As one of three finalists, I was tasked with creating a ten to twenty minute short film. This project was the longest and most complicated that we’ve attempted. Selected by a panel of judges as the winner, our entry screened at the Dell Lounge in the Brigadoon tent during a special breakfast awards ceremony. The competition called for a film in the style of French New Wave, with an “Out of My League” theme, featuring the song They’re Outnumbered by Dignan.

Prohibition 2020 takes place in the not-too-distant future in San Francisco, where strict prohibition laws are being enforced. David’s hobby is making moonshine whiskey in his garage, and he meets a well-connected wine dealer that he wants to impress.

The entire project was done in about seven weeks. The first two weeks after getting the contest requirements were spent watching and learning about French New Wave films (the commentary track on Breathless is magnificent). Script planning took a week or so, and most of the principal photography was done in a weekend. A week-long vacation to Portland gave me a break in the middle. Finally, editing and filling in the gaps took every bit of free time and every ounce of energy I had for the last three weeks. More behind-the-scenes action will be available soon.

The other entries are both impressively well made, and definitely worth watching. From what we heard, our use of French New Wave elements is what set us apart. Prohibition 2020 and all the other finalist videos are available at the Dell Lounge website (http://www.delllounge.com/screens/for/).

Huge thanks again to everyone who helped out, and to everyone who encouraged us along the way!

[The film would normally be embedded here, but it's currently only viewable over-compressed and in the wrong aspect ratio at the competition site.]

After three rounds of voting and judging, we became one of three finalist groups eligible for the grand prize, which will be awarded for the best micro-budget twenty minute short produced before the August deadline. We’ve won money, a computer, and a trip to the Telluride Film Festival. Each team will also track its progress somewhere on the Dell Lounge website.

Marisa’s cooking show concept came from her deep appreciation for food and cooking shows like Good Eats and No Reservations. I had the script by Thursday, and spent evenings shopping for props. On Saturday Matt hot-glued fishing line to mini-squash while Nick and I injected food coloring into eggs. Finally, we had to negotiate with the Union of Flying Saucer Operators to get the heat ray to show up on schedule.

Editing took all the way to the deadline. The music was my piano version of the competition song. I can’t play piano, so it’s really a franken-recording of a few notes at a time, all glued together. Since it was so close to the deadline, the drum pad accompaniment was recorded in a single ad-lib take.

Enormous thanks to everyone involved, but you’re not off the hook yet. Our next short film is due August 20th!

For movies on my projector? I save as many of those bits as possible. I try to keep DVDs in full MPEG-2 resolution on my hard drive now that terabytes are becoming affordable. This also preserves all the menus, special features, and audio tracks.

If I really need to shrink a DVD (to fit a DVD-9 onto a cheap DVD-5 for example), then I don’t transcode with DVDShrink, I re-code with DVDRebuilder. One of my better software purchases was a license for DVDRebuilderPro. If you don’t vote with your wallet like Jeff encourages, then there’s a free version you can use. I’d also encourage you to visit Hank315’s tip jar, he wrote HC Encoder, the under-the-hood powerhouse responsible for the quality of DVDRebuilder’s output.

Once you start trying to be a pixel purist, you can set up FFDshow to do magnificent up-scaling.

As for the multi-core processor debate, I’m firmly planted in the “people don’t need more cores (yet)” camp. The whole concept reminds me too much of razor blades. But, I still own a quad-core because my HTPC’s primary activities are up-scaling and video editing.

Hey, did anyone else notice that this is Jeff’s 15th post according to the archive ID?

In Livermore on April 17th, we entered the California Independent Film Festival’s 24-hour Iron Filmmaker competition. The TV show Iron Chef is the competition’s namesake. In Iron Chef a secret ingredient is revealed, and cooks compete to see who can make better culinary creations with the ingredient. In Iron Filmmaker the secret ingredients are things that need to be in contestant’s film creations.

I suspect there wasn’t enough communication between the sponsor and the festival representatives. Instead of a themed competition, we were told to make a Carl’s Jr. commercial. The sponsor didn’t make the proper connection to Iron Chef, and in the printed rules they even called the event the “Ironman Film Contest”. The prizes were great for encouraging first-time filmmakers, but were at least an order of magnitude less than usual for an advertisement competition. The Contra Costa Times covered the kick-off (EDIT: but since put the article behind a pay-wall).

I wanted to make a film, I wanted to be creative in the spirit of the competition, and I wanted to make it impossible to use our work as a promotion. I feel sorry for the people who paid to watch – under normal circumstances they would’ve been paid for being in the focus group and watching commercial after commercial.

Here’s our entry, which played at about slot 22 of 24:

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We got the biggest laughs, and the biggest applause, and somehow didn’t place in the top three. There was a scary moment when they stopped the film after the first segment and had to re-start it. The momentum was lost, but it didn’t really matter in the end.

After work, Aaron went grocery shopping while I drove Nick around town to gather footage before sunset. We filmed in Aaron’s kitchen and wrapped up within a couple hours. Marisa kept me caffeinated while I edited all night long. I made it out the door just in time for the traffic jam on the freeway. The back-roads were slow, but I made the submission deadline.

Thanks again to everyone who helped out. I had a great time in spite of the flawed premise, and am proud of what we accomplished.

That’s my homemade 1080p projector. This is the second DIY projector I’ve built.

I destroyed the first projector in 2005 when I took it to Martin’s to watch his relative’s film Cypher, which had just been released. The first projector was a modified overhead – the kind your teacher put transparencies on. When I retired it, I decided to go overboard and buy all the parts to do a 1080p build from scratch. The parts promptly arrived and sat in their boxes for a couple years, until I got around to construction last summer.

The principle is pretty simple. A really bright light, a stripped down computer LCD, and some lenses.

I’ll be completing the as-built write-up in the coming weeks – DIY Projector

Removed this guy from most of the plane shots.

One of my goals for Top Gun was to get familiar with doing basic special effects and compositing in After Effects. I had to remove the sticks from every plane butt, and had to remove myself from wider shots. It was lots of keyframed rotoscoping, and color balancing for the fill – I got to know www.creativecow.net very well. On my borrowed camera, lack of manual controls for aperture and white balance gave me four times the work I would otherwise have had.

Highway through the garage zone.

The green-screen shots use my home-built (PVC + sheets) backdrop. The green for the pilot shots was so blown out (bright) that keying out the background took a luma key first, and then a chroma key for whatever green was left. The “sparkle” from Maverick’s helmet is actually the luma key breaking through, but I didn’t have the time or motivation to tune it up.

I added digital clouds to some shots to try and give a sense of depth and speed. The radar shots are based on an online radar tutorial, and the missile lock overlays were manually animated to follow the planes. What a learning curve! I learned painful lessons that I’ll go out of my way to keep from having to learn again.

Thanks again to everyone involved. You make me happy.

Work on Top Gun started with building two plastic F-14 models. I embedded two LED’s into one of the models so I could light up the afterburners. I also found two same-size die-cast MiG-28 models at the hobby store. All the planes were hot-glued to sticks for flying around (scchheewwwwwwww!).

The missile shots are mini model rockets painted gray and filmed at the park. Some local kids even helped do a countdown to blast-off (“FWEEE! TWO! ONE!”). The shots launched at the camera were the best. I had no control over rocket flight paths, and knew I’d pay for it if I actually managed to hit the cameras. It reminded me of the time in college I fired a little multi-engine rocket that tore itself to pieces and corkscrewed after my mom and little sister – good times.

Model plane, glued to a stick, taped to a picnic table, camera sideways, and a mini rocket launcher at the correct distance to match the model scale.

The pilot helmets were all photoshop projects printed to paper, cut out, and stuck to a snowboarding helmet with two-sided tape. They looked a lot cleaner than I meant them to in the filming. My car’s passenger seat is the best all-black, close-quarters environment I have, so it makes a great cockpit. Most pilots were filmed in Aaron’s garage in front of my homemade green screen – I forgot to schedule no rain for the weekend.

Nick is testing out my helmet. Jester didn’t make the final cut.

The picture Goose actually took in the “watch the birdie” scene.

I tried my hand at storyboarding, and the drawings all look like I tried my foot at storyboarding. They were the crudest storyboards you can imagine, but Stu assured me in the DV Rebel’s Guide that they don’t have to be high art. They helped me get the scenes I needed, and helped organize eye lines and action lines, which were actually complicated during the dogfights.

“No plan extends beyond the first shot.”
- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (Well, he said something similar)

We never got an aircraft carrier, even though one is parked in Alameda. No motorcycle ride. No plane ejection. We didn’t finish a lot that was in the production plan. I fumbled that plan into Swiss cheese, but I got enough to tell the story.

Read Part 3 - Special Effects

We set our sights on Top Gun, filming over three weekends. Jets and missiles (mini model rockets) were filmed in the park over one weekend, acting scenes over the next weekend, and pilots in the cockpit with voice-overs on the third. Post-production took every free hour I had for weeks, and an exceptionally patient Marisa to put up with the house in “project mode” the whole time.

Competition Description:
Fighter pilots don’t need a back story… at least not much of a story. We’d rather watch the dogfights.

(Embedded flash video)

Thanks to the cast, and congratulations on the final product. This was even more fun than I expected, and the results are better than I’d hoped for.

Read Part 2 - Filming

It turns out editing is not trivial. I spent half of the editing time getting video onto the computer, and the rest of the time learning from online beginner’s tutorials. Miraculously I got film from each part of the script into sequence, burned to a DVD, and delivered - with 5 minutes to spare. After catching up on sleep, I resolved to let it go and be more prepared next time - I don’t need another long-term project. BUT… I figured I could use the film to get more familiar with the editing tools, so I made this one more version based on the original footage.

(Embedded flash video)

The competition was part of a Film Noir program at the library, and most entries were detective noir, which apparently means black-and-white, big-band music, and borrowed Naked Gun lines. I wanted to cram one solid emotion into 6 minutes, skimping on explanation wherever possible. It didn’t work out quite like I’d hoped, but I think someday I’ll pull off a good scene.

We shot on 2 cameras, and making colors match takes genuine magic. Reading Stu Maschwitz’s DV Rebel’s Guide (which I first heard about on Marc Andreessen’s blog), I learned that people who correct color, and people who compile audio are 2 incredibly important and well-paid groups. Unfortunately I read Stu’s book after the competition, so the submitted film had no color correction or audio work done on it. This version is still a bit off, but my magic wand is on backorder, so this is as good as it gets.

The puppets were a joke at the audience’s expense. I wanted to get them hoping it would end before it even got started, so it’s a couple long stretches of dialog. I wanted it to feel like a couple rambunctious teens were making “grown-up” drinking jokes with dad’s camera. I spotted no fewer than 3 people in the screening turn to their friends in exasperation as it was unwinding - success!

Video is nothing near as forgiving as still photography. It’s obvious when you re-size or re-frame a shot because of the low resolutions. I had to re-frame often, and I cringe at the results each time.

I’ll end with a huge thanks to my cast and crew who worked way past bedtime for the sake of art, and to Penny Johnson of the Pleasanton library for putting on such an awesome program.

Marisa and I bought a pumpkin with hopes that we wouldn’t let it rot in the garage like the two from last year. She wanted Bunnicula on it, so I spent almost all my free time Sunday making the stencil from a sketch she found online. I gave up twice while working on it and tried to find an alternative. I didn’t like the way it was turning out, and my Photoshop projects always take many more hours than I expect. Out of sheer stubbornness, I finished the stencil and hung it on the fridge like I would a hand-shaped construction paper turkey.

Sometime tonight while the Sunday crossword was kicking our combined ass, the rest of my carnitas burrito disappeared from the table. I took it as a sign that dinner was over, so we started on the pumpkin. A couple hours and two cramped, orange hands later, and Marisa has her Bunnicula Jack-O-Lantern and a big smile.

I’ve got boxes of full-size candy bars to hand out, and I’m contemplating setting up the projector outside and playing a kid-scary movie while wearing a big rubber mask. We’re all set for Halloween.