Video StudentGuy

Last class in this module, where we quickly edit the footage we shot the

previous Saturday and then review everyone's work in class on Thursday.

Capturing to Avid was a lot of trouble, and this wasn't the first time.

You need to pay close attention when you capture to your computer,

if you want to share your media and project files with other people.

Despite the fact that this was a great opportunity to look at

filmmaking beyond the technical issues, there was barely enough time to

take it all in. Some issues remain, such as how a director works with

the crew. Everyone felt there wasn't enough time to work with the

actors as well, or for discussing our experience in general, during

class.

I've tred to explain the reasons I think we're often cramped for time and

feel we're not getting all the information we need. The most important

reason is that there isn't enough class time in relation to the stuff

we have to learn. Even with homework and whatever we can find time to do on our own between classes, there's just not enough time.

This is really a bootcamp. There are a lot of ways you could slice the

curriculum to get more time at the expense of other classes, but then

where would be be? Think of what you would be missing. As it is,

there's a ton of topics we're merely touching on. I'm sure people in 2

and 4 year DAY programs feel as though they're not getting everything they want.

There may be tweaks that can be made to the content of this program,

but you have to recognize that how you're learning is tied to the

structure of the curriculum. As long as the end goal is to train people

who have no experience in filmmaking to get a job in the field in 9 or

18 months, we're going to continue to careen through the material at

breakneck speed.

This is what I signed up for and I wouldn't change a thing that would

affect the final outcome. All the same, it feels good to complain,

once in a while.

This episode of the Video StudentGuy is about the day I spent at Podcamp Boston

last Sunday October 28. This is my first time attending a podcamp and I

was really looking forward to it. Over all, it was a good experience.

I'm sorry I couldn't have attended the previous day, I was in class

There were a number of sessions specifically on video casting that I

know would have been interesting. To top it off I was really tired, it

was a busy busy week on all fronts. I never would have made it through

the weekend if I attended both days. Next year I'll be done with school

and I'll have a lot more time for user events like this.

By the way, just after I posted this I found this link to a video

recorded during lunch, Sunday I guess, from the sound of it. Fool that I

am I went to the cafeteria and ate lunch! Anyway, its an ad hoc

discussion about the value of the conference as the nature of new media

and new media producers matures. I feel very strongly that those of us

who are about to launch our careers in video should be up to our

armpits in new media. This is our wave. Thanks to Bob Goyetche for

recording and posting this video.

On a side note there is a podcasting meetup that takes place monthly in the Boston area. CC Chapman

is the contact person for this. It was on hiatus during the summer, but

I spoke to him at end of the day Sunday and he said there will be

something coming up soon. Like all meetups, its open to anyone, not

just people producing podcasts. I hear about them mostly from Mark and

Bob on the Canadian Podcast Buffet show, but I don't doubt they're friendly, congenial get-togethers no matter where they occur.

One note about the show, I start out with a rant about the venue, the Boston Convention Center.

I've got some pictures I need to put up on Flikr. Obviously it had a

significant impact on me, but it doesn't in any significant way detract

from the quality of the event, I just tend to notice UI issues and the

convention center definitely has a UI problem. If you're not interested

in listening to me go on and on about it, just move ahead to 4:18,

thats when my review of the sessions I attended begins.

I

understand attendance was smaller Sunday than Saturday, and it felt

somewhat subdued, so I didn't get a chance to meet a lot of people, but

everyone I spoke with was happy to talk and share their ideas and

knowledge.

Guido Stein - it's a Purl, man - knitting podcast
Jane Quigley - Digital Grit - exchanged cards, though I don have a card yet
Ben Ortega - Phive Tacos - another card
Faye Anderson - Anderson@Large - Citizen Jouralist - local politics, we had a nice conversation about the role of podcasting in political action
C.C. Chapman - Managing the Gray, Accident Hash - go to guy on the local meetups
Chris Penn - FinancialAid Podcast - cofounder of Podcamp
Chris Brogan - cofounder of Podcamp
Neil Gorman - Broken Toasters, Will Shatner and Podcaster Burnout - here's a link to a similar presentation he made at Podcaster's Across Borders
Beth Lawrence - Grow See This - we had a nice conversation at lunch
Gary Marriott

Grow See This videographer - creativegeniuscollective.com Lead

programmer at cyberwalker.com - he indulged my questions on

videocasting production techniques

Sessions Attended

Recording Remote Interviews - Dan York
Software for recording Skype conversations:
Mac:

• Audio Hijak
• Wiretap Studio
  
• Conference Recorder 2
• Call Recorder

Windows:

• Hot Recorder
• Pamela 2.0
• Call Burner
• MX Skype Recorder
• SkyLook
• PowerGramo

Both:

• Levelator

Social Media for Business - Isabel Hilborn
Social Networking 101 - Chris Penn
Creating a Great Podcast Listening Experience - Jared Spool
-check out Chris Penn's site to see what I'm talking about.

Podcamp 2 show

coming up. Got me to thinking about how to make each show easier for

someone to get into if they're listening for the first time.

Actors in the scene we directed and shot are Hannah Barth and Ed Hoopman.

Laura, John and I created a short film based on a scene from The Blue room.

The class is about directing actors and I was the director, Laura the

DP and John handled the sound. These soft skills are very different

feeling from all the technology skills we've been learning. Its

spinning around like a child in clockwise fashion, then reversing

suddenly to a counter clockwise spin. You feel totally different, dizzy

and yes nauseous.

I had a great experience in this new role, but

to be honest, I had a lot of problems figuring out exactly what the

responsibilities of a director are and how he/she relates to the

production crew.

As always, there's never enough time, but in this module it seems everyone was frustrated by the compressed production schedule.

I forgot my pop filter and you're going to hear it. I apologize and

promise it won't happen again, I just don't have time rerecord. I've

used a limiter and have compressed it a little to save your ears, I

hope that does the trick. If you find the popping too annoying, just

pass to the next show, though I think it's worth the bother.

The first week of the Directing Actor module. Our instructor, Steven Maler, Creative Director of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company

led us through several exercises that put us in the position of the

actor, so we could see first hand what an actor needs from a director

to deliver a great performance.

I'm not ready to channel Stanislavski,

but I get the point of method acting. Reading scripts in front of the

class and improvising dialogs between characters shifted our focus

radically from the technical aspects of production and editing. It

wasn't that difficult and I think the teacher gets a lot of the credit.

Another new idea we learned was the concept of the beat.

Check out the link, I don't know how well I explain it. It's pretty

important, both for the actor and director. The point is to know what good directing can accomplish.

The

last part of the show I get kind of moody and cow eyed wondering why I

bother and what's the use in trying. Somehow, when I think of Jeff Daniels, I feel all better. Let me know what you think

Finally, I'll be joining the seething throng at Podcamp Boston 2

at the Boston Exhibition Center this coming Sunday October 28. I'll be

the guy with the Canadian flag bandanna. I hope you check it out.

I'm trying out a new, scaled down intro, whadya think?

Here are a few podcast recommendations in the show:

• Canadian Podcast Buffet
• Coverville
• Macbreak Weekly

Podcamp Boston 2

is taking place Oct 26-28 at Boston Convention Center. Registration is

free and there's a lot of seminars presented by regular people who have

their own podcasts. During the sessions there's a lot of give and take

between the audience and presenter, so everyone has the opportunity to

contribute their experiences. I plan to be there on Sunday.

The

Avid Edit Lab module finishes this week and I've got the highlights. I

also have some comments to make about editing and the rocky road Avid

has led me on.

We spent about 4 hours in our Saturday class

critiquing the films we handed in. Nothing is ever finished, you just

pick a point in time and stop. The critique was great, lots of useful

comments and everyone was engaged. Two Film projects and eight people,

so there was a lot of variations on how the same problems were solved.

Howard Phillips is out for the next couple weeks, down in Washington, directing the fall program at the new CDIA campus. Good luck everyone. Filling in for Howard is Chris Bowan.

Chris is an Avid editor and has a lot of tips for accelerating the

editing workflow. He showed me a lot useful thing using key commands

for editing. It can be awkward to use at first, but it makes a big

difference in how quickly and smoothly you get things done. Eventually

you can work entirely through the keyboard, with your right hand and

the mouse in your left hand. Or vice versa, if you're a lefty.

Between learning Avid and editing a dialog centered movie I have a

feeling, shared by a few people in class, that this project is much

harder. Rather than trying to create a completely finished final cut,

I'm spending my time playing with different types of edits. Trying to

keep the story moving ahead smoothly. I'm relying on straight cuts, no

transitions and looking for shots that lead well into each other. The

dialog is controlling what I choose to keep in and out and if it

deviates from the script, I'll take that chance.

So I'm not thinking about the finished film, but how I take care of

individual aspects of the film. Hopefully that will lead to a good,

finished feeling cut. Same results either way, but different methods.

I'm hoping that I'll learn more by taking the long road.

I need to investigate storyboarding, it would help me visualize the

film better before I begin shooting. It's very easy to overlook crucial

takes at certain angles and frames. I believe it would have helped

identify how one shot would lead into another. I'm discovering that at

certain points in my cut I need a specific view, or angle of one

character to help lead into another character's dialog. I can see that

what I want isn't there. I would like to know what that would be while

I still have the opportunity to shoot it.

I include a brief description of how to prepare still images for use in

video. Despite years of trying to understand it, I still get confused

when I talk about it. If you take anything useful away from my

comments, let it be to do research for your own understanding. here are

some links about different types of TV screen resolutions, NTSC (what we use in North America and western South America) PAL and SECAM. You have to be careful of the pixel dimensions of your still image because TV uses rectangular pixels, unlike square pixels that are used for computer displays. Find a good book on Avid too, like the one we use as a manual class.

Show notes are in the lyrics section of the mp3. Drop me a line at videostudentguy.gmail.com.

This week we begin the Avid Edit Lab module, continuing to learn how to

use Avid as we cut a movie from footage we shot a month ago. I'm

finding it very difficult to get this. I'm looking forward to actually

digging into a project where I have to cut it from capture to export.

Be forewarned, if you've already got experience with FCP, it's going to

complicate your brain learning Avid.

The film we shot for the Huntington Theatre demonstrated to me how awkward the color correction tools in FCP 5 are. I know, they're way better in the next upgrade of the Suite.

Apple's Color app is a great deal, amazing deal, but I don't have it

yet. I asked Howard, our instructor to show Laura and I how to use the

color tools in Avid. Cool, powerful

and intuitive, at least to someone who's been color correcting digital

photographs for years. You use curves, not levels, not unlike Photoshop, only different. Of course I'm used to thinking in CMYK, from years of prepress work, so I'm sure it will be bumpy ride to the top.

Scouring the web for new podcasts I discovered one on wood fired pottery. Oten Maxwell's podcast, The Firing Log about using a woodfired Anagama

kiln, was very entertaining for the long drives home from school and it

got me to thinking about the divided lives professional crafts people

create for themselves due to their livelihood. They produce one of a

kind objects in a mass production world, they use 15th century tools in

the 21st century and they work outside the mainstream workplace. How do

you live when your focus is high touch in a high tech world. I got to

wondering how it looks from their perspective.

Our final project

is a 10 minute film, give or take, narrative or documentary, subject of

our choosing. It's still early, but I'm going to investigate this a

little further, so don't be surprised if you read some comments about frits, fluxes and fettling knives.

I've come to the end of the series of podcasts about the Digital Manifesto that Mike Jones posted on his blog, Digital Basin. That was earlier this summer and I try my best to explain why it's taken me long to post 5 podcasts.

Throughout the series I've been using his ideas in the Manifesto as a

guage to determine how current the curriculum at my school, the CDIA

is. It did very well - 9 out of 13. Here are the issues, numbered

according to the Manifesto followed by the episode they were reviewed

in.

Passed

04 Distribution w/o hierarchy #37

05 Owning the entire filmmaking process #37

06 Software agnosticisim #37

08 Screen Studies integrated into Production #39

09 Succeeding despite obstacles #39

10 Promoting the story ahead of production values #39

12 Collaborative Learning #44

13 Teacher as Facilitator #44

Not Passed

These episodes were different from what I usually post, they involved

big ideas and how they fit into the world of filmmaking. Keeping the

idea threads connected from one episode to another, particularly when a

lot of time passed between was difficult. Time to think and understand

seems to be a constant problem for me.

For all the effort, I enjoyed exploring ideas and that took me to unfamiliar territory

Bear in mind, these aren't my ideas, I'm just having fun poking at them.

I thought of a couple of things to add to the manifesto:

related/linked fields, such as audio, 3D and fx, even web design. I

don't think the fringes of our filmmaking experience should be familiar

territory.

Get more exposure to the supportive technology used for digital distribution.

Collaborative learning tools, such as blogs and wikis have a lot of

potential that I hope to explore for sharing ideas and information and

for promoting my work.

Towards the end of the episode I talk a little about how all this

technology is pushing against the boundaries of a stifling culture of

intellectual protectionism. If I sound a little harsh, it's only

because I've only recently come to recognize how limiting it is to

withhold access to resources that, if they were more available, would

result in a great deal more creativity to the benefit of everyone. I'm

sure once I get used to it I'll return to lamblike complacency.

I'm running to keep up again. I spent a lot of time recently on a

non-class film project for the Huntington Theatre in Boston Mass. We

did a promotional film for a play that is running through next week

called the 39 Steps,

a comedy based on the Alfred Hitchcock spy thriller. It was a lot work

in a short time, but I, along with classmate Laura got it in on time

and made the client happy, so it was good all round.

This is the

end of the Module on the introduction to Avid, but there's another 3

weeks of Avid that follows where we edit our own film. I'm going to

spread my comments about Avid over the next few weeks. This week I'll

give you a general overview of the program and talk specifically about

the user interface and how important it is to organize your files

properly in Avid, as opposed to to Final Cut Pro.

We edited the

39 Steps promo in FCP, but it's really difficult to use one program on

a job while you're learning a different one in class. There's a lot of

lessons we learned, like how difficult it can be for two people to edit

one film, dividing up production tasks and working remotely.

I

thought you would be interested in the process of setting up for the

shoot, so I included that as well as described the equipment we used

and why. Towards the end of the podcast I've included a list of things

I would do differently, or pay more attention to if we have a chance to

do this again, which I believe we will.

Some of the highlights

of the post production process was doing color correction, creating and

working with a soundtrack and setting the compression values to optimize file quality for posting on Youtube.

I've finally gotten a handle on some of my recording tools, such as the Mbox2 mixer and my condenser mic.

I hope you've noticed an improvement in the audio quality. I'm still

working on production quality, but I got a helping hand from Erica at

CDIA, who helps maintain the audio and classroom maintenance for the

Recording arts program at school. She demonstrated that my problems

were due to my incompetence and not the equipment manufacturers. She

also gave me a quick but thorough tour of Pro Tools. Sometime soon I'll

take a few trips into Pro Tools country to record a few episodes.

Another problem I had was the absence of a mic stand and so I made one out of coat hanger and I used the leftover wire to create a pop filter which keeps the mic clean and softens annoying plosives.

This weeks classes continues the module on learning Avid.

Since we have already covered Final Cut Pro earlier in the program

everyone was wondering how you work the two together in a single

workflow. Avid and Apple don't make it easy, but thanks to software

plug-ins from Automatic Duck, and a bunch of money, you can make them friends.

I continue the saga of a filmmaking project I'm involved in with classmate Laura creating a promotional video for the Huntington Theater in Boston. We're shooting audience reactions following a performance of the play 39 Steps.

Finally the class gets to attend a screening of the documentary This is Nollywood, produced by some of CDIA's own,

Franco Sacchi, Aimee Corrigan as well as renowned National Geographic

photographer Robert Caputo. You may not see it in a theater near you,

but you'll find it as a DVD online. If you're curious about the

exciting filmmaking scene that is developing in West Africa you should

check it out.