Camera: Panasonic GH13 + 14-140mm + 20mm (autofocus)
Support: Steadicam Merlin with Arm and Vest
Editing: Premiere Pro CS5
3D Matchmoving: Boujou
VFX/Mograph/Rotoscoping/”3D” Objects: After Effects CS5, After Effects CS5 Roto Brush

Album: “First Impression” – http://www.mediafire.com/?fy2m99q22sw5a51

Pmac – “One” – First Impression
Music Produced by Rollie Beats
Directed by Ray Pajar

Pmac
Tumblr: http://blueroomupdate.tumblr.com/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/pmacalac
Youtube: http://youtube.com/blueroomupdate

Ray Pajar
Twitter: http://twitter.com/RayPajar

Rolli Beats
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/rolliebeats
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/rolliebeats

OVERVIEW

After seeing the incredible short Blow Out Sale (by Timothy Kendall, Chris Marrs & Danny Pudi) for the Interpretations Film Contest, we were inspired to create an action film based on some of our favorite action films and video games growing up. Re-living and acting out our favorite action scenes was more fun than you can imagine!

CREDITS

CAST
Shahaub Roudbari
Kenny Leu
James Chen

DIRECTED, SHOT AND VFX
James Chen

EDITED BY
Scott Jacobs

ORIGINAL MUSIC BY
Michael Gonzales

CLOSING CREDITS
“Paralyzed” by
Phonic Youth

SPECIAL THANKS
Andrew Kramer (http://www.videocopilot.net)
Aharon Rabinowitz (http://allbetsareoff.com/)
Clinton Jones (http://ae.tutsplus.com/author/clinton-jones/)
Wendy Nguyen

TECHNICAL DETAILS

CAMERA: Panasonic GH-1 (pre-hack, 720p60), Steadicam Merlin + Arm & Vest
LENSES: Panasonic 14-140mm, Canon FD 24mm f/2
POST-PRODUCTION:
- Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro CS5 (Editing)
- After Effects, Trapcode Particular (compositing)
- VideoCopilot.net’s Action Essential 2 (effects footage)
- Photoshop CS5 (object removal)
- Mocha for AE (tracking)
- Soundtrack Pro (audio mixing)
- Color (color correcdtion)
- Motion (speed ramping)

About

A Mockumentary about a traditional Iranian man who makes a living for his family in a very non-traditional profession.  This short Mock Documentary is a commentary on the stereotypes, homophobia and taboo nature of artistic expression in both the West and Middle Eastern cultures.

Author: David E. Elkins, SOC
Recommendation Level: Required Reading.

Overall, the Camera Assistant’s Manual should be read by every aspiring filmmaker.  It is a highly detailed and well written book that covers the average day of a professional 1st and 2nd AC and a thorough explanations of all the duties involved.  It is well written and littered with plenty of real life  and encourages a friendly and professional behavior on set.  The majority of the book is well illustrated and littered with personal anecdotes.

Although the book repeats itself from time to time, the author explains it in the introduction as a good way to reinforce all the knowledge someone is learning.  If you’ve never been on set before, a lot of the information in this book may be like drinking from a fire hose, so I agree that it’s good to have the main principles reinforced.

Originally written, the book has been updated slightly to address SD and HD video cameras, though the coverage isn’t quite as in-depth.  I’d say 90% of the chapters discuss working in film and a quick 10% on how the same duties might be handled with video.  With the digital workflow becoming more and more used in Hollywood, I hope the book will be revised in future editions to provide more emphasis on digital video.

How the book is organized

The book is divided into the following parts:

I. Basics of Cinematography

This section provides an overview for all the basics of filmming, including terminology ranging from f-stops and t-stops to the camera and the different types of film, filters and support for the camera.

II. The Camera Department

A breakdown of a typical camera department and a summary of what each person in each department is responsible for.

III. The 2nd AC

It explores in depth the roles and tasks that a 2nd AC is normal responsible for.  This includes all the paperwork involved and appropriate and professional behavior to assist the 1st AC in preparing and setting up all the necessary equipment for the camera.  This also explains in depth the duties of a Loader, since this may very well fall to the 2nd AC on most sets.

IV. The 1st AC

It explores in depth the roles and tasks that a 1st AC is normal responsible for.  The major roles include prepping the equipment and the relationship with the rental house, as well as prepping and setting up the camera in the morning.  It also spends  a good deal of time describing the duties of the Focus Puller and gives a myriad of tips on pulling accurate focus.

V. Problems and Troubleshooting

Some basic tips to troubleshoot things that might cause a film camera to not function properly.

VI. Film Cameras

Plenty of diagrams and descriptions of popular 16mm and 35mm cameras.  Though, does not offer much more information than that and does not cover HD video cameras.

VII. Before, After and During the Job

Tips on professional behavior, resume building, interviewing and approaching jobs.

VIII. Appendices

List of film equipment, tools, forms, checklists and tables and formulas.

Conclusion

I always believe that it’s important to understand what everyone else is responsible for on set and this book can easily be a definitive guide to the responsibilities of the Assistant Cameraman.

You can access most of the checklists, forms, tables and formulas at the companion website: http://www.cameraassistantmanual.com/

About

This was our unmodified submission to the San Jose 48 Hour Film Project 2009.  Everything was written, shot and edited in 48 hours from 8/14/09 – 8/16/09.

A HUGE, HUGE thanks to the cast and crew involved, there were only six of us!!  This was the most fun that I’ve ever had shooting a film and it wouldn’t have been possible without you all!

Required Elements

- Genre: Romance
- Character: Zach or Zelda Alexander, an exterminator
- Line: “Tell me again why this matters?” (could be broken up)
- Prop: A piece from a board game

CREDITS

Cast
James Lontayao … DAVE
Mae Cruz … LIZ
Shahaub Roudbari … ZACH ALEXANDER
John Nguyen … ZEL DA

Crew
D.B. Cheng … Producer, Camera, DP, Music/Sound, 1st AD
James Chen …  Director, Writer, Editor, DP
John Nguyen … Fight Choreography, Stunts
Shahaub Roudbari … Fight Choreography, Stunts
James Lontayao … Stunts

Shot on a Panasonic GH-1 and a Panasonic HMC150 with a Letus Extreme adapter.  For the GH-1, a mix of kit and Canon FD primes.

Music composed in GarageBand by D.B. Cheng.

About

I’m not sure how I decided to join the San Francisco 48 Hour Film Project 2009.  I think I had been eager to try out one of the competitions since at the end, you would hopefully be assured a completed film in just one short weekend.

Technical

1.77:1
1080p/24
Panasonic HMC150
Stock lenses
Final Cut Pro, Color, After Effects, Video Copilot’s Action Essential’s 2

Production Stills

OVERVIEW

The principal photography was shot at the New Vision Church gym on Saturday, Feb 21 from 4:00pm to 10:00pm with a single break for dinner.  It was recorded on a Canon XH-A1, stock lens with Stephen Dempsy’s VIVIDRGB setting and using a Libec LS-55 and Steadicam Merlin.  Edited in Final Cut Pro 6, voice over using SoundTrack Pro, optical flow re timing with Motion and graded in Color.  Post production lasted from Sunday Feb 22nd 5pm until Tuesday Feb 24, 11:50pm.  Little to no sleep was also involved.

Final Budget: $200.
Food – $135 to feed 16 people ($95 for pizza and $48 for fruits, veggies and Baked chips from Costco).   I could have saved money if I had just bought Costco pizzas – next time.
Set Design – $65 for props/costumes.

PRE-PRODUCTION

A tiny bit of background about myself.  While I’ve been reading endlessly about filmmaking for the past two years, only in the last few months have I had enough free time to pursue it.  I’ve participated in a few indie shoots as an AD, but this was my first time directing a shoot of my own.

I learned about the contest a day before a trip up to Tahoe and came up with the concept on the car ride up.  At the time, there were about 10 or so entries and all were very home video-esque.  I wanted to submit an entry that I felt better represented the quality of the band.  I had seen several FM music videos before, and while the song could be shot as a straightforward hip hop video (ballers in a club), I thought it’d be fun to give it an ironic twist.  The first verse seemed something only a confident, player type person could pull off, so I felt an under confident person delivering the line would be funny.  After some brainstorming with my girlfriend, I thought that nerds at a high school dance would be a perfect blend of that innocence/strong desire to be with girls.  I brought the music with me on the slopes and pretty much finalized the shoot in my head on the lifts .

Miracle #1 – The Gym
I came home and immediately went to work on the storyboard, which I finished in a few days and threw up onto Vimeo – http://vimeo.com/2925078.

My first task was to secure a gymnasium.  I spammed twitter/facebook/im/emails, but had no luck.  I then tried calling several local schools and community centers, but most of them were a bit costly for this project ($400-500+ for a six hour shoot).  I was about to give on my original idea for a gym, when a friend of mine told me his church had a full gym open on the weekends and his dad had the keys.  Huzzah!!

I originally wanted to shoot Sat Feb 4th to give myself plenty of time for post and to enter the contest earlier.  But having only discovered the gym on Tues Jan 28, I was skeptical I could find enough people to participate in time.  Unfortunately, I was right.  After much spamming/begging/pleading to my social graph, only 4 people could make it, forcing me to scrap that shoot date.

The next available date was Sat Feb 21st, which would only leave me 3 days for post work.  Over the next week, response from my social graph was still tepid, leaving me two weeks left with little commitment.  With almost no cast and crew committed, this wasn’t ideal and I was on the verge of dropping the entire project.  Fortunately, my girlfriend kept encouraging me to not give up, so I kept asking for people to help.

Miracle #2 – Dancers, Assistant Director and more lights
While doing a script reading for my friend’s latest feature, I mentioned that I was planning to shoot a music video in two weeks.  He said he would love to help out and act as AD.  His producer heard and was interested in the dance choreography as she was enrolled in a hip hop class.  She told me that several girls in her class would be interested as well.  I found both my dancers and my AD.  Awesome.

Miracle #3 – Third lead
I was still short a lead actor, but bumped into one of my old friends two weeks before the shoot at a networking event.  He was a theater actor and quite good

With cast/crew/location locked down, all my efforts then went into preparing.

Rehearsal
We had a chance to visit the church the Tuesday before the shoot.  The dancers wanted to be able to practice their choreo and I wanted to get an idea about framing and possible lighting scenarios.

Rehearsal Photos (picasa)
Rehearsal Test Footage (vimeo)

Shot List
The night before, I stayed up until about 5am trying to finish the shot list.  I knew that we would be shooting a large number of shots and we would have to move very quickly.  Celtx offered a shot list feature, but wasn’t flexible enough for what I wanted to do.  I added timing checkpoints to force myself to stay on time.  Better to get less coverage and complete the video than more coverage and missing footage.

SHOT LIST (google doc)

Lighting Plans
With the limited time on hand, I referred to a 6-point hexagonal lighting diagram I had seen in Matters of Light & Depth, that would provide almost 360 degrees of high key light with kickers.  I strapped on lights and knew that I would only have 4 500-650w lights, so I hoped that a four point lighting scheme plus the CoolLights Flos could work.
Set Design/Costumes
With an extremely limited setup time, I relied heavily on my girlfriend to pull off some sort of set design and I felt she did some AMAZING work.  I asked her to create two punch tables and it was her idea for the banners on the walls.  What I found funnier is that during setup, I had left her alone for a moment in the staging area to setup some equipment, I came back and found she had found some help – in the form of two 9 year old girls who were still at the church.  Best of all, they just wanted to be paid in chips .

For costumes, my girlfriend again saved me and came up with a “geek chic” concept for the nerds to transform into.  We wanted to create a transformation that still had some nerd quality to it (the plaid shirt, un-worn suspenders).  I think she pulled it off very well!

The kids wanted payment in chips!

PRODUCTION

Equipment
This was the equipment checklist I created for the shoot the night before.  This list actually ended up saving me as after I had spent 1/2 loading my car and was just about to leave, a final check made me realize I had forgotten my Merlin at home.

EQUIPMENT CHECKLIST (google doc)

Wide shot of the gym

The Shoot

My girlfriend and I arrived at 2:30pm and quickly unloaded the car.  I was concerened that there were still several kids from the Church playing basketball in the gym, but fortunately they were just about to leave.  We had two friends who were supposed to arrive at 2:30 as well to help setup, but they called us to let us know they would get there at 3:45pm.  Lovely.  Since all the cast were told to arrive at 3:30pm, I scrambled to get everything ready.

Fortunately, my assistant director arrived at 3:00pm and brought two Lowell Omni’s with him.  So we quickly setup the quick and dirty four point lighting.  We turned off all the lights in the gym and I tried to fire down a Home Depot 1k worklight down for some ambient lighting.  To be honest, I’m not sure if this even had an effect, but I kept it on anyways.  I then setup two CoolLights CLMF0150 (600 watt equivalent) 3000K at two corners and used my friend’s two 500w lowell’s in the other two corners.  We lit the banners using 2 PAR cans with colored gels in front.  For the “disco” effect, I was fortunate enough to borrow a 750w Razzle Dazzle machine, which we simply just put onto a table.  I initially wanted to hang it from the basketball rim, but the weight of the Razzle Dazzle and not having a ladder would’ve made this quite difficult.

Setting up a CoolLights 255

When I got back to the setup room, to my surpise my girlfiend had enlisted the help of a few of the church kids.   They thought it was fun to blow up balloons and paint the banners.

The source of our music - a Toughbook with Winamp

At 3:30pm, about 4 of the 9 dancers showed up and two leads, but the third lead said he wouldn’t get there until 4:30pm.  We finished the set design at 4:00pm and decided to start shooting the scenes where the third lead wasn’t in.  I was so worried that we wouldn’t finish in time, I elected to cut out as many CU’s as possible and just go for the medium shots.  Of course later on as the editor I was cursing at myself for doing this, but at the time, I just waned to make sure we could finish.

To be honest, my first thought when looking through the viewfinder was that the image quality wasn’t quite what I had imagined.  The size of the gym, the lack of lighting and lack of a large cast all contributed to this.  Plus with the rush and small crew size, at times it wasn’t possible to hide the light stands or light stand shadows.   But at the same time, everyone was having a lot of fun, so I just kept pushing through.

As things calmed down, we tried to re-position the lights so they wouldn’t be in frame for most of the static shots.  But to be perfectly honest, almost everyone who has viewed the video haven’t mentioned the lights as a glaring error.

The shotlist ended up being a huge godsend, as I never had to think about what was next, but just focus on the shot as hand.  My assistant director was also superb, as he never stepped on my toes and only made suggestions when they were appropriate.  Having to operate the camera, act as DP and key grip, not having to worry about the script/shots really saved me.

We amazingly caught up to the schedule and took our dinner break on schedule at 6pm.  I’ve read that you shouldn’t skimp on food, so I ordered pizza from a Yelp highly rated pizza restaurant.  Though in retrospect, getting the food from Costco probably would’ve been better.  I didn’t realize this but female dancers can eat!!

Break for dinner

After dinner, we quickly moved to the choreo scenes.  Everything ran pretty smoothly, save one quick on-the-set decision to change the third chorus.  I had never seen any of the choreo before and for the 2nd choreo (“get your ass on the floor”), they way they did it conflicted with how I thought we would shoot that sequence.  I thought about possibly having the guys sit down and watch the girls, but my girlfriend pointed out that it might be a little demeaning, to which I agreed.  So I quickly thought that it would be fun if they just drank and all passed out, which ended up working quite well.

We finished shooting at 9:45pm (right on schedule) and we were out of the church by 11:00pm.  I was absolutely exhausted, but was still able to capture the 90 minutes of footage to Apple ProRes when I got home before I passed out.

Merlin and Tripod – Awesome combo
A quick comment about the Merlin.  Using the tripod plate adapter, I could easily jump from Merlin to Tripod in just a few seconds.  This was tremendously helpful as we were only spending an average of 10-15 minutes per shot, so I had to make the switch quite often.  The Merlin has been an amazing tool in my arsenal and I highly recommend it.

XH-A1 with Merlin

Canon XH-A1 on Libec-55

Production Stills (by Matt Hanagan)
Production Stills 2 (by Daniel Lee)

POST-PRODUCTION

Sunday Feb 22nd
I slept in Sunday morning and started looking through the footage in the afternoon.  I started editing at 8pm (while watching the Oscars) and passed out at 11am with a very rough first cut.

Monday Feb 23rd
My first cut was quite disappointing, both to me and when I screen it for my girlfriend.  I woke up at 2pm and continued to plow on through the day.  8pm-9pm that night, we shot the opening commercial.  I wanted to do a Apple commercial white background, and I had lucked out because my friend/neighbor was moving out of her apartment so it was completely empty.  My idea was to try to throw as much light on the back wall to blow it out completely, then stand in front of it and be lit separately with my new CL-LED600′s.  In post, I had to magnify it slightly to get rid of a wall socket, but otherwise, it worked out pretty well!

FM Spray Commercial Screen Shot

Commercial Shoot Set Stills (picasa album)

I had a few slo-mo and time-ramping scnes in the video, and I would send the 60i clip to Motion first and apply Optical Flow to it.  I was trying to time-remap some of the scens to the music and one problem with remapping in Motion was the lack of audio.  After a few failed attempts to send over the clip markers, I instead sent the slow motion clip from Motion back to FCP and remapped it there.  This worked pretty well for the scenes.  With the help of some coffee, I passed out at 6am.

Tuesday Feb 24th – Deadline
Woke up 9am Tuesday morning, and spent some time performing the VO for the commercial using my homemade Porta-Booth.  This was my first time using it and it worked out a lot better than I expected!  I then spent the rest of the afternoon grading in Color and this was when the panic started to kick in.   My grading abilities are squat and this was my first time using Color.  I know it’s good practice to only use Color after the editing is fully locked down, but I was too tired and still in a rush.  Color is great tool, but the roundtrip to FCP was very frustrating.  The rendering times were really killing my ability to work quickly.

Using Markers to Set Beats

Time remapping in FCP

Time Remapping by looking at the wav patterns

Close to Final Render

A quick break for dinner and then it was a race to the finish.

Race to the Finish
The deadline for the project was Tuesday, 11:59pm.  My first attempt at uploading was a 300MB file to Youtube that finished at 10:00pm and had taken about an hour.  Youtube it encoded quickly but turned out to be too dark, so I quickly ran into Color and raised the brightness a bit.  I then needed to re-render and compress it again.  I hoped that Ken Stone’s recommendation of a 3k bit-rate ceiling would reduce the filesize, but assumed it would be approximately the same.  I calculated that if Compressor finished  the 300MB file at 10:48pm, I’d have a shot at successfully uploading it by 11:58pm (Youtube timestamps based on upload completion time).

At 10:47pm, I was shouting all kinds of curses at my computer as Compressor had said “less than a minute” for quite some time now.  It finally finished at 10:52pm and I thought all was lost until I saw the file size was now only 100MB.  Whew.  I quickly uploaded it and even had some time to spare .  Thank you Ken Stone!!!  The regular encode finished before midnight and the HD encode kicked in at about 12:45am.  It looked great!

Final Thoughts

Overall, I had a blast.  The experience was amazing, and I think I learned more in those condensed 72 hours than I had in an entire month of studying .  It’s humbling to realize how difficult it is to reproduce exactly what you envision in your head, and my respect for filmmakers rose tremendously.  But I think it’s useful to be flexible enough to enjoy the end product regardless.  I’m always going to strive for perfection and hopefully I can inch closer on every shoot.

The best part though was that everyone had a lot of fun and we were laughing almost the entire time.  In such a high stress situation for myself, I really am grateful that I had such a patient and fun cast and crew.  It’s really what movie making is all about.

Prior Screenwriting Books: NONE

This was my first introduction to screenwriting, and I feel it worked very well as an introductory book.  I bought it based off of the large number of high reviews on Amazon.  I’ve read several other highly recommended screenwriting books since.

I feel that this book is a step above “Screenwriting for Dummies”.  While Synder does make you aware that succeeding in a screenwriting career can be daunting, his optimistic tone and simple breakdown of how to approach Hollywood screenwriting makes you feel empowered to go forward and write your first screenplay.

Snyder walks you through the basic Three Act structure, but gives a bit more hand holding by.   Snyder’s goal is simple.  He wants to show you how to breakdown Hollywood screenwriting so that it’s no longer intimidating.  And while his method may seem a bit formulaic, you soon realize that a lot of major Hollywood films follow a very similar major beat structure.

Snyder also publishes software for this brainstorming process.  It’s now in its 2.0 version.  I’ve never used it, but the people on the STC forums seem to really enjoy it.

Keep in mind though, that Snyder seems to really enjoys writing family comedies and has only sold scripts in that category.  So his beat structure and the examples he uses might work better for comedies.

In my opinion, I think a screenwriting book should really teach you the basics, but more importantly, it should get you to finish that first screenplay.  And I think Save the Cat definitely works very well on those levels.

Recommended For:  Beginning Screenwriters.
Reading Priority: If you have a queue of screenwriting books, I recommend reading this first.
Purchase Link:
Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need