do things the manual way. To be perfectly honest, it actually felt really nice to have a printed out EDL on which to direct everything! It felt much the same as the good old days with film!

If you have any questions about the workflow or how we did anything, feel free to post a comment. At some stage in the future we also hope to post some more detailed information on the various visual effects that featured in the trailer, so stay tuned!

Chris!

To be perfectly honest, I was as nervous as all hell in the lead up to the screening. A lot of the cast and crew attending the screening hadn’t seen the trailer at this point, so I had no idea what the reaction was going to be. But luckily, no bricks have gone through my window, and everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy the trailer. The general consensus seemed to be: “I loved it! It looked so cool! I really want to see the full feature! Oh, but I had no idea what it’s about”! Now, I’m not sure if that’s a problem or not. Right throughout the editing process it’s been a constant battle between “telling too much” and “not enough” when it comes to story telling in the trailer. The fact that we don’t yet had a locked down feature film script doesn’t help – but at the same time, trailers are meant to “sell a concept”, not just give away the whole plot. The fact that people seemed to really get excited about the whole idea is great – regardless of whether or not they knew what was going on. One of the best thing about listening in to other people’s conversations after the screening was hearing people arguing with one another about what it was actually about. Everyone seems to “read” the trailer differently, and come up with a whole of unique and intriguing meanings and metaphors. But the best thing of all is, that once both parties eventually give up arguing about what the film is actually about, they just agree to disagree, and say, “I guess we’ll just have to watch the feature film to find out”! Now, this is exciting! If people actually want to watch the feature film, then we’re onto something! Oh, and the fact that the audience clapped twice after the trailer is always a good sign (especially as none of the other films recieved the double clap!).

It was fantastic to see the trailer shown in a theatrical environment at such a great cinema! ACMI has to be one of my favourite cinema’s in Melbourne, simply because the visual and audio quality is faultless, the seats and comfortable, and it’s in such a great location. The trailer was shown in HD, via a HDCAM deck, so it looked and sounded amazing! One of the biggest things I noticed was how much faster it seemed being shown on such a big screen. Having watched it a billion or so times on a 17″ monitor, and a few times on various small scale projection screens, it seemed to run so much quicker on the bigger screen – which is actually great! It seemed so Hollywood – so action packed. Even I got excited watching it!

Sakooz made it’s second public screening at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, for another Swinburne event on the 4th of December. Unfortunately, the actual screening itself was fairly horrible, as the 12 students films were just played on a looping DVD player in a small section of ACCA, on a crappy little cheap projector with an incredibly bad sound system. It certainly wasn’t the best viewing enviroment to see the trailer, but even so, when Sakooz did play it certainly got a big reaction! As a lot of the other films were dialogue driven, as no one in the audience could really hear what was going on (due to the bad sound system, but also the huge amount of people in the venue chatting away, drinking and socialising), when Sakooz popped up, I think everyone was pleasantly shocked to see a piece that was purely driven by visuals. So once again, Sakooz made a reaction, which is what it’s all about!

So what’s been happening since ACCA? In terms of Sakooz, nothing really noteworthy. To perfectly honest, after several months of hell, I just needed a little bit of a break – not that I’ve been resting! I’ve been attending a lot of the other film school screenings the last few weeks (Holmesglen, VCA, RMIT, etc.) to “check out the competition” and see what other amazing up-and-coming talents are out there. As always with these kinds of screenings, there was some really great stuff, and also some really average stuff. To be perfectly honest, and I know this is going to sound biased, but I really feel like the Swinburne University screening was by far the strongest this year overall. VCA’s work was brillant as always, but there was a lot of films that seemed quite pretentious and “out there for the sake of it”, and I was also quite shocked that not all of the films were as technically perfect as they should have been. Normally everything out of the VCA is technically spotless (i.e. perfect sound – no nasty pops or clicks, no visual artefacts, etc.), but this year there were a couple of films that obviously missed quality control. That said, a couple of the films were terrific (for those that went, I really loved the opening film on Screening A about the boxes, as well as the film starring the killer wombat!). The Holmesglen screening had some really great films on display – but it also had a lot of average content. To be honest, the majority of the films seemed really amateur – almost verging on “home movie” quality. What was most surprising however was the 3D animations. I was expecting to see some really great stuff – but with the exception of two little shorts (one involving cups, the other involving a mime artist), the overall quality was fairly poor. But, as I said, with all these kinds of screenings, you had the good, and you have the bad. The scary thing is however, I can’t believe how many new film graduates are going to be trying to get a job next year. If you add up the enrolments from all of the various film schools in Melbourne – well, you get a lot of people all looking for employment.

So what’s in store for the near future? I am currently still trying to work out a plan of attack for the Sakooz feature film concept. I had a lot of ideas in the pipeline, and a few people that might be interested in getting on board the Sakooz freight train to help it get made. We are planning to release the trailer to the world on the 1st of January 2009 – although with everything else we do with Sakooz, this is subject to change. At this stage, we’re considering releasing the trailer through YouTube first, simply because it’s got such a good community, and word tends to spread fast between users. Obviously however, this brings up a lot of copyright issues, which we are currently considering. But rest assured, we’re certainly not sleeping – and Sakooz is very much an “alive and kicking” project! We’re also hoping to get some behind the scenes footage, and also some more information on our workflow, etc. onto this blog as soon as possible.

As always, exciting times certainly lay ahead! Onward and upward!

Chris!

What an adventure it’s been! I never thought that post production would be as exciting, dangerous and challenging as the principle photography, but hey, you learn something new every day! I can’t tell you how glad I am to finally be able to file away all those printed EDLs, editing notes, colour grading notes, and stop thinking about DPX sequences and colour sampling! In fact, I just can’t wait to finally get some sleep! It’s been a long time coming!

So what now? Well, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t thought too much about it! I’m just glad we got through today, and everything is ready for the ACMI screening! So I guess first up on the agenda is ACMI. This will be the first semi-public screening of the trailer – so if you want to get a glimpse before the masses, I strongly suggest you come along! Then after that, we begin our big marketing campaign! Originally I had planned to launch this directly after the ACMI screening – however, I’ve since decided to push things back until either later in December or the first week of Janurary, just so that I have a little bit more time to get things organised. Oh dear! Despite the fact that I’m in DESPERATE need of a holiday, December is going to be once again a busy month it seems – website to make, DVDs to produce, meetings to organise, the list goes on! Well, at least live isn’t boring!

It’s going to be so interesting to see what reaction the trailer gets. To be honest, most people that have seen the trailer so far (before it was completely finished), have said, “Wow! It’s cool. It looks amazing! But I have absolutely no idea what its about”. Fair enough! But to be honest, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I think I’ll have a better idea if I’ve made any horrible mistakes in the aftermath of the ACMI screening. As always, time will tell!

So once again, thank you to EVERYONE who has supported me over the last year and a bit! It’s been an AMAZING ride! I hope once you see the trailer you think it was worth the battle. Personally – I think it certainly was. I’ll be posting more over the next couple of days, and a heap more in December about the post production process and how we went about things. We also recently came across a whole heap of old Happy Sundaes behind the scenes footage, so we might upload that onto this blog as well for you to all have a look at.

Until next time!

Chris!

The whole post production process has certainly been an exciting and challenging one! We’ve definitely spent a fair bit of time hanging around at the Red User forum, trying to work out the best workflow with our limited resources and budget (you can read one of our threads here). But, so far, so good, and we’ve been able to develop a nice little pipeline that seems to be working. At some stage in the future we’ll explain everything in nitty-gritty technical detail.

I’ve unfortunately got to get back to work – so this is just a very quick little update. But rest assured, we’ll be posting more and more stuff in the lead up to 2009. How scary is that? The year is rapidly coming to an end.

Until next time…

Also, just to give you a quick update, we are still madly cutting together the trailer. We’ve gone through a few drafts now, and are still experimenting trying to put together a trailer that explains the story (but doesn’t give everything away), introduces the characters, looks and sounds amazing, and isn’t boring or clichéd. It’s not an easy task, as we’re limited to what we shot on our very hectic five day shooting schedule – but it’s a lot of fun just messing around with the edit and trying new things. One of the big problems I’m finding so far is putting together a sequence that won’t confuse the audience too much – because I know the story so well, it’s easy to forget what the audience do and don’t know. Also, a lot of things that looked good on paper, simply don’t translate through to the screen – so it’s a challenge thinking outside of the box, and messing around with the edit to give certain shots new meaning and context.

I’m off to Sydney tomorrow for a few days for work (so that I can pay off some of my Sakooz debts!), but when I return it will be full steam ahead again in the edit suite. Also, still on the to-do list, we will eventually put up some more detailed posts on what happened during the shoot, and add some more videos and photos. We’ll also start putting an official Sakooz website together, in which you’ll be able to view and download higher resolution versions of the above photos (and lots more)! So stay tuned – lots of exciting things are certainly coming up! We’ll also EVENTUALLY put up all the camera test stuff we talked about months and months ago, plus some R3D files for people to mess around with.

Until next time… Chris!

Ok – so what’s happening Sakooz related? Well… unfortunately it’s been quite a slow couple of weeks. After completing principle photography, I started on a hunt to try and lock down a professional trailer editor. Although I had an AMAZING response, and lots of people really wanted to help out (especially as many of them hadn’t had a chance to cut together RED footage yet), no one was willing to sign up given the deadlines. And so, after many discussion with various editors and mentors, I have decided to cut together the rough cut myself, and then get advice from various people to complete the edit. So yes, I guess I’m also going to have to add “editor” to my credit list. Luckily however, because the footage just looks so good (and I really love what footage we ended up with) – it’s quite fun to cut together. It’s hard work however, because you have to cut basically mute – as there’s very little location sound, dialogue and we don’t have any music yet. But hey, nothing like another challenge!

So yeah, we’re basically stuck in “post production hell” at the moment. Hopefully we’ll have the picture locked by the first couple of weeks of October. Fingers crossed! As promised, we’ll also be adding stories from the principle photography on this blog, as well as photos over the next few weeks. Here are some little happy snaps for you to have a look at for the time being… Enjoy!

Get Flash Player to see this video.

We’ll be posting lots more videos and photos over the coming days and weeks, so make sure you keep an eye out on this blog!

David is working away on Pinky's head.

This is Pinky's skull before skin is applied.

This is inside the spaceship structure.

David taking Pinky's head for a test drive.

Chris attacks the spaceship with a jigsaw.

Catherine & Karen sorting through all the rubbish.

The frame that will later be transformed into the rear of the spaceship.

Chris (with very little building experience) struggles to make the structure hold together.

The spaceship structure sits comfortably on a couple of arm chairs.

This is Pinky's Skull before skin is applied.

This is the unfinished space ship just lazing around.

Chris is busy nailing away.

This is the spaceship construction site.

David is hard at work putting together the puppet components of Pinky's head.

This is the Creature Laboratory, where Pinky is put together.

And, don’t worry – there will be plenty of more photos and videos coming over the next couple of weeks! Until then… Chris!

Ok… so I decided that the trailer must go ahead on the Wednesday night. That meant I had six days until day one of principle photography. Had everyone still been on the project, that deadline would have been a challenge but not impossible. Given that I was now producing, directing and art directing, this was going to be one of the toughest tasks I’d ever undertaken, but hey, I was up for it!

After an extremely tough Wednesday night of one minute thinking that Sakooz was dead, to the next deciding to take on the world, after many phone calls and some quite heavy discussions with friends, family and mentors, I finally went to bed at some unhealthy hour. Then Thursday it was pedal to the floor!

The morning was dedicated to working out a basic plan of attack. Given that my work load has now tripled, I had to do some seriously thinking and evaluating. There was a lot of work still to be done, so I started hunting down people I could trust to pull it off given the tight deadline. Once I had a very rough plan of attack, I then headed to Animal & Odd-bod Creators to pick up the Pinky body. I must say, Colleen, Karen and everyone at this company has gone well and truly out of their way to help us out. They have been so tremendously helpful, supportive and flexible, it’s been amazing. So thank you! The Pinky body was perfect, and so off I went, with a Pink alien body on the passenger seat. The adventure continues!

Then in the afternoon I had to pick up a work van and pick up all the props, sets and other odd-ball stuff that was still at Isaac’s. This was a very strange moment – almost an ending of an era. Isaac, Caithlin and Anli were all there, and together as a team we tried to get the uncompleted space ship set into the van. Thanks to our good mate Murphy (who seems to be following me around like a stalker), the ship was about 1.5cm too big to fit into the van (“missed it by that much!”). And so, we got some hammer out, and in a typical Chris fashion, we just “bashed” it in. After a good forty minutes of near death experiences, and some serious struggles trying to get everything into the now completely jam packed van, we won – and we went for coffee to have a debrief. To be perfectly honest, it was horribly awkward. I guess this was the point of separation. Anli, Caithlin and Isaac were heading off to work on something completely new and different, and I was continuing on where we all left off. There was no yelling or screaming – and everyone looked, although very sad, fairly relieved. And so, after I had one of the most hardcore Hot Chocolates I’ve ever had (it was like drinking a block of pure chocolate that had been turned into liquid form by a bunch of high precision lasers), we all said our goodbyes and headed off in different direction. Anli went off on a train, Caithlin jumped in a car, Isaac walked home, and I drove back home in a jam packed van. But I made it!

Once home I unloaded everything (which was surprisingly easier than trying to get it into the van in the first place), and then dropped the van back off at work. It was now very late, but I continued on working out schedules and attempted to nail and glue back the spaceship set together. At about 4:30 in the morning I finally got around to writing an e-mail to all the cast letting them know the situation. Some of them knew already – as I had spoken to them soon after I found out that Isaac, Anli & Caithlin will no longer be continuing on – but others had no idea. It was a very tough e-mail to write – as I didn’t really know what to say. I didn’t want to scare them away from the production (as loosing the director is quite a big thing!), but at the same time, I wanted to ensure them that I was more than up for the challenge and still really believed in the concept and the belief that this could be big.

After an hour or so of sleep, it was back to it. One of the main problems I had at this stage was that due to various reasons I no longer had access to the animatronic Pinky head. The head had taken months to build (as still wasn’t 100% finished), and so it was kind of scary knowing that I had to come up with something within a few days. But luckily I had a secret weapon – my brother! Although we couldn’t make an replica animatronics head given the time frame, we could still make a really great puppet! So I spent most of Friday driving around like a mad man picking stuff up and buying bits and pieces – fabrics, foam, plastic, metal, wood, cleaners trolley, wires, steel, bottles, tools, hard drives, etc. I also borrowed a Mac Pro from Eidolon Creative, for the on set capture. Julian, who runs Eidolon is amazingly helpful and supportive! We’ve worked together on heaps of various indie film projects over the years (Grey Days, Jumping Jack, Union Jack, Behind Crimson Eyes Clip… the list goes on!), and we constantly bounce ideas off one another, and have become quite good mates. If you ever want a great video clip produced, Julian is your man.

By the time I got home with all the bits, it was quite late and unfortunately I had prior engagements for the night – it was my brothers 21st! And so, despite the fact that my brain was racing at a billion miles an hour, I had to stop, put on some crazy clothes (it was a movie themed dress up karaoke night believe it or not!), and have fun. But of course, once the party was over (and I must say, it was a REALLY fun night!), when I got home it was back to work. Eventually I went to bed… I think.

Saturday was a big day. Luckily I convinced some of my brothers friends at the party to come and help me complete the spaceship. And so, with a team of talented people, we started work. Four of us took on the spaceship outside, whilst inside my brother started cutting up foam and fabric to build Pinky’s head. It really was a race against time. I wish I had some behind the scenes footage of us building everything outside, as it would be been seriously funny. None of us were really builders (although Karen at least knew how to operate all the scary power tools!), so we were just pretty much making it up as we went along. It was fun – a little scary at times (whenever I had the jigsaw in hand!) – but certainly not a boring afternoon! By the end of the day, we had made amazing progress. Outside, the ship was starting to look as if it would actually work, and inside, Pinky’s head was slowly coming to life. Thank you to Catherine, Karen, Shaun, David, Jacqui and the rest of my supportive family for all of your help! I got about one hour sleep that night, and just my luck, during that one hour of turning my back, it started snowing!

As we woke up on Sunday morning, the whole backyard was covered in snow! I couldn’t believe it! What are the chances? Unless I’m working outside, I tend to spend most of my time inside – and it was just plain bad luck that the one time I decided to build something outside (that is, the space ship), it started snowing! Crazy! I’ll post some video footage of the snow soon…

So, we continued building in the freezing cold with snow all around us, whilst inside the nice and warm house, David continued on with Pinky’s head. Once I had done all I could do outside, I spent the rest of the day in front of the computer doing call sheets. By Sunday night everything was looking good – call sheets were done, the space ship was ready for transportation, and Pinky’s head was done except for the eyes. We hoped that we could get the eyes from the animatronics version of Pinky, but failing that we ended up just making a new pair. They’re very similar, however, not quite as good. But luckily, you can’t really notice the difference on camera.

Then Monday, the day before shooting, it was a MASSIVE day of picking up and testing gear! First up we picked up all the uni gear (which was a completely full 4WD load – actually I’m pretty sure we seriously overloaded the car but anyway). Then we headed home, unloaded, and headed back out to pick up the camera from Inspiration Studios. As always Cail and Pete were AMAZINGLY helpful and supportive. These guys are the RED gurus – so if you ever need to hire a RED in Melbourne, give them a call. They really go above and beyond! Then it was off to Frazier Film Lighting to grab some more lighting. Les is amazing, and we are so grateful for all of his assistance and support. Like everyone else, he really went out of his way to help us out. So thank you!

Now with a RED, and enough lighting gear to sink a battle ship, we headed off to Hub Productions to pick up the lenses. Although I had heard a lot about him, and spoke to him on the phone and via e-mail I’d never met Jim (who runs the hire department). But all the stories were true! He’s just a really great guy! Super helpful and supportive! We did some quick tests to make sure the camera plays nicely with all the hardware, and then off we went. We were ready to rock and roll…

On the way, we grabbed an old JAG from work (thanks Frank!), and off Jacqui and I went back home to prepare for day one. At home, we started sorting through all the gear, and loading it all into a massive trailer.

Unfortunately that night I didn’t get much sleep either. We just had so much to do. But, despite all odds, we got there. We were ready for day one. Despite all the obstacles, despite all the problems, we had at least got to this stage.

So that pretty much wraps up this entry! In the next few entries we’ll give you a run down of what happened during the shoot – as we certainly had some exciting times!

Again, thanks to EVERYONE to helped get the trailer footage in the can (or on the hard drive as the case may be). I HONESTLY truly appreciate everyone’s hard work and dedication. I couldn’t have done it without you all. So thank you!

Photos and behind the scenes footage will start appearing soon, so stay tuned!

Until next time… Chris!

Lets flash back to the start of August. Things were stressful and chaotic, but we looked as if we were heading in the right direction. During the first weekend of the month was spent urgently trying to get some of the more creative and construction elements of the production finished. Isaac and Tim (our animatronics guru) continued work trying to get Pinky’s face finished, and the rest of us frantically started building a massive space ship in Isaac’s back yard. There were a couple of trips to Bunnings, a few trips to dodgy parts of town to grab unloved furniture, lots of hammering, jig-sawing, cutting, pasting, bleeding, gluing – everything was happening! Most of the ship was constructed out of things we got for dirt cheap at the Reverse Art Truck (RAT), in Ringwood. Basically you purchase a plastic bag for $25, and then you can fill it up with whatever “junk” you want. We bought two bags and filled them up with all kinds of weird and wonderful items (bits of foam, wires, tubing, cardboard off-cuts, bottle lids, malformed containers, etc.), and also purchased some large chipboard-like panels for $2 each. Most of the wood we used for the spaceship came from one of Isaac’s old beds, however we also picked up some other bits and pieces from Bunnings, as we didn’t have the time to hunt down more free wood. Despite the fact that neither Caithlin nor myself are builders, and Isaac wasn’t around for some of the time – we did a pretty good job. Things were starting to come together!

Given that we were building the craft in the middle of suburbia, as soon as it became dark, we had to stop building, not because of the lack of light – but because I don’t think the neighbours would have been too happy with us smashing wood with hammers, attempting to use power tools and singing songs from Triple M at some ungodly hour of the morning. So at night, we put down our tools, and continued work on other things – schedules, animatronics, the Pinky baby, call sheets, etc. With only a week to go until shooting – we had a lot to do

Caithlin and I continued building the craft on Monday, with Isaac up in Geelong continuing work on Pinky’s head. It was “full speed ahead” with the deadline looming, and still a lot to do. But despite all this – we were slowly winning. Although it was going to be tight (and by tight I mean to the nano-second), but we should have got everything built and ready for filming in time. Anli dropped in for a bit during the day, and over lunch we had some heavy discussions about the script and the overall direction of the production. She seemed to be loosing faith in the production, but given that we were only days away from shooting, and everything was gradually falling into place, I made the terrible assumption that she would just continue to ride aboard the crazy roller-coaster! I thought I’d been able to convince her once again that what we were trying to do what unique, exciting and in many respects ground-breaking. We weren’t just putting together a film for the sake of it – nor were we trying to cut corners or do things the easy way. We had a massively ambitious plan that involved lots of actors, locations, pyrotechnics, special effects, animatronics, shooting on a camera that is basically still in a prototype stage, and doing all this on basically no budget at all. The concept of Sakooz is hardly your average film student production – it’s an epic, big budget, fire, flames and smoke motion picture! Basically, we wanted to make an Australian version of The Host (visually and thematically that is), without the 10 billion won (which works out to be about $11 million Australian) in our back pockets. Challenging, yes. Impossible – hardly!

On Monday night, we continued working around the clock – building, sewing, writing, calculating. And then on Tuesday, the first bombshell exploded. We were all spending the day away from each other each working on our own things – Isaac was up in Geelong working on the head, Caithlin was at home working on baby Pinky, Anli was busily trying to put together some additional script and character information for our actors, and I was also at home busily trying to work out the logistics and financial of the whole production. Then, just after midday on Tuesday, Anli sent us all an e-mail:

Chris, Isaac and Caithlin, I really don’t know how to say this in the best way possible, and I apologise for not being able to tell you this in person but I don’t think I could explain it properly at all. To put it simply, I can’t mentally pull myself through this project any more. After being sick and being away from you guys, I took on a different perspective about the whole project which I can’t seem to reverse no matter how hard I try. I want to be there for you guys, as your friend, to support you in everything you do, but I also really care about being a writer, and from a story point of view, through nobody’s fault except for my own, I feel like I’ve compromised too much of what I really care about. I’ve known this for a long time, but have always maintained the mentality that I can put it on the back burner and ‘fight’ my way through. But now, without a true belief in the story, I can’t physically do this. I know this will seem very unfair, selfish and weak of me to do, but I hope you somehow understand, and not take this personally.

And with that one short e-mail, everything started to very slowly fall apart. As soon as I read that e-mail, my mind went into overdrive. Anli deciding to leave the production was obviously a massive shock, and a big reality check. She had obviously lost complete and utter faith in the production, and more importantly, she had lost faith in the concept and the story. This was a big problem – but what scared me most of all was what Caithlin and Isaac would think. Having already lost Dave (our ex-Production Manager) earlier in the year, and now Anli, was this the end of what was heading to be an absolutely amazing production? Anli obviously takes her writing and all creative elements of film-making deadly serious. And despite all the hard work we had put into trying to get the screenplay to a point were everyone was happy and genuinely in love with the script, we obviously never reached that point. Her fears that we rushed the writing process, and were planning to shoot something that simply wasn’t ready, story wise was completely valid. At the end of the day, I guess what makes a film is STORY, STORY, STORY, and if the story is wrong – the whole film will fall apart. This is obviously what scared Anli to the point were she decided she couldn’t go on. Of course, the fact that we were only days away from shooting and there was still so much to do must have also been a deciding factor – as well as the fact that this whole venture was going to cost us so much money! And so, Anli left the project.

One of the biggest problems that Isaac and Anli have always had about this project is that they have felt as if we have been writing the script to a deadline – which is exactly what we’ve been doing. Last year we decided that we wanted to make a feature film, and after thinking about a couple of different ideas, we all decided that “TV Tubsters” (which became Sakooz), was the way to go. And so we started developing the idea. At first we started trying to put it together as a group and we did this for a couple of months. Then we decided that it was too hard to write together with three people and so we left the task to Isaac. Despite my objections, we also decided that it was going to be way too hard to complete a whole feature film in a year at University and so we scaled back our production to a three minute promotional teaser/trailer. Although I still really like the idea of the trailer, and think it will lead to bigger and better things, deep down I still believe if we just “went for it”, we could have pulled off a feature length film – but I guess we’ll never know! Isaac then spent his whole summer stuck in front of the iMac writing away. He wrote and he wrote and he wrote. At the same time I started studying every single writing book there is from Story (Robert McKee), to How to Build a Great Screenplay (David Howard) and even books like Screenwriting for Dummies (Laura Schellhardt). Having attended many, many script writing lectures at all kinds of institutions over the years (both as a student and as a technician in charge of making sure the presentation runs smoothly) – I actually have a really good understanding of the screen writing process and the techniques and principles behind it. However, I’ve never considered myself a writing, and therefore have never practised the craft. Anyway… A first draft was very close to being finished by Isaac. In March, Isaac, Anli and myself went to beautiful down-town Hong Kong for a couple of weeks for the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Of course, the plan was that when we weren’t watching films, we would be further developing the script. As could be expected, this never happened, and we spent most of our time doing touristy things and going out on the town. However, when we finally returned to uni, and Anli and myself read the draft in its latest state, I don’t think either of us understood it. It was funny, it was quirky, it was out there (one of our biggest inspirations at this stage in development was Gremlins 2), but I for one just simply didn’t “get it”. And so, I made the EXTREMELY tough decision of trying to convince Isaac that we should re-think the first draft in its current form. It was hard (especially as he had just spend weeks and weeks in front of his computer busily typing away), but eventually that’s what we decided to do. We went back to square one. And then, one more as a group, we started busily “smashing” together another feature film concept – obviously along the same lines (i.e. aliens on a kids TV show), but just with a different approach and direction.

Having read books like Rebel Without a Crew (Robert Rodriguez) and Peter Jackson, A Film-Makers Journey (Brian Sibley), I guess I’ve never seen the problem with just making the decision to just sit down and write a really cool screenplay that I for one would personally like to see. I’m a strong believer in just making films that you would like to see, as I’m sure that there are at least one or two other people in the world that have the same taste and humour as me. And if I can create a reaction from just one person, then that’s what I think it’s all about. Film-making, in my opinion is about creating reactions from your audience and about making people really think and question the world they live in. Some people may say that most films are purely just in it for the money, and they don’t change anything. I disagree! Take for instance Jurassic Park (1993). At first glances, you might wrongly assume that this movie was just solely created to sell tickets. And I guess, in some ways it was. But just like most (if not all) of Steven Spielberg’s movies, this film also addresses all kinds of things about what’s good and bad about the world we live in. Although you might not notice it at first – this movie makes you question things. Should we mess with nature? Is family the most important thing? Is your life more important that your loved ones? Although this film is a big, action-packed roller-coaster ride – it also has messages embedded into it, and morals. And I think you’ll find that with all GOOD movies, one of the key reasons that makes them good, is the fact that they question the world we live in, and make you ask questions in your head. That what I wanted to do with Sakooz! Sure I wanted to create a really “cool” movie with lots of action, explosions, cool aliens, etc. But I also wanted to create something that made you question things. I wanted a film that had the heart of Garden State (2004), with the action of Transformers (2007), and the humour and visual style of The Host (2006).

And so, Anli, Isaac and myself started rebuilding the story, character and plot outline. We started to question everything, and ask ourselves and each other heaps of questions. What would Leodore do in this situation? Why would he do it? We did pages and pages of character notes and questionnaires. If we couldn’t answer a question, we sit down as a group and run around in circles until one of us had a brainwave and everything fell into place. The process was hard work – it took a hell of a lot out of you, but it was (in my opinion at least), worth it. Not only were we creating a story that was beginning to have some kind of a backbone – but we were also learning just how hard it is to create a complex story from the ground up. I’ve read a million times just how hard the writing process is, and how much pain writers go through – but until you do it yourself, you just have no idea. Like most things, when you sit down staring at a blank screen, it all seems almost impossible. How can you possibly fill all these pages with magical words? But once you start getting into the swing of things, slowly by surely, everything starts falling into place. Of course, what you write the first time won’t be perfect – you’ll no doubt need to stop, go back, and re-write what you wrote (and probably took you three days to write!), but that’s all part of the process. It’s hard work – but someone has to do it! Flash forward to the 26th of April, and that’s when we started this blog!

So, in an attempt to get this post back on track, what happened after Anli’s e-mail? Well the next day was absolute hell. It will go down in history as of my the toughest days I’ve ever had to go through. Now this might sound like an overreaction – but believe me, it wasn’t. And I’ve been through some pretty tough dates in the past, believe me! Isaac, Caithlin and I met at Isaac’s house. When I got there, I went round the back, as the original plan was that we would continue to build the spaceship all day. But when I got round, no one had hammers or glue in hand. And so, we started talking, arguing and discussing. It was like some kind of a crazy triangle. Isaac had decided that for various reasons, we shouldn’t continue on with the trailer. Caithlin was still (at this stage) in the middle. She saw everything from Isaac’s point of view, but at the same time, we’d put so much work into everything, and were so close to filming, that she also felt that it would be a shame to throw everything in. I was at the other end of the spectrum. I REALLY wanted to make Sakooz a reality. And the discussions continued. We were hitting road block after road block. I’d tried to convince them both we should just finish what we started, because despite what they might think, I still believed in the concept and story and honestly believed we were heading in the right direction. Isaac tried to convince me that we should stop now as the whole production had bad foundations from the get go. Caithlin tried to see things from both points of view. Eventually however, I lost the battle. They both decided that they definitely didn’t want to do it. I was shattered. But what could I do? Without a Director, Assistant Director or Art Director, it was just me all alone. I was outnumbered, and I lost the war. And so, in Isaac’s backyard, we made the INCREDIBLY tough decision that Sakooz was not going to be finished this year. I was devestated – seriously. After all the money, blood and effort I’d put into this production (that I TRUELY felt strongly about), everything had blown up in my face. One of my final words were “I don’t care what anyone thinks, I’m going to get this film made one day”. We decided that I would keep everything in storage at my place. And so, I left. The drive home was a so hard. At first, I just expected it. It almost felt a bit like a relief. I no longer had to worry about all the problems and issues that Sakooz brought with it. But it was an easy way out. As I got closer and closer to home however, I started to break down. To be honest, I just didn’t know what I was going to say to my family and friends. The fact that I’d have to tell my family that we’d basically just given up (and yes, I know it wasn’t as simple as that), was too much. As I got closer and closer to home, with Lovers Electric blasting through the stereo, I started to ball my eyes out. It was all too much. I nearly ran off the road a couple of times. But all I wanted to do was get home. I felt like a three year old again that had just been bullied in the playground. When I got home, my family thought something SERIOUSLY bad had happened. Had someone died? I know it seems really silly, getting so worked up about a stupid university project – but when you put so much heart and soul into something, only to have it taken away from you in one foul swoop, it’s tough. I knew deep down that it wasn’t the end of the world, and I knew that I shouldn’t be getting so worked up about it, but at the time, my body and mind just gave up. It was all too hard. But, after much calming down, and hugs from my amazing family (and yes, this all sounds very lame and stupid – but anyway!), I started to regain some kind of composure. They started to ask me serious questions – why did we decide to give up on the trailer? What needed to be done? What are the pros and cons of the situation? Could I just do it myself? Slowly but surely my brain started working again. I started to seriously consider everything.

I’ve never been one to just give up, regardless of how tough things get. It’s just not in my nature. However, this situation really put me to the test. I felt trapped – I couldn’t see a logical way out. But after discussing things with my incredibly supportive family, I started calling up friends and asking for their advice. I was still shaking like crazy. I had no idea what lay in the future. After calling up heaps of people, the general consensus was that I should just go for it. Don’t give up no matter how hard things get. Just continue on. I started thinking back to all the books and stories I’ve ever read. Every film has these kinds of issues. But they always get through it with a bit of hard work and determination. It was decided – despite loosing the Director, Art Director, and Assistant Director (and my co-writers), the show must go on!

In the space of one day, my whole world collapsed, and then I suddenly found myself no longer as just the producer of this crazy project, but also the Director, Art Director and everything else. It had gone from a group project to a solo mission. But I wasn’t alone – I had an AMAZING team behind me. I had a incredibly brilliant crew in place, and an equally impressive cast. Despite all that had happened, I all of a sudden felt like maybe, just maybe, we could pull this off. It wasn’t going to be easy – but we the support of my family, friends and the rest of Team Sakooz, I felt that we might just win the war after all…

And so, the start of the real adventure continued! The first step was going to be tough – real tough. I had to call up Isaac and Caithlin and explain to them, that despite everything that happened today, I had decided to take on everything myself. Isaac wasn’t impressed. It had been an incredibly tough decision for us all to throw in the towel, and he didn’t appreciate my sudden change of heart. But in my defence, at the time I didn’t really have much of an option. It was two against one, and I didn’t think I could even remotely possibly think I could do everything myself. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I wouldn’t be doing it all by myself. I would just be the “ringleader” – my fantastic cast and crew would be the one’s that would help ensure that everything goes to plan. Although neither Caithlin or Isaac liked it – they didn’t really have a choice in the matter. If I wanted to go ahead, then that was my choice. They both warned me that it was going to be hell and that I would probably end up with something that was just plain “crap” – but that didn’t really bother me. At least I’d give it my very best shot. And at the end of the day, I believed in the concept. I believed in the story. In fact, I loved the story and the characters. After all, despite the fact that Isaac, Anli and myself developed the Sakooz story as a team – at the end of the day, I felt as if it was always my story. I had worked on the Tweenies over a period of four years (I first travelled around Australia as a minder and animatronics assistant at the extremely young age of 15). It was a MASSIVE part of my life, and the experience really made me the person that I am today (for better or for worse!). Although Leodore was a fictional character, there are so many elements of him I can relate to (which is kind of scary).

So, despite all odds, and despite all the issues and problems, regardless of the fact that we lost our director, art director and assistant producer, the show must go on! Over the next few blog entries, I will start filling you in with what happening in the days leading up to filming, and then what happened on Day One through to Five of Principle Photography. It sure was one hell of a ride!

Now to finish up this post, I’ll leave you with a blog entry that Isaac wrote the day after I decided to take on the project solo, that explains his reasons for why he chose not to complete Sakooz. It’s been really tricky writing this, as I don’t want to put words into his mouth – so hopefully this clearly states his point of view:

Well, I am the Director of Sakooz, or at least I was the Director. Yesterday we completely scrapped the film, it was an extremely hard decision for all of us, and it would have been far easier to continue along ignoring it’s problems just to finish the damn thing. However if we were to continue along we would have not only been wasting our own time. Not that this is a problem considering the fact that we have already spent over 10 months on this project. One of the problems is that we would have been wasting many other people’s time and resources. We were lying to everybody involved, convincing them all that it was a good idea when we didn’t truly believe in it ourselves.

It is nobody’s fault; the film just didn’t have any depth, heart, or substance. The primary problem behind this is that we attempted to develop the idea as a group of three, each of us taking turns at it and sometimes developing it together. With a project this big it really needs to begin as one person’s idea or baby, they can seek consultation from the people around them, but the story remains theirs enabling that person to immerse themselves entirely in the story. This film was nobody’s baby and then at the same time it was everybody’s baby. We all knew the story in different ways, which constantly caused major confusion.

We worked like this primarily so that we could achieve the result by the deadline, this is the second problem. When developing a feature motion picture a deadline is rarely a good thing. These problems lead to the overruling problem, it became a business, it felt like we were a factory churning out a pre-packaged microwavable instant-movie-matic 3000.

But why didn’t we stop and work things out? Well, here we come to the biggest problem. We are a great team here at latenite films, we have made great films and will continue to in the future. However with this film the three person creative collaboration is where we went most horribly wrong. Of the three key members of latenite, (becoming four) there are two creative minds and a technical mind. The two creative minds knew there was something wrong, we felt we couldn’t just do it as factory work. We needed to be working on something we truly believed in, something we believed in beyond the surface, beyond it’s colourful furry exterior. However the technical mind was of the mindset that if we just continue pushing and ignore the problems we will get past them. This is a great quality to posses especially as a producer; you need a person who is so stubborn who can push people through the bad times with sheer force. However, you also need to know how to stop, when you can see that things have been going in the wrong direction for a long time and that all which was the idea of the film is lost.

It was more than just this; we the creative minds should have spoken out. But we did, we tried to change the direction of things at various points along the journey. Whether it is 5-minute attempts or an hour trying to get rid of the ball and chain, which held us on this one blind path to… well? We were strongly opposed by the technical mind and were shut down, I admit after my last objection I just went back in my hole, knowing that the opposing opinions were not open to change.

I shut myself down and just thought of it as a shit-house ass-munching job of which I have done many. I stopped thinking about what it meant and just went along with it. It was impressive at times, I had formula pitches I would use to bullshit to people that it was a good concept.
But at times it shone through, like when we pitched our final proposal to the lecturers at our university. I thought I should try to actually think about it and what I believed about it, I had nothing, and this film was no longer a positive part of me. It became a cancer, filling me with anger and rage, I began to hate everything it represented.
Even beginning to hate those I worked with, though underneath the rage I loved them dearly. I went along with it during the day going about it as a job trying to distract myself from its dark side. I even enjoyed parts of it, but only because I was able to disconnect myself from the deeper elements of the film.

It was at night when these elements caught up with me, causing me to lose many nights of sleep, fighting with my head. To a large degree it was the fault of us creative people, we tried to voice our opinions and were shut down, but we should have tried harder. I guess because we loved Chris so much we wanted to diplomatically convince him, but once you have pressed the go button on Chris there is no compromise, no change, until the project be completed, no matter what the outcome.
We obviously should have tried harder, but would it have changed anything?

And so, I had shut myself into a thoughtless capsule, in the daytime blind to the negative elements of the film of which there were so very many. I didn’t have the balls to try to escape, my thoughts were along the lines of “just finish this piece of shit and move on”. Luckily because of sickness the other creative Anli had time to herself to think clearly, she managed to rack up the courage to make the harder decision to leave while we were weakly continuing on.

I came to my house from Clifton Springs dressed in work clothes prepped to finish the spacecraft for the film. I was blocking out all my rational thoughts as I commonly did during the daytime. Caithlin (Art Director) came to my house to work on the ship and I could tell instantly that something was wrong; she had a distressed look on her face as she explained to me that Anli had quit. When Chris arrived we sat down in my yard and had a very long discussion, going round and round in circles weighing up the pros and cons. We all decided it was best to pull out, all of us quite reluctant; knowing though it was undoubtedly the harder route, it was the smarter one.

We don’t know what will happen from here; Chris has changed his mind overnight and has chosen to pursue the film. Why? Maybe partially for fear of the alternative. This is ok, though I must admit I feel betrayed, even though I know this was not his intention. I understand why he is not ready to make such a powerfully destructive and painful decision. Whether he finishes it or not I hope he learns the many valuable lessons I have learned from this experience.

I am going to pursue some ideas I have been working on for some time and see what comes of them. Above everything I have learned to push my opinions a little harder even if it compromises relationships.

I was listening to a podcast the other day, from the amazing team at fxguide where they were running a   fxguide/fxphd hosted a roof top party at Siggraph. Although the whole podcast was fantastic, there was one section that Mike Seymour was talking about (in which he himself was quoting Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar) that really caught my attention. He explained that: you need really good people because the idea itself isn’t neraly as important as the execution. And a good team with a bad idea, will actually just fix it or replace it. A bad team with a good idea will just make a bad film.’If you haven’t listened to the podcast already, I highly recommend you do, because there are some other words of wisdom that are just really helpful and inspirational. And I guess, this point perfectly sums up why I wanted to make the trailer despite all the problems. The idea was good – not perfect, but the initial concept has so much potential. However, more important than that, we have an AMAZING team working on this production. We have the most incredible DOP I could have asked for, the most amazing production team, the more incredible crew that went above and beyond, an amazing pyro and special effects team – in fact, everyone was just so terrific, and I can’t thank everyone enough for all their hard work. We ran over schedule ever day – and not once did anyone get angry or start putting up a fuss. So thank you to everyone that helped get Sakooz through principle photography!

Well… that’s all for now! In the next post I’ll start going through what happened in the days leading up to the shoot, and then explain what happen during and after filming! Lots of exciting things still in store, let me assure you!

If you made it this far down the post – thank you! This has turned into a bit of an essay!

Until next time, onward and upward! ( Which reminds me – congratulations Chris Jones on all your recent success with Gone Fishing! Bring on the Oscars 2009! )…

The ringleader… Chris!

Chris!

Chris!

We were originally planning to have our first day of principle photography THIS COMING WEEKEND believe it or not. But, for better or for worse (votes still to be counted), we have had to reschedule due to actors availibility. On the negative side, this has meant that we’ve had to re-think a lot of things and call up and cancel stuff, and reorganise things for another time, but on the positive side, at least we get a bit more time in pre-production. So now, our first day of shooting is on Tuesday 12th of August. We have SO much to do up until then. At least now we have our cast and locations sorted, but we still need to build sets, props and costumes – write up call sheets and schedules, do rehearsals, complete visual effects tests, and numerous other things! Some how, the list of things to do seems to get bigger day by day even though we are ticking things off at an amazing rate! The best news is that Anli is back in action, after fighting with Glandual Fever for several weeks – so it’s really nice to have her smiling and happy face back! We really missed her, and are very happy that’s she’s feeling a fair amount better (not perfect – but these things take time).

So anyway – I must be off… I have a stupidly big list of things to achieve tonight, so I’d better get back to it. Apologies for not writing more over the last few weeks, and also for not putting up many photos. We still need to upload some of the camera test footage as well – so many things to do! But all of these things will come in due course. Thanks to everyone who has spent us e-mails asking questions, and giving us positive feedback – we honestly really appreciate it! Ok.. time to get back to it!

Chris!

I’ve just looked through my diary, trying to remember what we’ve been doing since I last wrote on this blog, and to be honest – I have no idea. It’s been chaotic. I wish I had some exact stats – we’ve driven so many km’s, wrote thousands of e-mails, made hundreds of phone calls, seen hundreds of people, drank so much coffee, watched no TV, ate very little food, seen many fantastic locations, begged countless times, etc. over the last few weeks. I know I say this every single blog entry – but it’s true. Everything is getting rapidly more intense with every day.

Due to the fact that we’re pulling in so many favours, this also means that we are restricted to certain shooting dates (i.e. a gaffer might be willing to donate a light or two, but he can only do it on specific days when he’s got nothing else on). This has forced us to shoot even sooner than planned – our first shoot dates are now on the 26th and 27th of July! That’s not that long away… 16 days to be precise! And we’ve still got so much stuff to do before then… Luckily, however, we’re not shooting again until the 11th of August, which means we have two weeks in between to sort out everything else. It’s not a lot of time – but at least it’s something.

So where are we up to in terms of the production? Casting is now almost completely locked in. We only have one major character that we haven’t cast yet. We’ve locked in 80% of our locations. All the majors ones have been finalised – we’re now just after some of the smaller (yet still important) locations, such as hallways and store rooms. Costumes and animatronics are coming along slowly, but we should JUST make the deadline. Set Construction is a big issue at the moment – we have a lot to do in this department, and not a lot of time (or money!) to do it. Which brings me to our biggest issue at the moment: money! It’s so incredibly hard to find the funds to get things off the ground.

This is one of the biggest problems with university courses. Sure you get access to all this great gear – but, as a student, you are not allowed to apply for any of the various federal, state or local government grants. This seems really stupid! Surely the whole point of all these grants is to help create the best possible content possible? If students could get access to these grants, then not only would they have access to all of the great university facilities, but all the money they save in equipment hire could be devoted to other departments. The result? Vastly better production values! Also, because students would have to spend less time trying to find money for their products, they can spend more time actually making their films!

I think that’s one of the primary reasons why a lot of crap comes out of film schools – students simply don’t have the funds to boost their production values. Now I’m sure I’m going to get e-mail after e-mail abusing me about all this. Everyone’s going to say, “you don’t need a lot of money to make a good film”, “you just need a good story”, “you just need a good script”, “a good story shot on a mobile phone is better than a bad film shot on 35mm”, etc. And of course, this is all true! But I’m not suggesting that governments just throw money at any old project! Obviously there would be very strict guidelines and procedures, and only the best scripts would get green-lit and funded. And for this simple reason, I think this would push students to spend more time creating beautiful scripts, simply so they can get the funding to make the film. As sad and bad as it is, money is always such a strong driving force. I think if there was some kind of funding incentive, then it would help force students to really fine tune their script drafts, and help ensure that the shooting script is really at the best it can be.

Anyway – this isn’t going to happen in the short term, so in our case there’s no point worrying about it! What we need to do is focus our attention on finding money via untraditional means. We have a couple of tricks up our sleeves, but the biggest enemy is time. As we’re shooting very shortly, and we have so much other stuff do it, we simply don’t have time to pursue our other money-making ventures. It’s such a difficult thing to try and juggle!

I guess the one thing we’ve all learnt so far this year, is that in the film world, a year isn’t a very long time. We’ve been working much more than full time on this production all year, and yet we’re still so far behind. Now I really do understand why it takes so many years from concept to creation to get a film up. And we’ve made it a lot harder for ourselves – even though we’re only doing a two and a half minute teaser/trailer, we have to basically treat it like a feature film. We need to work everything out – and then only shoot sections of it. But I guess, all this work means that when it eventually becomes time to make the feature film, we’re going to be so prepared it’s not funny… Well, I say this, but no doubt when it comes to making it we’ll have 9 billion new problems!

So what’s in store in the weeks ahead. Lots. We need to get so much done, it’s really not funny. But at the end of the day, it’s just a matter of doing it. Some might say it’s impossible. Some might say it’s crazy. But we tend to keep our mouths shut, and just get on with it! Oh, of course with the exception of keeping you all informed via this blog!

Finally, to wrap things up, for those that haven’t already, make sure you sign up for the Red Centre podcast, courtesy of the team at fxguide/fxphd. It’s the one thing that’s been keeping us entertained while we drive around location scouting.

http://www.fxguide.com/redcentre

Seriously – if you haven’t listened to any of the episodes already, open up a new tab, and start downloading!

Well, that’s all for today. Time to get back to work!

Chris!

So what’s been happening since my last confession? Well, as I’m sure you can imagine, a lot! After writing the last blog entry it was straight into “fundraiser” mode – all hands on deck were devoted to ensuring that the Lens Flair event at loop bar was going to go to plan. That meant sending THOUSANDS of e-mailing, ringing up HUNDREDS of people, and biting our lips and approaching hundreds of shop owners face to face, to see if they would be interested in donating anything towards our little event. Anli and myself literally just drove to big shopping complexes (such as Chadstone) and one by one visted every single store in the complex “selling” our story. And it was hard. We got rejected a lot – which was demoralising! But for every five or so rejections, one person felt sorry for us, or got honestly excited about the project and gave us a small donation. So we walked away with quite a lot of stuff – from shampoos, to gift vouchers, towels, chocolates, books, free hair cuts, all kinds of weird and wonderful things! If you were one of the people who donated something to us – THANK YOU! It’s actually quite incredible the quantity and quality of “free stuff” we actually got! So for all the other film makers out there looking at ways to raise money for your film – don’t be afraid to ask for free stuff and then auction or sell it off! If you’re persistant and hard working, the amount of items you can get is quite high.

As I said, the rest of that week was just getting everything organised for the big Thursday night event! Putting together hampers, encoding videos for the DVD screenings, doing sound checks, printing labels, etc. It was one crazy week – there was so much to do, and to be perfectly honest, just not enough people to do it, which meant everyone had to work around the clock pulling everything together. But soon enough it was Thursday, and we got everything done in time! To start things off, here are some photos of the event:

Overall, I think we can classify the event as a success. We had a massive turn out – probably around 200 people at it’s peak, although we had people coming and going all night. Not sure how many unique people turned up, but I would imagine it would be around the 300-350 mark. A lot of the people that were there for the first screening didn’t hang around for the second screening, but luckily were replaced by new people! From all reports, everyone had a fantastic time! We’ve recieved quite a few e-mails saying “thank you” for putting on the night, and saying how much fun they had which is great! Word has even got out into the “low budget” film making community in Melbourne saying how fun the event was – and a lot of people who didn’t attend for whatever reason have said to me they wish they made the extra effort, or changed their schedule around to fit it in.

However! The only downside to the night, and it is quite a big downside unfortuantely is that we didn’t make a huge amount of money. Don’t get me wrong, we turned over an OK profit – but we didn’t get the numbers we were hoping for. Unfortunately for us, it seemed that most of the people that came along were poor. No one could afford to spend big money on anything. It’s almost criminal, but some people walked away with some of the most amazing auction items for so cheap! For instance, in one of our hampers, not only was it jam packed with so many great things (the whole hamper value was estimated at around $200) , but it also contained a $50 Sanity voucher, and the hamper only sold for $40. Even if you just consider the Sanity voucher, the punter did well – but when you take into account everything else that was in there, but person did fantastically! One of the biggest issues for us what that in regards to the silent auction, the few people in the audience that did actually have money got everything for cheap because no one was up for bidding against them! Despite all our best efforts to attract the more wealthy crowd, it just didn’t work out that way at the end of the day. In retrospect, instead of putting on a really fun and cool event (which was focussed primarily at “art” people – as we had a film screening and auctioned off lots of artwork), next time we should do something unique and “out there” that reflects the film. I don’t think we took enough risks, and by having a very “safe” event, there was not enough reason for people to come along. I think we also went about raising money the wrong way. All our income was coming from raffles, the silent auction and a lucky dip box (full of brand new CDs!). If instead we had a book charge, and we took some of the profits from the bar, I think we would have done a lot better. However, that said, if we had a door charge, then we may not have attracted the large crowd that we did. It’s a bit of a catch 22!

So, at the end of the day, we are still in need of more funds to get this trailer off the ground. As I said, we did make a fair amount of money, but no were near enough to cover all the expenses of the trailer. We still have a lot of work to do!

The day after Lens Flair we had yet another road bump – one of our key production team members has pulled out of the production for various reasons. Although we can “live without him” it just means that individually, we now all have even more work to complete – which is tough. We may find someone to fill his place, although it could be quite tricky considering our time frame. Which brings me to a very good point – the hardest thing about film making (especially in the low-budget world) is finding great people who can work happily together, and then keeping everyone happy and together! As the producer, I spend a lot of my precious time just keeping everyone motivated and excited about the production. You become even kind of like a “mother goose” type figure – you’re responsible to cheering everyone up when they get depressed about the production, and generally just try and keep everyone on the right track. It’s hard when the hours are horrible, the work load is huge, and no one is getting paid. Personal life vs The Film is always a big issue. But the show must go on!

After several deep and meaning fulls, I then had to head off to Sydney for the week for work. The timing couldn’t have been worse, but there was no way out of it! So I spend a week away from the production – but meanwhile, back at base camp, lots of things were happening! The animatronic head continued to be work on, as did all the costumes. Special effects tests were completed. Despite my absence, the show certainly continued!

But when I got back at the start of this week, I fly into yet another road block – but this time an even bigger one than last! One of our key production members, Anli, has “Glandual Fever” and will be out of action for several weeks. Now with two key production members down and out, it meant that we had to push back our shooting schedule. Originally, we were planning to shoot in July – but with Anli sick and David off doing other things, we had no choice but to slam on the brakes. This is quite a big pain – as it means that we have all kinds of new issues, especially in regards to equipment availibility.

Step forward into the present – today. We obviously have a lot of work to do, and now with Anli sick, it means that everyone else has to do even more work. But, with a little bit of luck, we’ll survive! We still have a huge amount to do, but I guess one bonus is that we have a little bit more time to do it now. We’re planning to shoot in the middle of August. Exact shooting dates have not yet been confirmed, but we’re trying to work them out as I type.

So that’s what’s been happening the last couple of weeks! It really has been a bumpy ride so far! Whenever we think we’re starting to win the war, something else comes and bites us in the butt! But I guess that’s what film-making is all about! You just need to push your way through regardless of what happens and get your vision up there on the screen, regardless of the obstacles.

I’m still planning to upload some of our camera test material on the blog – hopefully we’ll have something up by the end of this week. But I’m also going to start posting other intersting things as they pop up – like links to cool websites, and podcasts. So keep an eye out on this blog (or subscribe via RSS), as I’ll start posting more and more in the coming weeks, months (and if I survive that long) years.

That’s all for now! Thanks for taking the time to read! Until next time…

Up & At ‘Em!

Chris!

The Monday after location scouting was the start of an exceptionally big week ahead. On the upcoming Friday, we had our “pitch” for university, so before that, we had a lot of work to do! The whole week was basically dedicated to putting together pre-production documentation – scene breakdowns, location documentation, post production pathways, schedules, budgets, bla, bla, bla! So much work to do, and so very little time! Of course, this was mainly our fault – as we left a lot of it to the last minute. But we’ve also been so flat out with other things – location scouting, organising costumes, casting auditions, camera tests, and the list goes on, and on! Time is just ALWAYS against us. Lesson to new film makers – not matter how much time you think you have, you’ll always need more! Monday through to Thursday we just kept our heads down and kept on working away with very little, if no sleep. On Thursday, Isaac and Anli came over to my house, and we continued to just throw together our “production bible”. After Anli left in the afternoon, Isaac and myself kept on smashing away, and soon it became 4:00am on Friday morning – another night of no sleep! After an hour of shut eye, it was time for breakfast, and then off we went to uni – slightly exhausted, but we had put together our production bible – mostly finished. To be perfectly honest, the pitch went pretty horrible. I’m still not sure whether I should be saying this in our blog, for the whole world to read, but I guess when we decided to start this blog, we made the decision to keep it honest, as it’s primary purpose is to help out others by explaining what we’ve done and tried, and also failed, so that you can learn from our mistakes (and so that you don’t have to do them as well!). So, anyway – the pitch was bad. Not only were we under prepared, but due to the fact that our brains were all running at half speed (if at all), we couldn’t answer even the most simple of questions. What’s worse is that the only things we were asked, were about story – and we’ve spend so much time, energy and resources on the feature film story and concept development! The main problem was that we were having serious trouble expressing our ideas out loud – mainly because we were tired, but also because some of us were sick. We knew all the answers, and despite our best efforts, we just couldn’t convince the panel of four that we knew what we were talking about. Lesson number one, never go in to anything under prepared! Lesson number two, never go into a pitch exhausted – as you’ll need your brain! It went bad – we stuffed up – but the show must go on! We all knew were we went wrong, and we now all know how NOT to do things. On a positive note, despite the bashing, the panel didn’t really question anything BUT our story, which means at least we have the production side of things remotely under control. We also have a huge amount of faith and belief in the concept, so we’ve taken there hints and suggestions on board, and are continuing on the adventure as per planned! Just a minor little speed hump, but I think we came off OK…

Last weekend was then a chance to recover from the pitch – we really needed a break! Although, I don’t think any of us really had a break – we just continued on doing all our other stuff that needs to be done, that isn’t Sakooz related. We still had all our individual university projects and assignments to do – so all of our “to do” lists were quite full up! Which brings me to lesson number three for today – if you want a life, then don’t go into film making – it takes up EVERY single moment of your time. Seriously! But I guess, if you’re crazy enough to be reading this blog entry, then there is probably very little chance of convincing you that the film industry is a horrible place to get into. Anyway!

We all hoped that the new week would bring with it a new slate. But the Monday after was a disaster as well. It seemed like everything was against us! We had to pick up gear in the morning, and just ran into problem after problem! Then in the afternoon, it just got even worse! Everything just went WRONG! But somehow, we survived the day – JUST. But luckily for everyone Tuesday was a FANTASTIC day – the complete polar opposite! Finally!

In the morning we met up with Cail & Pete from Inspiration Studios to try out their new RED camera. If you don’t know what a RED camera is, and you’ve got anything to with the Film & Television industry, then stop right now, and check out the RED website, because RED is BIG!

Right through pre-production for Sakooz, we have very much loved the idea of shooting Super 16mm, because it looks fantastic! However, there has always been a whisper that if there was anyway we could shoot on a RED, then it would DEFINITELY be worth looking into! There are only a very limited number of them in Melbourne at the moment – and not even that many in Australia as a whole, so just getting hold of one is quite a challenge at the moment, because there under so much demand! But luckily for us, Cail & Pete had a rare day when the camera wasn’t booked out, so we jumped at the opportunity to do some tests! To start things off, here are some photos!

We basically just followed the same procedure as per our 16mm tests. At some stage in the near future we’ll upload some of the footage from the tests for your viewing pleasure! But we also did some slow motion passes, which looked amazing! Overall, we had a really fun and educational morning playing with the RED camera – and we must say, even with the stock standard RED zoom lens, the results from the camera are incredible! Unfortunately we didn’t get to shoot any night time footage (it’s on our to-do list), but all the day time material looks great!

And the day continued to be fun and exciting! After playing around with the RED for a few hours, and having some “training lessons” on how the whole post production workflow takes place, we headed off to Digital Pictures to do a one-light telecine session of our 16mm tests. On a properly calibrated big monitor, the footage looked incredible – especially the 500T VISION3 stock, which was virtually grain-less considering the scene was only lit by candle light! Again, at SOME stage, we’ll post some stills of the footage, so that you can compare the RED to the Super 16mm footage.

After a truly fantastic day – it soon became Wednesday. But with all our university assignments due on the Friday – Wednesday and Thursday was dedicated solely to getting all that work done. Again, two nights of very little sleep – if any.  Then Friday was the day all the work was due. We all got it in – just. We did some good stuff – and some bad. But we survived – and that’s the main thing! In the middle of all the mayhem, we also had a meeting with Loop Bar to discuss our fund-raiser night – which is THIS COMING THURSDAY! Make sure you come along – it should be a great night!

Then on last Friday night – it was finally a chance to let our hair down. We all went out to a local pub near uni and celebrated with everyone the fact that we survived the week! And what a week it was!

This weekend we’ve just been concentrating on getting things ready for the fund-raiser. Again, like always, so much to do and so very little time!

So that basically sums up what we’ve been doing lately, and why you haven’t heard much from us! Busy! Busy! But despite all this whining, and despite all the problems and complications, it’s all a lot of fun! I wouldn’t recommend it to ANYONE – but if you’ve got the film-making bug (and you’ll know if you’ve got it), then you can’t live without the thrill and excitement of trying to make the impossible possible.

Now, exclusive to all you blog readers, I’m going to show you something very special to end this post! Here is a sketch of “Pinky” (one of the Sakooz characters) for your viewing pleasure! As with all the images on this page, just click it to enlarge. Enjoy!

…and remember, feel free to e-mail us at ANY time should you have any questions or queries! You can also post any questions directly on this blog. A BIG thank you who has already e-mailed us thus far, and also a MASSIVE thank you to everyone that has been helping us with our fund-raiser! Until next time…

Well, as I said previously, Saturday was camera test day. We piled up James and Doris (the names of my 4WD and Isaac’s van), and headed to a football grandstand in Melbourne to test some Super 16 stock. We shot several different things (colour charts, grey scale charts, city skyline, people running, etc.) using the different stocks (specifically Kodak 50D VISION2, 200T VISION2 and 500T VISION3) at different exposures, and using different filters. We also shot the exact same material using a Panasonic HVX202 and Sony Z1P (using the fixed lenses) to use as a comparison. Originally we intended to use a P+S adapter on both the digital cameras, however we couldn’t get one that weekend. The day went pretty much as planned – although the weather was horrible and freezing! Here are some photos of the day for your viewing pleasure:

As you can see, we had a lot of fun! Especially when Anli and myself had to run around pretending to be Sakooz creatures! After many hours of freezing and burning film, we wrapped for the day. On Sunday, with a substantially smaller crew, as a lot of people got sick on the Saturday, we headed off to Lara (near Geelong) to find a location for our big “crash landing” sequence. After much searching, we eventually came across a road that, although not perfect, seemed to look pretty good. We shot some camera tests at the location, and then when it got dark, we did some night fire camera tests. We especially wanted to test out how the new Kodak 500T VISION3 stock compares to the VISION2. And all of a sudden, the weekend was gone! Dear, oh dear!

Monday through to Friday was pretty much, what is becoming a stock standard week. Meeting after meeting, discussion after discussion, no food, no sleep, millions of e-mails! Who would want to live this life? Really! It’s all so crazy! Thursday was probably one of the bigger days, with meetings non-stop all day at various places around Melbourne for all different things. It was great though – we got to meet up with so many interesting and diverse people, all interested in what we are trying to achieve.

This weekend, it was all about location scouting. Anli, Isaac and I jumped in Doris (the 4WD) and zoomed around Victoria looking for suitable spots to film. Yesterday (Saturday), we mainly looked around the Geelong side of the world looking for “places in the middle of no-where” for the dramatic opening of the film. Then today, we headed down Mornington way, and around Portsea and Phillip Island, looking for the epic ending location. All things considered, we did quite well – we’ve found two locations that are almost exactly what we’re after, which is fantastic! They’re still not locked in 100% as of yet, but they certainly look the part. So we’re getting closer – which is great, as we haven’t got that long to go till we need to start shooting!

But there’s also been some huge announcements recently! Singer-songwriter Katie Weston is now opening our fund-raising night with an acoustic set, which is fantastic! But also, we’ve made the Nigel blog live! There currently only one episode online (plus a bunch of random blogs) – but another is coming online very soon (maybe even tonight). The production values aren’t great – but it’s quite funny, and well worth a look and listen! As the weeks go on, there will be more and more stuff appearing on Nigel’s site, so stay tuned!

So what’s in store for this coming week? A lot! A hell of a lot! On Friday we will be pitching our concept to our university, so that we can get “green lit” and given official permission to hire the gear required for the teaser/trailer. We have a lot of work to do up until then! Storyboards, shot lists, budgets, bla, bla, bla! The list goes on and on! We also need to lock in the final Sakooz costume designs, continue work on the animatronics, start building sets, etc. So more work to do, and so little time! What’s even more annoying is that now I’m starting to get sick! How annoying! It’s only a cold – but it’s not something you want when you need to get so much done. But I’ll survive! Unfortunately however, Anli and Isaac are also both still slowly recovering from their various bugs.

Anyway, I must be off! As always, if you have any questions or queries, feel free to either post a comment on this blog, or send us an e-mail! We’re ALWAYS more than happy to answer any questions you have about us, our work or about movie making in general. Until next time…

Chris!

Monday brought with it a whole heap of meetings. We met up with a whole collection of extremely talented costume design students, and other people interested in helping out with the Sakooz characters. You’ve really got to be careful when you do meetings all day, as you really do intake a massive amount of caffeine, simply because generally speaking we’ve been having crew meetings at the local coffee shop. After a very massive day, and exactly 318 e-mails later (for me alone that is!), after a quick two hours sleep, it was suddenly Tuesday! Once again, we had more meetings and discussions. This time with actual costume builders (more about this in the coming weeks!) and sound designers. I can’t really go into too much detail at this stage, but all the meetings went exceptionally well! Everyone seems genuinely excited about our concept, and they all really want to help us transform our idea into an actual feature film! It’s actually really inspiring to see people get inspired themselves, from an idea that we came up with. It really makes our day, when the eyes light up of the people we are pitching to – and start getting carried away thinking about how we can various bits and pieces to make the film happen. We’ve had so many great ideas and suggestions!

Wednesday was audition day again! 9:00am till 6:00pm – one audition every half hour. It’s only just longer than your standard working day – but I’ll tell you what, sitting in the one place for 9 hours straight, having to repeat yourself over-and-over again, and having to really concentrate on what in front of you, really takes it out of you! It’s just so exhausting! Once again, we had a great mix of audition’s, and some more interstate travellers. Unfortunately though, by the end of the day, our fearless leader, Director Isaac’s body had finally given up – and he started getting really sick again. Unfortunately he was too ill to make it on Thursday, so Anli and myself had to do it alone. But, as we’ve been developing the script and story together, this wasn’t a big deal, as we all equally know the every aspect of the production and story back-to-front. Despite the fact that Isaac had to take a “sickie” – despite the doctors request – he still continued to work at home. I’m not sure if it’s just a complete and utter devotion to the project, or whether he’s just clinically insane. Probably a bit of both. And then, he did something even more crazy – he still went to work on Thursday night, despite nearly being on his death bed. Unstoppable!

Today it was back to uni for a rarely attended class or two – and we also had to pick up gear, as we’re doing camera tests this weekend. We’re planning to do some tests using different stocks (Kodak 50D, 200T, 500T VISION3, etc.) on both a ARRI SRII 16:9 16mm and AATON A-Minima 16mm camera. We’re also going to have a Sony Z1P and Panasonic HVX202 set up for comparison. More on the camera tests in the coming days!

There’s lots of exciting things coming up as well! Within the next few days, we’ll be introducing a new blog to the site! I don’t want to give away too much just yet, but I can tell you now, that a person called “Nigel” has joined the team, and will be following us around. So keep and eye out on our website, as Nigel will soon be here to entertain and inform all! We’re also running a fund-raiser night at Loop Bar in Melbourne on the 12th of June. We’ll post information about it on the website soon – but in the meantime, if you join our Facebook Group, you’ll see the event we’re talking about. It’s going to be a fantastic night, with a silent auction, DJ, raffles, and lots more! So please, if you live in Melbourne, come along and help support our film! We’re planning to raise around $15,000 to help make the best possible trailer we can.

We’ve also been getting a lot of e-mails asking us various questions about the production, and why we’re doing certain things. Over the coming weeks I’ll explain all as to why exactly we are making a trailer, and not just a short film. I’ll also talk at some stage about our marketing strategies, and how we think we can actually achieve in making Sakooz a commercial success.

Ok… That’s about all I’ve got time for tonight! I need to start getting ready for a weekend of extensive camera tests and potentially heated discussions about how we intend to film the trailer, etc. I leave you today, with some photos of the week that was. Have a great weekend readers! And thanks to everyone who has sent us e-mails of support and encouragement! Already this blog is getting a massive number of hits, so thank you! But also, please tell your friends about it – as the more the merrier!

Boy, oh, boy! What a week it’s been! On Tuesday it was back to uni for our production class. We had a discussion on post production, which was actually really helpful for us. Of course, once class was over it was just back to work – replying to e-mails, working on the script, completing documentation, drawing up costume designs, researching, the list goes on! Looking back in my diary, the “to-do list” which came out of Tuesday completely filled the page from top to bottom, and there was even righting horizontal on the page. So many things to do – so little time!

Then Wednesday it was all about meetings! I had to get up really early to pick up Anli, and Isaac (we all live on different corners of the globe!), and off we headed to having a meeting with Frank Strangio, an extremely talented and well respected composer. Rather than write for hours about all the amazing stuff Frank has done in the past, it’s probably best if you just check out his website. Apparently it’s a bit out-of-date (as he’s done heaps more in recent times), but it still gives you a very good idea of just how talented and remarkable this bloke really is! We spent nearly two and a half hours in his beautiful studio just chatting about each others projects. He’s one of the most lovely people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting – and I mean this in all honesty. He has such a passion for film making, and the industry – it’s very inspiring! I’m sure we’ll be talking much more about Frank over the next few months on this blog!

After meeting with Frank, it was off to Digital Pictures to talk about all things post! At this stage, we are looking at shooting the Sakooz trailer on Super 16mm using an ARRI SRII film camera – so we need to somehow get the footage from film to our editing system. This is done through a process called telecine. For those that have never been to Digital Pictures – the facilities are incredible and very much world class. The staff are fantastic, and they all genuinely got excited about our project.

Then it was off to Soundfirm – another leader in their field. Once again, the staff are not only the very best at what they do, but extremely friendly, and excited about what we are trying to achieve.

In an effort to jam as much as we possibly could in the one day, we then headed off to Federation Square to attend a special industry forum called MINDSHIFT, run by Film Victoria. Although it was a very interesting discussion – and lots of good points were raised, the fact that there wasn’t any young up-and-coming film makers on the board, nor was there any full-time script writers, was kind of a disappointment as the purpose of the event was to talk about the future of the industry, and about the lack of good ideas and concepts coming out of Victoria.

So, after a very busy day, it was time to head home for a couple of hours sleep and get ready for another day of auditions! Thursday brought with it another 18 auditions… Like previous days, there was an amazing array of different talents! There a few people that you knew straight away, when they walked in the room, that they could just play their chosen part. It’s a fantastic feeling to know that this up-and-coming actor could one day be the next Hollywood icon! After a very long day, and another night of very little sleep, it was Friday…

After some great acting workshops at uni, we headed off to have a meeting with Chris and Tim – our animatronic gurus. After a lengthy discussion at a pub in Richmond (next to Barnes), we finally got to a point were the duo are ready to actually start making something! Exciting times!

Friday night was set aside to finally catch up again with our own family and friends. However, even when we decided to have a break from one another – for just a night – we still end up running into one another! Out of all the venues in all of Melbourne, amazingly I still ended up running into Isaac completely randomly. I guess after spending two weeks together stuck in the same hotel room in Hong Kong, we are just drawn together whenever the alcohol is flowing – weird! Eventually, Friday became Saturday. We continued work in the comfort of our own homes, and Saturday soon become today – Sunday!

What was on today? Well, despite the fact that it was mothers day – we had auditions from 9:00am to 5:30pm! Sorry mums! As always, we had a great mix of different peoples, auditioning for different roles. For some reason, we also had a large amount of people travel from interstate today – some from Perth, others from Brisbane, and a couple from Sydney! It’s absolutely terrific that people get so excited about Sakooz, that they are willing to fly down to Melbourne, at their own expense, just to attend a half hour audition. I’ve been thinking a lot about why people actually do this – I mean, seriously, it’s only an unpaid student film after all! But, I guess, at the end of the day, you never know where one of these unpaid jobs may lead. In our case, we are confident that we’re going to get Sakooz “off the ground”, into a feature film and onto theatre screens world wide. In fact, we’re almost certain – it’s just a matter of when! So I guess, keeping this in mind, auditioning for a freebie gig could lead to something big and amazing. It’s probably worth the risk! So, a MASSIVE thank you to everyone that flew in today to audition! And I guess, at the end of the day, I’d personally be more than happy to fly to New Zealand to work for free on any Peter Jackson projects! But yeah, I guess we’re not exactly Peter Jackson… yet!

So anyway, I must be off! Since I started writing, my computer has already beeped about fifteen times – signifying fifteen e-mails to read and reply to. The fun never ends! And I leave you with some snap shots, of the auditions from today… Enjoy!

Not to be confused with Yang Chuan’s 1980 film, also set in Hong Kong and as of the same English translation, Kenneth Bi’s “Zhan. Gu (The Drummer)” is his third feature film (despite popular belief, as his first feature film, “A Small Miracle” only received a straight to video release). Nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, this film is the first from Hong Kong and Taiwan to be selected for competition in the festival, and is already gaining positives reviews all around the world, no doubt helped by Tony Leung Ka Fai receiving the “best supporting actor” award at Taiwan’s highly acclaimed Golden Horse Film Festival. However, the film is not without its critics – with many describing it as “ill-conceived” and “unconvincing”.

The Drummer tells the story of Sid, a pompous drummer in a rock band by night, and an insufferable pain during the day, played by Jaycee Chan – the son of one of Hong Kong’s greatest talents, Jackie Chan.

After eyeing off a beautiful woman during a sold out gig, Sid ends up sleeping with Carmen (played by Hong Kong pop sensation, Yumiko Cheng Hei-Yi), despite knowing that she’s having a relationship with Stephen Ma (Kenneth Tsang) – a triad kingpin. However, even when Sid is caught messing around with Carmen in a hotel hot tub by a very infuriated Mr. Ma – accompanied by his nasty looking henchmen – Sid just yells at the top of his voice, “You have to deal with my father if you hurt me”.

However, even though Sid’s father, Kwan (played by a typecast Tony Leung Ka Fai) is also a triad leader, unlike Ma, he doesn’t wear a suit – and in these underground societies, a suit signifies a lot more power than those who wear gold chains. Incidentally, Kwan also owes Ma from a previous triad-related encounter, and is suddenly thrown into an incredibly difficult situation, as Ma wants Sid’s hands – quite literally. Unfortunately for Sid, his usual “get out of jail card” is of no use this time round, and ends up taking refuge in his sister’s veterinarian clinic. But he’s soon discovered when he stumbles out of hiding to his sister’s rescue, after Kwan goes mental and starts bashing his daughter and destroying her practice. Despite objections from the rest of his gang – who would much rather Kwan hand his sons fingers and palms over to Ma for the good of the team – Kwan decides to sneak Sid out of the country to Taiwan, while he tries to smooth things over in Hong Kong.

Accompanied by his official triad babysitter Chiu (Roy Cheung), Sid finds himself stuck in a beautiful Taiwanese town, with nothing to do. Chiu even resorts to joining a small adult school where they teach you how to be a “better person”. However, one morning Sid is awaken by the distant sound of drumming, coming from the nearby mountain. Together, Sid and Chiu hike up hill to investigate, and come across a group of Zen Drummers. Instantly, Sid is enchanted by their powerful rhythmic drumming, and he entices them to allow him to audition, despite Chiu’s prior objections. Put head to head with the youngest group member, a fiery and stunning young lady called Hong Dou (Angelica Lee), who Sid has already had an altercation with back in town, he soon gets bored of following her lead. Holding up the audition, while he rearranges several other drums around him, he then decides to improvise, smashing them as if they were a drum kit and he was back at home in a dingy nightclub. Despite the noise pollution, the group decides to let Sid join (much to Hong Dou’s disgust), supposedly because he has talent, but more probably because they want to teach him a lesson in humility.

He moves up to the mountains to receive his drumming training, but soon realises that it’s not all fun and games. Before he can put stick to canvas, he must earn their respect and learn to “drum without drumming”. Following along the same lines to movies such as “The Karate Kid”, Sid also endures several “wax on wax off” moments, as he learns virtues like patience, discipline, hard work and perseverance from his wise and patient teachers.

This section of the film, as Sid truly become at one with himself and the world around him, is truly beautiful. The cinematography is stunning, despite the fact that it’s Sam Koa’s first time in the role of director of photography – although, thanks to a picturesque location, it would have been very hard to mess up. Chan’s acting is impressive, especially during his character’s spiritual transformation, and he certainly proves his come a long way since his debut on “Twins Effect 2″.

However, once Sid finally becomes “one with the moment” and masters the art of Zen drumming, the movie takes, what most critics describe as a turn for the worst. Leaving the breathtaking scenery of the Taiwanese mountains, the film heads back to pollution filled Hong Kong, for clashes with treacherous triads and ham-handed moralizing.

However, despite the many complaints from reviewers and film critics, I for one personally agree with the directors choices. Although there is a good argument that this film could have really be made into two completely separate films – one a film about triads in Hong Kong, and another about Zen drummers – by combining the two very different worlds together in the one motion pictures creates a very unique piece of work. Although the differences between the two worlds are almost jarring, this adds to the impact to the film, in what I believe is a positive way. In essence this is a very simple coming of age story, of an impatient youth, and in many ways a lot of the plot and subplots are almost clichéd in nature. However, by dramatically contrasting the fast paced and dangerous Hong Kong streets with the serenity of the Taiwan mountains, the director has created a whole bunch of visual and aural metaphors, which help add many extra layers of meaning onto the quite simple framework.

But one of the biggest things going for this film is the score by Andre Matthias, and the sound design by Du-Che Tu. When viewed in a surround sound environment, the scenes with the Zen drumming are just absolutely spectacular – the beautiful and organic sound just floats all around you. But then in more dramatic scenes, the score (which also features a lot of unique drum sounds) builds dramatically in tension to reveal a whole orchestral score. Obviously the fact that the director has actually won several awards for his composing work on previous films has meant that he put a lot of importance into getting the sound elements of this film just perfect. Continuing to follow the same path as past films, Kenneth Bi also took on the roll of editor for The Drummer – he really is the kind of director who likes to retain absolute creative control over all elements of his production.

Internationally speaking, this movie should do quite well for several reasons. Firstly, it stars Jackie Chan’s son – and for this reason alone, it will draw a big Western crowd. But by also merging two very visually strong and bold worlds together (the land of the gangsters and the land of the Zen drummers, high up in the mountains), the audience is really taken on a journey of stunning proportions. Forgetting about the story for just a second – the sound design and cinematography alone is reason enough to watch this film.  That said, I still don’t agree that it was necessarily a poor script (as some critics have suggested – although notably a lot of them were actually from Hong Kong) – I just think that maybe the director decided to go down an unconventional route when it came time to making the film. And of course, the U-Theatre fans will obviously come flocking to the theatres to see these amazing drummers up there on the big screen.

In conclusion, The Drummer is an amazingly beautiful film – with visuals that easily rival the very best BBC documentaries and Hollywood blockbusters such as Lord of the Rings. However, the highlight of this film is by far the music and the drumming. The soundscape that is created by the filmmakers is truly incredible. It’s also great to see Jackie Chan’s son up there on the big screen – as well as a host of other fantastic actors. Although the script may not be as tight and exciting as some might have liked – it really doesn’t matter. You have to sit down in the theatre, relax, and become at one with the drumming…

References:

• Bi, K (2007), Zhan. gu, DVD, Kenbiroli Films, Hong Kong.
• Making Of, DVD (Special Feature), Kenbiroli Films, Hong Kong.
• Zhan. Gu (2007), Internet Movie Database Inc., viewed 27^th April 2008, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0831386/.
• Kenneth Bi, Internet Movie Database Inc., viewed 27^th April 2008, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0080456/.
• Wikipedia contributors 2008, Zhan. gu, Wikipedia, viewed 27^th April 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drummer_(2007_film)
• Wikipedia contributors 2008, Kenneth Bi, Wikipedia, viewed 27^th April 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Bi

So anyway, illness’ aside – what have we been doing since last Saturday? Why haven’t we been sleeping? Why are we so stressed? One simple answer – casting! We started advertising early in the week, and since then it’s really been “all hands on deck”! We had a MASSIVE response – I’m generally getting around 60+ e-mails a day from people all over Australia. To be perfectly honest, we’re really surprised! We knew our concept was pretty unique and exciting, but we had no idea people would be willing to fly interstate (at their OWN expensive) just to attend a half an hour audition! It’s all been really exciting! We had our first auditions yesterday (as it’s now after mid-night), and it all went very smooth considering Isaac’s lovely cough. We did plan to get some behind the scenes footage, but unfortunately, we just ran out of time. We really need to get someone on board to just take care of all our behind the scenes stuff! Anyone interested? Well, if you’re one of the few people who actually read this, and you are interested in documenting this – lets face it – AMAZING adventure, then get in touch!

So what else has been happening? Well, the search continues for costume designers/builders for our Pinky character. So far we’ve had quotes ranging from $60,000 – $3,000. We’ve been in touch with so many different costumes companies, it’s been incredible.

We’ve also been hunting down crew, further developing the feature film concept, working on the trailer script, doing budgets, schedules, and generally sending and replying to HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of e-mails each day, not to mention many, many phone calls and SMS’. And it never stops. However, at least we’re not alone – believe it or not, but when we put up our first online ad for casting at 3:00 in the morning, we had a reply by 3:30 am! Seems actors don’t sleep either…

So what’s in store for the next few days? More auditions! Meetings with various post production houses, costume design companies, composers, crew, etc. Script sessions and internal production meetings. Really – it just never stops. And it’s not going to stop for a while – we have so much work to do over the next couple of months (and of course, years).

So stay tuned! Lots more exciting things to come! We’ll TRY and get around to recording some video footage at our auditions on Saturday and post it up here on the blog, or at least some photos so you can see how lovely we all look.

Over the next few weeks we’ll also start posting up information on the production and the story on this blog, as well as some of our development documentation and drawings, so you can start to piece together how this whole nightmare came to be. Lots of things planned – and we WILL actually get around to it at some stage.

Ok… I’ve now got 45 unread e-mails sitting in my inbox. I’d better get back to it…

See you in the soup!

Chris!

One thing that I’ve always wanted to do, ever since working on the BBC Kids show “Tweenies“, is create a movie about a bunch of kids show characters that are actually aliens. And so we started work on “TV Tubsters” – a full length feature film concept. However, due to the fact that our doco took over our lives for a lengthy period of time, the first story outline wasn’t completed until the start of November. It was also hopeless and massively incomplete. Then throughout November and December we continued, as a team to build upon the general outline. It grew and evolved. Characters were introduced, and then destroyed. Plot outlines grew in size. What started out as a 1000 word outline became a 2000 word outline, and then 4000 word outline. Ideas were accepted, and rejected. Christmas and New Years came and went. Then in the new year, despite our better judgement, we decided to stop trying to develop the story as a team, and sent Isaac to work solo on a first draft of the script. While he went absolutely crazy writing like a mad man, the rest of the time started organising all the pre-production elements – despite the fact that we didn’t have a completed script. After a few weeks or writing it became very clear that we were never going to pull off a feature film script in the time that we had. As heart breaking as this reality was, we decided to press on writing the script, and actually produce a teaser/trailer this year to use as a promotional tool to get the funding required to get the feature film script off the ground the following year. Everything continued along slowly but smoothly. The script grew in size and complexity.

And then Anli, Isaac and myself went to Hong Kong for the International Film Festival. We all had an amazing time – saw lots of great films, and also got to see all the sights and sounds. But when we came back, after some quite intensive script sessions, we came to the conclusion that we were in the world of shit. Because Isaac was writing solo, the idea was morphing, re-shaping and changing – which is fine, as it was definitely turning into a really fantastic script – however, Anli and myself just weren’t involved enough. We didn’t really know the characters on the page – nor could we relate to a lot of events that were taking place. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, as the writer could have continued to do his or her thing, and after a few rewrites, the director could then bring the script to life in their own special way. But because we’re really building this film “as a team” from scratch, everyone needed to be across everything.

We learnt a valuable lesson – in our case, we needed to do everything as a team to achieve the best results in the given timetable. Sure, if we had years to write the script that Isaac could have taken the first pass, then we could discuss it, make changes, move on to the next draft and continue along like that. We also made the fatal mistake of tackling the first draft without a clear plan of attack. We had a beginning and a middle, but no end. I don’t think you should start writing a draft without any idea of what direction you want the film to go.

So, despite having written thousands and thousands of words already, we made the tough decision to go back to the start, and revisit the story from line one. It was tough. We spent several weeks going back to basics and seriously reviewing all our decisions. What’s the story about? Who’s story is it? We started re-reading scriptwriting books, and re-visiting fantastic movies from the past. We spent a lot of time locked in confined spaces, forced to just put pen to paper and come up with something of value. Slowly but surely, things started falling into place.

Now it’s time to step into the present. Where are we up to now? What’s going on? Well, the good news is that we have a completed story outline – it has a very well defined beginning, middle and end. The characters have been completely built from the ground up, and we basically know everything there is to know about them. We’ve started work on the teaser/trailer script (based on the story outline) and everything is heading in the right direction. Costume design is under way, and next week we start meeting up with our Director of Photography, and other key crew members to start working out how exactly we’re going to pull this off.

This really isn’t the right way to make a movie. You shouldn’t really “force” a script out of people – although it seemed to work. Ideally, we would have loved to have spent two of three years developing the feature film script, spent all of last year getting funding, and then actually made the feature film this year. But that just didn’t happen. So the plan is, to create the basis for a feature film concept NOW, produce and shoot a teaser/trailer this year (to mainly use as a promotional tool), and at the same time start writing the 1st draft of the full length feature film so that it’s ready for a re-write later in the year. The aim is to have a completed teaser/trailer, as well as a feature film script, promotional website, and extensive marketing tools all in operation by the end of the year. Can we pull this off? Only time will tell…

But by far the most frequent question we get asked, is why are we “jumping the queue” and working on a feature film now? Seeing as we’re studying 3rd year university – why not just produce an amazing short film? If it’s really good then we’ll get into all kind of fantastic International festivals, and who knows were we’ll end up… Well, that all very well and good, and sure it works for some people, but we don’t want to head down that route. Why make shorts when you can make a feature? We’ve very much of the opinion that if you want to do something, then just get out there and do it. I’m personally a huge fan of Peter Jackson – despite all the limitations, he just pushed every boundary and made amazing films. Sure, he made a hell of a lot of short films before he started work on the bigger features – but so have we. Although Happy Sundaes is the first narrative film under the latenite banner, individually, we’ve all worked on well over one hundred short films, video clips, television commercials, low-budget/independent and professional feature films, etc.

Don’t take me the wrong way, we haven’t learnt everything – and we’re by no means experts when it comes to film making. But, we think, for better or for worse, we’re ready for the next step. It’s time to make a feature film! Unfortunately it’s going to take a bit longer than we originally hoped (as we’re making the teaser/trailer before the full length feature this time round), but that’s all part of the fun.

So that’s the current situation! It hasn’t been an easy ride so far. Ignoring all the script/story problems, we’ve also had many other unavoidable set backs: marriage break-ups, couples break-ups, team member partings, sickness, car crashes… the list goes on. But we’re all alive (although you probably wouldn’t think it by looking), and feeling great about the project thus far! It’s not going to be easy – but that should at least mean that this blog will be half interesting…

As Chris Jones always says, Onward & Upward !

Chris!

Well firstly, I must say that I’m a huge fan of them. Take for example HD For Indies. Written by Mike Curtis, a film post production and workflow guru, this site dedicated to providing independent film-makers with all the latest information on affordable digital technology. He’s now moving a lot of his new content over to the ProVideo Coalition – a fantastic new site which brings together the industry’s best writers, bloggers and video gurus under one website. Because technology changes so rapidly, and new products hit the market quicker than ever before, site’s like Mike’s help keep you in the loop. And because it’s written from his point of view – not just a whole heap of marketing crap – it helps answer a lot of questions and also helps make you question the way you think about new technology.

And then there’s blog like Stu Maschwitz’s, ProLost. Writer of one of my all time favourite tech books, The DV Rebel’s Guide. co-founder of The Orphanage (one of the best visual effects and production companies in the world), ex-employee of George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), creator of the award-winning Magic Bullet software and overall nice guy – Stu’s blog is jam packed with technical wonders. If you’re into After Effects, then you really have to take a walk around through his blog.

But my favourite blog at the moment has got to be Chris Jones’. Founder of Living Spirit, and author of the Guerilla Film Makers Book series – this guy is an absolute low-budget film-making legend! His books are priceless (I have all of them sitting in front of me as I type), and his blog (which is currently following him while he puts together a short film called Gone Fishing), is so easy to read, so jam packed with useful hints and information, and so interesting, it’s amazing.

So anyway, it’s pretty clear that I like blogs. But why start up one for latenite films? Well, mainly because film making is all about community and teamwork. It’s all about sharing information – and what better way to do that than by documenting everything we do, and publishing it free of charge on our website? Just like Chris Jones site, Peter Jackson’s various production diaries (such as Kong Is King), and Melbourne own Gravediggers Blog, we hope to have a site that people will occasionally have a read through, to not only see how we’re going, but to also learn about film-making through our experiences and mistakes. Although the best way to learn about movie making is by actually getting out there and making films, in your down time, it’s always nice to read up on how others have gone about things. And secondly, for more selfish reasons, we are putting up this blog so that we can actually keep track of what we’ve done in the past! Even now, there are so many times when we’ve been working non-stop without sleep for a couple of weeks, and we completely loose track of what happened and in which order. Film making is so intense and takes up so much of your life and time, that it’s so easy to just loose large chunks of time in the abyss. So hopefully, this blog will help us keep a diary of what we’ve done and when we did it so that when we’re grumpy (ok… even grumpier) old men and woman, we have some record of the past (because lets face it – whatever memory isn’t destroyed by drugs and alcohol, will no doubt be wrecked by our crazy no sleeping, no eating, hard working lifestyle).

So what exactly are we going to put up on this blog? Well, good question! The aim is to just keep it updated with what we’re working on and how it’s all going. We’ll post lots photos and videos were relevant. Basically, we’re after a site that’s very similar to Chris Jones and the Gravediggers site – except we’re a lot more indie, a lot more low budget and a lot less experienced! So this site will probably contain a lot of information that’s REALLY useful to budding student film makers who also don’t have access to huge budgets and fancy gear.

So welcome to the blog! We really hope you enjoy reading through it and learning about all our fun, tears and adventures. Let me rest assure you know – at least this site won’t be boring! With every shoot we do, the stories get more exciting and, let’s face it, scary, so who knows what amazing things will happen this year round!

Stay tuned!

Chris!