Lifehacking - look back in exhaustion

I've just finished my short film - Lifehacking. It was a really good experience - hard but good. I've been making short films and cutting together bits of footage taken on holiday and on events for a couple of years but this is a different order of magnitude. Doing a whole film from beginning to end and making it as good as you can make it is a big step up. I've learned so much about sound (I need to get much better - or get someone else), setting up the camera (I feel really comfortable with all the manual modes now and I'm pretty sure I know how to get the best out of the camera in any given situation), and loads about colour grading and colour correction.
The way I put the film together was this:

• First I did a rough cut of each scene as a separate project in Vegas. For each one I would leave it about a week and then go back and see where I could cut more out and where there were transitions that seemed uncomfortable.
• I then went through and did the colour correction and grading. This took many more passes than it would now as I had to learn the effect I was trying for as well as how to do it. The Red Giant Colorista tutorials on Vimeo were really useful for this as Stu Maschwitz takes you through the look he is trying to achieve in real detail. Since the controls are a bit different in Vegas then I had to figure out how to get the same effect. Unfortunately Vegas' secondary colour correction masking tool doesn't seem to work quite as well as Colorista for selecting skin tones so I struggled a bit until I found this Vegas tutorial that taught me all about compositing. Then I was flying! I'm really tired of the modern style of colour grading where everything is a sludgy blue/green/grey and skin is a putty colour (See BBC Sherlock). I went for an old fashioned Technicolor look. I'm especially pleased with the night-time scenes on the sofa as I was able to darken the background and relight the face. Unless you know, you can't really tell.
• I then assembled a rough cut of the entire film and handed it off to my brother Matt to add the music. I then left it for two weeks so that I could come at it fresh.
• Two weeks later I rewatched the whole thing (it was getting really tedious by now and hard to stop my mind wandering) and also listened to it right through without watching. I made a set of notes which I have reproduced below. I then went right through the list, fixing everything I could. The final edit took a full day, including re-recording (ADR) the voice for the entire first scene.

My gear

• Canon 550D with 28-55mm kit lens and 50mm f1.8 - Brilliant. Like Crazy was made with a 7D which is basically this camera in a metal body. Now the 600D is out you can get this much cheaper: For £500 you get a camera that you can make a pro film on. The 50mm lens cost £90 new! Great for shooting indoor scenes if you live within its limitations (No IS - Can hunt for focus in low light - though I now use manual focus with the preview screen zoomed in)
• Zoom H1 Digital recorder. Lovely and small. Great with the Lavalliere as you can slip it in your pocket.
• Audiotechnica stereo mic. Nice neutral sound quality although the output level is a bit low.
• Lavalliere (tie clip) mike. Really handy for outdoor shots where you want to reduce background noise.
• Asus X53E Core i7 laptop - Great! Renders 720p HD straight out of the camera at a little better than real time and a really complicated scene with colour correction and compositing layers at about half speed. I no longer have to bother with transcoding. The only problem is the vertical viewing angle on the screen is very small (the side to side viewing angle is fine, strangely so two people can easily watch the same thing, as long as their heads are at the same height) so you have to make sure you're looking directly at it to make sure you're seeing the colours accurately. When I can afford it I will buy a decent HD monitor.
• Sony Vegas Platinum - I'm a real fan of this. Once you're used to the interface it's really fast to use and you can do anything on it that you can do with high-end pro packages. The only thing that I wish it had from the Pro version (which is 10 times the price) is scopes and the ability to split the preview screen to make it easier to grade across scenes.

I'm now on to my next project, an adaptation of a short story by Checkhov. I will definitely use actors for this one, and hopefully my brother will come in to do the sound.

These are the notes that I took on the rough cut of Lifehacking:

Notes on lifehacking
====================
Sound
=====
Scene 1
-------
- Phone ring too loud - Done
- Less bass on the vocals
- Replace "Bank Account"
- Check "Bank Account"
- Clunk after "Still a bit hot?"
- Clunk after "mystified"
- Vocals are at about -18dB
- Background at about -48dB

Scene 4
-------
- Equalise vocals between 2 takes
Scene 5
-------
- Phone ring too loud. Needs room reverb?
- Reduce top end on vocals
Scene 6
-------
- Phone ring - scene 5
- Equalise vocals between scene 5 and 6
- A couple of vocal glitches. Replace?
Cut scene
---------
-Replace sound with wildtrack without wind-noise
Scene 7
-------
- Vocals a little harsh on top/mid - equalize with scene 6
- Vocal should shift to centre for final headshot

Visuals
=======
- Check beginning credits
- Replace font on Voidstar
- Narrower, smaller sans serif font
Scene 1
-------
-Improve secondary colour correction when seated to darken the fence in the background and pop the face
-Close-up needs colour correcting so it matches rest of scene
Scene 3
-------
- Can cut to seated shot earlier
Scene 4
-------
- Redo colour correction on front shot
Scene 5
-------
- Redo colour correction to darken background while relighting face
- Skintone is good! Replicate in scene 4
Scene 6
-------
- Match skintone with scene 5 and between medium and close-ups

- End credits

Lessons learned from making Lifehacking

Yesterday Matt sent me over a new cut of my short film, Lifehacking, with some music that he had added. It sounds great!
I'm now going to leave it a week and then do the final edit.
In the meantime I have been thinking about the things I've learned from making the film. Here they are:

The Good

The camera (Canon 550D) is great and the 50mm, f1.8 lens is a must have at only £90. It means you can shoot in pretty low light conditions and still get a decent result (see the last scene for an example of this)
Towards the end I got into using the magnify function to check the focus - vital when you've got the aperture wide open.
Sony Vegas is a fantastic editor and my new Asus core i7 laptop just flies. I no longer even bother to transcode the video off the camera, it's fast enough without reformatting - as long as you remember to keep the power plugged in.
I found the tutorial videos on using Red Giant Colorista really useful in learning how to use the colour correction tools in Vegas. Though I found myself wishing I had the power mask feature most of the time!
Using the Zoom HA-1 with a Lavalliere worked very well for recording the outdoor scenes. I found it easy enough to sync the on-camera sound with the recorded sound.
Just going out and shooting, even in quite crowded areas, was a lot easier than I thought it would be. People naturally seem to stay out of your way. I asked before filming the cafe scene but they were more than happy to let me go ahead.


The Bad

The sound for the inside scenes is a bit reverby. I put the mic roughly where the camera was. I should have close miked all the scenes and then recorded some wild-track.
If you have an actor in his 40s, don't write a script that requires that he looks down a lot. Very unflattering.
Some of the inside scenes are not quite in focus. I ended up shooting at f2 or 2.2, rather than f1.8 but it's still very hard when you're trying to guess where the actor's face will be. This would have been so much easier if I hadn't been both the actor and the cameraman.
In one of the outside shots there is a wooden fence going straight through my head. I wish I had noticed this at the time of shooting.
It's best if your lead actor has either very long hair or very short hair, especially if you are going to shoot over an extended period of time. My hair was in between, and when I had it cut, I had to wait about 6 weeks for it to grow back to the right kind of length

Things I'd do differently next time

Get actors instead of doing it all myself. I did it this way out of frustration because I'd been speaking to an actor about a collaboration over the summer and for one reason or another it hadn't happened. Next time I will definitely stay behind the camera
I need to be much better at sound recording. For my next film I'm hoping that Matt will be able to help out with the sound.
Because the script allowed me to read off the laptop screen, I didn't learn all the lines. I think I got away with it, but I wouldn't do that again.
I would also like to get someone to do continuity. It was really hard to remember what position I was in and where everything was between shots. There were a couple of scenes where in one shot I had my arm up and the other I had my arm down, which really cut down the options when it came to the final edit.

First cut of Lifehacking in the bag!

I finally got my replacement laptop on Friday, after a false start on Tuesday when I got to the door of Comet at exactly 6 o'clock and it was already locked. The new one is an Asus X53E, same as the old one, but a Core i7 rather than an i5 as the i5 is now £900! (The trackpad button failed on the old one after less than a month - bizarre. Hope it's a one-off).
I managed to restore all my data, reinstalled Vegas (the on-line registration worked fine, so the rumours that Sony allow you to install Vegas 5 times must be true). The first time I re-rendered scene one I was a bit disappointed - it took longer than the i5. Turns out it was AVG doing its initial virus scan that was slowing it down. The next one I tried was very fast - A fairly complex scene with multiple levels of colour correction, and a scene that I had reversed, takes about 130% of the running time to render. How long would it have taken on my old pc? 10 hours?
Anyeay, Lifehacking consists of 7 scenes that I edited as separate Vegas projects so yesterday I put the finishing touches in to each scene (mainly adding the sound of the mobile phone ring tone) and produced a first cut of the whole thing. It's longer than I thought, nearly 15 minutes. Watching it through (which I promised myself I wouldn't do) it seems very slow to me, but then I've seen every second of it dozens of times.
I'm going to give a copy of it to my brother, Matt, to see if he can come up with any music for the intervals between the scenes and then I'm going to leave it for at least 2 weeks with the hope that coming to it with fresh eyes will help me spot the errors and have a clearer view of the overall flow.
I've learned masses from doing this, which I hope to make the subject of a future post.

Finished with the Premiership

I have been unfortunate enough to see Everton play twice in the last two weeks. I thought last week was bad enough but this week has convinced me that something must be done. And for me, that something is to stop watching Premiership football.
But why, I hear you cry? (Oh, suit yourselves). Well, I'll tell you: Last week Everton played against Man City plus the estimable Howard Webb. Webb seemed to think that the mere fact of an Everton player successfully challenging for the ball was evidence of a foul on his part. Man City are obviously so superior in every way that it is inconceivable to Mr Webb that any player from the lower ranks can dispossess one of the Etihad anointed without stepping over the line between fair play and foul. This week was the icing on the cake, with the cherry on top. Jack Rodwell sees the ball, Rodwell gets the ball, Suarez falls over Rodwell and referee Martin Atkinson sends Rodwell off! Apparently in today's Premier league it is a red card offence to get the ball if your opponent wants it at the same time (if your opponent plays for one of the top 5 clubs, that is). I presume that players from the other 15 clubs are now supposed to stand around like particularly expensive bollards, while the Galacticos amaze us with their artistry. It makes football about as meaningful as a competition as a Nike ad.
This might all seem like sour grapes but it's more than that. I freely admit that both Man City and Liverpool were better than Everton (although not that much better - it may be a partisan view but of the expensively assembled talent available to Liverpool only Suarez and Kuyt would walk into the Everton side, at least on Saturday's showing. I didn't even know Downing was on the pitch until he got substituted). It would be a funny old world if they weren't - Liverpool have spent over £100m since Dalglish returned while Moyes has spent a big fat zero. No, my central point is that if you interpret the rules of the game in a way that only the most prodigiously gifted are allowed to succeed then you snuff out any possibility of an upset, of the underdog succeeding through hard work, or better organisation, tactics or teamwork. You might as well play top trumps before the start of the match: Liverpool - £114m, Everton nowt. Liverpool win!
Although Webb and Atkinson were culpable in these two cases, they're not the ones to blame. The real culprits are the Premiership and most particularly Sky. They've turned the game I and millions of others love into a product. And d'you know? It's a product I'm no longer prepared to buy.
So farewell beloved Everton, I wish you all the best. There will always be a part of my heart that belongs to you and I'm sure I'll sneak a look at the results every now and then. From now on though, the only team I'll be watching is the mighty Carlisle United of Division One. Come on you Foxes!

Lessons learned from making Buses with Bowties

Buses with Bowties was the first proper go I had at making a film using my new sound recording equipment. I learned a few lessons along the way that I want to share here:

• Make a list of your kit. Print out the list, laminated and put it in the kit bag on the top. Before you go out on location, check the kit against the list. That way you avoid forgetting something really important (like your sound recorder!)
• The lavalliere microphone doesn't work very well plugged straight in to the camera. I think this is because of the lack of ambient noise from the mic. The camera turns its auto-gain right up and the speech is distorted because it can't react fast enough when you start talking.
• Get enough wild-track at each location to cover the entire shooting duration. Otherwise you will spend ages piecing together bits of sound to try and make a decent wildtrack in the edit
• Record all the bits that are supposed to sound the same with the same mic. So if you are doing something to camera with a lavalliere in one shot, use the lavalliere for all pieces to camera (unless you have an obvious mic in shot, as I did for one piece.
• The auto-focus in live view mode is rubbish for close-ups. It's better to switch to a picture mode, focus and then switch back
• Have a big pause at the start of each scene (at least 2 seconds) and hold for a similar time at the end of the scene. Makes editing a lot easier. 
• Consider getting a clapper board and saying "Scene 3, Take 4" at the start of each scene. This will make matching the audio and video a lot easier. If the clapper board is in view at the start of the shot, it will show up in the preview mode when you edit
•  Before each shot check the microphone is on, then the sound recorder, then hit record on the camera.
• At the end of each shot turn off the microphone! Sounds like a pain but otherwise you will forget to do it and will run the battery down on the mic (as I am typing this at work I am wondering whether I turned my lavalliere off!)

You can see the results here:

Buses with Bowties from Steve Green on Vimeo.

Everton 2 Fulham 1

I made my way up to the pub more in hope than expectation for yesterday afternoon's fixture. Everton have consistently failed to beat clubs that are lower in the league than them and the two teams have drawn 27 times between them this season. This one had nil-nil written all over it.
From a tactical point of view I was interested to see how Moyes would react to the latest injury crisis, that is, the loss of Arteta. In the past few games he has employed Mikel wide on the left in order to counter their increasingly predictable (and therefore easy to counter) reliance on Leighton Baines galloping up the left. The answer this time was to play Leon Osman inside him in a similar role to that played by Steven Pienaar before his departure to Spurs in the January transfer window.
The rest of the team lined up like this: A back four of Hibbert (a welcome return in my view as he is a good honest defender of the kind you don't see that much nowadays), Jagielka, Distin and Baines. In midfield, Neville sat in front of the defence, Coleman had an attacking role down the right, Rodwell played through the centre (generally tending to drift left), Osman played down the left as I mentioned  above, and Cahill, returning from injury, played in the hole behind Saha, the lone striker up front.
When in possession Everton played their usual mix of slow out of defence and long balls to the front men. Fulham when defending, used the tactic which has been so successful against Everton this season, namely pressing when the ball is in the Everton half, then quickly dropping back to 2 banks of 5 when the ball crosses the half-way line..
The long ball tactic worked better than usual for Everton, not because they got decent possession straight from it, but because the Fulham defenders tended to hack the ball into touch.
What Fulham seemed to be trying to do was hit Everton on the break, but this tactic wasn't very successful, mainly because Hibbert did a fine job of shepherding Andy Johnson out wide and into the left corner. I don't think Johnson got a single cross in all match and he certainly didn't have a shot at goal.
The interesting tactical battle was the way that Fulham tried to deal with Everton's wide men, Baines and Osman on the left and Coleman and Hibbert on the right. What they did was, whenever Everton got into the danger zone, around the edge of the penalty area, two defenders and two midfielders would form a very tight box to try to deny the attackers space and options. In the end, this proved to be Fulham's undoing as Baines very cleverly feinted to cross but cut the ball back to Osman, who was stood on the corner of the penalty area. He then beat one man and gained enough space to float the ball over to Coleman. Coleman was un-marked since the whole Fulham defence had been pulled over to the left to deal with the threat from Osman.
The second goal was much simpler tactically. A driving run from Rodwell saw him fouled on the edge of the penalty area and the resulting free kick saw Saha combine power and accuracy to thread the ball through a gap in the wall and into the back of the net.
The consolation goal for Fulham came from that usual source, an attack down the right into the space left by Baines. To be fair, it was a very well worked move that required a pin-point finish from Fulham's American striker. However, once again, Everton were undone by a fast break and what seems to be an over-reliance on Distin to cover too much of the left-hand side.

Management Patterns: High cohesion - low coupling

In their seminal book, Structured Design  Larry Constantine said that high cohesion (the degree to which the internal contents of a module are related) and loose coupling (the degree to which a module depends upon other modules) were desirable aspects of a well designed programme. I think that these tenets can be taken and applied to the design of organisations and teams.
In an organisation, the equivalent of a module (for my purposes at least) is a team. A team exhibits high cohesion when all of its members are focused on the same business goal, when the communication between team members is fast, accurate and relevant to achieving the goal and when all the resources it needs are either under control of the team or can easily be acquired and accessed by the team.
In an organisational context, coupling is a measure of how teams interact. Team are loosely coupled if the responsibilities of teams are clearly defined and when, on the occasion that a team needs something from another team to achieve its ends, the mechanisms for doing this are clear and well known.
In order for teams to be highly cohesive and loosely coupled they have to be exist in order to achieve a business goal. They have to be made up of people with different skills that when they come together they can achieve something that they could not possibly do separately. A great example of this is a film crew. This consists of a lot of people with specific skills (including technical and organisational skills) that are brought together for a specific task.
The alternative to this is teams that are based on functions rather than business goals. This is the great anti-pattern of matrix management, to which I will return in a future blog.