11 posts tagged “pdx comics doc”

Watched the first really good interview that I probably won't be using much of in the final film. There are a few subjects I spoke with who will end up not quite fitting into the big picture as well as others. I am considering ultimately releasing all, or at least a substantial chunk, of my raw footage online for others to view and play with. That's one way to ensure that the stuff on "the cutting room floor" doesn't end up simply forgotten and unused.

Noticed more mic bobbling, and seemingly more intrusive this time.

Having to defer some tapes as I wait for companion cassettes to be logged. I will likely be taking the next few days off from tape review. Generally, I am torn between wanting to power through the material and taking a more measured approach to ensure that my judgment stays clear. So far I have taken a measured approach looking at two to three interviews a day. With pauses for note taking, a thirty to forty minute interview has been taking about an hour to review.

Today, I encountered the first interview so far that is marred by one of the sound people moving the mic around; bip, bip, bip, bip. Fortunately, this isn't constant and I should be able to cut around the bobbles. I also hit one of the two tapes where the video mode had been shifted accidentally in the bag and went unnoticed until after several minutes had been recorded. At the time, I chose to play out the tape in the incorrect mode, but switched to the proper mode when a new tape was started. That may not have been the best choice. It might have been better to record the whole interview in the wrong mode and then conformed it all later. I won't really know what the effect of this choice will be until I get into editing proper. Finally, on the flaws and mistakes front, I learned that one of the people who worked on the tape logs managed to record over about two minutes of one of the interviews. I don't think I lost anything
valuable, but it was a shock. Am glad that this particular person did not get a chance to do work on the logs in an extensive way.

I've also noticed that my in-person perceptions of the interviews are not always born out on screen. I have found subjects that seemed kind of flat during recording coming across much better on playback. The differences are not dramatic, but enough to be encouraging. Less common is for a dyamic in-person interview to be turned flat in review. This is also encouraging, obviously.

One of the hardest things about this process is listening to my own voice on tape-after-tape.

I started reviewing my interview footage yesterday and I have a few early thoughts on what I've watched.

• Subjects who like to talk are good. You have listen to much more than you will need, but you're also more likely to get good material (I also have to say that some of the less relevant discussion I've heard in these first few tapes is as much a product of the questions I asked as it is a product of subject answers).
• More than before, even, I wish I had had a DP to work with. I undoubtedly would have done more set-ups with individual subjects, and would have ended up catching some little things that slipped by last summer, lack the reflections off of the glasses of one of my better interviews. Having written that, the video generally looks good. Rich, vibrant colors and clear images.
• Sound quality is excellent. Buying a field mixer before the shoot was obviously a good investment, as was the sound workshop I attended at the Northwest Film Center and this little tool.

With the school year done, I can turn my attention to film projects, starting with my documentary of comic book creators in Portland, Oregon. This also means that this blog will be sparked back to life. I will be posting more of my personal thoughts, frustrations, reflections on the documentary here, leaving the more "official" communications to the doc blog. There will also be other projects to write about as the summer continues.

My filmmaking activities have been curtailed by the day-to-day at the university, but last Friday, 13 February, I screened a short film, "24-Hour Comics Day at Cosmic Monkey", as part of the Oregon 150 commemoration at Western. The short was produced from footage shot for my larger documentary project on the comic book scene in Portland, Oregon (USA). I've inserted the YouTube version below, but better viewing can be found on my lo-fi cinema page at blip.tv.

As I've alluded to in other posts on the comics documentary, I've cobbled together a crew for the summer from students, recent grads, and Anne-Marie. Mostly, this has been to help with interviews; while you can be a one person crew working with digital media, it isn't the best way to work, at least not for me. However, I've also been asking folks to help with logging tape, an essential, but tedious job.

Logging tape entails providing useful descriptions for every shot on a tape, usually including information like time code, angle, and subject. Getting this done is helpful for a number of reasons. Once you have a tape logged, subsequent viewings can be devoted to evaluating quality and content. A log lets you see at a glance what's on a tape. It makes it possible to fish out specific kinds of footage without having to actually watch an entire tape. It can guide the creation of a batch list for downloading footage. I'm sure that there are people who work without logging their tape, but I can't imagine not doing it, especially not on a project where you're going to be working with hours and hours of material (I generally don't create a tape log for events like this weekend's 48 Hour Film Project, but that's a time issue, and we usually don't have much more than an hour of tape to work with in any event).

I've been asking members of the crew to log tapes, and with some mixed success. Not surprisingly, no one is eager to do this job, but most have been game when asked directly. The main limiter I've discovered is that most don't have access to miniDV cameras, and certainly not to miniDV decks. All but one person has informed me that they only have access to hard drive-based cameras, or everyone they know just uses the video function on their digital still cameras. One person told me that he's never had a miniDV machine, only hard drive based ones.

I have wide control and access to a couple of camcorders from the university, but not enough to keep everyone working simultaneously. I guess that miniDV became outmoded at the consumer level without me really noticing.

I've written previously about how budgetary limits have compelled me to be my own director of photography on the comics documentary. This is not an entirely bad thing, it forces me to do work that makes me a better filmmaker, but last week I got a sharp reminder as to why it's preferable to work with a photographer.

My camera, a Panasonic DVX100a, has a set of "scene files" which allows you to use and save different combinations of settings for color, detail, frame rate, etc. I think I've been reliable about checking that the scene file setting is correct before we begin shooting. However, last Friday, for various reasons, things were moving slow and we were behind schedule, and clearly checking the scene file dial simply slipped my mind. When I changed tapes during one of the interviews, I noticed that the dial had moved, which will happen sometimes when I put the camera back in its bag (hence, the need to check). Unfortunately, we weren't in a location that set off any alarm bells about how the image looked on the LCD screen - muted colors, no real dark areas, s stable camera and subject - and it wasn't until I actually saw the dial that I realized what had happened.

I haven't looked at the tape yet, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to smooth out or finesse the differences in footage during editing and post-production without too much trouble. Fortunately, even though I haven't tested this yet, my understanding is that Final Cut Pro makes it relatively easy to work with different kinds of video (here, I'm looking at needing to work with 24PA and 60i). In retrospect, I probably should have kept the "wrong" scene file for the rest of the interview, but my first impulse was to change it back to where it should have been and that's what I did. This will make it easier to integrate the second half with the rest of my footage, but poses a new challenge of how to reconcile the look within the interview.

The lesson here for me is that one of the practical reasons for working with a photographer is that that person will have nothing to worry about except the camera, making it less likely that something like this will happen. But, to tweak a cliche about teaching, you have to work with the production you have, not the one you wish you had.

As I posted to the production blog, the interviews for the main part of the documentary began yesterday. Before getting those interviews underway, I set up a Google Group for the crew to facilitate communication and provide a central place for asking questions, working out problems, etc. It is also a way for the crew members to introduce themselves to each other. I'm actually not sure if I'll ever have everyone together on one shoot. Fortunately, one of the advantages of digital technology is its relative simplicity. On Friday, I was able to get the two crew members I was working with, Tanya and Danny, set up for sound and monitoring without any real difficulty. As I've mentioned before, I'm essentially acting as my own DP on this project, but as time goes by, I hope to have at least one other person that I can trust to set up shots and work the camera. In addition to using Google Groups for the production, I've also set up a tape log in a Google Docs spreadsheet, which should make it easier for everyone to complete those assignments and have the documented updated in real time instead of having to track so many different versions of it (I was a little surprised to see that Google Groups and Google Docs are not seamlessly integrated with each other, which means that I can't share documents directly with the group via the group page). Other than all of the driving to Portland this stage of the production will entail, I'm looking forward to the remaining interviews, and to getting more of the crew working together.

After pushing my production schedule for 24-Hour Comic Day and Stumptown, I was able to move back into research mode. More particularly, I've been sending out a survey to Portland-based comics creators, and their allies in publishing, libraries, and retail, to get an initial sense of why so many in this community have decided to make the city their home. Now, it's time to sit down with the results and plan the first part of the shoot, which will primarily involve scheduling interviews (another purpose of the survey was to net potential subjects).

I am torn between different ways of approaching the next stage of production. I am drawn both to taking an intensive approach, where we focus on three to four subjects and "their" city, and an extensive one, where we build the documentary around many voices. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or resources to effectively try both angles at once. What I think I might do is identify a few potentially interesting subjects from the surveys, schedule interviews with them, and see what I have. How well those interviews go may hint at whether we should to return to those subjects, or some combination of those I initially talk to and one or two new people, or if we should start building up a pool of interviews to draw on in editing. There are, of course, gradations between these two extreme alternatives, but I think the doc will substantially follow one or the other path.

I should also add that with production picking up, this blog will likely become more active again (I also have this to look to forward this summer).

This past weekend Anne-Marie and I went to work on the comics documentary. We shot footage of 24-Hour Comic Day at Cosmic Monkey Comics in northeast Portland. We came away with three hours of tape, including about one and a half hour of time-lapse footage from over night. You can read more about the weekend, including links to an archived live blog of the event, on my production blog for the film.

Because I don't really have a crew or group of collaborators lined up yet, I've had to act as my own director of photography, which is not something I like to do, but which I recognize is a good thing. It makes me a better director, and expands my skill set. Over the weekend, in particular, I got some more practical experience with the Fig Rig, including seeing how easy it is to work when fully hooked up for sound (the answer: quite easy). Anne-Marie and I talked about trying to coordinate me on the camera and her with the mic while moving with the rig, but we decided there wasn't good enough reason, especially since we may have ended up looking like fools!

The week or so before, like many an independent filmmaker these days, I agonized over frame rates and aspect ratios. My deliberations over frame rates are partially available in comments to this post on Susan Ee's blog. In the end, I decided to shoot in the DVX 100a's “24p Advanced mode.” The reason is partially aesthetic, I do like the softer more organic look and feel of progressive video better than I do interlaced, at least for “film” projects. Is 24p “better” than 30p? No. Yes. Depends.

In a truly digital world, I'd probably choose 30p. It simplifies shooting and editing, while retaining much of the analog aesthetic of 24p. However, it is the remote possibility of wide-ish theatrical distribution that tipped the balance to 24p Advanced. From just about everything I've read, the biggest downside to choosing 30p is that it is virtually impossible to get a decent transfer to film with such footage, and, indeed, most shops don't even offer it as an option.

Of course, interval recording is not possible in 24p on the DVX100a, only in 30p or 60i. I shot the time-lapse footage in 30p. Hmmm. As I write that, maybe 60i would have been the better choice, but I wanted to minimize the disparity in appearance between the regular shots and the interval recording.

I did play with warming up 60i as the primary shooting mode, but applying “Cine” settings in that mode tended to just produce muddy looking video. And that brought me back around to 24p as the only way to preserve the transfer-to-film possibility.

Theatrical presentation is also a primary reason for thinking about aspect ratio. For better or worse, my camera's native 4:3 signifies “TV” or “video” not “cinema” or “film.” Unlike the 24p choice, I have my own reasons for wanting a widescreen look for this project.

The film is fundamentally about the city of Portland, and cities are cinematic, either in look, e.g., skylines, or in subject, e.g., the young and hip. Furthermore, as comics and movies are increasingly integrated, it seems like a natural choice.

The question is how to get the widescreen look.

I have two in-camera options: “squeeze” mode and letterboxing. Squeeze mode essentially stretches the 4:3 image into a 16:9 image. Letterboxing adds black bars to the top and bottom of the image.

There are two issues with squeeze mode. One is a loss of resolution (as I understand it, at the center of the image, resolution remains high, but as you move away from the center, the stretching results in lower resolution). The other is the LCD monitor on the camera lacks a widescreen setting, so the image you see while shooting is distorted. An appropriate external monitor can fix this, but I find that cumbersome on documentaries.

With letterboxing you sacrifice pixels for the black bars. In addition, the bars become part of the image on the tape. Effects and filters added in editing and post-production will apply to those bars as well as to the rest of the recorded image.

What I am trying to do is shoot in 4:3, but “protect” for widescreen, that is, letterboxing in post-production. Essentially this is the same as what happens in camera, except that you retain full use of your CCDs for recording “real” information. In addition, the masking you apply in post-production is independent of your recorded footage, which means that transitions, etc. will only apply to what's between the letterboxing.

The trick here is leaving enough room at the top and bottom of each shot to accommodate the masking. However, I will be able to reposition the image when needed, another reason to shoot a “full” image rather than using the in-camera letterboxing.

Like shooting in 24p, shooting in 4:3 will make for easier “blow up” or “up rezing” to film or HD.

One thing I've learned from trying to research these questions is that there are no hard and fast answers. For every person who cautions against, say, squeeze mode due to the loss of resolution there is another who will tell you about the project they just worked on where this was no big deal, even after a transfer to film or HD. My choices are fundamentally conservative in the sense of wanting to conserve options for different formats for distribution and presentation styles.