What are you working on today? Community Blog

Big or small! On a film shoot? Writing? Whatever!

If you do something for your film, even something small, every day, it WILL get made! Eventually. ;) Let this blog help you.

Don't procrastinate! Even something as small as proofreading or shopping for batteries counts.

So what are YOU working on today? Post below! And if the answer is nothing, think of something!

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Film Production: On Set of 'Pendant'" by vancouverfilmschool is licensed under CC BY 2.0
 
I love the film look, but i'ts not to fake people into thinking this is 35mm. I just think this gives my image pleasing dept and brings the best out of its colour's. This is the first time that I'm excited with the results of my a6300. I was thinking it was the lack of dynamic range of camera or its 8 bit color space, but perhaps y I did not know how to expose Slog 2 and how to grade it. The best way to make something look like 16mm or 35mm is to shoot it on 16mm or 35mm. But that is a very expensive hobby. I cant afford that and would rather invest in some new lenses or a Zoom Recorder.
 
I never considered what an AI film look would be capable of. That is very exciting to consider.

We could have a long and wonderful conversation on "what film is" to cinema sometime...
 
Nice shot of the bees. Everything looks good. I'm kind of surprised that it's shot on a 16 prime, it doesn't look that wide in most shots. Maybe I'm just so used to the 2.4:1 that it's thrown off my perspective. Still, you usually get a bit more lens distortion on a 16. Did you crop or zoom anything in post? You must have been really close for some of those shots.
 
THX man. The lens is an E mount. So its more of a 24.5mm if compared to full frame. I did some cropping to help composition and in some shots a bit of warp stabilisation.
 
I like what you are achieving. Some of the coloring even has the old home movie look, like super-8, but it has the 16mm/35mm clarity. I bet with a film grain/scratch plugin it would look really cool. But I would never recommend that for a movie, but for a music video it would look awesome.
 
I like what you are achieving. Some of the coloring even has the old home movie look, like super-8, but it has the 16mm/35mm clarity. I bet with a film grain/scratch plugin it would look really cool. But I would never recommend that for a movie, but for a music video it would look awesome.
Would be interesting to combine it with some Split Screen effects.
 
What am I working on? I would hardly call it working, but I have two things I keep re-reading, trying to imagine I am someone else, to try to determine if any of this is any good, and, along the way, polishing, fixing bits that don't yet seem right.

One is a TV thing, which seems like fan fiction but which is, to me, more. Writing it, I imagined its reader as one guy, the original writer of the TV show whose stuff I am putzing around with. I know him well enough to be able to imagine him reading it and getting a kick out of it, and being able to appreciate its, if nothing else, fluency. The thing is done, a pilot of fifty or so pages, (done in that it has a beginning a middle and an end) and now I think that its purpose, to be read by this one guy, is assinine. I can't imagine any way he might read it, and, worse, it could easily be embarrassing junk. Anyway.

The other is an adaptation, questions about which prompted me to join this forum in the first place. I still have done nothing with it.

I sometimes think about paying someone, in one of those script reading services, to look at this stuff, but it's hard to imagine that any opinion, without knowing the reader, without having read the reader, would mean anything to me.

I have also been doing research, making notes, and outlining scenes for a movie script. I have it mostly blocked out, but I cant get any real writing started. It seems beyond me. Like this early scene:

1715, London. A young German prince is on tail end of his Grand Tour. He travels with a retinue, a chaperone, a guy who's job is to keep his travel journal, and some servants. In London he admires architecture, visits coffee houses, cruises book stores, (picking up the latest from Isaac Newton) and attends--his real love, his real passion--the opera, where he meets and speaks with his countryman, George Frideric Handel, about music, and about the court orchestra he is building back at home. He hears, from Handel, that the famed Berlin court Kapelle is disbanding, for financial reasons (which is one reason Handel loves London, there is plenty of patronage) and that the players may be looking for a job. The Prince, later, will scoop them up, and will find himself possessing, in his little backwater principality, an orchestra of unequaled talent.

So how do I dramatize this bit of character development, introduction, and exposition? I have no freaking idea. Anyway.

Anyway. What am I working on? My solitaire game on the ipad. Mindless diversion. I wake each day from dreams of friends, family, females, into a dull world of dreary tasks. I make a coffee. I sit and stare, on the far side of uselessness, my real task--to try, somehow, to become a viable human being--deferred, on the far side of possibility.

Yipe. Sorry. Anyway.
 
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So how do I dramatize this bit of character development, introduction, and exposition? I have no freaking idea. Anyway.
For the nickel that it's (not) worth -
I immediately saw the prince meeting Handel not at the opera itself, but at the after-party. Everyone's drinking, flirting, having a damn good time - and suddenly the prince finds himself face to face with the guy whose music has turned him on for the past ten years. Doing a serious fan boy thing, he pitches his project in the middle of the party, and realizes his timing may be stunningly perfect. Kind of a non-romantic meet cute.

Just a thought.... :)
 
For once (in a long time) I am (sort of) working on something film-related. In my head, at least. Once again, the fruit of a great few days at a festival that isn't too highly organised around acts and events, leaving great opportunities for inspiration and improvisation ... but also in respect of its own practical needs. I came up with the idea of shooting/publishing a set of three very short marketing clips, perhaps to tack onto a proper "long" short based on the same theme, for which I've had an outline sitting in a file untouched for a couple of years.

But there's a problem, and that deserves a thread of its own ... only not today, coz I've been working 20-hour days since Thursday! So first: :sleep:
 
For the nickel that it's (not) worth -
I immediately saw the prince meeting Handel not at the opera itself, but at the after-party. Everyone's drinking, flirting, having a damn good time - and suddenly the prince finds himself face to face with the guy whose music has turned him on for the past ten years. Doing a serious fan boy thing, he pitches his project in the middle of the party, and realizes his timing may be stunningly perfect. Kind of a non-romantic meet cute.

Just a thought.... :)
Ms. m. Thanks for taking the time to think about it, and I always find your cents valuable :) When I read your bit, I immediately saw that this was the way in, a personal moment between the Prince and Handel. Instead of worrying about all the exposition, the setting, and about how to start to establish the unique baroque aesthetic that would inform the thing, I saw the Prince hesitantly trying to recruit the great Handel, by all accounts a forbidding figure, to lead his little Kapelle. The idea is laughabley dismissed, but the Prince is in no way offended, and Handel, speaking to him, begins to see our prince in a new light--the Prince not only loves music, but, surprisingly, somewhat understands it, a tribute his eventual Kapellemeister (who works out pretty well) will famously echo. Thanks
 
Anyway. What am I working on? My solitaire game on the ipad. Mindless diversion. I wake each day from dreams of friends, family, females, into a dull world of dreary tasks. I make a coffee. I sit and stare, on the far side of uselessness, my real task--to try, somehow, to become a viable human being--deferred, on the far side of possibility.

Yipe. Sorry. Anyway.

Maybe you should write a Walter Mitty type thing. One can only imagine that the author of the original felt the same way you do, and found a creative way not only to communicate his dull reality with the world, but to share the unseen aspects of his fun loving psyche in a relatable way that entertained and amused the audience.

If you've never seen it, I would say that the original is a better version of the remake.
 
Today I'm working on something fairly niche. I'm running tests to see what kind of foley production works well to accentuate mobile light sources.

I'm playing various different samples as instruments, chimes, generators powering down, doppler effect recordings, etc. The standout so far is this one at 43 seconds in.

 
Maybe you should write a Walter Mitty type thing. One can only imagine that the author of the original felt the same way you do, and found a creative way not only to communicate his dull reality with the world, but to share the unseen aspects of his fun loving psyche in a relatable way that entertained and amused the audience.

If you've never seen it, I would say that the original is a better version of the remake.
I remember reading the Thurber story and liking it, and I thought i remembered liking the movie, the old one, as a kid, but somehow I thought it was with Don Knotts, not Danny Kaye. Maybe I was thinking about the fish one . Anyway, I can't quite get my head around the idea, although i appreciate any input. I think I am still emerging from isolation, and feel an aversion to any kind of fantasy life. My secret life, I think, is just, I think, words.

And, it's such, to me, an odd suggestion, I'm wondering if it's sarcasm, especially the "fun loving psyche," bit, lol. If so, it's fine; actually it's pretty good. And I don't know why I am being confessional in this little corner of the internet. I think I just like my voice, some times, regardless of the topic. Oh well.
 
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Today I am working on nothing, but there is a good reason for that.

Yesterday, I broke a lifetime record. 72,115 frames of animation sent to the renderer in a single day. That's manual cg footage just like all the demos I post. 50 minutes raw output in a day. The plan was always to snowball and orchestrate internal synergies, but at this point I'm bottlenecked. It will take me a week to render and process yesterday's footage.

For contrast, in 2017 I could probably put out 30 seconds on a good day, and yesterday it's 50 minutes. That was just 1 14 hour shift working non stop with no issues. I would work again today, but the computers are overloaded processing the footage. Time to go to work on IvonV's festival pitches.

I would post frames once in a while, but they are 7mb per frame, and the site kicks the images during upload.
 
I'm working on last years film, christmas fire.
in the title i replaced the word 'fire' with 'hellfire' and the title is better now and works in search engines.

last years release was rushed, editing til dec 17th then just had to put it out there for christmas.

and the sound was shockingly neglected lol there isn't even an ambient track in the opening scene :shocked:
so im putting time into the edit now, so far i've made a few notable improvements.

i really hate the gun sounds in the opening scene too.. such a harsh unpleasant noise
 
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