New Movie “Make ‘em Squirm - The Sharkbiter Way” Now On-line

I’ve posted my new video, Make ‘em Squirm - The Sharkbiter Way, on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-9y-Bf6abU

An interview with Orville Sharkbiter about his new book Make 'em Squirm: The Sharkbiter Way. Orville Sharkbiter is a very successful man, but I wouldn’t want to work for him.

Please have a look at it, and if you know anyone who may appreciate it, pass it along to them.

This movie is quite different from what I’ve done in the past.

I created this video with Xtranormal Desktop, http://www.xtranormal.com/, a program that allows users to create animated movies quite easily. I wanted to test the program to see if I could use it to plan my live action movies. I am very happy with the result.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

New Movie “Make ‘em Squirm - The Sharkbiter Way” Almost Ready

My new movie, Make ‘em Squirm - The Sharkbiter Way is almost ready to go. The project progressed well this week. I went through several revisions of the dialogue and action. Each time I needed to make fewer and fewer changes. That was a good sign. As a final touch, I added some music and titles.

For a while now, I’ve wondered if I really should do this film. It is not like what I’ve done in the past. I worried that maybe I went too far with the idea. I posted a preliminary version on-line and asked a few people review it. Two people got back to me so far and both thought it was good.

I did most of the work on the movie in Xtranormal Desktop, but I added the titles in Premiere Pro. Xtranormal takes a long time to render the movie: nearly two hours for a nine-minute movie. I had a couple minor changes I wanted to make near the beginning of the movie, but didn’t want to re-render the whole movie. Instead, I created a second, shorter, movie with just the section I wanted to change. Then I cut it into the movie.

The time it takes to render a movie is a problem. I have to redo the whole movie to see the effect of some minor changes. Maybe I need to get a newer, faster computer. I bought the one I have back in 2007, so it is almost five years old. Ancient in computer years.

Even with a faster computer, I think it makes sense to work on the movie in shorter chunks and then stitch them together. This movie is a single scene, but most movies have scenes that run two to three minutes. That is a more manageable piece of work.

I wanted to add a little music at the opening and closing of the film. I found a website where you can download music that is in the public domain http://www.musopen.org. I found a Bela Bartok piece, Roumanian Dance #1 that I liked. The site says that all the music is free to anyone who wants to use it, even if it is in a for profit movie. Bela Bartok’s music from this period are in the public domain. The person who performed and uploaded the music says that his recording is public domain as well. All the same, I want to contact him and make sure that he is OK with the way I used it. I haven’t managed to contact him yet.

Update 2012 May 31: The musician agreed to let me use his music.

I have a couple of other changes I want to make before I’m ready to release it. When I’m done, I’ll post it on YouTube. I've signed up for the revenue sharing program on YouTube. The Xtranormal licence allows that. If I want to sell it though, I need to get a commercial licence. That is fairly expensive, compared to what I’ve paid so far. I may do that when I think I can make the money back.

I should post the final version by the end of the week. If you would like to see the preliminary version and give me some feedback, please get in touch.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“Sharkbiter” File Conversions 2012 May 20

I made a little progress on my Sharkbiter video this week. It has taken longer than I’d hoped. There are far too many things to distract me. I got a new version done, but I’ll need to do at least one revision before I’m done. I’ve done five so far.

I made some substantial changes to the script for the latest version. I also did more with the facial expressions and gestures. I think they make the video more interesting to watch.

The video takes nearly an hour to render, so it is hard to check up on minor changes. I need to create the whole thing before I can see what effect any changes have. The final video comes in at about 9 minutes.

Another problem I’ve run into is that since I need to make work with the whole video at once, I need to keep good notes of what changes I make. The first time I did that, I had to watch the video though a couple of times and modify my script to match. The program doesn’t allow you to output the text as a script.

However, I found out that I could open up the data file the program uses, access the text directly, and transfer it to my script-writing program (Celtx) without much difficulty.

The dialogue is in the .state file, which is actually a compressed .zip file with several files that contain the information for the video. I renamed the .state file as a .zip file and opened it up with Winzip. One of the files inside, document.xml, contains the dialogue.

I opened document.xml in Excel and deleted all the items except the character names and dialogue. Next, I changed the xml code to match the html codes used in the Celtx file. I think I could set up an xml style to do that instead.

The Celtx file, like the .state file, is a compressed .zip file. Two files contain two different versions of the script. script-TF1.html has an older version and script-TF1-1.html contains the most recent version. I just cut and pasted the edited dialogue I got from the document.xml file. Finally I rezipped the file and renamed it.

This approach seemed to work fine. I could open the new file in Celtx and it looked OK. I’m sure that there are some nuances to the files that I haven’t picked up on. I’m sure I’ll find out about them later. I think the conversion could be done the other way too.

If you’ve found an easier way to do this, let me know about it.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“Sharkbiter” Update 2012 May 13

After a week or so on other projects, I got back to work on the Sharkbiter video I did with Xtranormal.

When I left off, I had created several versions of the video from different angles. This week I reviewed them in detail. I printed a copy of the script and made notes as I watched.

The first thing I looked for was pronunciation problems. A common problem with artificial voices is that they have trouble with some words. I tried to fix those with changes to the spelling. I wasn’t very successful with that. Other times I rewrote the line to avoid the problem word. Strangely enough, I found that while one voice would have trouble with a word, the other one wouldn’t. In a few cases, I could shift the phrase from one character to the other.

My next goal was to revise the script. I found that it really helped to watch the video. It made it much easier to spot problems with the dialogue. So much so, that I think I’d like to use the program with all my script writing. I’m not sure exactly why it helps. In the past, I’ve found text to voice software was useful when proofreading.

Sometimes I find it difficult to rewrite a script, but this time it was much easier. Often I’m reluctant to make changes. After I watched the video, I think it was easier to decide that the dialogue needed to change.

A third goal was to revise the expressions and gestures. Xtranormal allows you to make the character to express some emotion and make some gestures. There are only six facial expressions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise), which does limit you. There are almost 80 gestures, which gives me a little more flexibility.

The facial expressions allow you to change the intensity of the emotion. I found that most of the time I set the intensity too high and needed to dial them back. The gestures don’t allow you to change the intensity, although sometimes I was able to substitute a less intense gesture.

I also found I needed to change the timing of gestures and expressions. This is a bit of a trial and error process. I expect that after more experience I should be able to get it right the first time.

In the previous version, I had one camera angle for the whole video. This time I put in over the shoulder shots and close ups. I had planned to do several versions with different angles, then edit them in Premiere Pro, but I learned a few tricks over the course of the week and decided to go with what I could do in Xtranormal.

I rewrote the script, and then revised the Xtranormal input. Finally, I output a new video. I experimented with different output formats. When I tried before, I couldn’t import the AVI file into Premiere Pro. I still had that problem. I was able to work with the AVI file with Encore, Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker. I found that I could import the WMV files from Xtranormal into Premiere Pro. I used Premiere Pro to add the titles.

Next week I’ll review the new video and make more changes. I’m not sure how many versions I want to make before I decide to go with what I have.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

The “Real” Third Man

I watched a documentary on YouTube called Shadowing the Third Man about the movie The Third Man. The person who posted the version I watched took it down. However, I found another version http://youtu.be/q6zLJrfoKyQ

I became a fan of the film many years ago. I enjoyed learning some of the stories behind the film.

I particularly liked some of the technical aspects of the film. The lights they used inspired many shots. They were very large and threw impressive shadows on the walls. Since Orson Welles wasn’t always available, they used a lot of shots of shadows on the walls to give the impression he was there.

One interesting tidbit was the origin of the name Harry Lime. Lime is a shade of the colour green, which is likely a reference to the author of the story, Graham Greene. The first name, Harry, refers to Greene’s good friend Harold “Harry” Philby, better known as Kim Philby the Russian double agent. Ironically, a dozen years later, when Philby defected to Russia, people called him the “third man” in the Cambridge spy ring.

I was also surprised to learn that many of the small parts in the film, such as the caretaker, were famous Austrian actors.

When I read the script years ago, I was surprised to see that originally they said Holly Martens was a Canadian. That would imply that Harry Lime was also a Canadian. I’m glad they changed that in the film.

The impression I got from the documentary was how so many elements of the film came about by chance and luck. I’m a little sceptical about that. I suspect they exaggerated a little there.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog