damien

With day three shooting completed, the crew hit the bar for drinks. The Northcote Social Club intimates Wenders(Buena Vista), feels like all the bars of Fitzroy rolled into one, and has barman that offer insight and opinion into overheard conversation as naturally as if it were their living room. Which it probably is. After the windblasting exposure we’d had all day, this place did seem particularly warm & comforting. With the knowledge that this was mid-shoot and that we had some great scenes in the bag, the cameraderie of the team was a comforting assurance given the long days completed and the hard work still to come.

…

Day One, Scene One.
The team is an unknown force: the only thing to do is get on top of the schedule and push through. From the beginning, this was a tough location to shoot. No budget had existed for art direction or set dressing and audiences have seen so many well-lit big-budget American courtrooms there was little chance to compete on this level. Travis and I decided to strike for minimalism, hoping that the airy, ethereal wide shots (aka the under-dressed set) could be covered by cutting in quite tight on the actors. With the tight window of availability(four hours in-out) the gear was bumped in and lit in an hour and a half.

I’ll link a series of audio bites this in as soon as I can figure how the hell I can upload it the server.
Servers! seems like a poorly chosen word to me…

Still, I know in theory it should work from remote sites, so, given my obstinate determination to resolve the “you cant do that” in all things thinking and feeling, its only a matter of time…

Australian Screen Directors Association mini-conference, June 11, Storey Hall, RMIT.
This was packaged as The Essential Workshop for Directors and this conference delivered beyond its brief.
Shoni has a post that covers the conference content in detail, so I think I’ll focus on the aspects that had most impact on me.
Nina Landis, actor and teacher, began the day by taking us on an inspired journey through the history of acting technique. An accomplished lecturer/performer, Nina brought the material to life. As a friend said to me later,

I went through three years of acting college, spent two years studying media, and finally someone has connected the dots, explained what acting is really all about…

Her dissemination of contemporary theatrical acting technique in relation to acting for the screen was illuminating. Given the disjointed shooting structure actors must endure as a result of shot blocking, Landis emphasised the need for strategies that the director could employ to ensure an unbroken line of action.
To this end, affective memory (aka emotional memory) and how actors draw upon it (”the method”) was reviewed through constant referencing of the pantheon of modern theatre directors: Stanislavski, Strasbourg, Adler, Hagen.

When an actor creates emotion for a role,whose emotion does he or she experience when acting? His own, of course. The only emotional life the actor can create is his own, though granted the actor’s imagination can be added to his own truthful basis. The only imagination the actor has is his or her own, the only life history nesting there, in an actor’s subconscious, is his own. He cannot borrow Einstein’s emotional life, Brando’s, or his friends. The actors’ total being (physical,mental, emotional and spiritual) is his instrument - the only clay with which he has to work.

Thanks to modern psychological discoveries and the dedicated men and women who have explored, taught, directed and used acting techniques which lead to truthful, believable behavior, acting has finally become a craft and an art.
Lorrie Hull, Ph.D.(2005)

A few good sites on Acting
The Method & Affective memory
http://novaonline.nv.cc.va.us/eli/spd130et/acting.htm

H.264 is a codec that improves the viability of video on the web, and has immediate application advantages for broadcast, cable, and videoconferencing. It’s also known as MPEG 4 path 10.
The implication for new media content is obvious- suddenly our productions have a more affordable distribution and marketing capability.

http://www.shapeofdays.com/2005/05/more_h264_demon.html
this site has a good demonstration of H.264 using action footage from Saving Private Ryan and talking heads in front of static backgrounds from The West Wing. Not my favorite movies but they clearly illustrate the point.
Five different samples for each clip are provided for comparison :
* Encoded at 256 kilobits per second
* Encoded at 512 kilobits per second
* Encoded at 768 kilobits per second
* Encoded at 2,048 kilobits per second
* Encoded at 4,096 kilobits per second
The important aspect here is that codecs are most susceptible to artifacting(breakdown of the pixels) when there is a lot of movement within the frame.
The results show that, even with dynamic action sequences, an encoding bit rate of 2048kbs or higher will look like DVD quality whilst significantly reducing the file size. Static scenes (eg a short interview clip, say, for a vog) could get away with 512 or 768. This is a very good thing!

QuickTime 7 features a state-of-the-art video codec called H.264, which delivers stunning quality at remarkably low data rates. Ratified as part of the MPEG-4 standard (MPEG-4 Part 10), this ultra-efficient technology gives you excellent results across a broad range of bandwidths, from 3G for mobile devices to iChat AV for video conferencing to HD for broadcast and DVD

a video clip to be inserted here… cant upload to the server for some reason- will have final attempt today but may have to swap this as a blog submission for

http://damienpierce.blogsome.com/2005/03/17/djembere-kids-1988/

Earlier this month I worked as Video Split Operator on a 4 day television commercial(TVC) shoot: a Medibank Private ad with high production values and an action adventure script. No dialogue/talking head. Given the size of the crew and the cost of the content I’m estimating that this thirty second ad, with a probable shelf-life of 2-3 months, cost four to five hundred thousand dollars. Which is more than that of many an independant feature. Still, the budget pales against Singleton Ogilvy and Mather’s 10 million dollar Qantas ad, which drips with jingoistic patriotism and has hardly been aired. From a content perspective, TVC advertising is the great imitator: it borrows shot concepts from cinema, takes .. appropriates…
On this shoot examples are the helicopter tracking shot(Apocalypse Now), and extensive use of staight or curved track, car, track and even a grip-rigged monobike track. The camera kept moving except for the occasional fixed longshot, in which the focus puller tracked a precision driving stunt.

TVC’s also feed a great deal of Australia’s feature film production talent, allowing to keep their eye in, skills up between major projects.

a useful resource:

http://www.dvdmadeeasy.com/glossary/g.html