Project Finished: "The Container Adventures: The Rescue"
 

Hi folks. I'm happy to announce that my first project with the HD100 is now "finished" and posted on-line for viewing/downloading. (I use "finished" lightly as there are still things I want to fix but ran out of time for this year's release.)

http://www.encorp.ca/cfm/index.cfm?It=908&Id=48

The movie is 18 minutes and will also be distributed on DVD to schools in British Columbia who register for Encorp's annual recycling programs. (Encorp Pacific (Canada) is the corporation in charge of beverage container recycling in B.C. and has a number of community and school programs.)

Some local folks may recognize the container puppets from Encorp's TV commercials. Those spots were done by Encorp's ad agency, whereas my company (Stargate Connections Inc., an ISP) was hired to do the educational video to tie in with their Web-based school programs that we also developed and maintain.

So, needless to say, movie making isn't our primary job, just a sideline several of our staff have dabbled with over the years. But I'm really glad Encorp gave us the opportunity to work on this project, which is our second video for them. It was a lot of fun and I hope people enjoy it.

All comments, criticisms and questions are welcome! (I'll be able to make changes when we press a new batch of discs for next year's programs.)

It is obvious your group put alot of effort into the video. Cudos on a job well done. Cheers!

The image quality is clear as a bell with one exception, the mother characters face. Did you use skin detect on her color to make it softer?

Thanks Stephen!

No, I believe her closeup in the kitchen was slightly out of focus. (My fault.) Is that the only shot you noticed was soft or all her shots?

questions
 

What settings did you shoot on? Nice job.

Thanks.

dave

Thanks! I used a combined variation of Paolo Ciccone's True Color 2 and Tim Dashwood's Wide latitude settings:

TRUCLRET ("widelat" variation)
Master Black -1
Detail MIN
Black STRETCH3
White Clip 108%
Knee MANUAL
Level 80%
Cinelike OFF
Color Matrix STANDARD
Adjust
- R Gain 3
- R Rotation 4
- G Gain 2
- G Rotation NORMAL
- B Gain 3
- B Rotation -3
Gamma CINELIKE
Level NORMAL
Color Gain NORMAL

However, I found this was quite sensitive to over-saturation and white balance variances, especially when down-converted to DVD and viewed on normal TVs. The father's yellow hair was a problem, as were the walls in the home, and whites in the basement turned pink. I had to do a fair bit colour correction work, which is one of the items I wasn't entirely satisfied with. (Some scenes look washed out.)

Admittedly, one of my biggest problems in learning the camera was avoiding underexposure. One shot in particular was horribly underexposed. (It's the first shot of Kim riding her bike to her dad's office after the wipe.) I was looking at the camera's LCD at a weird angle in the back of my van and misinterpreted the iris adjustment based on what I was seeing. I didn't have my external monitor at the time, but wish I had. Lesson for next time.

Excellent job Earl! I was wondering if you'd share more of how you went from shooting to finished product, like:
- Did you use the provided mic at all? If not, what kind?
- How large was your lighting rig?
- What sort of dolly?
- What frame rate did you shoot at (24p? 30p?)
- What did you edit with?

And, lastly, is there anything you'd have done differently now?
Thanks for sharing - keep up the good work -

john
evilgeniusentertainment.com

Great Job Earl,

Love the 'leave it to Beaver' type soundtrack. I wasn't going to watch the whole thing but the storyline was compelling enough (what does happen to those containers).

As the parent of a 9 and 2 year old, I think it will keep kids entertained and most importantly, informed.

Stock lens or Wide-angle?

Thanks John!

Only a handful of shots used the stock mic. In particular, the gag scenes when Flap is exaggerating. But we mostly used an Audio Technica AT897 mounted on a home-made boom (an extendable watering pole).

Very small. I have four 1000W Ianebeam red heads I got for $35 each at an auction many years ago. Only three had working bulbs at the time, so that's the most that were used at once. (Usually only one or two.) We shot everything daylight balanced, so those were gelled with CTB. However, one gel in the basement slowly faded over time, which became apparent in the preset white balance and had to be corrected out.

Beyond those, we supplemented some shots with high-CRI fluorescents and used a 10x10' butterfly (also homemade) for some outdoor scenes.

The window in the basement, by the way, was faked. It was black-backed with one of the redheads mounted over it and two banks of 4x4-foot fluorescents behind it to each side (8 tubes total). The views out the window were then composited in later.

Homemade wooden dolly with rubber wheels and PVC/wooden tracks. It was made back in 1987 and its age showed -- one wheel cracked in half while we were shooting because the rubber had dried out! Still made it through the rest of the shoot though by standing alongside it rather than riding it.

All our material was shot 24p. It was a blessing to work in that format with all the rotoscoping required for the puppets.

All of the stock footage (which is of obviously lower quality) was 60i SD. I used a combination of field blending and scaling to up-res it to HD 24p.

Premiere Pro 1.5.1 with Aspect HD. My computer is a below-spec 2.66 GHz Pentium 4, non-hyperthreaded with 1GB RAM and 120GB system drive, 300GB project drive (dedicated to this production, i.e. to be stored away later). Compositing and effects were all done in After Effects.

Even though it wasn't a top-of-the-line setup, I could edit HD better than DV thanks to CineForm.

Definitely! I would hire more people to divide up the work. I tried to do too much myself. (I only took three screen credits but I actually did many more jobs, like casting, effects, editing, etc.) There wasn't enough time and I burned myself out. Plus, I know some jobs could've done better by people with more experience.

I also significantly underestmated how long the rotoscoping would take. Most of the puppets were operated with rods from above. Some elements only took about 15 minutes to rotoscope, but others took much longer because of shadows or small details (like Flap's straw or Al's pull tab). I originally figured the transparent containers would be the problematic ones, but they turned out to be the easiest.

That's great to hear Ken. It's exactly what we've been hoping for.

All of the music is from SmartSound, and most of the tracks were from one disc, Richard Band Vol 6 - Family. The track over the end credits is a separate piece that came bundled with SonicFire Pro.

Everything was done with the stock lens. You can see some of the limitations of this lens in an early shot where Kim is on her bike and stops to take a sip from her beverage. It was shot from across the street at full telephoto. The left and right extremes are very soft.

Would LOVE to get the wide angle but simply can't afford it.

Thanks for all the knowlege Earl - keep it going Brother!

john
evilgeniusentertainment.com

Great job, Earl.

Very entertaining and informative. I love the puppet idea.

Having worked many times with Jim Henson's puppeteers, I am a firm believer in the value and creative impact of puppets.

What was your roto work flow like?

Again, great job.

aloha,

Keith

Lucky fellow. That's a group I'd love to meet/work with myself. Jim Henson was one of my idols. (So was Kermit.) :)

It varied a bit from one shot to the next. A simple shot required just two elements -- the puppet doing his or her thing, and a clean background plate without the puppet. Both would be shot in sequence with a locked-down camera and our best attempts to make sure nothing else changed. Shots with multiple puppets moving were shot one puppet at a time.

In After Effects, I'd load the puppet clip into a layer and do as little rotoscoping as necessary to remove the rod with masks. In some instances, it was easiest to just loosely mask around the rod with minimal keyframing except where the rod "connects" with the puppet, wherein the mask would be keyframed more accurately.

In other instances, where shadows were a problem or puppets crossed over one another, the entire container outline would be masked to isolate it completely, and selected shadows would be put back in with a soft-edge mask.

A couple of problem shots required shadows to be created artificially because the natural shadow was clipped by the rod (e.g. when Al sits upright on the pavement, his rod was visible on his back where the shadow was). In those cases, another mask was used as the shadow, with its opacity and feathering keyframed as needed.

Despite all the work required for the rotoscoping, the toughest shots by far were the three inside the backpack (which didn't need any roto work). Those were done with all three puppeteers (myself, Barry Wong and Rick Evans) crowded around a cut-open backpack with a 1000W light over our heads and containers bopping around all over the place (and usually the wrong place). Took many takes to get those shots right. :)

Thanks very much!

Very well-executed video. Mad props!

I didn't think to ask earlier, and please excuse my ignorance Earl, but why was it easier to rotoscope in 24p? - simply fewer frames to deal with, or something else?

You know (and I didn't say so before) but I thought of watching THE RED BALLON as a child after viewing your film. I know it's corporate and everything, but it's also very sweet and hits the exact right tone (and the rotoscoping is excellent)!

john
evilgeniusentertainment.com

Thanks Earl, its exactly as I figured.

You made it look easy and seamless.

When I work with hand puppets, it's all real time, and all our sets are built five feet off the ground so all the puppeteers can huddle underneath working the puppet overhead. Puppets average 18" high with one hand for the head and mouth and one hand controls one arm and hand. Each puppeteer has a headset mic so all audio is in realtime also. When we have a number of puppets at once it gets very crowded underneath with pieces of script pasted everywhere. Oh, and BTW, we rig up monitors underneath everywhere so they can see - but the image is backwards - left to right for them - so they have to mentally reverse it - that's why they make the big bucks.

The most fun is when they take one of my scripts and make it come alive with their ad-libs and humor. It's really magic. Kevin Clash who plays "Elmo" and Marty Robinson who plays "Telemonster" and "Snuffalofogus" keep me rolling on the floor all day.

Jim also taught them never to come out of character on the set. So I find that when talking about a scene between takes I find myself talking to the puppet - it seems so natural.

I just love to write for puppets in corporate films because they can get away with murder and say things you could never say with real actors.

Anyway, great job. I loved the music also. I've never used smartsound but you gave me a good demo - thanks.

aloha,

Keith

Great production Earl, well done indeed!

It might sound small a comment, but I even liked the titling. It's usualy a sore spot for most productions and can ruin even the best of efforts. But from start to end you did a great job.

I agree wholeheartedly. The title fonts were great and this is a sticking point for me as well. There is no good reason not to have great titles with any production.

Hey Earl,

Outstanding job! Well done. I was wondering, though, why you chose to shoot in 24p if you had planned all along to go to video and or the net? From all the posts I've read they say only shoot 24p if you plan to filmout? I'm assuming it's because of the roto work but in your opinion, what would it have looked like in comparison to 30p?

Heh heh... I know what you mean. A few people commented how I continued to refer to the containers as "him" and "her".

Those are great anecdotes, Keith. Really makes me long for working for them. :) (Even with all that hard work -- sick puppy, aren't I?)

Thanks, Daniel. One thing I learned in my old desktop publishing days of the 90's was to use restraint. Back then, the big fad was fonts, so people used dozens of different ones in everything they created. I realized jobs looked much more professional if you just picked one, possibly two, and used them consistently throughout the whole project to give it a unified "look".

Thanks Scott! Indeed, the rotoscoping work was a major reason for choosing 24p. But I'm also quite comfortable working with that frame rate, having used Super-8 and 16mm film for animation in the 80s. I've developed a sense for pacing at that rate, so it felt like old hat. :) And it really has no negative repercussions when converting from 24p to 60i once everything's done because people see 24 fps material on TV all the time.

I really consider the HD100 as a digital film camera more than a video camera (though I do pop it into 4:3 SD60i for some projects, mainly when it's being intercut with the GL1 as an alternate camera).

Yes, that's mainly it. After Effects does a really good job of interpolating between keyframes, but that's only when the object moves at a consistent rate. So, for example, if it's a motorized item moving across the screen, you generally only have to keyframe every 5 - 10 frames. After Effects will move the mask accurately for all the frames in-between.

But with these puppets, which were operated by hand, there is much less consistency in the movements. I would start keyframing on major moves, then have to go in and tweek the in-betweens. Some shots ended up with keyframing on every frame (e.g. for fast or erratic movements). So, having only 24 to deal with helped a lot.

The other issue is that interlaced video (60i) is the worst thing to keyframe. This is because After Effects normally only displays one of the two fields, meaning the object can be in an unexpected position for the hidden field. Plus, in an earlier project I did, the keyframes interpolated at a 30fps rate, whereas the underlying video updated every 1/60th of a second. Looked very wrong. The general advice is to treat 60i as a 60 fps composition, which is a 2.5X increase in the number of frames to deal with.

ADDENDUM COMMENT: One other reason I just remembered -- the underlying premise for this project came from Encorp's TV commercials, which were all shot on 35mm film at 24 fps. So, I was also trying to maintain some consistency between the two projects.

24p is an aesthetic choice, too.

Would it look different on a DVD or the net as opposed to a transferring to film to be shown at a festival?

In a temporal sense it would all look the same.

Fantastic Earl - just downloaded the full res version and it really is impressive.
Another inspirational use of this camera (and the 24p/25p is pretty remarkable) This would slot into a TV schedule without anyone blinking an eye....ah, reminiscent of the days of Degrassi Street we used to get over here when I was a kid!

Did you tend to hold the mic placed in the middle of the actors or was it passed (via the boom) from 'mouth to mouth' so to speak? Currently getting to grips with scene files (knee/black stretch/RGB rotation et al) putting myself through a self taught learning curve (struggling a little at the moment) but I'm concerned that the sound I record is spot on i.e. actor on the left - voice appears in the left channel and not the right foxing the audience a little.
Did you use much foley? Was there any audio dubbing carried out?

Many thanks, keep up the good work.
dave

Thanks very much, David. :)

Assistant Director Barry Wong also doubled as the boom operator, which was something new for him. Wherever we could we avoided having two people, who were a distance apart, speak in the same shot. But he did his best to redirect the mic in situations where they were closer together (at the cash till and Kim and mother in the basement).

The three scenes with widest separation were when Kim comes home and talks to her mother in the kitchen, Kim and mom in the living room, and when Kim intercepts the guy on the street. All of those were covered by careful editing, so only the primary subject of a given shot was miked. L-cuts and J-cuts allowed the voices from each take to intermingle.


Voices are typically recorded mono on-set, and then rebalanced into stereo during post. It's much easier than trying to add stereo balancing to all the other duties during filming.

Foley was one thing I ran out of time for. I did a bit, but you'll notice that sometimes the container characters make noise when they move, other times they don't. The backpack scenes are also missing a "rustling sound" while moving. Those are things I'll fix up for next year.

We didn't do any ADR for the human characters (though in hindsight there are a couple of scenes that could've used it, we just didn't have enough budget left). All of the container voices were recorded at SoundKitchen Studios in Vancouver. The session took about 2.5 hours, each performer did their part alone, and we used no playback -- just voiced from the script.

In general, dialogue is all recorded mono and is also played back mono out of the center speaker. The dialogue does not bounce around the speakers.

I should know this...but what are L and J cuts?

That makes things easier then! It's just that I noticed in one of the scenes the dialogue appeared out of one side (Left on headphone - early kitchen scene) whilst the music was in full glorious techno-stereo?!?! Could've perhaps been my playback device.

The picture and the sound are cut in different places, thus creating on the timeline the look of the letter "L" or the letter "J."

A common use of this kind of cut is when the audio from the next scene comes in before the picture cuts to that scene.

In dialog scenes, there is often so much editing, and often the sound is recorded separate from the picture, that the dialog is just a separate track cut together with whatever is needed.

Yes, that was a mistake on my part. The one mic on input 1 was also routed to input 2, but the levels were set differently by mistake (one got bumped). That's another item that will need to be fixed for next year. :)

I probably only noticed because I was listening through headphones!
Confused me a little that - I set up a seperate mic on input 1 but the levels seem to appear on both channels...I thought this wasn't possible using a mono mic (sennheiser ME66) and that you'd create a 'stereo' effect in post?!?!?

Not sure if this was a question or comment. :) The HD100 has two inputs, which can be used either as a stereo pair or two different mono tracks. I was treating them as stereo even though I only had one mic. For that situation, you can patch Input 1 into Input 2 with a switch so both channels share the same microphone. However, the levels on each channel can still be adjusted separately. So, in my case, with one level set differently, my mono source got recorded into stereo off to one side.

Earl,

I wanted to let you know that I finally downloaded the HD WMV version and played it through the SR-DVD100 to a JVC 17" HD monitor (CRT.) It looked great.
The puppets caught the attention of my 4-year-old son and he watched the whole thing with me. He helps me sort the recyclables every week so he was really interested in what happens after the truck takes them away. (We've never had the 5cent deposit program in Ontario.)

Anyway, good job. You've created a piece that entertains and educates at the same time.

I'm curious as to how this sort of thing makes it through the editing process, since it's very obvious when you listen to it and an easy fix. Are there editing suites out there that don't monitor in stereo?

That's great to hear! I'm anxiously awaiting the verdict from our local school kids too, so getting good early reviews from your son and others is very encouraging.

Thanks Tim, I really appreciate that. :)

Heh heh... I was wondering if someone would ask that.

It's all a simple matter of circumstance. That final edit was worked on all night until 6:00am the day it was due. I got so zonked I just had to call it "done" and get some sleep (which ended up only being 2 hours). I just simply didn't get to it.

It's sort of like how Fellini (I believe) said, "A film is never done, it's abandoned." There's always something that can be changed or fixed. So, when deadlines press, you simply do your best to get the most important things finished. Since most of the schools will be watching this through TV speakers, it was at the bottom of the priority list.

And afterwards, I had forgotten all about it before exporting the WMV files for the Web site. It took David's message to remind me, then I knew exactly what he meant.