Monthly Archives: August 2008

adventures in amateur filmmaking

Phew

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Thanks to everyone and their thoughts, well-wishes, prayers to the FSM, etc.

I sat down last night and recaptured the footage that had gone all wonkily blocky with my initial capture. This time around everything worked!

I only have a few more scenes to capture, then everything will be in my cozy little external HD.

Onward and upward,

Splotchy

comix

Embrace The Comix

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Hi kids.

I have a neat idea. I have already contacted a few people privately about this, but thought, what the heck, it wouldn’t hurt to put it all “out there” for any interested parties.

I am planning on doing a Comix Week at I, Splotchy later this year. As of now I am thinking of doing it during the first week of November, 2008.

What Comix Week is this — during that week, the only blog posts I do will be in comics form. Any text in the post will have to be part of a cartoon.

I am the first to admit I am pretty awful at drawing stuff. I thought it would be neat if I could get contributions from a variety of people.

There are some stipulations to participating in Comix Week. Either the comics will be created based on something I write, or created as a result of my direct collaboration with the artist. What I’m trying to say is that I want to be some kind of creative force in any of the comics posted on the blog. All the comics posted during the week will be assembled into a digital comic book and made available for free download.

I’m announcing Comix Week with lots of lead time because I know it’s not easy making the fancy drawings.

So, let me know if you are interested!

adventures in amateur filmmaking

Oh, Snurf

7 Comments

I diligently logged and captured footage on the rest of Tape 1 and all of Tape 2 last night.

I connected my new 1 TB(!) external HD to my laptop via a FireWire 800 cable.

Next, I connected the camera to the laptop via a special cable. I haven’t really done any footage-dumping to a computer, so it’s a neat experience for me. I actually control the camera from the editing software I am using.

Anyways, the process of logging and capturing begins with logging the shots. Logging consists of marking start and end points of a shot, and giving it some sort of name. At this point your editing software stores the endpoints’ digital timecode (there is timecode on all the footage).

After you have logged some shots, you can then capture them. Basically, you’re giving the software a set of endpoints, and it will take these endpoints, find the relevant timecode on the tape, and capture the footage into a digital file.

Everything was working great, until my last capture session. I had logged about fifty clips and kicked off the batch capture process. The capture process has to be done in real time. In other words, if you have a ten minute clip to capture, it will take ten minutes to capture the clip. So, I let my computer chug for a while and came back to it around midnight.

Something is wonky with the last batch of footage I captured. Any motion on the screen goes blocky, mosaicy. The original footage does not look like this. I can’t use shots with this blockiness. It looks horrible.

I am relatively confident that my footage is okay, and there’s something else at play. Maybe I tried to capture too much footage at the same time, maybe my computer couldn’t handle it. I talked to Lance, who told me, based on my description of the blockiness-in-motion, that it might be a compression problem.

I’m going to review the footage again tonight, and recapture it if it still looks crappy, but do smaller batches of clips per capture.

Wish me luck, okay?

adventures in amateur filmmaking

There Is A Movie On My Computer!

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So, I went over to my friend Lance’s house last night. He showed me how to capture video footage to my computer, and also gave me some helpful editing tips.

Over the next couple days, I am planning on transferring the footage to my laptop. Shortly after, editing will commence. I still have a few more things which I need to film, and I need to do this sooner than later, but 98% of the movie is shot.

While we were messing around with the editing software, I took two of the shots, trimmed them and spliced them together. I played it back and behold! The juxtaposition of images! The magic of storytelling! The thrill of a conversation in a car!

It is absolutely pure joy seeing this movie start to come together.

Editing really suits my personality — intense concentration, attention to detail, etc. I am looking forward to assembling this movie. It will take time, but I hope to enjoy every minute of it.

I still can’t believe I’m making a movie.

Yeehaw, man. Yeehaw.