In case you didn’t know, I have a number of sites and blogs I maintain, each with different purposes. Lately I’ve been so busy building the business that I haven’t had time to update this site much, but I have been posting other items all over the place. Here’s a list of where to find me:

iMakeArt – A more general purpose site about me and my conceptual art

A7is – My portfolio site for more commercial works

Ottawa Video Production (and more) Blog – The official Hotcakes blog where I talk about business related announcements and articles

In addition to those sites, there’s also the Hotcakes twitter account @HotcakesOttawa that gets updated several times a day and the Hotcakes Facebook Fan page for major announcements.

So there you have it. Now you can follow me everywhere I digitally go.

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I have finally gotten around to importing the footage of the crime scene shoot (formerly known as the accident scene). I am completely blown away by the beautiful lighting, and the superb acting by everyone involved. Shannon and Alfredo’s scene is especially convincing, and both performed with conviction.

You all know the scenario by now. We got Jeff to come up from Toronto to help with the lighting. We got extras, PAs, grips, and makeup artists… and at the last possible instant, literally minutes before shooting, we got a call saying our lead actor was not coming in, and our props and extras were not coming either.

You can read the full story as narrated by the lovely and talented Tina, who was not only documenting the shoot, but jumped right in to fulfill a PA role and assist in the shoot. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, a few stills from the actual captured footage that night.

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The second shooting weekend for To The Rescue’s new music video being produced by Hotcakes New Media can now officially be considered a successful shoot. It was, however, a rocky shoot. Want to know why? Keep reading.

Doing night shoots are tricky. Unless you are able to properly block the windows to simulate nighttime, you have to wait until it’s really dark to get your lighting set up correctly. In this case, shooting this scene at Anne and Dave’s house, it was crucial to wait until it was fully dark out before starting (past 9:30pm!) because of the HUGE windows in the space. This led to a very slow start, but ultimately, not really a issue as I had informed people that the shoot would run until midnight (which it did, almost to the minute). Instead, the main issues we faced were due to the small space we were working with, and the performance of our lead female.

First, the small space; Small spaces are always difficult to shoot in. It makes it difficult to set up lighting far enough away to avoid hot spots on the skin (completely white areas due to too much light) while providing a decent fill light to make the lighting look natural. In this case, we had to soften our lights with frosted gels because they were too harsh, and place lights in precarious positions in the stairs. For the entrance, we had to literally hang a light with a softbox over the stair railing. The good news is, Dave and I are getting better (faster?) at lighting, so everything turned out very nice. The only issue is one shot where the light is a little too bright (at the entrance, directly below the light), but I was able to fix it in post.

Second, the acting; Jay, our lead male, is a natural. His performance was very consistent and very well acted. Our female lead, Kandisse, was not as natural. It was a little more difficult to get the performance the way we wanted. In all fairness, after looking back at the original script (before the editing), the dialogue was not 100% believable to begin with, so it made matters worse than they should have been. The issue was that she was not conveying the emotion we wanted for the scene, which was hurt feelings driving to anger. Instead, she was portraying it more as self-pity and despair, with long drawn out sentences that felt completely manufactured. After taking a break from shooting and Dave going over the inflection we were looking for with the actors, we on a roll, and the performance was becoming more honest.

With all the issues we had in shooting, we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to put together a believable scene with the footage we had. But it turns out we have more than enough footage to put together a great intro scene with nice pacing and flow. The editing is now done, and it’s official; The scene works very well and Dave and I are both happy with it. I should also mention that Lorelei, the producer for Moonrise Productions, was on set to help, and provided the scene saving gels for our lighting. She has a great eye, and noticed a few glitches I didn’t catch while looking at my monitor.

So you want more pictures? Of course you do! (but crafty people will find the video on YouTube if they know how to search well enough)

Here you go:

On to July 4th for the big accident scene shoot.

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Notable updates to this version include a proper full 15 second animation, updated mountains, more “shine”, and a fade out at the end to reveal just the company name. Note that the music is just a temporary filler until the proper music is written.

(Original post)
I put together a rough (yet completely polished) draft of the intro video for Moonrise Productions (the company Dave is releasing his short film under). It is actually a 15 second intro, just like the Hotcakes “chomp” intro, but it got sped up a bit when I exported, and the YouTube version loses a lot of detail (like the sparkling letters). The final High Definition version will be a full 15 seconds. Let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas for improvement!

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Take two (the much much much shorter version).

In filming the To-The-Rescue music video, Dave and I have run into a few technical snafus that caused some issues for us.

1- Monitoring: The best way to shoot this type of production is to have a director watching the full-resolution large monitor while someone else is filming. This allows the director to ensure the footage is well acted, well framed and lit, and in perfect focus. We had a monitor on set, but it was not color calibrated, nor was it a 1:1 pixel ratio. We also had issues with the crappy RCA component cables unplugging from the extended coupler. I have already taken steps to eliminate some of these issues by ordering some BNC connectors (they “lock” into place). But there’s still the color calibration and aspect ratio issues.

2- Recording time: The camera we use records HD footage to memory cards. I have two 4GB memory cards (which is all I could afford when I bought it). That allows me only 20 minutes of 720p footage, or only 8 minutes of 1080 footage!  Once the cards are full, we have to stop production while I dump the cards to hard disk. Dumping the cards takes 25 minutes! This is a severe workflow problem and a serious hindrance to our final product. Bigger memory cards sell for $2000, and would still only allow for 40 minutes of recording (and take 50 minutes to transfer!).

3- Audio: This was not an issue for our shoot this past weekend, but will be an issue for the rest of the video shoots. The camera’s built-in microphone is woefully inadequate, and a camera mounted shotgun mic is not ideal except for documentaries (the person needs to be facing the camera to be heard… everything else gets blocked out. Using a shotgun mic on a boom pole is extremely awkward as the cable running into the front of the camera weighs down the lens and interferes with camera movement.

4- Editing: Even the most powerful systems have a hard time keeping up with HD content. My monitors are not big enough to display a preview window and a timeline window at full resolution, so the software has to do some converting to make it fit my screen. This eats up CPU and graphics power, and lowers quality significantly. I often get a stuttering (lowered frame rate) or blockiness (lowered resolution) to compensate. This is less than ideal when working with HD footage, as it’s important to see all the details.

Can one single product fix all these issues? Yes. Yes it can. Meet the Matrox MXO2: http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo2

It comes with a laptop card, and a desktop card, so it can be used wherever it is needed. It allows video input (from a number of sources, including my current camera’s component cables, as well as future camera’s HDMI and HD-SDI) and also has video out for monitoring. You can plug in a standard monitor with HDMI (just about any modern LCD monitor) and it will color calibrate and do 1:1 hardware accelerated pixel mapping. It can record 10-bit uncompressed or compressed video directly to the laptop, so no more need for small memory cards and low bitrates. It has 4 XLR mic inputs for live monitoring and recording of audio. It accelerates HD video and is capable of scaling HD footage in real-time to allow for crystal clear editing. And it does a whole lot more too (like accelerate compression, output audio monitoring for 5 channel sound, Genlock, RED camera support, video upconversion, and more).

That will be Hotcakes New Media’s next purchase… as soon as we secure a bit of funds. Anyone got a paying video job to send our way?

Gnite.

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I have a few other ideas I might incorporate, but so far, I like the simplicity and light-hearted nature of it.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thoughts?

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I promised you all something big, so here it is! I invite you to visit Hotcakes New Media, my new video production and design company. There is still a bit of organization left to do before I start taking contracts (getting a business bank account, setting up accounting, and awaiting delivery of my new lighting and chromakey kits) but everything is registered and well underway.

Today marks the official launch of Hotcakes New Media.

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