ARE YOU THERE

So I've finished the video for the Amplify Me film fest

I think

Still a few days to mull it over, feedback appreciated

Are You There

LOVE WHEN A PLAN COMES TOGETHER ... OR NOT

So I've collected most of the footage I think I need for "Where Are You" the little video I'm making for the Amplify Me film festival in July.

Many shots of people downtown using their cell phones and some close ups along with some voice overs with the help of some of Collette's friends. So time for the offline, or rough cut

My plan from the beginning was not to use any music for the soundtrack. Partially this is because I don't have any rights to commercial music but also because I wanted to see if I could build a soundtrack without music.

I began editing my shots into the timeline and adding my audio. Some of it was "wild" or ambient audio, the street sounds that accompanied each shot. A lot of it was sound effects, many of them downloaded for free from websites that give you permission for use. Phone rings, phone hang ups, typewriting, that sort of thing.

Final Cut Pro gives you the ability to use multiple audio tracks, up to one hundred, though I could never imagine using that many. So I began layering in the audio, "bedding" the wild audio under the shots, matching SFX with other clips then adding the voice overs. I edited the VOs as if they were a music track, making the phrases almost nonesensical.

I like the effect but I kept watching the video and something was still missing, The video is coming out around 2 minutes and 45 seconds. That's a lot. Most TV commercials are 30 seconds and think how much "information" is contained therein. The averages song for a music video is around the 3 minute mark. Although I liked my soundtrack and it was conveying my message it felt a little clinical to me. Yes, here is the message but I want more than message. Andy video I make, I want that emotional element and in a video like this, without characters or dialogue, music was the obvious way to inspire emotion.

I still had the problem of needing to use music that I have the rights to. Well, I have that. I play around with Soundtrack Pro and Garage Band sometimes. I take pre recorded loops and instruments and make my own music out of them, music that I obviously have the rights to. So one of those songs got added to the project .. and I think it works

I can easily make videos without dialogue. Perhaps though I can never make one without music.

The best laid plans ...

VOYEUR OR DIRECTOR

It's an interesting question and I don't pretend that it's particularly original.

Just the act of looking through the lens at someone else puts you, theoretically, in the head space of a voyeur. When working with actors, or non actors who are knowingly participating, the voyeurism remains a purely artistic or intellectual exercise.

But what if the people on the other side of the lens are not in the know? Are you still a director or are you a true voyeur.

For the video I'm creating for the Amplify Me film fest, I needed to have clips of people using their social networking devices: Cell phones, laptops, tablets etc. Not a difficult thing to find in Toronto. I swear that most of the people in this city have had some kind of cybernetic surgery to have a cell phone implanted in their ears.

On a beautiful sunny day downtown there I was amidst thousands of people and all of them were communicating, but not with each other. Everyone just drifting through the crowds, almost shoulder to shoulder but barely aware of each others existence, so focussed on their own little world. In contact with the people who they know, out of contact with the rest of the world

Is this communication? Well, that's kind of the point of the video

And to that point, I had to video people who were locked into these little worlds. I have to admit, it felt a little weird. When I was shooting the footage for After, I did not experience this level of discomfort. But in that case, I wasn't looking for close ups, I didn't want faces. In fact I wanted faceless .. as in the faceless crowd.

This was different. I used a long lens, from a distance; I could not hear what the people were saying and they were not aware of my presence or that I was filming them. Now, I'm pretty sure I'm on secure legal ground here. I was shooting in public places; parks, streets, public squares. Always outside. In such situations you can't have expectations of privacy. It's the tune they sing to permit them to film us all with remote controlled security cams. Who are "they"? I don't want to say, they may be watching ...

But legal or not I couldn't help feel a bit uncomfortable. There were moments when I didn't feel I was filming, I felt like I was peeking, or snooping, I felt like a voyeur. I know that in the finished video most of these shots will be distorted, my intent is to make them a bit inhuman, as if rendered so by the isolation their desire to communicate gives them. And after all, it's just shots of people talking on their phone and they are doing it in public ... the fact that they don't seem to be concerned that their private business, their personal conversations, is in the public does not seem to concern them

Perhaps it should. Because they have lost the public sense of being public. And some old dude with a camera may be watching.

See, that sounds creepy doesn't it.

NEW PROJECT: AMPLIFY FILM FESTIVAL

Amplify Me is a non profit organization out of the US involved with discussing and promoting the media arts, as stated on their home page

They're asking for videos that explore the impact of social media for a film festival they are holding in Florida. Deadline for submissions is July 2

I was intrigued by this; their submission brief describes videos concerned with all aspects of social media, from unity to dissonance and this was a minor thread through my video After that I created for the Hello Future film festival

So it's been something I've been thinking about, actually for quite a while now. I watch all these people in my city wandering around with their smart phones and tablettes and laptops and although they seem to be furiously communicating, they barely notice each others existances

The other things that made me want to take this challenge; aside from the theme, there really are no restrictions. They will accept videos in any format, made to any style. After restricted me to length, for instance, the video had to be the exact length of the song. Also, I couldn't import any other other audio or add to the song in any way

This one gives me more freedom and that allows me to tailor the video more to my restrictions; ie no budget, no actors, very little time. I remember reading an interview with Rober Rodriquez about the creation of his first movie, El Mariachi, a film made on an extremely low budget. He said he looked at what he had, props and time and actors etc, then built his story around that, instead of writing a script and scrambling to gather elements that he may not have had access to

I like this theme because it may permit me to make the kind of short film that really interests me; something without acting, without real dialogue, something that tells its story with images and audio

As to the audio, that brings another challenge. When creating these projects for film festivals, you have to have the rights to everything in the movie, including the music. I took on After because Moby actually gave over the rights to his music; that is not the case here. Now, I have Soundtrack Pro and Garageband where I can create my own loops and I also have a nephew who is a musician.

But the more I thought about it, I wondered if I really needed a traditional score. Although I love editing to music, I love using a song to replace a dialogue, I wondered it if I could even take it further: Could I create a video with no music at all, just using ambient audio and sound effects and sound bites as the score

Can I make a movie with no dialogue, no score, no real actors ...

Well, let's find out

THE HELLO FUTURE COMPETITION: A SHARED DISSONANCE

I've been enjoying going through the other videos submitted to the Saatchi and Saatchi Hello Future video competition As of this posting there are over 200 videos posted. The deadline is today so I'm not sure how many more will be submitted but they do seem to be coming pretty fast and furiously.

It is utterly fascinating to me to see what different people do with the same inspiration. I've looked at most of the videos but of course I'm particularly interested in those that used After, the same song as I. That is still the least popular choice but it's interesting that those videos seem to be the ones now coming in right at deadline. Could be because it's such a damn long ass song. It is, in fact, the longest song by a good two minutes or so.

A few things came to mind as I watch all these videos. Firstly that for these skilled and dedicated amateur film makers, the overwhelmingly most popular weapon of choice is the digital SLR, primarily some version of a Canon SLR that records HD video.

I can see why these cameras are popular. The image quality is outstanding due to a combination of huge image sensors and superb optics. Using a DSLR gives you access to a large range of lenses and it gives you the advantages; focus control, depth of field, exposure, etc. It is also a relatively light piece of gear. Also most of the have the option to record video at 24 fps (frames per second) which mimics the "film look" so often sought

That film look is not something I actively seek. I love the look of video. For most of the projects I work on, I don't need them to look as though they've been shot on film. I am not a movie maker, I'm a video maker. Even if I make a fictional video expressing abstract ideas I like the look of video and it's possibilities

I still love the look I achieve with my Canon XL1. It is a standard def mini DV camera but it has a superior lens and 3 good sized image sensors. It is definitely old school, all the buttons I need to operate on it are within the reach of my fingers as I hold it, no annoying menu's to scroll through as I have on my Sony

Now, I am very impressed with my Sony. I bought it to replace my old Samsung standard def tape based handycam; its image quality was fairly low but it was small and portable and I liked to carry it in my pocket and mostly used it to take video of the girls and when Collette and I are out and about. These videos end up on this blog and I wasn't terribly concerned with the quality.

When I went looking at a replacement cam I would have been happy with another mini DV cam but those simply are no longer made. And I admit to the advantages of a cam that records on to a hard drive; you eliminate some of the physical issues you encounter with tape and if your hard drive is large enough, you can record a lot of footage. I liked the Sony because its small and I can record about 60 hrs of high quality footage on to its hard drive. The fact that it records in HD was not immediately important to me but I have to say, I'm very impressed with the quality of the footage. It doesn't record to 24 fps but the optics are pretty impressive.

Still, most of the videos for the Hello Future competition wanted that "film" look and most of them got that, with a deeper contrast ration than 30 fps and greater control over the colour temperature.

Let's leave the technical aside. I want to concentrate on the creative aspect. This competition featured video makers from all over the world, at all different quality levels. The film school kids were out in force and a lot of their work was quite impressive. The little film production companies are well represented and not surprisingly a lot of that work is of really high quality. And the artists ... the computer artists, the digital artists, the photographers even the musical artists all came to play and I really enjoyed watching their videos. They offered perspectives that never would have occurred to me.

What surprised me was how many common elements we chose to include in these videos. My submission features speed altered images of traffic, subway trains, the city at night. Turns out a lot of other people felt that same inspiration not just with my song but with the others as well.

I made a video that tried to portray emptiness and lonliness surrounded by millions of people. I knew that this was not the most original of concepts and a lot of others shared this idea.

The overall theme of the competition was Hello Future. Some folks tackled this in a very literal fashion: Robots, post apocalypse, cyborgs, plague, evolution .. all on display. I think my take was a bit less literal but fairly obvious and I'm in good company. Some approached the theme of the future on a very personal level, illustrating it through the degradation of personal relationships for instance.

Some chose to ignore the theme or perhaps tackled in a way that just escaped me. Power to them. My original concept for my video had nothing to do with Hello Future. When I reread the brief and understood that this theme needed to be an element in the video I at first thought "I don't really care, I'm making the video I want" But as I thought about it and began to figure out how I could introduce the future into my video it actually helped solidify my theme. And it gave me a clearly defined ending which had eluded me up to that point.

Vimeo is a website that is intended and designed to be a community for video makers. Mostly I use it as by far the best option to host videos, videos I generally create to show on The Hairy Edge but it is kind of nice to dog paddle in the shallow end of the movie making pool

My other blog is often about inspiration. This competition was all about inspiration, for myself and hundreds of others. As disparate as our videos may be, we all shared that same inspiration.

JIM MORRISON SINGS

This is the end my friends, the end ...

The video is done. Finished. Completed.

Not only is the deadline for the competition fast approaching but there really is no point farting around with this thing anymore. Sitting here with all these clips and my software I could edit and tinker forever.

But I started this with a particular idea in mind and I've achieved it. I've actually made the video I wanted and for a short time abandoned .. it's not very often that I can look at a personal piece of work and say "No matter what, that's what I set out to achieve"

I look at it and can envision more scenes but they were scenes that I did not shoot and did not think to shoot. That's why I need deadlines. I tend to rewrite and re edit personal projects and rarely finished.

I've submitted the video the Hello Future competition. I have no idea how it will fare. I've seen some of the other entries and they are incredibly diverse. Most of them were shot with DSLRs and look great but other than that they are all over the map.

I'm not worried about competition because honestly, I didn't embark on this to win. I started this because it inspired me. I would love to be a top 10 finalist, I put work in this and it's nice to be recognized but the judges have specific concerns and I respect that; but I didn't make this for them, I made it for me.

There have been a lot of entries for the contest, for all three of the Moby songs that were made available. Some of them are pretty amazing and you should check them out. Top ten finalists will be announced June 1 and the winner announced June 23

I did notice that the song I chose was the least popular choice of the three. Perhaps that had something to do with it being a goddamned long song, who knows

So, without any further ado, here's my official entry into the Saatchi and Saatchi Hello Future contest, After by Moby.

Normally I would embed the video here but it's a large HD file and seems to be playing havoc with Blogger's capacity so just follow this link to view it here.

ENTRY NUMBER THIRTEEN: THE LITTLE THINGS

The little things count, the details

The first offline was about assembling the clips to the tell the story, making certain I had the shots, making sure the story even makes sense, timing the clips to the music.

After I took my pick up shots I decided I had a good range of shots to use. Multiple angles of each shot, for instance, the correct length of the shot to time out to the song.

Although I'm working with a tight deadline I've left myself enough time to go over and over the footage, making adjustments. Once you're satisfied you have what you need, you have to pay attention to details. Details count.

I shot all the footage with Moniqea at Union Station on a drizzly overcast day. I shot the establishing shot of the train station on a relatively sunny day. You don't want that to jump out. But I shot the front of the building from several angles. One of them kept the facade in shadow and since I'm applying a diffusion filter to it anyway, it matches up

The in and outs of your clip are important. If you are matching cuts you want to make sure you don't have even a frame of errant camera movement at the end of a shot, trust me this is going to jump right out at the viewer; they may not know what they saw but they will know that something is awry

In parts of the song I want to cut right to the music, and I am doing this for a whole sequence of beats or musical cues. In the timeline, as I'm replacing shots, sometimes the in and out point of the clip will get moved but a frame or two; again, this will actually be noticed. So I routinely have to go through the timeline adjusting the clips to match up to the markers I placed early on

I'm also looking at things like exposure, colour saturation, things that I can tweak with the software. You always want to try to get the best shot possible during a shoot but in the run and gun style I shot this in, that always wasn't possible.

Then there is the creative aspect. Do the filters I'm applying make sense? Should I use a close up of Moniquea here or a mid shot? Even though this shot is timed to the beat does it go on too long?

I have a technical standard I want to meet but really, it's all about the story telling