Steve's pop picks

Now that the NME is free, I've being checking out their recommendations. Here is some stuff I like:

El Vy - really good - bit like Lloyd Cole
The 1975 - Love me - Like a combinations of Fashion-era David Bowie (my favourite) and Duran Duran 
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Hot Wax - Brilliant sound, a bit reminiscent of early Jon Spencer Blues Explosion but more surf garage - Great use of a flanger and great bass sound
Potty Mouth - Cherry Picking - Again, lovely bass. Reminds me a bit of Belly.

Review of An Irrational Man

Interesting film but no more than that. Woody Allen writes really good dialog, not just in itself but in the sense of dialog that moves the film along. My partner took exception to Joaquin’s prosthetic belly. I can’t say I noticed. 

Woody Allen is a very functional film-maker nowadays, though I found some of the focusing of his shots rather odd. He doesn’t use the very wide aperture look (which is good cos I really don’t like it - most of the time it’s style over substance) but he often leaves most of the screen just a bit out of focus. Unfortunately, if it’s not immediately obvious where the point of focus should be, it makes it look like a mistake

The Martian Review

This is a good popcorn movie, with a nice balance of introspection and action. Matt Damon is a good lead and the other characters are well drawn. What was Sean Bean doing though?

Making of Dads Rock On

TTB Dads Rock On from Steve Green on Vimeo.
I have just completed a music video for The Tall Boy: Dads Rock On from his latest EP, Take it to the Kids. I thought I would share with you the details of the way I put it together.

Filming

The basic idea for the video is a pretty simple one. It was Matt’s idea, I can’t take any credit for it. The idea was that he should do some embarrassing Dad dancing to the song, and that I should film it. 
All filming was done using my trusty 550D with the 18-55mm kit lens. I use the Cinestyle Color Profile with the settings as per the recommendations to get as flat a picture as possible. I have also recently installed the Magic Lantern software. I turned on the zebras, to get the maximum dynamic range out of the sensors. Magic Lantern also gives you good control over the ISO range, adding a whole load of intermediate steps that you don’t get from the out of the box camera.
I had my Rode Videomic Pro on the camera - not strictly necessary but I’ve only just bought it and I wanted to check it worked. Incidentally, I have seen a few reports on the Videomic Pro that suggest that the battery is incredibly difficult to change quickly - I don’t know whether they have changed the design but I tried it several times and it couldn’t be simpler. Perhaps they have changed it
The camera was set on a tripod for all the shots except the last two - the feet close up and the top half of the body where I wanted to make sure I got the arm movements. With the IS on I find I can keep movement down to a level where it’s not distracting. I’ve got a huge problem with the modern shaky cam style of filming - why when lighting, hair, make-up, sound etc still has to be perfect, is it acceptable to make it look like the camera is being held by a monkey?
Lighting was a lot of natural light (a large bay window behind the camera position) supplemented by my Neweer LED light with the orange filter over it. With the camera white balance set to Shade I find that this combination gives skin tones that are pretty close to the skin line without the need for a massive amount of tweaking during the post production phase.

Importing

 I imported the footage onto my Macbook Air by popping the SD card straight into the card slot. I’ve experimented with various ways of doing this but for this project I made sure that Final Cut Pro was running before inserting the card, which makes the FCP import window open automatically. I think that, now I’ve figured out the best way of backing up my work from FCP libraries, this is the way I’ll keep doing it from now on.

Editing

 The first step was synchronizing the takes on the timeline. After fiddling about with the multi cam option for a bit I finally figured out that FCP tries to use the record time to put the clips onto the timeline, even when you tell it to use the audio to match them up. Luckily, the Synchronize clips option works a treat - I simply selected all the clips, together with the sound file of the track, pressed the button and voila! a perfectly synchronized compound clip.
 It was at this time that I noticed my first mistake - you can see the lighting stand in one of the key clips (where Matt is playing the guitar). A quick round trip to Motion was required to fix this. Integration between FCP and Motion is non-existent so the sequence was:

• Right click (or 2 finger click on the magic track pad) on the clip in the FCP browser and select Reveal in Finder. 
• Open Motion, create a new project and Drag the clip onto the time line 
• Create a copy of the clip 
• Mask the lighting stand on the top clip 
• Slip the bottom clip over so that the background wall replaces the lighting stand 
• Blur the edges of the mask so I couldn’t see the join. 
• Use share to write the new file out to disk, accepting the default settings 
• Switch back to FCP, import the file and drag it into the multi clip. 
• Using the audio waveform as a guide, synchronise with the audio track (this was really easy in this case because the track starts with two clicks) 
• Delete the old clip with the lighting stand visible and we’re done! 

I suppose I could have tried to auto synchronise the new clip but I thought it might not work and, since I was only synchronising one track I thought it would be as easy to do it manually
The next step was to separate the video from the audio for all the tracks and delete the unwanted audio. After doing a few I discovered that separate audio works if you select multiple tracks so I did that. Note that after you done this you have to be really careful not to time slip any of the tracks as you no longer have a reference point to resync. I didn’t have a problem in this case but I suppose an alternative is to mute the audio on all the tracks you don’t want to hear. There’s probably a clever way of doing this that I’ll have to figure out in the future.
So now I had a big stack of tracks on top of the audio track and I had to figure out how to cut them. This was where I made my second mistake - I should have done the basic colour correction before starting to cut - it would have saved a bit of time, but I didn’t think of that til later.
Dads Rock On as a song is in two parts - very cleverly linked by the chorus. In the first half our hero stumbles across a gig being played by one of the heroes from his youth while in the second half he decides to get his own band back together and get out on the road. I decided that the first half should mainly feature the Dad dancing elements with short stabs of close up guitar action while the second half would reveal our hero as the singer and guitarist, intercut with more stabs of dancing. I decided that the close up of his face should be reserved for a couple of key phrases to emphasise the journey in the song. The next phase was all about selecting the right clips in the right sequence.
The way I did this was to make all the tracks except the one I wanted to use invisible, then cut that track roughly on the beat. I would then select where I wanted to the clip to end, cut again and then make the before and after sessions invisible. I decided to do this, rather than delete the unwanted sections as FCP tends to drop tracks that are above the main timeline down to the lowest possible level. This would have resulted in a jumble of tracks. By just making the tracks I didn’t want invisible I kept the clips lined up, like a conventional editor. This turned out to be a good decision and I would definitely do this again if I was working with a multi cam or synchronised track.
Once I had got all of the right clips I wanted, I concentrated on getting the cuts exactly right. Dads Rock on is a very beaty track so it made sense to cut very rhythmically on the beat. This took several passes through until I was sure that it was ok.

Colour correction

Once I was happy with clips and the timing, I did the colour correction and the shot-to-shot matching. As I said before, this would have been easier if I had done the colour correction before starting to cut, but heigh-ho, lesson learned. In doing this I use the workflow suggested by Denver Riddle on his excellent Color Grading Central website. That is, for each clip:

• Optimize the dynamic range using the exposure controls. Generally I set the low and high to give maximum dynamic range, then use the mid to bring the skin tone back in to line (in this case Matt’s skin was around the 50% mark) 
• Correct the colour balance for skin tones. In this case it was pretty much bang on, thanks to the orange filter on the LED light. There was just a very slight green cast to the shots, probably due to the green curtains. 
• Next shot-to-shot matching. I probably should have followed Denver’s advice and used a secondary for this but in most cases I just messed with the primaries until all the shots matched the look I was going for. The only shot I had to use a secondary for was the head shot, where for some reason there was a much lower contrast between Matt’s face and the background. For this I used a secondary with an oval mask and just raised the exposure on the outside until it matched the other shots. 

Applying the look

Finally, it was time to apply the look. This was when I realised the power of compound shots. When you drag them to the project timeline, they appear as a single clip and any effects or colour correction apply to the whole clip rather than the individual shots. This is incredibly powerful and, in fact, better than other NLE’s where you generally have to apply looks on a track-by-track basis.
Anyway I thought the FCP Indie Red effect might suit the video so I whacked it on. Although I like the effect, I thought it boosted the highlights too much so I went back into the compound clip, lowered all the highlights to 75%, then tried again. For some reason, FCP doesn’t seem to recognise changes to compound clips once they are on the timeline, so I had to delete and re-insert the clip to get the changes. I don’t know if there’s a better way of doing this but since there was only one clip it didn’t take too much time. I reapplied the effect and this time I was really happy with it.
I uploaded it to Vimeo and sent a link to the client. However, when I looked at the on-line version myself I was more than a bit disappointed - what had been a vibrant red leather colour on my Mac had been turned into a dull brown wash! Back to the drawing board…
I decided to go for the good old standard bleach bypass look. Rather than use the built in effect I thought I would have a go at one of the methods Denver Riddle recommends. This involves overlaying a copy of the clip, turning the saturation all the way down to zero, and changing the composite mode to screen. This produced a lovely result, increasing the dynamic range very nicely without crushing the blacks and highlights (which the built in effect does).

Finishing off

The second time I uploaded to Vimeo I selected 720p upload rather than 1080p. There is no discernible difference in quality (in fact I think the 720p version is slightly better) presumably because it is not as heavily compressed.
I uploaded to Vimeo and this time was rewarded with a rendering that looks just about identical to the one I get on the Mac.
That’s all there was to it! It was a lot of fun, I learned a lot about FCP and I hope you learned something too.

Richard Branson's campaign to review the West Coast Mainline Procurement

Richard Branson is running a sustained and successful campaign (in pr terms at least) to get the Government to review the recent awarding of the West Coast mainline franchise to First Group, rather than his own Virgin Group. The main thrust of his argument is that First Group have promised to pay too much back to the Government and that they will be forced, by economics, either to renegotiate the franchise mid-way through, or to walk away before the end. There is of course a precedent for this: both GNER and National Express have walked away from the Eastcoast mainline franchises, leading to the effective renationalisation of the service. In both cases Virgin came second in the bidding process as they offered less money to HMG. While I have some sympathy for Branson's position I suspect that the Government's hands are tied in a way that no-one I have heard or read has made clear. I'll explain: I assume (although I don't know) that the franchise renewal process took place under EU procurement rules. The procurement process requires that you set out the criteria by which you are going to judge the bid and how you are going to score the criteria beforehand. Once you have started the process, you cannot change the criteria without starting again. The rules have nothing to say about what criteria you use, or whether they have to make sense, you just have to state what they are and apply them equally and fairly to all bidders. From the fairly gnomic utterances of the Department for Transport, I would guess that there is nothing about the sustainability and realism of the revenue projections in the criteria, so there is no way that, legally, the DfT could halt the process for review, even if it wanted to. In fact, under the new rules that came into force earlier this year, FirstGroup would be able to sue the Government for loss of earnings if they delayed the process, having awarded the franchise. At Stonivale, we have substantial experience of running successful EU procurements that deliver value for money, both for the public and for the company doing the bidding. If you would like advice, either in helping to respond to a Tender or in formulating an Invitation To Tender (ITT) so that you get the best value for money and reduce the risk of a challenge, why not contact us?

Outsourcing considered harmful*

Following the G4S debacle there is a lot of debate over the usefulness of oustourcing in the public sector, inlcuding a number of calls for outsourcing to be halted altogether
I have been both sides of the outsourcing fence, as a supplier and a customer, in both the public and the private sector. I like to think I have more of a perspective on it.

In a way, there should be nothing too controversial about outsourcing. It is simply a decision to buy a product or service from a supplier that you used to do yourself. So when you start out you might do your accounts yourself. As you do more business you might decide to put all your receipts in a box and pay an accountant to do it.
A company I worked for in the early 90s made their own pcs. They had good reasons for doing it then (it was much, much cheaper). They'd be mad to do that now.

Questions to ask before you outsource

Before you make the decision to outsource, ask the following questions:

Why am I outsourcing?

There are good reasons for outsourcing and there are not so good reasons. The good reasons come down to three key reasons:

• Will I save money?
• Will I free up time (to make more money)?
• Will I get access to skills that I don't have in-house?

The first two are pretty much self explanatory, but you need to decide which of these you are going for and make sure you select a supplier that delivers the one you want. Outsourcing is not always cheaper but it should always free up time for you to devote to your core business. Whether that's important to you very much depends on whether you can use the extra free time to make more money.

What are you outsourcing?

The third one requires a deal of thought. One of the big mistakes that businesses make is not understanding what is core (that is, what you do that is special and makes you, you) and what is non-core. For example, say you make and sell hand-crafted furniture from a studio in rural Yorkshire. Nobody will care if you outsource your payroll. They will care if you start selling furniture that's made in China.
In my opinion, you should hold onto the core as hard as you can - otherwise you could end up being a sales organisation for your supplier, which is probably not what you went into business for.

Do I have the skills to select and manage the supplier?

The kind of person that is good at managing the in-house team is probably not the kind of person that can write a good invitation to tender, see through all the supplier BS and negotiate a good but fair contract that leaves both sides feeling like winners. All too often however, the person who does or oversees the job currently is thought to be the best person to bring in a supplier. (There are obvious conflicts of interest here as well, which many businesses seem able to overlook). Of course you could buy in the skills to select and engage the supplier (from someone like me *slight plug*) but then you would have to be sure you had the skills to engage a consultant ;-) At any rate you would still need to make sure you had the skills to manage the supplier once the contract was under way.

What is my Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement?

Take the time to figure out at what point you should be walking away from negotiations with a supplier. Is it when the price is too high? Maybe they want you to guarantee a certain amount of business? Maybe they want to own the IP that is created? Too many companies do not work this out beforehand and end up giving too much away during the negotiations. This also happens a lot in public sector procurements where the process is so long drawn out and painful that any deal is seen as preferable to no deal at all. It is also very common in large businesses that have separate buying or procurement departments - the people negotiating the deal are not the ones who have to live with the consequences.

Bad reasons to outsource

There are lots of bad reasons to outsource. Here are some that I have come across at one time or another:

• Outsourcing to get rid of a problem employee or team.  Don't do this. Man up and deal with the problem
• Outsourcing to transfer risk to a supplier. This happens in Government all the time. It is usually done to reduce the risk to the individual (they can blame the supplier if it doesn't work out). At the end of the day, however, the business will still suffer if the product or service is not delivered and on top of that, you've added the risk of supplier failure. G4S is a classic case in point
• Outsourcing for 'flexibility'. A lot of outsourcing specialists will sell their ability to scale up and down to fit the needs of your business. In practice, it will probably be just as hard for them to provide you with the staff with the experience in your business as it would be to do it yourself (G4S again). Also, companies that specialise in this tend to move their staff around a lot, so you will be paying for the privilege of their staff gaining valuable experience in your industry.

 

Need help?

If you need any help deciding whether to outsource, selecting the right supplier, and making sure you have the right contract in place to make sure you get value for money, why not get in touch with Stonivale for an initial chat

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*This is a geek reference to the famous article by Dijkstra: "Go To statement considered harmful", published in 1968

Project Management, G4S and the Olympics

There's been a lot of speculation around concerning the failure of G4S to recruit and train enough security staff in time for the London 2012 Olympics.

Buckles buckles, and poor Tommy Atkins picks up the pieces

According to G4S' CEO, Nick Buckles, they will end up losing between 30 and 50 million on this contract. G4S are going to pay for the extra soldiers who will be forced to give up their recovery time to fill the gap. While I would bet much on Buckles still being in a job in a month's time, surely the most serious outcome is that some of the troops in Afghanistan will be required to stay out there for longer to cover for troops that have been drafted in for the games.
Some commentators have expressed surprise that Buckles was only made aware that they weren't going to make it 9 days before the story broke. I'm afraid that, with over 20 years experience of delivering complex projects (and this was not a particularly complex project), I was not surprised at all.

2000 to 10000 in 9 months, a slow-motion train wreck

Now I haven't worked for G4S, but I can make a pretty educated guess as to what happened: G4S were originally contracted to supply 2000 security staff. This was upped to 10000 staff following a review in November 2011, leaving them with less than 9 months to find an extra 8000 staff. Just to be clear, this represents a 400% increase. Now I'm willing to bet that the Project Manager in charge, and the recruitment team knew that this couldn't be done as soon as they were told about the change. The project manager may have even told people higher up the food chain that it couldn't be done. They would then have come back to him/her and said that it had to be done. They may have even offered extra money and people to do it. The PM probably took on some extra staff to try and avert the impending train wreck.

 

Classic mistakes

[As an aside, in software development circles, this is known as a classic mistake, adding people to a late project. There's a whole book on it, The mythical man month, which I recommend to anyone who's interested in why software projects go wrong. ]
What I'm guessing happened now, is that the PM and the team struggled on, knowing that they were not going to make it, but equally knowing that no-one in senior management would be interested in hearing the bad news until it was obvious to everyone. There's a name for this in software development circles too: The Death March Project.
I think (though I don't know) that the Olympics security debacle was a symptom of a corporate culture at G4S that is all too common in UK business: The people at the top think that they can get things done by demanding it, they don't like to hear bad news, and moreover, dismiss those who say that a thing can't be done as whingers, even while they are relying those same people to do the thing that can't be done.

"Star Trek is not like real life" shock

If there's one thing that I've learned in 25 years, it's that if you're relying on a person to do a thing, and they tell you it will take three months, and you tell them that it has to be done in two, it will take three months - if you're lucky. Real life isn't like Star Trek.
Another thing that is common to these sorts of organisations is a Mickawberish belief that something will turn up, and if you are lucky, you will get away with it. Again, 25 years of experience tells me that you are never, ever lucky. In fact, if something only takes the amount of time and effort you thought it would, and not more, then you can count yourself as lucky.
I have two prescriptions: one for the CEO, and another for the Project Manager:

 

A better way for the chief

For the CEO - This, like many aspects of leadership, is simple. Simple but not easy. What Buckles' successor has to do is to change the culture of the organisation so that open communication of bad news is encouraged and acted upon. And in case you think I'm being hopelessly idealistic - I have actually done this, for a team of 30 people, and it does actually work. The way you start is, the next time that someone brings you bad news, just take the time to actually listen to their concerns, engage with them in a way that shows that you understand and negotiate some changes that will make a difference. Then you keep doing that every day. Within 6 months, you will really see the change.
Imagine if someone had come to Buckles in November 2011 and told him that there was no way that they could go from 2000 to 10000 in 9 months and instead of just telling them to make it happen, listened to their concerns and responded to them. They might have figured out that the best that they could do was 5000. They could have gone back to LOCOG with that figure, LOCOG would still have had to get the troops in but they would have had 9 months to plan it and it would certainly have kept G4S out of the headlines.

 

A better way for the Project Manager

Too many PMs, when faced with a project, and a management like this, just give up. They stop planning and they stop reporting. This is the wrong thing to do. When the project goes wrong it is then the PM's fault, fair and square. What you should do is keep the plan up to date and keep reporting openly and honestly. Here at Stonivale we have a simple way of reporting progress, using red, amber and green statuses that are clearly defined and consistently applied:

• GREEN - All tasks are on time and the project is on time
• AMBER - One or more tasks is forecast to finish late but the project is still forecast to finish on time
• RED - One or more tasks is late and the project is forecast to finish late.

We insist on weekly reporting, not monthly as is common (and was the case for the G4S project). Senior managers tend to sit up and take notice if they are getting a report week after week that is telling them their project is late.

Does any of the above look familiar? Need help with sorting your projects and programmes out? Contact Stonivale for a chat. We might be able to help.