The Abbess

Hey all!

We’re finally moving forward with our feature film “The Abbess.” If you’d like to act in or be part of the crew, or for more information about the project, visit “The Abbess” website. Most posting and news will be on that website, and less here.

Hope everyone has a great New Year!

Building camera support gear, New camera, New software

One of the things that always hits me when I'm planning a shoot is the relatively low importance of cameras (film, video or otherwise) in the food chain when you are trying to optimize for the best possible results. The best camera will give awful results if lighting is bad, or if it is (badly) handheld. A tripod that is fine for stills may (usually will) be useless for movie work because it's not just necessary to keep a camera still -- it's necessary to allow it to move, but have it move smoothly. This turns out to be difficult, and often way more expensive than the camera itself.

Building my own cameras for movie purposes is not something I'm really wanting to get involved with because of the cost and difficulty involved. Camera support equipment, however, is a much more tractable problem because it is typically mechanical and relatively simple. I can do mechanical and relatively simple -- I have a machine shop in my garage with a variety of tools including a small lathe, a small 4-axis CNC milling machine, cutoff saw, bandsaw, grinder, etc. So I can, broadly speaking, make bits of metal, plastic or wood smaller and more weirdly shaped with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

I recently put a bit of effort into pricing commercial equipment, and basically kept hitting the realization that I wasn't really going to get what I wanted for much less than $5k - $10k, which in the scheme of things for conventional movie making isn't a lot, but I was really hoping for something more like <$1k. I like to work from requirements up, so I basically decided I wanted the following:

1. A track dolly that I can operate on my own (without a regular person to work as a dolly grip, a ride-on dolly would be pretty useless)
2. A small to medium-sized jib/mini-crane that is optimized for leading the camera from the front, rather than the rear (which is more usual in a crane).
3. A slider, approx 1m long that can take a good fluid head but is still pretty low profile so it can do low angle shots easily.
4. A decent tripod and fluid head.

So, yeah, that's all pretty spendy. Given that I want to be able to use a fairly nontrivial rig comprising a DSLR (probably my Panasonic GH2 possibly with a fairly heavy lens), rail system, follow focus, matte box, field monitor, audio recorder, etc., I'm going to be beyond the weight limit of a lot of lower end gear, and heading into 35mm film territory. $$$SSPPEENNDDYY$$$. So, I decided to price building my own, and in a couple of hours mostly just on the McMaster-Carr web site I figured out I could build everything I wanted for about $1k, without compromising. I currently have a pile of parts sitting in the garage that is waiting on me finishing the CAD and CAM programming, but I'm pretty close to being able to weigh in to the build. Anyway, here's my idea:

Track Dolly

This is probably the simplest project. Basically it will be a T-section built from aluminum extrusion, with two v-section steel wheels at each end of the top of the T, and a cylindrical roller parallel to the end of the bottom of the T. Hard to explain in words, I'll put up pictures when it's done. The basic idea is that the V groove wheels keep the rig on track (literally), running on one rail constructed from aluminum angle, with the roller running along the top of the other rail. Since the roller will be fairly wide (about 4"), it should mean that a fair bit of misalignment can occur between the rails without any difficulty. Commercial designs seem to use an extra follower arm/castor arrangement, but it seemed to me that just making a super-wide cylinder-shaped wheel would work just as well whilst being far simpler and having a huge weight carrying capacity. I have worked to a ~350lb carrying capacity when specifying the wheels and bearings. The tripod (aka sticks) legs essentially sit on top of the dolly.

Slider

This is a fairly simple build. Basically I'm using the same IGUS industrial slider mechanism that a lot of commercial sliders use and am fixing up the floor mounts and tripod mounts myself. It's relatively straightforward, and probably the only build I'm doing that could have been done with relatively simple tools.

Jib/Mini-Crane

I have designed (in CAD) what should be an extremely solid jib. Most commercial jibs have a single jib arm made from aluminum section, say 3"x1", with 1/16" or 1/8" wall thickness, and a second smaller section arm running in a parallelogram arrangement to keep the camera platform horizontal at all times -- usually this second bar is shorter than the main bar, and isn't load bearing. On pricing the material, I decided to overengineer my version. In my design, both beams are constructed from ridiculously stiff 3"x1.5" section with 1/4" wall thickness, with both beams sharing the load between them. Though it will make the jib fairly heavy (a good thing in use, though not so much for transport), it should cope with a really nontrivial camera rig, way in excess of 50lbs if necessary. I designed the centre pivot from scratch using industrial bearings rather than requiring a tripod head so I could be pretty certain that the load bearing capacity will be well within design requirements. In all, the jib's vertical axis will move on 12 sealed ball bearings, and its azimuth axis will move on an industrial 'lazy suzan' style rotary bearing. I'm pretty confident that this thing will work really well and should outperform anything in the <$10k price range. I have some pretty nontrivial Bogen tripod legs that I used to use for large format photography before my geared head was destroyed en route to the arctic on a C-130 a couple of years ago -- I'm intending using those sticks to support the jib because they seem solid enough. If not, I'll make my own -- it won't be fancy or necessarily pretty, but I'm really only caring about solidity and load bearing ability at this point.

As for the tripod and fluid head, I already had Davis & Sanford sticks with an FM18 fluid head (I used this on 42 for the interview shots), but I'm not happy with that head for pans and tilts because it doesn't have controllable resistance. The sticks are pretty good, however, so I picked up a Manfrotto 519 head that happened to have the same 75mm ball mount. Wow, such an enormous difference. That's a really nice head, and it seems to cope with heavy rigs without any trouble at all. It has dialable resistance on both axes, as well as a dialable spring action that's designed to compensate for the weight of a rig during panning. It works really well. This isn't part of the $1k budget I mentioned because I already had everything.

Also, I've recently picked up (as I mentioned briefly above) a Panasonic GH2 DSLR. It's basically a small mirrorless micro-four-thirds camera with a very good sensor that is a fraction smaller (but only about 10%) than Super 35mm movie film, that has the ability to do 14megapixel stills or 1080p 24 with an AVCCAM codec. With adapters, I've managed to make it work with most of my Nikon and Bronica lenses as well as a couple of wide angle micro four thirds zooms I picked up with it. Very nice little camera, with image quality for stills that gives my bigger Nikons a run for their money and that blows my Panny video camera out of the water for video. The results are very cinematic, much more so than the HMC150. With a rail system and a follow focus, it starts getting interesting. I have a fair bit of work to do to build out the rig the way I want it and to amass the right collection of lenses (which will need modifying with focus gears because I'm not happy with the detachable ones I have), and to sort out the right video monitoring options, but this thing is stunning for $800. I can't recommend it highly enough -- they don't exhibit the problems that persuaded me against going the Canon route (e.g., moire fringing and overheating problems).

On the software side, I recently picked up the Turbulence FD plugin for Lightwave 10. It's basically a computational fluid dynamics engine that can simulate photorealistic fire and smoke that looks amazingly real, certainly hugely better than anything I've seen from a conventional particle system approach. I've already used it to mostly complete an animated matte painting for BC vs CC, and will be using it pretty extensively on other shots on that short.

This is all a lot of work, but it's fun, and I'm (eventually!) getting there! Ultimately I'm trying to work toward acquiring gear that can be completely owned rather than rented and that is fully capable of supporting shooting shorts or even full feature films that look every bit as good as you'd find in movie with a $10 million budget. I'm deliberately not attempting to compete at the $100m+ level, but (possibly surprisingly), the $10m level actually is achievable, at least in terms of visual production value, on a zero to micro budget approach.

The next two shorts (Basement Cat vs Ceiling Cat and Super Rainbow Gun) are really intended as technology demonstrators that will help shake out all of this new gear and help us focus on what really is necessary to do a good job. BC vs CC is intended as a shakedown mostly for CGI, match-moving, miniatures, forced perspective and compositing. Super Rainbow Gun will be a chance to get practiced at green screen work, prop building and working with a slightly larger cast, though will be a little less CGI-driven. Aleph will use all of this and more -- once we've nailed that one, we will definitely have claim to being film makers, because we'll have used pretty much all of the big tricks that the expensive movies use.

We're now on Facebook!

Hi all!

We now have a Facebook page! Come visit us!

We weren’t able to film Basement Cat vs. Ceiling Cat yet due to some scheduling conflicts, but Sarah’s been busy doing all the CGI and testing all the equipment. She also has a few more script ideas in the pipe which should be really awesome!

If you’re interested in helping us out, please join our crew mailing list! We need production folks, costumers, sound people, and, well….as many people who would like to help.

Hope everyone has a great fall and a great holiday season!

Musings on the upcoming shoot, new equipment, etc.

We're going to shoot another short on Saturday (rather than Sunday as originally listed) -- Basement Cat vs. Ceiling Cat. The script is downloadable over on the right hand side of the web page. The short version of the concept is we want to make a very short short that is likely to go viral, so what better than making a cat video and posting it to icanhascheezburger.com? Of course, it won't be just a cat video. There will be some pretty fancy CGI, match moving, forced perspective, green screen, etc. And a cheesy Star Wars reference. Total overkill, I know, and inappropriate for something so throwaway, but so what? It'll be funny and will get a lot of hits on YouTube. Actually my real reason for wanting to do it is as a shakedown for the techniques and equipment that I want to use on Aleph -- ordinarily I'd be shooting a lot of tests for that movie, which at some point I actually will do anyway, but I thought it would be more fun to actually make a short (as in 1 - 2 minutes max) short that's a finished piece of art in its own right. I still want to do Super Rainbow Gun, because it also is going to be a technology tryout for Aleph, pushing the green screen/match moving harder than BC vs CC, and also requiring prop making, which will figure heavily in Aleph so some practice makes sense.

OK, some new equipment is arriving (or has arrived). I just picked up a Panasonic GH2, which is basically a small mirrorless micro four thirds DSLR that happens to have extremely good video capabilities, arguably leading the field currently in the DSLR + HD world. It arrived about an hour ago, so it's sitting on my desk looking shinily at me while its battery charges. I did get a brief play with it before the battery died, and at least so far it seems to be a pretty awesome beast, being capable of high resolution stills (16 megapixel/just under 5k horizontal resolution) in the same setup as shooting movies, which will be incredibly useful for visual effects work. I picked up a couple of Panasonic Lumix zooms with it, a 7-14mm and a 14-42mm, both of which seem to work pretty nicely whilst being really tiny. I picked up a Novoflex Nikon adapter for it (the one including the aperture ring) which should allow all of my Nikon lenses to be used on the camera, and stacked with a Nikon to Bronica ETR mount adapter will also allow my Bronica primes and zooms to be used (slightly hilariously, since they will utterly dwarf the tiny GH2). I'll need to do some testing, but this means I should have working primes at 28mm (tilt/shift, possibly only usable wide open unfortunately), 30mm fisheye, 35mm, 40mm, 50mm macro, 55mm (Schneider medium format tilt/shift, an OMG awesome lens), 75mm, 100mm macro (which has an optional bellows with its own rail system), 150mm and 250mm, and various zooms covering the whole range from 7mm to 300mm, including a couple of ridiculously sharp medium format zooms (a 45-90 and a 100-210). Hopefully next week (not in time for the shoot at the weekend, but it shouldn't matter), I'll also have a matte box, follow focus and rail system. It kind of feels like cheating -- my stills lens collection suddenly all became extremely useful and usable for movie making. Many of these lenses are easily comparable in terms of image quality with the best cinema lenses, if not better, so it will mostly just be a case of fitting focus gears to the ones that I decide to use the most. The micro four thirds format is a little smaller than the 35mm movie standard, but much bigger than the 16mm film standard, so it should hopefully be relatively straightforward to achieve a cinematic look. I'm personally not bothered about the extremely shallow depth of field that is the current fad (just like HDR was the fad a couple of years ago), but I do want it to be easier to control than it is with the (otherwise still totally awesome) HMC 150.

I'll post more after the shoot. We have a definite intention to do a making-of for this one -- Gina is taking point on that and has been practicing with her new tripod and her little Sanyo camcorder. I think the movie is short enough that it will be possible to go shot by shot and describe how each one was achieved.

Buy some stuff! Even official 42 stuff! Woot!

We now have an place where you can buy stuff that says "Unsubtle Films" on it. Really, all the cool kids are doing it! You don't want to be uncool, do you? Well, actually, that doesn't matter because there's Official 42: The Truth About Zombies swag! Mugs! T-shirts! Yay capitalism! (Ok, that last part was added because it's well after 2 am and I should be in bed.) Annnd...if you want to be on the crew, you could even get a crew shirt...but really, you should sign up on the mailing list to do that, first. (Cuz, srsly, we need crew!)

Watch 42! Buy 42 stuff! Join the crew!

(And now that I've done my official producer duties for the night, it's time for bed!)

Support Forbidden Fiction!

This past weekend we helped our friends at Forbidden Fiction put together a promotional video for the launch of their site. If you’d like to help them out, and support the freedom of speech, check out their IndieGoGo site, and throw some change their way!

42: The Truth About Zombies

Here it is: The complete footage of 42: The Truth About Zombies!

Have fun!

42 is finished!!!111!!!!Eleventy!!!

Well, it's been almost two years from principal photography, but 42: The Truth About Zombies is finally finished. Finally! As I write this, my editing software is compressing the HD version for YouTube.

It's Done. DONE! DONE DONE DONE!

Most people who haven't actually done it themselves assume that it's the shooting of the movie that's the hard, time-consuming part of the production process. Not so. Not at all. Even on a weird little movie like 42 that didn't have particularly complex visual effects or compositing needs, the amount of work in post production far exceeded the shooting time. By a factor of several. Of course, with a large crew and a huge budget, it would not have been on me personally to do all the post work, but reality is reality. A is A, as Nabil says in the movie. If you actually want the thing to make sense, sound vaguely intelligible and not look like a piece of crap, you need to put the work in.

Of course, this was my first movie, unless you count a 30 minute all-animated industrial I did in the late 90s for my own software company, or the weird little animations I did on Super 8 as a kid that had my grandparents zooming around the garden on demented stop-motion lawn chairs. So I screwed up in quite a few places. OK, a huge number of places. The camera was new and unfamiliar to me at the time, a very nice Panasonic AG-HMC150 full HD 1080p 24 jobbie that did a very nice job. I didn't do a great job of recording sound, I wasn't careful enough, and didn't check what I had. Hey, I thought it was going to be a stupid little project that would be over in a couple of weeks, an adjunct to a fun party for my 42nd birthday (that's where the name comes from, though we invented the 42 Luna Drive address after the fact -- you might notice I put a 42 on the outside of the house during the news footage, entirely in post). If I had looked ahead to the hours of messing around with the sound track that I gave myself, I would have spent WAY more time on getting it all right in the first place. I know better, I'm a former professional sound engineer. WHAT WAS I THINKING??? Oh well, I did my best. One good thing I did was record an extra track for Les's interview scene on a portable recorder hooked up to a lavaliere mike on her lapel -- this saved my ass in post when I found that the rifle mic sounded like she was standing in front of a jet engine. My housemate, Sarah, had a couple of large fans going in her bedroom window just behind the area where we were shooting (in the back yard), and I somehow missed that. Always check your audio. Properly. Oops.

Editing was hard. Really hard. I started with about an hour and a half of footage, and I think the real reason why the project took so long was that I put together an assembly edit really early on that was 1hr 10mins long. There were great performances, lots of funny stuff, but the fact that we shot without a detailed script with people ad-libbing documentary style meant that there was nothing to guide an edit. The original ultra long version SUCKED. It dragged its ass along the ground and was completely unwatchable. I pretty much gave up on the project for about a year and a half, finally deciding a few months ago to give it another try. I'd gained enough distance from the material by then to really hack into the edit. I actually started over from the raw footage, scrapping the first edit completely -- I didn't want to inherit its cooties. To paraphrase something I read somewhere -- Write like Kirk, Shoot like Spock, Cut like Khan. I think I added the Spock bit. To unpack that, there isn't any point shooting something if the script sucks. The whole process of film making is so hard, why bother with a crappy script? You need to shoot like Spock, because accidents are rarely happy -- usually you have to get everything right, or damned close, for the footage to be any use. As for cutting like Khan -- yes, you really have to be prepared to boil your babies alive and sell your grandmother to the rag and bone man. If every shot doesn't advance the story in some way, the movie's suckiness quotient increases exponentially with every infraction of this rule. It takes real guts to edit for that, particularly when you're the person who envisaged, wrote and shot the scene that you just love but deep down in your gut know you have to cut. Denise's best performances ended up cut, which really makes me feel bad, but I could only use what moved the story forward. That, and I had to get out while the going was good before the movie started to get repetitive. No, the movie doesn't have a 3 act structure. I didn't save the cat in the first scene. But hey, it is what it is, I learned a lot, everyone had a lot of fun, and (to quote Sarah Huffman), nobody died, nobody got deported, nobody went to jail!

I shot the party scenes with the Panasonic, intending to knock the quality down in post. This worked fairly well, but I found that I had to push pretty hard to actually stop the footage looking super sharp. I ended up using Red Giant's Magic Bullet plugins for an awful lot of that stuff. All I can say is that I wholeheartedly recommend that bundle, particularly Looks, because it really is a Swiss army knife for creating looks after the fact, and in fixing up less than ideal footage. Sam (Professor Northgate, the zombie expert) looked really sharp in the raw footage, but I'd totally missed that his face didn't have enough direct light. In retrospect, I think what happened was I was composing the shot with the little fold-out viewfinder on the camera, which was just too small to really allow that kind of detail to be seen. I've since picked up a portable 7" HD monitor that can just plug in to the camera to give me a better view of what I'm doing. Another lesson learned. The Magic Bullet Looks plugin saved my ass on Sam's footage -- I was able to simulate a fill light on his face digitally, balanced against a deliberate vignette and blurring of the background. If I get a chance to do a making-of featurette for the DVD, I will have to show a before/after of that footage because the difference was amazing. Colour grading actually turned out pretty fun, mostly thanks to having Looks available, which really does take all the pain out of it. I didn't typically use presets, I built most of the looks from scratch other than I think the grading for the news item which started with one of the presets and was then tweaked. I used one of the other plugins to add some noise spots to make it look like either badly processed 16mm or some kind of bad video artifact.

Then came the soundtrack. The way I did this was to compose the first-cut in Premiere, using its ability to layer multiple audio tracks. I built up foley sounds, music, extra bits of replaced dialogue, etc. in there. Other than Jonothan Coulton's track over the end credits, I wrote and recorded all of the music myself. Clearing music for film and video is incredibly expensive, way out of my budget, so I was really the only game in town. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun. I wrote a few tracks for the party, just working very quickly into Reason/Record. Mostly it's just sequenced, but one of the tracks (the middle one in the party sequence) has me playing bass guitar and a variety of drums (djembe, tambourine, etc.). It was fun. All of that was written separately then layered under the existing sound track inside Premiere. Finally, I spent a couple of hours exporting each track out of Premiere separately then importing them all into Reason/Record, in which I did the actual sound mix because it has way superior audio processing capabilities, and then I printed that to a 48KHz 24bit WAV file that got dropped back into Premiere. At that point it was a simple matter of turning off all the other channels, leaving the new mix turned on, and hey presto, finished soundtrack. I used some audio mastering tricks more commonly used for music production to squash the dynamic range so that the sound track will sound much louder on small speakers -- this was really in anticipation of most people watching the movie on a phone or an iPad or a laptop's internal speakers.

So what was the budget? If you don't include equipment, then it was something like $35 for the pile of Ayn Rand books we used as props (one person is waving a copy of the O'Reilly Bourne Shell book, which might give the geekier-inclined a laugh). If you include everything, then it's probably more like $3500 for the camera, $1500 for the lights, $2000 for software, $1000 for a new Mac Mini that was used to finish the editing, $300ish on miscellaneous hard drives and memory cards, $350 on microphones. So maybe about $9000ish total if you squint a bit. Actually not much at all for a ~20 minute short, but it does mean that that's all paid off before the next project starts -- Aleph will be the biggie, because that one will heavily depend on motion tracking, green screen and CGI, and probably also Steadicam. Way too ambitious for the likes of us, but hey, I am a strong believer in the principle of doing it anyway and apologizing later (thinking about it, this post is probably my apology for 42. Here goes: Sorry!). Whatever anyone says, it's still a crapload cheaper than film school.

Enough excuses, anyway. I just wanted to write some of that now, with the experience fresh in my mind. This was a lot of work, but a lot of fun too. And the next one will be cooler. :-)

Moving forward with "Aleph" and Tweets!!

Well, after having a great vacation, we’re ready to move forward with a few new things here at Unsubtle Films!

New Site

As you can see, we have a new website, kinda the same as the blogger site for now, but as we make more stuff, we’ll update the website accordingly.

Now on Twitter

As of today we have our very own Twitter account: @UnsubtleFilms. Feel free to follow us there!

Crew Mailing List

If you are interested in helping out with the movies we currently have in production, or in future movies, you must join our Crew mailing list, as it will be the easiest way for us to communicate to everyone.

42

42 (aka the zombie movie) is moving closer to the finish line. We’re hoping to have a get together with people around Sarah’s birthday to premier it, and Sarah will have more information about that soon. (I got to watch her do rotoscoping and color grading last night, which was really cool!)


Aleph (aka, The Steampunk Movie)

The Steampunk movie, now called “Aleph” is back on! It’s morphed into more of a steampunk sci-fi movie, and Sarah will post more about it when she can. She’s finished the first draft of the script and we’ve already approached a few people for roles already, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need other folks! We especially need:

• An assistant director/script supervisor.
• Someone to take charge of Wardrobe.
• Someone to help with props.
• And more actors! (extras, mostly)

We’re still in pre-production at the moment, so we don’t have an idea of when we’ll be doing the actual filming.


Rainbow Gun

Still in pre-production for Rainbow Gun. We’ll need more of the same folks as we do with Aleph (although, this film will be shorter).



That’s about it for now. Again, come join our crew if you want to help with any of these projects! We’d greatly appreciate any help people can give!

On 42

I just thought a few words about my long-running project, "42: The Truth about Zombies" might be in order. This was/is an experimental short film, shot as a retrospective documentary a year on from a devastating zombie outbreak in Cupertino, not entirely uncoincidentally occurring on the eve of my 42nd birthday. A fair bit of the footage was shot at that party, with the rest added as separate interviews. Though the movie did have a (very loose) script, written by myself and Nabil Arnaoot, none of the actors worked to a conventional script. Wherever possible, I tried to use a documentary film making approach: after talking the actors into character, I asked a series of leading questions, then edited myself out of the resulting footage.

The result of this was some amazing performances, and an editing nightmare from hell. I gave up, actually, not really touching the project for nearly two years. Recently, I finally decided to give it another go. After the nerfing of Final Cut by Apple, I'd just moved to Adobe, so I decided to use the raw 42 footage and start completely from scratch, dumping the previous edit. This time, I tried to be much more ruthless, cutting everything that didn't specifically move the story forward (trust me, there are some awesome deleted scenes that will hopefully find it onto a DVD version sometime). Second time lucky -- the edit seemed to flow, so I took it further, trimmed it a bit more and fiddled with it. At the time of writing, I've locked the edit, and am working my way through the (shamelessly cheesy) visual effects. Next up will be grading, for which I'm seriously considering picking up Red Giant's Magic Bullet plugins, then finally the soundtrack. Most likely I'll do a first cut mix in Premiere, then export it as a series of separate audio tracks and bring it into Reason/Record so I can add the incidental music and do the final mix. Home stretch now, a couple of weekends and a few evenings will see it done. My hope is that it will be ready for my next birthday, so the project will get put to bed exactly two years from the start of principal photography.

It is definitely going to be a very odd take on the zombie genre. I did say experimental, didn't I?

(This might mean it will actually suck, but we shall see -- I'm too close to the project to judge, and I usually hate what I'm editing while I'm editing, so...)

Let the cat herding commence!

Begging for Help

Right, then.

So we decided we need to get our feet wet with some even shorter films before we go full on into the Steampunk film, since, well, we need a crew.

Here’s who we’ve got already (officially):

Sarah: camera work, music, stories/scripts, editing, computer geekery, workshop/props….

Gina: Production (aka cat herding), ideas, sweet-talking finding actors, checking laws/regulations for locations, and other production geekery…

And…well…that’s about it at the moment.

So, want to join the crew? We need writers, actors, costumers, prop makers, storyboard, and other talented people to help with our projects.

This is mostly for the fame and glory, and will be done as people’s schedules permit.

Interested? Comment here, or shoot me an email at worthyadvisor(at)gmail.com.

Got a Story Idea?

If you have a short story that you’d like to consider making into a movie script, shoot us an email. If you know how to write a script already, or have a script already, that’s even better!

Just remember that we can’t do everyone’s stories because of the fact that we’re doing this on our own time and money. We’re going to shoot for about two films a year, but hey, if we can make more, we will! Also keep in mind that we will be releasing these under a Creative Commons license, so read up on it before submitting so you know what that entails.

What’s in the Hopper

Sarah’s first movie, the infamous zombie movie “42”, has been edited (she had some time to do so while in the arctic), and hopefully released in the next month or so.

The Steampunk Movie is postponed for the time being, but don’t worry, it’ll come back!

The next project is an approximately 10 min film called (at the moment) “Super Rainbow Gun” written by Sarah. The premise is a group of queer terrorists and a mad scientist create a gun that can turn anyone gay. Their target: a corrupt politician who’s homophobic. Interested in being an actor in this? Comment here or send me an email!

And Finally…

We’re going to be releasing these to YouTube and Vimeo, and also doing DVD’s via Amazon. (So yes, you can show all your friends!) The proceeds from the DVD’s will go back into our production costs for the time being. (Remember the whole doing this out of our own pocket thing? Right.)

So, that’s about it for now. Again, if you have questions, comments, or want to help us out, let us know. The sooner we get a crew, the faster we can make movies!

Here we go again...

Into the filmmaking breach again, dear friends.

(I intend to finish editing the zombie movie. Soon. Really. I mean it this time. Honest.)

This morning, Gina (who will be along shortly, I'm sure), persuaded me to make another movie. More specifically, a steampunk movie, no less. This is going to be serious work -- the aforementioned zombie movie wasn't entirely trivial, but this will be another order of difficulty. However, a steampunk movie? Now how much cooler could that possibly get? (I say this partly to remind myself how cool it's supposed to be when I've been in the shop for 18 hours straight working on a prop, but I digress).

Gina is much better at cat herding organizing volunteers than I am, so she is basically de facto producer, whether she likes it or not. She asked for it, so there's not a lot she's going to do to get out of it.

So here are some FAQs to get people started:

What will the budget be? 


Budget? What is this budget thing that you speak of? I do not understand this concept.

Basically, this will be a zero budget movie. As in, 'it won't have a budget,' not, 'it won't actually cost anything to make.' I'll be sinking quite a bit of time and money into it, as I'm sure will other volunteers, all for the fun and the glory of it.

How long is it going to be?


How long is a piece of string? Ultimately, to keep the project within sensible bounds, we should aim for a final length of 5 - 10 minutes not including titles and credits.

How will it be distributed?


Primarily YouTube and Vimeo, with a DVD available for anyone that wants one (probably through Amazon/Without a Box).

Who will be involved?


Pretty much whoever volunteers. There should be plenty to get involved with for everyone. I'll most likely be directing and doing camera operation, and probably also lighting. Gina will be producer (a.k.a. cat wrangler for cast and crew, liaison with locations and facilities, etc.) We are looking for pretty much everything else, particularly (at this stage) a writer, we possibly have a storyboard artist, and of course we need a cast, location, props...

How's this all going to work?


I'm something of a follower of the Robert Rodriguez tradition of basically trying to come up with a list of locations, props, potential cast, wardrobe, etc. that is already extant and can be borrowed or hired for little or no money. Where possible, I'd rather use practical lighting and effects, i.e., living off the land and using whatever is there, rather than bringing in large amounts of equipment. This hugely reduces costs and also makes it possible to work much faster, both of which being essential, remembering the zero in zero budget. That doesn't mean we'd never use CGI, or make props, or shoot with a green screen, it's just that any of those things will hugely extend cost and time scales, so avoiding as much of that as possible will keep the project within reasonable bounds. This approach also means working backwards, to an extent -- rather than starting with a story, then creating a screenplay, then a shooting script and storyboards, then finding locations, cast, wardrobe, props, etc, we're starting with the last few items and working backwards to create a story that we actually can feasibly shoot.

Consequentially, we're really keen to talk to anyone who already has costuming, props and/or locations to hand, and who can help us hit the ground running (with a big explosion right behind us, muhahahaha). We would also like to find one or more writers who can help with coming up with the story, and who don't mind too much having their precious baby ripped to shreds by the process of constructing a shooting script.

What next?


Email Gina or myself (actually, Gina is a better idea than me since she's producer), and she'll add you to this blog so you can post and interact. In the first phase, we're basically trying to nail down resources and find a story on which to base the movie. Then, we'll move to putting together a shooting script and start planning that actual shoot. Time scales are a bit flexible -- at the time of writing, I'm about to disappear to the arctic for nearly a month, so I'll not be able to do much until I'm back.