Month: April 2015

The One That Got Away: Festival Results

neiloseman, ,

In 2013 Katie Lake and I made a little puppet film for the Virgin Media Shorts competition, called The One That Got Away. Although it failed to make the shortlist, I believed it had legs, so I started entering it into festivals. Today I’m going to talk about how it fared. A little later in the year I’ll do the same thing for my other 2013 short, Stop/Eject, and between the two posts I hope to help you answer the question, “Is it worth entering my film into festivals?”

To start with, here’s the film.

It cost next to nothing to make, so I decided to enter it only into festivals that had no entry fee. I created accounts on the festival submission platforms Short Film Depot and Reel Port. Both sites have systems whereby you purchase credits (known on Short Film Depot as ‘reels’ and on Reel Port as ‘stamps’), which you can then use to pay for submissions. As far as I know, this payment is purely a middleman fee and doesn’t go to the festivals themselves. Both sites allow you to upload your film, which is then sent automatically with your submissions.

The_One_That_Got_Away_ posterShort Film Depot allows you to upload your first film for free, with subsequent uploads costing 3 reels (€3 – currently about £2.15). Each festival submission costs 2 reels(€2 – about £1.45).

Reel Port is free to upload your film to. Each festival submission costs one stamp. Stamps are priced on a sliding scale: buy just one and it will cost you €3 (£2.15), whereas a book of 5 is €12.50 (£9), a book of 20 is €39 (£28) and a book of 50 is €75 (£54). So if you buy in big bulk, you could pay as little as £1.08 per submission, plus currency exchange fees. More likely, you’ll end up with leftover stamps you never use!

I entered The One That Got Away into 36 festivals over the course of about 18 months: 23 entries on Reel Port, 12 on Short Film Depot, and one directly to the Worcestershire Film Festival (which was completely free).

The total cost was €98.95, or about £71 plus currency exchange fees – that’s about twice the film’s budget! I should point out that I made one exception to the ‘no entry fee’ rule: that total cost includes €12.50 I spent on entering the film into Encounters. This was a discount rate because I was entering Stop/Eject at the same time. Why did I pay for Encounters? Because of their Depict Competition (which The One That Got Away didn’t actually qualify for, being over 90 seconds) they seemed to be associated with very short films, and with hand-made animation-type films. Plus I knew the festival director from doing FilmWorks.

How many of those 36 festivals did the film get into?

Two. Worcestershire Film Festival, and Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival in Brazil. Belo Horizonte’s notification email told me that The One That Got Away “was one of the 12 selected for the Children’s Exhibition, among 2,700 subscribers.” That gives you an idea of the kind of odds you’re up against with a festival submission. Suddenly 2 out of 36 doesn’t seem so bad.

Shooting The One That Got Away. A row of 100W bulbs can be seen on the right.
Behind the scenes of The One That Got Away

I have great admiration for what the guys at Worcestershire Film Festival are doing, and it was really great to go along and see the film with an audience, but at the moment it’s quite a new and low-key festival. For all I know, the same is true of Belo Horizonte, though I wasn’t about to fly to Brazil to find out. (They were not offering to pay my travel.) I’d estimate a total audience reach of about 100-150 people for those two screenings. Less, I would guess, than it’s had online. And apart from a little bit of buzz amongst my social media network generated by the announcement of these festival selections, there have been no other benefits.

I leave you to decide for yourself whether you think it was worth all those entries and the cost of £71. A full list of festivals entered follows.

Look out for my future post on Stop/Eject’s festival entries. Since that film was crowd-funded, we were able to take a very different approach and enter a lot of top tier festivals, so it will be an interesting comparison.

The One That Got Away submissions via Reel Port:

  • Anibar International Animation Festival, Republic of Kosova
  • 12th International Festival Signes de Nuit,  France
  • Kinodot Online Festival of Creatibe Short Film, Russian Federation
  • The International Bosphorous Film Festival, Turkey
  • Exground Filmfest, Germany
  • Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, UK
  • 9th International Short Film Festival, Lithuania
  • Cinefiesta, Puerto Rico
  • Mobile SIFF – Shanghai International Film Festival, China
  • Odense International Film Festival, Denmark
  • Concorto Film Festival, Italy
  • 20min|max, Germany

Submissions via Short Film Depot:

  • Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia
  • International Short Film Week, Regensburg
  • Seoil International Extreme-short Image & Film Festival
  • Curocircuito – Santiago de Compostela International Short Film Festival
  • Tehran International Short Film Festival
  • Kaohsiung Film Festival
  • Asiana International Short Film Festival
  • Bogota Short Film Festival
  • Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (accepted)
  • Kuku International Short Film Festival for Children and Youth, Berlin
  • Off-courts Trouville
  • Uppsala International Short Film Festival
  • Shnit International Short Film Festival
  • Manlleu Short Film Festival
  • Sapporo International Short Film Festival & Market
  • Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival
  • Seicicorto International Film Festival Forli
  • Festival Silhouette
  • China International New Media Shorts Festival
  • Plein la Bobine
  • Corti da Sogni Antonio Ricci – International Short Film Festival
  • FEC Festival – European Short Film Festival
  • Mecal Barcelona International Short Film and Animation Festival

Direct submissions:

  • Worcestershire Film Festival (accepted)

 

The One That Got Away: Festival Results

How to Make an Electronic Press Kit (EPK)

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Lately I’ve been working on the electronic press kit for Kate Madison’s web series, Ren. An EPK is a collection of footage that a broadcaster can use to edit their own piece about your film or series. It should contain:

  • a trailer (optionally with versions without music and without dialogue, so it can be dubbed);
  • clips from the show (again, versions without dialogue are handy if you’re expecting foreign coverage);
  • interviews with the director and principal cast;
  • B-roll, i.e. behind-the-scenes footage.

You may also want to include a short (5 minutes max) ‘making of’ featurette.

The whole thing should be about 20-30 minutes long.

You need to think about your EPK in preproduction. Assign someone with camera and editing experience to film behind-the-scenes material on a few key days of the shoot. This post has lots of tips for shooting good B-roll.

Here’s some B-roll from the Avengers: Age of Ultron EPK.

Personally, I think that putting black slugs between every shot is excessive. With the Ren EPK I loosely edited half a dozen montages and titled them ‘Filming crowd scenes in the village’, ‘Filming fight scenes in Epping Forest’ and so on.

Here’s another example, this time from the Chappie EPK.

When shooting the interviews, encourage people to keep their answers brief. Answers of about 30-45 seconds are ideal. Remember that an EPK is not a finished product: you can’t have jump cuts or paper over edits with B-roll, which means you can’t cut stuff out of the middle of people’s answers; all you can do is trim the beginning and end.

Typical EPK questions are:

  • What’s the film about?
  • Who is your character?
  • What was it like working with the other actors and the director?
  • What was it like filming the action scenes / scary scenes / romantic scenes / scenes where you had to be painted blue from head to toe?
  • Why should people go and see this film?

Put a title card before each answer, giving the question (or a brief description of what the person talks about in their answer), the duration of the clip, and the person’s name and role.

Here’s an example, again from Age of Ultron.

See how the picture kicks in before the sound? That’s to give someone editing the clip into their show more flexibility – they could dissolve into the shot, for example.

Here’s another example, this one from Far from the Madding Crowd.

Once upon a time you would deliver an EPK on Beta SP, but clearly those days are gone. For Ren I’ll probably put the clips up on VHX, a VOD platform we’ve been using for our behind-the-scenes Kickstarter rewards. We can create a package of videos which people can be invited to, with a nice, slick interface, and the videos – one for each interview answer and B-roll segment – will all be downloadable by invitees as 1080P H.264 MP4 files. If anyone wants less compressed versions, they can contact us directly.

If you missed it, check out my post on lighting the Ren EPK interviews.

And for another perspective on making an EPK, you can read Sophie Black’s guest blog from 2012 in which she talks about making the one for Stop/Eject.

Find out more about Ren at rentheseries.com

How to Make an Electronic Press Kit (EPK)

2015 Cinematography Showreel

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I thought it was about time my showreel got an update, so here it is:

Please get in touch if you need a DP. I’ll consider most projects as long as they’re creative and not entirely unpaid.

These are the films, series and promos featured on the reel. If you want to find out more about any of these productions, you can find links in the showreel’s YouTube description.

* Note: I only worked on the trailer, not the film itself.

The music is “Up is a Down” from the OST of Pirates of the Caribbean at World’s End.

2015 Cinematography Showreel

Converting Blackmagic Raw Footage to ProRes with After Effects

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My 4K Blackmagic Production Camera
Blackmagic Production Camera

One of the big benefits of the Blackmagic cameras is their ability to shoot raw – lossless Cinema DNG files that capture an incredible range of detail. But encoding those files into a useable format for editing can be tricky, especially if your computer won’t run the processor-intensive DaVinci Resolve which ships with the camera.

You can usually turn to the Adobe Creative Suite when faced with intractable transcoding problems, and sure enough After Effects provides one solution for raw to ProRes conversion.

I’ll take you through it, step by step.  Let’s assume you’ve been shooting on a Blackmagic Cinema Camera and you have some 2.5K raw shots which you want to drop into your edit timeline alongside 1080P ProRes 422HQ material.

1. In After Effects’ launch window, select New Composition. A dialogue box will appear in which you can spec up your project. For this example, we’re going to choose the standard HDTV resolution of 1920×1080. It’s critical that you get your frame rate right, or your audio won’t sync. Click OK once you’ve set everything to your liking.

step1

2. Now go to the File menu and select Import > File. Navigate to the raw material on your hard drive. The BMCC creates a folder for each raw clip, containing the individual Cinema DNG frames and a WAV audio file. Select the first DNG file in the folder and ensure that Camera Raw Sequence is ticked, then click OK.

step2

3. You’ll then have the chance to do a basic grade on the shot – though with only the first frame to judge it by.

step3

4. Use Import > File again to import the WAV audio file.

step4

5. Your project bin should now contain the DNG sequence – shown as a single item – along with the WAV audio and the composition. Drag the DNG sequence into the main viewer window. Because the BMCC’s raw mode records at a resolution of 2.5K and you set your composition to 1080P, the image will appear cropped.

step5

6. If necessary, zoom out (using the drop-down menu in the bottom left of the Composition window) so you can see the wireframe of the 2.5K image. Then click and drag the bottom right corner of that wireframe to shrink the image until it fits into the 1080P frame. Hold down shift while dragging to maintain the aspect ratio.

step6

7. Drag the WAV audio onto the timeline, taking care to align it precisely with the video.

step7

8. Go to Composition Settings in the Composition menu and alter the duration of the composition to match the duration of the clip (which you can see by clicking the DNG sequence in the project bin).

step8

9. Go to the Composition menu again and select Add to Render Queue. The composition timeline will give way to the Render Queue tab.

step9

10. Next to the words Output Module in the Render Queue, you’ll see a clickable Lossless setting (yellow and underlined). Click this to open the Output Module Settings.

step10

11. In the Video Output section, click on Format Options… We’re going to pick ProRes 422 HQ, to match with the non-raw shots we hypothetically filmed. Click OK to close the Format Options.

step11

12. You should now be back in Output Module Settings. Before clicking OK to close this, be sure to tick the Audio Output box to make sure you don’t end up with a mute clip. You should not need to change the default output settings of 48kHz 16-bit stereo PCM.

step12

13. In the Render Queue tab, next to the words Output to you’ll see a clickable filename – the default is Comp1.mov. Click on this to bring up a file selector and choose where to save your ProRes file.

step13

14. Click Render (top far right of the Render Queue tab). Now just sit back and wait for your computer to crunch the numbers.

step14

I’ve never used After Effects before, so there are probably ways to streamline this process which I’m unaware of. Can anyone out there suggest any improvements to this workflow? Is it possible to automate a batch?

Converting Blackmagic Raw Footage to ProRes with After Effects

Physical vs. Digital: Moving Day Musings

neiloseman
image
Part of my DVD collection, packed ready for the move

I blogged recently about my upcoming home move, and how I was throwing out my Mini-DV tapes. Moving to a smaller place forced me to consider what’s important to me and what I can live without, and it’s interesting how the march of technology affects those decisions.

A few years back I got rid of my CD collection, choosing to use just iTunes for listening to music. More recently I considered doing the same with my DVDs. After all, how could I justify having 100-odd DVDs on my shelves, when they could all fit onto a hard drive the size of just one of those cases? If I could just import my DVDs into my iTunes library like I did my CDs, I would have done it. Movies on physical media would be no more for me. But of course you can’t do that. You have to buy all your films again as downloads. Or rip them all using Handbrake, which is clumsy, tedious, and unreliable, but nonetheless maybe I’ll do that some day soon.

The decision is harder with films than music, because – to be perfectly honest – I was always a bit embarrassed of my CD collection. I had no regrets about losing their physical presence from the shelves where all could see them. Ironically, in recent months I’ve acquired a turntable and a small vinyl collection, which I’m quite proud of.

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All hail the Boss

There is definitely something, then, about physical media and its packaging that appeals to me. As a kid I would always make packaging for stuff – drawing covers for my amateur films, making boxes for Lego kits of my own creation. Packaging, that physical presence, is deeply engrained in me, and perhaps my whole generation. It’s telling that, when I first considered dumping my DVDs, I planned to have a noticeboard onto which I would pin a postcard or magazine cutting image of each film I owned as a download, to proudly display my virtual movie collection.

And then there are books. I love books, and my personal library constituted a significant proportion of my stuff on moving day. A small memory stick, at an infinitessimal fraction of the size and weight, could store all of these tomes; many of them would be free to acquire digitally, as they’re out-of-copyright classics; and many of them, in all likelihood, I will never read again. Yet still I can’t part with them. Perhaps because the book is a centuries-old invention, that does not rely on a compatible device to play it, that never runs out of batteries, that shows its history in every crease and grubby fingerprint. Particularly with those classics, I feel connected to everyone who has ever read that story down the years, even if the copy I’m reading is brand new.

One thing that did go, however, was my TV. Again, a deeply engrained part of my life, but one which no longer feels necessary or relevant. (Conversely, radio increasingly connects with me, but that’s probably just because I’m getting old. Ken Bruce rules.) There is rarely anything I really want to watch on, and if there is then the best use of my time is to save it for my next train journey and download it to watch on my iPad. So both of my TVs and DVD players departed, along with my TV license.

I also said goodbye to my printer, which I pretty much ceased to use once I got my iPad – my new means of taking documents out into the wild. And my landline, which saw most use recently as a means to contact BT telling them I no longer need their services. If only Alanis Morrissette understood irony this well. (And now you start to see why I was embarrassed by my CD collection.)

IMG_2096
Just before the removal van arrived

Phone, printer, TV, CDs. Not so long ago, life without those things seemed unimaginable. Who could have predicted I would ditch these things, yet retain records and books? Vinyl sales are on the increase – is this a sign of a wider backlash against the intangible realm of the digital? Will 35mm projectors make a comeback in the homes of movie connoisseurs? OK, probably not.

And this is the final paragraph, where I wrap these musings up into a nice, tidy point. Sorry, there isn’t one. I just wanted to put down some of the thoughts about the transience of media and technology I’ve been having. What media is important to you? Is the medium itself important, or is it only the content that matters?

Physical vs. Digital: Moving Day Musings

DIY Interview Lighting for the Ren EPK

neiloseman, ,
Left to right: the flipchart holding up the key bounce reflector, the halogen key source with the flagging reflector immediately to the right of it, the hair-light LED panel peeking over the backdrop above the hot seat, the LED panel acting as a flag, and the halogen 3/4 backlight.
Left to right: the flipchart holding up the key bounce reflector, the halogen key source with the flagging reflector immediately to the right of it, the hair-light LED panel peeking over the backdrop above the hot seat, the LED panel acting as a flag, and the halogen 3/4 backlight.

Shooting interviews is a great way for a cinematographer to learn to light. I figured out loads about how human faces react to light of different kinds from years of experimenting on the talking heads in corporate videos. And because those interviews were often long and dull, there was plenty of opportunity to evaluate my lighting as I relaxed behind my locked-off camera.

At the weekend a “promo day” was held for Ren, the fantasy-action web series which you must all have heard of by now. The goal was to shoot publicity stills of the lead actors, and to shoot interviews for the EPK (Electronic Press Kit). We decided to stage these against a black backdrop.

Our venue was the office-cum-studio of the nascent Cambridge TV station, kindly lent to us for the day, but the only lighting kit we had were two Chinese LED panels, two halogen worklights and a couple of collapsible reflectors. I knew from the start that I wanted to use the worklights to key the talent, because halogen bulbs put out a much fuller spectrum of light than budget LEDs. Without a full spectrum you can’t capture all the skintones, and your subject will lack life.

SB8opNy

Here’s the lighting set-up I arrived at.

Sketch 2015-03-30 12_59_18

I’ll talk you through it.

The keylight (halogen, top left) bounces off the silver side of a reflector (resting on a convenient flipchart) to give a nice, soft source. The second reflector is used as a flag to stop direct light from reaching the talent.

The second halogen (top right) serves as a hot three-quarter backlight. One of the LED panels is used as a flag (!) to stop this backlight flaring into the lens.

The other LED panel pokes over the top of the backdrop to provide hair-light.

The white walls of the studio provide sufficient bounce to render a fill light unnecessary.

The result is a nice, slick, minimal look. The two backlights stop dark hair or clothes from disappearing into the background, and the soft key is flattering to all yet is at enough of an angle to provide shape and contrast – see how it outlines Sophie’s left cheek and jaw.

Blackmagic Production Camera 4K_1_2015-03-22_0220_C0002

Incidentally, we considered using a white backdrop for a little while. Had we gone with this, how would I have changed the lighting? I would have had to lose the backlights, because white rim-light will only make your subject bleed into a white background. The lamps thus freed could have been trained on the backdrop in an attempt to blow it out, but it’s questionable whether that would have been achievable with the Blackmagic’s dynamic range. Finally, I expect I would have introduced negative fill to get rich, black shadows on the talent’s up-side, in order to get some contrast into the image. More on lighting for a white backdrop here.

After the publicity shoot, we repaired to Kate’s place for a Q&A livestream. Here it is if you missed it. Subscribe to Mythica Entertainment’s YouTube Channel to make sure you never miss our behind-the-scenes videos and trailers.

www.rentheseries.com

DIY Interview Lighting for the Ren EPK