When Should You Hire The Editor?
You only have to look at the filmmaking forums where people post expenses-only jobs to see how many filmmakers look for an Editor to cut their short only after they’ve finished shooting.
As I’ve mentioned on here before, I still believe that the edit suite is a great place to learn how to be a filmmaker, and any editor who has cut a few shorts can be a valuable aid to an inexperienced short film director. Working on shorts by new directors, you also see the same basic mistakes made again and again, so as a director, surely having someone involved who can make up for your own lack of experience is a no-brainer.
Because the work of pretty much everyone involved in the earlier stages of the production is funnelled through the editor, the editor gets the almost unique opportunity to analyse the successes and failures of many of the people involved in the film. A big part of an editor’s job is to refine the structure of the film, get the beats in the right order, and get all the narrative and dramatic elements in the right places, which means that in many ways, they act like a Script Editor.
So, if one of an editor’s key jobs is to help get the structural fundamentals of the film right, then why not let them help you do that before you shoot, rather than waiting till after?
Link of the Week: Script Editors
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Tags: Directing, Director, Editing, Editor, Film, Short Film
Animated Shorts from a Box
I’ve not talked much about how we actually made Concerning Heaven and Hell, so I’m going to get a bit technical this time and explain how we did it. I’m hardly the first person to highlight how much filmmaking technology has changed in recent years, and I’m not exactly unaware of it working in digital post-production, but if you take a step back, then it is pretty astonishing what you can now achieve for very little money (relatively speaking).
Aside from initial character and background sketches, everything on the film was done on with a computer. We essentially went all the way from the second step of the process to the film being available to people from almost anywhere in the world, without leaving the digital domain. In addition, aside from a couple of cd-r’s for sending dialogue recordings and sound mixes (which could have been sent over the internet), we didn’t have to create any hardcopies. While Mark was animating the film, we were exporting SD clips from Anime Studio Pro and cutting them in Final Cut, only exporting HD when we did the final HD master (1920×1080 pixels and about 12GB for 60 seconds uncompressed). The final deliverables were submitted on a data DVD as Quicktime and avi, but could have been uploaded straight to the site.
If we were buying from scratch all the kit we needed to make the film, I reckon you could get everything you need to make an animated short for less than £2000, and not just any short, an HD short too. Mark used Anime Studio Pro (£150) on a Dell laptop with a Wacom graphics tablet (£200) and a couple of freeware programmes. It was cut on a MacBook (£700) running Final Cut (£700 if you want HD, £100 if you’re happy with SD) , but you can use Anime Studio Pro on a Mac so you don’t even need a PC. We hired a studio to record the dialogue and used MudShark’s facilities for the sound mix and music, but with a decent mic, Soundtrack (part of Final Cut Studio), and a mix of programmes like GarageBand, you could probably do all the audio to a reasonable level on one machine, which means that you could animate, cut and mix the whole thing on a Mac for about £2000. Going back 20 or 30 years, it would cost you several £k’s to buy one piece of kit that would do just one job!
However, if you think that’s amazing, then just wait till you hear about some of the ways people are using digital technology when they’re not having to operate within the confines of a 100 year-old medium.
Link of the Week 1: Ralph Bakshi
Link of the Week 2: Concerning Heaven and Hell
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Tags: 60 second, animated, animation, commission, Concerning Heaven and Hell, dialogue, Editing, Film, Filmmaking, Short, Short Film, Short Films
Well, not only is the film finished, but it’s up online for a public vote. You can see it if you follow this link, and hopefully, you’ll like it enough to vote for it. At some point in the future, after it’s gone through a round of festival submissions (and hopefully been accepted into a few) we’ll no doubt put a much higher quality version up online somewhere.
The final week was actually fairly stress-free. I’d been aiming to get everything finished a couple of days before the deadline so that we had an extra day in case anything went wrong, and fortunately things went fine. We finished the picture cut of the film over the weekend, sent that to MudShark who were doing the sound mix and the music, and they spent the next couple of days working on that and sending us an mp3 to sync up to the picture and review in the evenings. Mark went down to their office for a couple of hours on the Wednesday afternoon, and in the evening we attached final sound to final picture, did a little bit of a grade, created the delivery versions we needed, and dropped the discs off at the Producer’s on the way out. A couple of colleagues who were working on two of the other shorts on the scheme ended up doing things a little more last-minute, but I was smugly finished with plenty of time to spare. Plenty to be said for sorting out a schedule and sticking to it.
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Tags: 60 second, animated, animation, commission, Concerning Heaven and Hell, Editing, Film, Filmmaking, Short, Short Film, Short Films
Tweaks
Less than a week left before the delivery date but not a huge amount left to do. Aside from the sound mix, we’re just tweaking at the moment. The first major pass on all the final shots was finished early in the week, so we’ve spent the past few days with Mark working through a daily list of tweaks, then I add the new versions of any altered shots and we review the whole film before drawing a up a list of changes to make the following day. They’re mostly just simple changes, altering the pace of a particular shot, or trying a new shot order. The ending has taken a little more work, as it often does, although we think we have it cracked now. For a while I thought we might need to add another shot onto the end as I wasn’t sure if the ending we had felt like “an ending”. But now that we’ve got the preceding shots working (including cutting to the second character earlier in order to maintain the ending’s pace), an extra shot on the end seems unnecessary.
The guys who are doing the sound mix and music have all the dialogue takes and a 95% complete version of the picture. We’ll be locking picture over the weekend and sending them the locked picture (which means that we can’t really make any more changes to picture after the weekend) on Sunday night, with the intention being to get the sound finished on Wednesday so that I can online and encode it on Wednesday night. The delivery date is Friday, but I’ve put Thursday in as an extra day in case something goes wrong. I’m sure we won’t need that though.
Wikipedia Article of the Week: Online Editing
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Tags: 60 second, animated, animation, commission, Concerning Heaven and Hell, dialogue, Editing, Film, Filmmaking, Short, Short Film, Short Films
Slow and Steady Progress
Character Design Sketches
Although the budget this scheme provides is pretty tight, for an animation it’s extremely stretched. You can shoot a live-action 60 second short in half a day, and cut it in perhaps a couple more, but for an animation, there is far more work involved. As every element within a shot has to be created from scratch, as well as being animated in a convincing and realistic way, I think Mark will probably be spending in the region of 30+ days working on it.
Progress is being made though, with Mark getting through roughly one shot a day. The deadline is on March 6th, giving us three weeks from this coming Friday. My main concern at the moment is whether or not we have enough time between completing the first pass on the animation, and having to lock picture for the sound, to be able to tweak and refine the film as much as we need to. We’re making changes as we go along, dropping a little bit of dialogue, removing a pregnant pause, but only when we get all the shots put together will we be able to make a proper judgement on exactly what needs tweaking. At the moment it looks like we might go a little over the 60 seconds first time around, so we’ll need to trim it in the right places to keep the pace and rhythm feeling right.
Site of the Week: Animation World Network. Apparently this is the best place for anything animation-related on the internet.
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Tags: Concerning Heaven and Hell, Film, Short Film
Selecting The Dialogue Takes
We’ve spent the last few days (or at least part of those days), sorting through the dialogue takes from last week. Although there are only a few lines in the film, recording dialogue in a studio is much faster and more flexible than having a whole crew on set, so it’s far simpler to get multiple takes, try different variations and so on. All that means plenty of material to listen through, even from a short recording session, and as ever with making a film, sorting through this material means making lots of decisions. The most subtle of changes in tone or pace of the line can result in a dramatic difference in the meaning, so choosing the right take is very important.
One thing that makes dialogue in an animation a little easier than live-action is the fact that you’re only dealing with audio, so you can chop it up and piece it back together without worrying about affecting the picture. For instance, we’ve assembled one section of dialogue from 4 pieces, taken from 3 different takes, which would probably be impossible in a live-action drama.
Creating the final animation also began in earnest this week. Mark’s spent the time between completing the animatic and now finalising the look of the characters and the backgrounds; now that the dialogue takes have been chosen, he’s begun work on creating the final shots. This involves several steps, but I’ll explain them another day, once I understand exactly what’s involved.
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Tags: 60 second, animated, animation, commission, Concerning Heaven and Hell, dialogue, Editing, Film, Filmmaking, Short, Short Film, Short Films
Recording The Dialogue
Mark and Jack, the film’s Producer, took a trip down to London on Wednesday to record the dialogue with the film’s two actors, Eiji Kusuhara (left) and Masashi Fujimoto, who are probably best known for their work on Channel 4’s Banzai, but who have lent their acting and vocal skills to all sorts of things, including features, shorts, commercials, cartoons, computer games and opera. Obviously, as it’s a 60-second film, there’s not too much dialogue, so the recording was simple enough, just an hour spent at Aumeta, a little studio in South London. The dialogue is recorded before the animation is completed for the simple reason that the animation is to a certain degree built around the dialogue, with lip-syncing of the character’s mouth movements obviously requiring recorded dialogue. But now we have this stage complete, once the preferred takes have been chosen the animation will be able to start in earnest.
The rest of the sound is also on the go, with Newcastle’s own MudShark Audio beginning work on building the film’s soundscape and music. They’re going to be developing ideas alongside the animation, partly because they can’t do a final mix until the animation is complete (and we haven’t got time to do one after the other), and partly because we hope that each stage will inspire ideas in the others, with audio ideas feeding back into the visuals and vice versa.
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Tags: 60 second, animated, animation, commission, Concerning Heaven and Hell, Editing, fcp, Film, Filmmaking, japanese, monk, samurai, Short, Short Film
60 Second Short
Preliminary Background Sketch
My brother’s been commissioned to make an animated 60 second short, so I’ve been working on that recently, both as the Editor, and as a supplier of more general filmmaking advice.
This is the first time I’ve worked on an animated film, so we’re going through a very different process to the one I’m used to. Last week we completed the Animatic, which is an animated storyboard, used to judge timings so that you’re not animating frames, or even shots, that you’re not going to need. In many ways, the way animated films are made makes more sense than the process for live-action. Whereas with live-action you finish shooting having, at the most, only seen rushes or roughly assembled scenes, with animation you can constantly tweak the “final” version as you’re working, adding completely new shots or scenes without having to pay to re-assemble a large crew.
The thing I’ve found difficult about the animatic is that, even when some of the shots are created from 2 or 3 images to illustrate movement, the shots can feel very static, which means that you’re cutting static images, something that’s very different to cutting moving images. I guess the solution to that is to increase the amount of animation in the shots, but then you’re doing the extra work on something that’s basically just a storyboard. So the approach we’re going to take is to start work on the final animation earlier than we might do if we had a little more experience making animated films, using versions of the final animation, rather than a storyboard or animatic, to judge if we’re heading in the right direction. Really, this is the opposite to live-action, where if you’re a first time filmmaker, it’s best to plan your shoot as much as possible, because you’re probably going to be overwhelmed when you’re shooting and won’t have the headspace to make clear, spur of the moment decisions.
Wikipedia Article of the Week: Animation (well, what else did you expect?)
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Tags: 60 second, animated, animation, commission, Concerning Heaven and Hell, Editing, fcp, Film, Filmmaking, japanese, monk, samurai, Short, Short Film
BAFTA Screening
Litterpicker, the UK Film Council funded short I cut last summer, is going to be part of a four-film screening at BAFTA HQ in London next week. I don’t know who the attendees’ are, I heard “industry guests” from one source, and “the public” from another, but anything that gets people to sit down in front of a short is a positive thing.
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Tags: Editing, Film, Litterpicker, Short Film, UK Film Council
My Kingdom For A Script
Like most people interested in becoming a filmmaker, I spent some time trying to write scripts, but, like most, it eventually dawned on me that I wasn’t quite cut out for it. While never exactly thinking that I was doing a good job, I did at least hope that I would eventually get good enough. It seems that most writers hate the majority of the process of writing, but I don’t find the process of writing particularly conducive to creativity. The most prevalent approach in this country seems to be in having a lone writer, probably stemming from our strong literary and theatrical histories, but I find it incredibly difficult to write on my own. The time I was at my most productive was always immediately after receiving feedback. For the first few days, I was motivated and inspired, but by the end of the week, my work-rate would tail off dramatically, and the script would lie untouched for the next few weeks or months, until I made a few quick changes to prepare it for another round of feedback. So I eventually decided that writing on my own was a deadend. However, this left me with a problem. If I wasn’t going to be writing scripts for me to direct, who would be?
In all honesty, living and working in “the regions” doesn’t give you the best access to the cream of the talent, even the developing talent. Of all the work I’ve seen by filmmakers up here, there are only a handful of writers whose stuff has really impressed me, and most of them already have firm working relationships with directors, or are writer-directors. So I’m still on the lookout for writers who I could potentially work with.
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Tags: Directing, Film, Filmmaking, Short Film, Short Films
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