All my stuff in one place

By popular (Hey Georgie!) demand here is all my videos for Uni in one location.

 

O.R.B: Operation Retrieve Briefcase

Front Cover

O.R.B Front Cover

Back Cover

O.R.B back cover (image)

The Feature Film

The Trailer

Behind the Scenes: HeadSplosion (TURN VOLUME UP, it was recorded at 2:00am and I was trying not to be heard by my neighbours)

Behind the Scenes: Rhyming Narration (again TURN VOLUME UP!)

Blooper Reel

 

 

Media Self Portrait

Media Portrait about someone else

 

A couple videogame related videos (mostly Bloodborne)

 

Some random Gif’s I made for various internet forums.

(you probably wont get them at all, but they are still here)

 

(dont ask)

 

 

 

 

Final physical film screening at IMAX, Intersteller.

Last night I had a unique cinematic experience, that was almost certainly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Seeing Christopher Nolan’s Intersteller in its 70mm IMAX glory, the last 70mm IMAX filmstrip played at Melbourne Museum and the final use of a 17 year old projector that needed more floorspace than my apartment.

I will fully and un-ashambly admit I sacrificed the quality of my essay to see go to this event, 4 extra hours would have massivly improved my barely finished piece of writing. But alas…..I really wanted needed to see this.

Before the film began the managers and projectionists at IMAX gave a brief talk about the history of the 15 perf70mm projector at IMAX, and showed, live for the audiance, the process of setting up the film for display. The machine was impressive, and the size and scope of the filmstrip was awe-inspiring. 7cm film is a hard concept to grasp without seeing next to regular sized film. 24 frames, 1 second of film, is as tall as the average male. It was an insightful look into the technical complexities of the medium (and the visual fidelity of the film was a testoment to the quality of the product and the projector).

However, they also talked about why it is being replaced and how after 17 years it is time for the IMAX theatre to move on. The primary reason is cost, the monetary expenditure on keeping it running and obtaining/storing films is ludicrus. Another reason cited is  a lack of content being produced for the format, the host of the event saying that they couldnt keep it running relying solely on Christopher Nolan.

I am not the type of person who defiantly hates digital film (although I will not buy a digital copy of anything unless physical media doesnt exist), but seeing something disappear forever is always sad, an important part of artistic history lost (I know other 70mm IMAX projectors exist, but they are slowly vanishing everywhere, and I’ll likely never be able to visit them anyway). That being said, it is easy for a casual movie-goer to be angry at the loss of the projector, as we are not the ones who have to keep it running. A feeling of sadness is more approriate in my opinion. Like a beloved grandparent, its loss is sad, but not unexpected and its memory should be treasured.

As for the actual film, I did not see it on its original run, but I did see it later on DVD on a 24 inch TV with crappy speakers (although it was still better than my cousin, who watched it first on a plane). When I first saw it I enjoyed it moderatly, but I had several issues with the plot. As for the visuals and score, they were butchered by the TV, and all I could think was “I bet this was amazing in IMAX”.

I was correct.

Intersteller has the most 70mm IMAX footage out of any Hollywood film, over 75 minutes that made full use of the technology. The impact was stunning, while the constantly changing aspect ratio was annoying and a bit distracting, any and all the fullscreen sections were amazing, especially the scenes of silently drifting through space. The sound sytem at IMAX also put my TV’s shameful speakers in thier place, at certain points Hans Zimmer’s score made the entire room vibrate and teh deafening organs were incredible.

My issues with the plot still stand, but for sheer spectecle and overwhelming cinematic experience seeing Intersteller the way it was intended (as well as the emotional impact of knowing it was the last 70mm physical film reel to be played in Melbourne) made this event one of THE best movie-going events of my life

2 Hour video talking about the cinematography of Mad Max: Fury Road

As you may remember from THIS blog post, I really enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road. During my travels of the internet I came across this video, in which cinematographer John Seale talks about the making of the film

I found it very interesting and ended up watching all 2 hours of it.

 

Making of Mad Max: Fury Road from ACS Victoria with John Seale ACS ASC and David Burr ACS from ACS Victoria on Vimeo.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Part of this blog is meant to be writing about random Media stuff, I’ve been fairly slack on that, but I’m trying to do more:

 

On Thursday 14th of May, I went to the cinema and saw the new Mad Max movie, Fury Road, directed by George Miller. I very much liked this movie. It was incredible. This blog post contains my impressions about the movie, there may be spoilers.

There was so much that resonated with me in this film, first and foremost was the action: the movie is almost non-stop action from beginning to end, and it does it without it getting stale or feeling repetitive.

This is because of the variance in action set pieces, each one has a different style, such as cars ramming into eachother using spikes as a weapon, or motorbikes using rocks as jumps to assualt the vechile from above, or even giant poles to swing from car to car.

This brings me to my next thing that I really appreciated was the lack of exposition. The movie does very little to explain its world, instead opting to just show us in motion and rely on the audiance to understand.

For example the religious aspect of “War Boys” in which they deliberately commit suicidal attacks in battle to gain glory and enter the afterlife of Valhalla. This is never actually explained by anyone, instead we are just shown this process in action, and the audience is trusted to put the pieces together and use their imagination/knowledge of real-world events to create the whole picture.

I feel this kind of “show dont tell” filmmaking has be neglected in recent years, with many action blockbusters stopping and meticulously explaining background information instead of letting the audience put 2 and 2 together.

Mad Max: Fury Road had excellent editing, framing and cinematography that made the chaotic action easy to understand, and THIS article explains it better than I can.

It was a great movie, and is the type of film that inspires me to make my own

 

 

SYN Media training and video.

During May I participated in SYN media training at SYN Media located on Cardigan Street near RMIT.

It was over 2 Saturdays and involved learning how to operate equipment such as camera, lights, mics and editing software, as well as learning about how to get into the media industry in Melbourne, especially Channel 31 which SYN has a close relationship with. On the second Saturday we used our learned skills to produce a short video.

On the first day we met up and learned how to use some of the equipment, it was a small group of only 6 students and a teacher. All the students were from University (a few from RMIT, one from Melbourne, Monash and Latrobe), and studying a variety of subjects including Media, Journalism and more.

Some of the learning was redundant for me, since it covered the same basic stuff that we had done in Media 1, such as learning how to use the cameras. However there was other equipment that I was un-familar with, such as Boom Mics, lighting, and having multiple audio channels.

The first Saturday wasn’t very exciting, but everyone was really cool and interesting to talk to about the different Uni-courses.

The next week was much different: We were tasked with writing, filming and editing a short video in a few short hours. Our concept was to make a faux-reporter style video where and Interviewer asks questions to various university students, with each student embodying a different “type” or “cliche” of a university student.

We settled on having 3 interviewees, an overdramatic political activist, a foreign exchange student and a over-the-top hipster parody. Each one was written with various levels of satire and ridiculousness, with the foreign student being almost 100% sincere (since Joel, the actor, was in fact Malaysian), and the other two being parodies or massively exaggerated.

Each person had multiple roles in production, I was both an actor and holding the Boom mic (in all shots except where I was acting), while others swapped around using the cameras, using the sound board etc…

After working our a rough script and assigning jobs we set out to film in various locations around Melbourne. We filmed inside SYN headquarters for the intro, at the Library for the political activist, in a graffiti filled alley for the Hipster and at the Vistitors centre for the Exchange student.

We encountered various hassles in filming, especially outside the library. Since apparently people couldn’t tell if screaming “SAVE THE ANTS” was sincere or not. Also an old man walked straight through the middle of our shot, paused, took out his mobile phone and took a picture of one the camera operators from behind and walked off. It was creepy and probably illegal, but we were all too bewildered to do anything.

The other shoots went smoother, and we were back at SYN in plenty of time.

Now we were tasked with editing the video together, we were given a breif tutorial in how to use Adobe Premiere and then left to our own devices. It was decided that having everyone stay would be pointless and crowded, so only those who wanted to edit stayed.

Me and Jasmine were the only ones to stay, and we began the mammoth task of editing the video together.

We quickly learned we had made a cardinal mistake of filmmaking: we had forgotten to use a clapboard or label our takes in anyway. This meant we had multiple cameras and multiple mics without any way to tell which take matched up with which, especially since for some takes one camera wasn’t used, so simply counting from the top didn’t work either. Not to mention there was no uniformity between lengths, sometimes one camera kept rolling, while another cut and reset.

It was slow and extremely frustrating, but eventually we matched video with audio, and got different shots from the same take to put together. After this it was much less frustrating, but still time consuming to edit all the clips in order and crop everything to proper length. We also added a title, credits and names for the interviewees.

The rest of the group had all left at 4pm, the final video was uploaded to our Facebook group at 9:30pm. Everyone was extremely happy with the finished product, and were surprised that Jasmine and I had stayed so long.

I am quite proud of this work, it was great meeting new people and seeing pathways into the media industry. As well as having lots of fun making a video and learning how to use new editing software and filming equipment.

Here is our video: “Uni Lyfe”

 

 

Noticing aspect ratios being changed to fit screens – Mad Max 2

Continuing from my previous post, I have continued to take extra notice of how non-standard aspect ratios are converted to fit onto TV.

This particular noticing involved George Millers 1981 film Mad Max 2 (also known as The Road Warrior, or Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior). In excitement for the upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road I decided to re-watch the originals over the weekend on Blu-ray.

I noticed it was also on TV Sunday night, and I compared the differences.

On Blu-ray the film is in 2.40:1 letter box aspect ratio, while the version broadcast on television was full screen at 16:9. This meant that the edges of the screen were missing.

While nothing super important was cut off the side of the screen, it still messed up a few shots: Near the beginning of the film, on Blu-ray you can read the signpost, but on TV it was almost entirely off-screen.

Another example was in an overhead shot which had Max walking across the screen to investigate the parked Gyrocopter, the copter is half off-screen, whereas it was fully onscreen in the original aspect ratio.

In the final chase sequence multiple cars which were fully in view on Blu-ray were partially obscured on TV.

I personally found it very disappointing, and I wish TV broadcasters would show content as the creator intended. It also raised another question: Why do 4:3 programs get black (or blurred copy’s of the image) to fill excess space, but anything wider than 16:9 is cropped to fit

Aspect Ratio’s on TV – Continued from a while ago

In a previous Blog post I talked about Aspect Ratios and there history, and gave a brief discussion about how they are dealt with when transferring to screens of different aspect ratios than the original.

Over the past few weeks I have been taking conscious effort to notice how different media is dealt with when the aspect ratio is an issue.

4:3 programs on TV (usually reruns) are usually displayed with 2 black bars going vertically up each side when displayed on a 16:9 screen. One such example of this that was prevalent was episodes of The Simpsons from earlier seasons which are displayed this way.

But other methods are used as well, another common method I observed was to still leave the image un-cropped, but instead of simply having Black Bars a faded, blurred version of the image is used. This allows the original footage to be un-altered, as well as the screen to be completely filled (even if its just filler). The advantages of this are removing the stark contrast the Black Bars give, the edges of the screen are the same colour palette as the actual video, it also moves which prevents “burn in” on older Plasma TVs. I observed this method on the ABC show Good Game, where it was used to show footage of older video games made for 4:3 screens.

As far as I know, I did not encounter any 4:3 media that had been cropped to fully fit a 16:9 screen on television.