I’ll occasionally highlight videos that I think are super awesome here that you guys have sent in. Today, we’re going to look at a masterpiece of ingenuity:
This is the kind of “get out and shoot it” attitude I love – so what if you don’t have prop weapons? Make them out of cardboard and use those instead! Stay for the sweet cardboard tank, too!
I got all kinds of crazy ideas, but the problem is YouTube doesn’t really give me a good idea of what my audience looks like! So I need your help – if you have a moment, please fill out this brief 10 question survey. It’ll help me get a better grasp of your interests, and will allow me to make even more kickin’ rad videos. Thank you! I really appreciate it!
99% of all guitarists do not survive the fall off Dave Matthews Peak, the splintered remains of their Yamaha acoustics and worn, browned strings littering the ground beneath.
The ones that do have a long period of thankless chop building ahead of them, which is paid off when they become True Bluesmen.
Funny how words change their meaning.
A lot of folks on YouTube tell us we’re “good editors” which is an interesting thing to be called because that word doesn’t mean what the film industry thinks it means anymore. Used to be a time where people would apprentice under a film editor, organizing clips, syncing dailies, and doing all the grunt work that being an “assistant editor” entails. After they’ve paid their dues, they’d move up to actually cutting footage. Used to be a time when being an editor meant taking in the footage, working with the director, and cutting together the sequence of shots that make a movie.
But nowadays “editors” are the directors, and being an “editor” seems to entail a lot of aspects of film production, borne out of necessity. As a filmmaker just starting out, odds are you shoot your own footage, direct the actors, cut together and add effects to the footage by yourself. The entirety of the post-production process is what a lot of people seem to consider “editing” nowadays, and also to a lesser extent, the act of shooting the footage itself seems to be considered part of the “Editing” process. Being labelled a “good editor” is about the highest praise you can hope to achieve – even greater than “good director” or “good producer.” A “good editor” is someone that is good at the process of making videos as a whole.
I got no problem with this – when I was starting out, my friends and I all referred to what we were doing as “editing” and we were loose with the terms because there weren’t enough people around to assign specific roles to (not to mention we didn’t have any idea what those roles necessarily entailed). The usage of the title is a symptom of lack of resources as well as the fact that technological advances has enabled a single person to handle the entire post production process of a video all by themselves. Rather than invent a new term, an older one was co-opted. And because good editing should be unobtrusive, actually good editing (say, a well cut, well paced dialogue scene) escapes the radar because it doesn’t have the whiz bang effect of flashy special effects or percussive music video editing.
But I definitely get the sense that the usage of this term doesn’t extend beyond the YouTube/DIY community. You don’t hear Spielberg or Tarantino referred to as “good editors,” and conversely, I think most of the people using the term in that way would be hard pressed to name Kahn or Menke as their respective editors. The next generation of filmmakers, and to an extent the generation that I occupy, is composed of a lot of individuals that are used to doing things by themselves and who’ve become jacks of all trades.
It’ll be interesting to see how on-set roles will change in the years to come. The rigidly defined roles on set work around big shoots and film cameras, but what happens when the crews get smaller and are composed of people used to wearing many hats? I strongly believe editors will no longer be relegated to taking in footage after it’s been shot and staying off the set – they’ll also become “On-Set Editors.” The job of an editor will require someone who handles all the footage dumping on set and is also fast enough of a cutter to rough in entire sequences as they’re being shot – a luxury that is only afforded by digital filmmaking and individuals who can specialize in numerous roles.
The advantages of such a position would be enormous – a director can respond immediately to a scene if it doesn’t play correctly, the editor can request different performances from the actors, and cutaways and inserts can be noted and in some cases, grabbed on the spot, reducing the need for reshoots and pickups. Why should there be two rounds of “performance evaluation” of an actor – once on set by the director, and then again by the editor in the cutting room? What matters is if the performance plays on the screen – and that can be evaluated on the spot. By assembling scenes moments after they’re shot, they’ll ideally have a very rough cut of the film the day it wraps production.
It’ll be interesting to see how filmmaking changes in response to the habits of filmmakers who are growing up now. We can restructure the shooting process into something that makes more sense by reevaluating the needs of digital filmmaking in combination with the myriad of skills of the crew.
PLEASE NOTE! Click HERE to go to the YouTube page – the player will only give you 3D options there!
Nintendo was not allowing people to take photos of the screen on because “it wouldn’t look good.” Drawing from our experience with working on 3D footage, I’ve created a mockup with the most anticipated launch title of the century. For everybody who was unable to make it to E3, this is essentially what the 3DS looked like in person!
Had the chance to pop through E3 this year. The Nintendo 3DS was the stand-out. Matt noted that while the 3DS had a line two hours long, the Playstation Move had, at most, four people waiting to play it at any given time. Ouch.
One of the things I love about all the press conferences is this bizarre adherence to the theater of pretending to play the game “live.” Generally, there’s no way they’re really playing it live (especially at the major press conferences) – there’s way too much that could go wrong – AI might bug out, textures might screw up, something might fail to spawn, etc. etc.
It gets even more awkward when the performers try to pretend like they’re “gaming” – the Gears of War 3 presentation was pretty bad, filled with half hearted gamer jive talking that, echoing against the massive cavern of the presentation hall, sounded pathetically meek. I guess there’s still the Barnum and Bailey gee-whiz factor they go for, but it’s pretty lame at this point. Once you learned Half-Life 2 faked most of their E3 presentation, the illusion is pretty much shattered. Just show us some video and get on with it – don’t pretend like you’re actually doing this stuff live, or if you’re going to pretend, at least go all out.
Also hilarious is the apparent inability of everybody to give a half decent presentation. Granted, comparing these guys to the King of Keynotes, Apple’s Steve Jobs, is like comparing a TED Talk to an eighth grader’s presentation on an assigned South American country, but still – watching these grown men struggle through enunciating their sentences with any semblance of self-confidence is pretty harsh. Reggie ain’t no Jobs, but man does he run laps around these guys.
Also, Power Gig: Rise of the Six String has to be easily one of the shittiest games ever made.
Frozen Crossing Part 2 is out!
We had a good time making this one. We didn’t realize it, but it’s been exactly two months since the first one came out. I didn’t direct this one – Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski were the directors – my job was sound design, which I talk about here:
Sound is incredibly important because sound affects a film viewer on an instinctual, gut level. It’s not enough to see the flare of a gunshot, or the swipe of a punch – a good sound will make you wince and react emotionally to what’s happening on screen. Because it has this ability to worm its way in through the subconscious level, it’s an incredibly powerful tool, and unfortunately, one that’s constantly overlooked.
My favorite example of good sound was when I saw Apocalypto in theaters – when one of the guys jumps off the waterfall, it cuts to his POV as he smacks his head into a rock. THAT sound, my God – it was the perfect sound – it was the sound we all heard in our heads when we smacked our heads on the floor of the pool. But the reaction – EVERY single person in front of me threw their hands up to their head and reacted vocally as if they had hit their own heads.
When was the last time the visuals of a knife stab caused you to clutch your own chest? Or a gunshot caused you to and duck involuntarily? A single sound effect caused an entire theater of people to react, whereas if you had just had the visuals, the impact would have been non-existent.
I had the opportunity to work with my friend Kevin Klauber on his MPAA Golden Reel nominated short Bio.Rhythm as a DP. For this short, Kevin thought a lot about using sound as a storytelling element – and he went crazy with all kinds of cool abstract sounds that fit the picture. You rarely see this level of experimentation in movies nowadays, and it’s too bad because it’s such a treat to listen to.
The last movie I remember thinking pushed abstract sound design as an element was The Book of Eli. While it was a flawed movie, everybody should go “listen” to this movie – it’s a really awesome sounding movie, and also one of the few movies where sound ties strongly in with the story. Too many people get into the mindset of “OK I’ll put all the elements that should be there in – background noise, dialogue, some music, and they leave it at that. Think about how sound can work as an emotional storytelling tool – it doesn’t matter if the sound is what something should sound like, it matters if it’s what something should feel like.
So next time you fire up a movie, give sound design a chance. Start being experimental. Go crazy – try putting sounds in places where they wouldn’t be realistically. Follow your gut and remember – if it feels right, it is right.
Want to light paint like we did here?
It’s easy! Here’s what you need:
The idea behind light painting is that if you open the shutter, you can draw lines by moving the flashlight around in front of the lens. So hold the shutter open, get in front, and try drawing something in the air. If you have a camera flash, you can have someone stand in place, and flash them. Then have them hold still and draw around them. Experiment!
Some tips:
Finally resolved the myriad of technical issues with the site because I was swapping servers around behind the scenes like crazy. The old freddiew.com is no more – freddiew.com is where my blog resides from here on out.
So hey what up.
