Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

With people giving you advice this good Ryan, why am I not surprised?

If you were a chef Ryan, and you opened the fridge and the only food had gone bad, and smelled - would you actually use it?

Some things you say Ryan would be funny if you didn't really believe them? You knew you had bad actors, but you went ahead and used them? That is a something I have never known a director or producer to say. If you have a choice between a poor product or no product - I'd not want to be known as the crap guy?

Have you considered maybe your friend did not mean you to take it this way? Either that or she is frankly a screw loose and her elevator doesn't go to the top floor.

I agree with Pete - you are only as good as your last project!

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

The only reason to do a film with a poor cast is a technical exercise, you make it and move on. Learn what you can and make another film without looking back.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

Funny I also had a food analogy in mind, but I was thinking if you are a bad cook will buying better quality ingredients make you a better cook? Most of Ryan topics are really about him trying work around his inability to direct, spending years planning every detail because he can't improvise on set, hiring a co-director because he isn't good at directing actors... I could go on but we are really beating a dead horse. None of what we are saying is going to have any impact.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

Oh yes, from now on I am only picking actors I feel will do well in the parts.

But as for the whole, actors and crew will only want to work with me if they have a prior personal relationship with me, that is one one thing I will have to work around and find an alternate solution for then. There are other filmmakers I worked for that have had strangers that they have had no past relationships work with them before on their projects, so I felt it was possible. For example, I was told before that if I want enough actors to choose from that are good, that I should be auditioning 50 people for each major role. If that's true, I don't have time to build personal relationships with over 50 people and what filmmaker does. Best just do casting calls with lots of actors and crew and pick people even if I never worked with them before, I figure.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

As long as some small group of people is willing to keep responding to the same questions over and over again, Ryan is going to keep asking the same questions over and over again. My theory (as I've mentioned before) is that Ryan would rather talk endlessly about making his dream movie, rather than take advice on what to do instead. At this point he seems to be more of a movie groupie, rather than an actual movie maker. And the consensus seems to be that he's not making any positive progress toward becoming the latter.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

You're right I shouldn't have asked the same question again. From now on if I would like advice on a particular part of filmmaking I will ask about that but stick to new areas and only ask questions in new areas and try not to repeat myself.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

How's the color grading on your phone going on your other job? Have you walked out yet? Because if this goes wrong it will reflect on being a director or anything else. People remember mistakes more than good work.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

It's going a little better now because I have gotten use to the grading now. I wanted to take the phone home so I could put the footage on my computer then put it back on the phone, but the phone has some sort of security on which I cannot do that, so I am stuck with it I guess.

I asked them how they like the grading so far, and they said it was good and they seem to like it so not sure if that is good or bad. But it's starting to look someone better now that I have gotten use to working it. Not as good as it could be on a computer though of course. Well it's a documentary project and those usually do not have big cinematic color anyway, so not sure if anyone will notice a more simpler grade since documentaries tend to have them anyway? I wanted to go beyond that though and make it the best I could, but the phone security is preventing me.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

I've shot broadcast programmes that had no or very little colour grading, it was all done in the camera, because it just wasn't an option in post production unless they were rescuing a scene because the white balance was wrong.

One of the rules is that the customer is always right, even when they're wrong. If they can't tell the difference they may be unaware that there higher levels, or it could be a case that it meets their needs, which are basic in nature for these productions.

Colour grading in documentaries varies from little to none to the production being graded to the highest levels for high end flagship documentaries. This web series sounds like it's at the lower end of the spectrum

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

I think grading for video is very much like mastering is for audio recording, and the real purpose is now surrounded by hype and the idea seems to be that anyone can master, on equipment designed for recording. So somebody sits in their studio and produces a masterpiece. Traditionally they then gave this to a different person who improves it for the general public. Grading is the same mysterious subject.

The trouble is that very often the people who 'master' are the same people who recorded it. So you finish your project and it's perfect. You then do more things to it, on the same system, on the same speakers with the same set of ears and the reality is you simply slap on a few presets that the internet says are flavour of the month excellence tools. Exactly the same with grading. It's something you MUST do, but most of the decisions were done in the edit. You already balanced the shots by adjusting the ones on a dull day to match better the ones on a sunny day and then these get matched against inside shots. You do this in the edit, or at least, I do. Then we could give it to somebody else to do on their properly calibrated monitor with much better contrast ratio capability - or we do it on a cruder device - perhaps cruder that the ones used in the edit. M Mastering and Grading when done by professionals with experience can improve things. When done by amateurs, my belief is that the process can be destructive. Even worse are the people who clearly don't understand it dictating use on the wrong kit. I suppose there is the point that if the viewers will mainly be watching it on a phone then grading for them, using a phone could be appropriate. I think it's probably bollocks!

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

Grading on a phone. lol I shouldn't laugh because I'm working on a budget dance film and they wanted and inexpensive gimbal so I'm using my iphone 12 with the dji osmo. They needed something small, light and easy to use, to run around in the middle of dance sets. It works well for that purpose. I'm using FilmicPro and paid a little extra for the ability to film in 10bit log. I've found despite using log there isn't a big difference mainly due to it's a phone with tiny sensor.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

Oh that's interesting, I haven't seen footage in 10 log on a tiny sensor before. Why does the tiny sensor make less of a difference in terms of log quality?

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

Probably because the photosites on the phone sensor are so small the sensor has a limited dynamic range.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

I had a gimbal for my GoPro and want that impressed but when I read the dji spec on the ronin s I realised my JVC100 would just fit on it, I bought one and I’ve kept the camera on it now semi permanently and despite the weight it works really well. The battery means I don’t have a full range of movement but I can work around that. The GoPro and the JVC both on 1080 look so different. I bought one of those silly cheap Chinese gopros and it’s 4K image on the dinky sensor looks impressive until you realise the dynamic range is quite squashed. I guess this is the same issue?

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

I think this is a case of DeJaVue
https://www.dvinfo.net/forum/techniq...-director.html

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

was that a pun?

Deja View?

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

Most of his threads are recycled topics he revisits. While his topics are phrased as questions he really is only looking for confirmation of what he wants to do. Sometimes he capitulates but often this is only temporary in a few months or a year he'll be asking the same questions. I get the feeling he bounces around looking someone to tell him what he wants to hear.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

I always wonder why when a question gets the answers that loads of us could have predicted on page one, why Ryan tries to rephrase his questions to get different answers. This topic wasn't about a second unit director at all, it was about hiring a director who can do the things Ryan finds tricky. The key factor in all Ryans posts is simply that he's not too good with people. We find him a polite inoffensive fella who really wants to make movies - but simply doesn't have any talent in that area. Ryan isn't alone - when I was teaching we'd always put students into little boxes - where they'd have exactly the same strengths and weaknesses as students in preceding cohorts. Some were eternal researchers, and just never got around to producing anything because they consistently got stuck when research produced conflicting info - and they'd be trying to make sense of it, and never moved on. They were the people who always volunteered but rarely delivered, or delivered a warped version of the intention because tiny, but critical things got missed.

I remember a composer being contracted to write music for 3 opera singers and a big orchestra. The person who commissioned him was swayed by his charisma, larger than life personality and name on posters from outside movie theatres. On the first day I met him I went to see the Artistic Director and told him we needed an assistant for the guy. No budget, not included in the plans, no office space etc etc - why do we need an assistant? Because he cannot read rom write music. He's down there with the orchestra and the singers and is humming everyone's parts, expecting them to learn them. Every job he'd had, he had an assistant to write down the music when he hummed it!

I've had to heavily redact it to protect the reputations of many really good people, but this is what was said in the press at the time. You can still imagine the absolute chaos of the event. Fundamental issues like time - playing music from a large oil rig support ship offshore was a technical feat, but since nobody has invented a time machine, it was seconds late arriving on the shore. Somebody on land was supposed to be singing to the music, dressed as Napoleon (nobody really understood why) Every single Arts or community group had been seconded - so yes, there really was a model boat club contingent working with real opera singers and a load of people rollerskating (or at least trying to rollerskate, as a beach area is not that friendly to roller-skates). The BBC were going to broadcast it, but I think they realised the chances of it working were zero. This review was the kindest.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

A number of musicians can't read music, but in cases like that I would've assumed that the assistant would be part of the deal and they would be brought in before the orchestra and singers were involved.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

The three foreign concert opera singers got engaged on International contracts and lots of it was non-stop wailing, totally tuneless and impossible to learn - and there were pages and pages. Plenty of musicians can't read music, but an 80 piece orchestra has to. If you are a composer for works that need a symphony style orchestra, then you would normally even have somebody assigned to actually being in charge of the pads, but they are essentially copyists and musical grammar checkers. The image is from what the assistant musical director produced, and features the composer's input on the staves below.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

This composer seems to be putting in less than you'd expect. They don't seem to be a Irving Berlin, Lionel Bart, Anthony Newly, or Paul McCartney. I guess George Martin laid out the orchestration and score for the latter.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

The last two lines looks like a stock market chart or an ekg

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

Apparently the composer wants the fourth part to play a sawtooth wave, and the fifth part to play a sine wave. Since the frequencies are so low (only a few cycles per measure) they will be infrasonic, which is a blessing ... nobody will hear them.

If this guy got a job as a "composer," can someone sign me up for a high-paying gig as a Swahili translator?

Personally, I would rather hear a performance of 4'33" by John Cage, unless there are crying babies nearby, in which case there's a lot to be said for just going home and playing 4'33" on my own piano.

Re: Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?
 

Ryan would get on very well with John Cage, and a video that supported the 4'33" would be interesting - I've never thought of that one? I wonder if I could pop it on Youtube or would the content protection system catch me out? If they removed it, I wonder how I'd know.

EDIT - damn the BBC beat me to it in the Barbican series

I'm not sure it was the best choice for the finale of the concert, but it's actually a good track to use a source of background for some uses - a study in coughing and sniffing maybe?