Boy oh boy did the Hotcakes New Media crew and cast members put in a lot of sweat equity last Sunday, August 16th when the temperatures hit 30+ and had us bathing in our own sweat for most of the evening. However, true to form, our crew was nonetheless back to work as the consummate professional bunch and we got done what we had to do on a quiet little avenue that evening…. yet another segment for the video “Are You Bullet Proof” for To The Rescue. Luckily, the rain was nowhere to be found in O-town that night and we were left alone to get down to business…..a real blessing considering the kind of summer that we have been having this year. And so with that, I will recap the evening to catch you all up to speed….

The evening began with Andy and Dave setting up the lighting for the outside scene….

As you can see here, our cast of characters were waiting in the wings before they were called on to the set… killing a little time with a little chit chat amongst themselves…

And admiring the bike that one of our actors brought on to the set to add authenticity…She is a beauty!

Andy and Dave had to meticulously check out every angle…..

…to ensure that there was enough lighting to capture the moving images…

And one by one, they added in their actors to the scene to see how their images appeared on camera…

Lucky for us, the cast members working on this film project are all real gems to work with – so easy to direct, so agreeable and willing to give us what we were looking for.

And since the scene inside had to be created to resemble a place where a drug deal was going down, the props used had to make the scene rather convincing….and it looked like Andy was quite pleased with the results….

However, the money was no fake – it was all real…..

And again, we did have to powder puff our actors to get rid of the sheen that a natural complexion gives off – and believe me, it was a challenge to get that glare off with the sweltering heat that would not let up that evening. Luckily for the cast, it was dark….

Here we have Jason, Dave and Reda going over their scene ….

And Dave is inside getting everyone engaged about what he was looking for…

The boys playing around…..time is a ticking away…..

And I can tell you that the poor front door met with many takes with Dave kicking it open, but no collateral damage was sustained as Andy and Dave expertly secured it with a pillow taped to the closet behind it…and Dave, our lead “cop” was also gentle enough not to jam his foot through it…

With this particular scene, Dave had to bring his camera around the table and shoot from many different angles….

There was one point where the heat just got to be too much and a much needed break was taken by all to rehydrate…

But our dear Andy and Dave kept on working, finalizing a few more details before the crew was refreshed and ready to resume work….

And so the camera rolled again and captured the much needed footage of the actual deal going down….

And of course, when some are working, there will be others looking to have a little amusement on the down times when there was a little time to kill…

Here we have our lovely ladies….uhh, I mean our lads…..doing their Charlie’s Angels rendition…or sort of…….okay…..nice try guys….didn’t the ladies face away from one another????

Dave, again, hamming it up for the camera….

And sure enough, before we knew it, Andy again called it a wrap at about midnight and everyone was free to go….

But not before my role call…

Here is Jason… the lead character in the video. We were glad to have you back Jason!

And the lovely Sam who played the little drugged up crack…… umm…. well, I don’t want to say it, but you get the picture, I’m sure…..

Marc also played another one addicted to the nose candy……

Eric was the dude who took the money and ran….

Danny played the biker in search of his next great buzz….but the fuzz in this video got a hold of him first!

And of course, we have Reda here…or is it his alter ego….I don’t know…..the heat was getting to all of us actually…..

And finally Dave….”Super Two-Gun Totting” Dave! Well, bee bee pistol totting anyways…. (is that how you spell bee bee for “bee bee guns”?)

Oh, and of course, I couldn’t let the night slip away without snapping at least one picture of the resident canine cutie in Da House!!! Lotus!

So again, we had another great evening where the spirits were high and the gang accomplished what they set out to do that night.

I think the picture here sums it all up rather nicely…. you could feel the sense of excitement, enthusiasm and comraderie on the set and other activities surrounding this project. And the nice thing about it is that everyone who has participated in the making of this video has done so because of their love of and respect for the craft of film making and because they believe in this project and the team making it come together.  And it is through this sense of adventure that one will open doors to new and wonderful opportunities and experiences… and lucky for us, we are meeting new and interesting people along the way.

And with that, I feel my eyes getting very heavy and tired so it is here that I conclude this chronicle of the events that took place on Aug 16th and bid you all a very good night….

Love Tina  oxoxox  :)

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.

A7

My annual “year in review” music post in January 2010 will be filled with fantastic music (and will actually be written properly this year). But before that happens, you should have time to enjoy the music now! So here’s a little breakdown on some stuff you should be listening to.

Alexisonfire. Old Crows, Young Cardinals.

These guys know how to rock, and this album is no exception. Their sound is familiar, yet new. Somehow, the screaming parts (the parts NOT sung by Dallas Green) are more controlled, and thus, not as irritating. Some songs have a bit of a punk influence to them (especially the single, Young Cardinals). This is not my favourite album ever, but it is a really solid album that will have you rockin’ all night long.

Green Day. 21st Century Breakdown.

Green Day has come back with what I believe will be a milestone album for the band. With a unique mix of old-school fast “machine gun” guitar riff songs that are pure Green Day, to softer ballads that elevate their songwriting skills to new heights, this album is my top pick for album of the year.

Moneen. Hold That Sound EP (full album due in a few months)

It’s no secret that Moneen is at the top of my band list. They have such a complex and deep songwriting style that is unmatched in a market full of “sound-alikes”. If this EP is any indication of what the album will be like, I expect Moneen to do quite well for themselves. Their songs are finely crafted in true Moneen fashion, and they are sure to please long-time fans as well as garner a few new fans along the way. I bought the EP instantly on iTunes. Have a listen if you get a moment. You have my personal guarantee that it is worth listening to over and over again.

Till next time.

A7

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!

A7

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.

A7

After a long wait, and large amount of planning, Hotcakes New Media‘s first weekend of shooting was finally started this past weekend. Dave and I just wrapped the “bar scene” and all the live band footage. Keep reading to see more pictures and find out how it went.

The video shoot was spread out over 2 days. Saturday night was filming the crowd, live band performances, and the final acting scene (cop chases criminal into the bar, criminal tried to get lost in the crowd, gets taken down by the cop). We started the night with the live performances of the band. We needed to run the song 5 times, each from a different camera angle (middle of the crowd, back/left, behind the band, and two roving steadicam shots of the band and the crowd). Those shots went amazingly well, though incredibly slow. The “crowd” was not made up of paid extras, just the band’s friends. So in between shots, they all left to get drinks and go party upstairs. It took forever to get everyone back in place each time. Of course, since that extended everything, it meant that people were getting increasingly more drunk as the night went on. We ended the night by attempting to film the acting scenes. By then, the crowd was drunk, rowdy and belligerent. Things were getting out of hand, so we had very little time to shoot. We gathered all the crowd we could and just shot everything as fast and as furious as we could, hoping that we got what we needed. It was hectic, and messy, and I had all kinds of alcohol spilled on me, but I think we got most of what we needed.

As a result of the drunken partying, people were stepping on the camera’s cords. The camera was unplugged abruptly on a couple of occasions, which caused us to lose some good footage. We also had a number of people in the crowd looking directly into the camera (which made those shots unusable). But as I said… there was enough footage to put the scene together (but just barely).

Now we are on to planning and shooting the final 4 acted scenes of the video, including one huge scene with police cruisers, bloody bodies, smoke machines and a cast of 10-15 actors. So far everything has gone relatively well, and the footage we have is unbelievable. I forgot just how amazing my camera is. Doing this video shoot has reminded me how much I love it. And Dave did a fantastic job of working the camera in question. I think we work well as a team… I was like the director watching the monitor to ensure the footage and shots were clean and we got the shots we needed, and he was co-director and camera operator. Judging from the footage, it looks like that setup worked quite nicely.

A few more pictures of the footage we captured are below. For more information on Hotcakes New Media, visit our site at http://www.hotcakesnewmedia.com .

A7

EDIT: More pictures from Day 2!

A7

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?

A7

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.

A7

The gears are in motion, and things are well underway. Stay tuned for more detailed news in a couple of days.

A7

You have to make the time to watch this right now! It will be taken offline at midnight on Sunday!

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

What do you get if you mix a musical, a rock opera, a sitcom, and a video blog? You get Dr. Horrible. And what do you get if you make it about the rise of an anti-hero/supervillain (and the thin line that separates the two), the struggles of good and evil within each of us, and get it written by Joss Whedon (quite possibly one of the greatest TV writers of our time), and acted by Neil Patrick Harris (who is a surprisingly amazing singer) and Nathan Fillion (who is always entertaining)? You get the single best bit of video I have ever seen in my life.

Go watch it now: http://www.drhorrible.com

Go. Now. Not kidding. Be late for work. Stay up late. Skip the workout. Just watch it.

A7

Edit: Moved from front page to general news. Sorry folks, you missed the free videos. Lucky for you, I liked it so much I bought it in iTunes. If you want to see it some time, let me know and I’ll play it for you.