Paul Zadie

I’m starting pre-production on my next short film project called Broken Promise. In addition to being Director of Photography on this one, I’ll be producing. That means in reality I’ll be serving as the Producer, Production Manager, Production Coordinator, and Catering. I guess I’m really going to need a good 1st AD.

So my first step is doing a script breakdown. I typically use Final Draft Tagger for the breakdown, Showbiz Scheduling (formerly Company Move Show-Planner) for scheduling, and Showbiz Budgeting for uh… budgeting.

Most scripts are written with Final Draft, so this method works. But Final Draft gives me a headache with activation issues. I swear that the people who pirate the software don’t have to deal with the issues that legit customers put up with. DRM and copy protection suck, and only cause problems for the users who pay good money for software and media. I think this has been proven time and again. When are these companies going to learn? I digress.

Showbiz Budgeting works fine, so I’ll be sticking with it for now. Showbiz Scheduling on the other hand doesn’t run on my MacBook Pro because I use File Vault to keep my home folder encrypted. This is the only application that I have any issues with. For some reason, it is unable to find the user’s library folder to write application support files to when File Vault is in use on the system. But whatever. This is a fantastic piece of scheduling software. It runs fine on my Mac Pro, but I need to be mobile, and I’m not going to sacrifice the security of my documents and all of my hard work just to use Showbiz Scheduling.

I have been writing with Celtx and I have had very few complaints. So I decided to give Celtx a try for prep on this project. With the recent release of Celtx 1.0, I figure it’s time to put it to the test as a real pre-production tool. It makes it easy that Broken Promise is only seven pages. If it works out smoothly, I’ll do prep on my upcoming feature with it.

The first step to ridding yourself of the inconvenience that is Final Draft is to open your script in said inconvenient application. Then save your script as an RTF file. Import that file into Celtx, and it should recognize all of your formatting. Here’s where I ran into a small glitch. There were a few instances where an action line got caught at the end of a line of dialog. It was formatted properly in the RTF, but went a little wonky on import. No big deal this time. It only affected the last two pages of the script, and was an easy fix. This may be a bigger issue with a feature length script. Or may be no issue at all. It could have been a formatting error somewhere else in the pipeline. I’ll have to test it with a longer script. I’ll get back to you with the results.

That’s it for now. The next step is the script breakdown.

A couple of months ago I was the DP for a music video for singer Raquel Martinez. The video for the song Heaven In My Heart was directed and edited by David Bermejo.

I shot this with a Canon XH-A1, Redrock M2 adapter, and some Canon FD lenses. The most commonly used lens was a 50mm f/1.4. The 28mm was used in a couple of shots, but very minimally. This was mainly because we shot with a small crew and just didn’t have the time to change lenses.

Lighting for the indoor scene was done with a small Arri kit. Exterior lighting was done using a shiny board where needed. We also had a dolly rolling on PVC for the moves. All pretty basic.

Check out the video in HD on Vimeo, or see it below.

I was on a Disney Cruise shooting video for the Make A Wish Foundation in February. This was shot at our stop at Castaway Cay, Bahamas.

Back in November I was invited by my friend and world class Aerial Cinematographer, Norman Kent, to document a world record attempt at a 100-way parachute formation. I shot footage from the ground while Norman and a handful of others were in the air capturing some stunning images of the formation. After a couple days of practice with smaller formations, the skydivers began the actual record attempt. On the second day of attempts, the record was accomplished. What a great experience. The people were incredible, and it was lots of fun. I can’t wait to attend another skydiving event.

A few months later… Norman asked me to cut together a miniature documentary/promo video. So, here it is. Enjoy.

Or you can view or download a higher quality version of this video here.
 

This was a design I originally whipped up for the header image of this site. I liked it, so I made a desktop. I hope you like it too. If you do, get the original 1920×1200 size. Enjoy.

Matt over at FreshDV posted a list of free editing software. It’s a list of 11 open source applications ranging from Non-Linear Editors to Format Converters. It isn’t a comprehensive review, but it is a good resource if you’re looking for editing software on a zero budget. 

The only software on the list that I have any experience with are Avid FreeDV, and Jahshaka.

Avid FreeDV isn’t half bad, but the biggest problem I remember having with it was the lack of any way to escalate your project to any of the other Avid applications. It would be nice to at least be able to get FreeDV projects opened in Express Pro, or at least Express DV. This is a bit of a moot point now, as none of these applications is available any longer through Avid. 

As one of the commenters on the FreshDV post stated, Jahshaka was not much more than a time waster. It was fun to experiment with, but I lost interest quickly and never finished a project with it.

Check out the rest of the FreshDV list. And the Fresh new theme too.

This is my video camera all dressed up. It is constantly evolving, but for now it consists of a Canon XH-A1, the Brevis 35 Flip adapter, a Redrock Micro follow focus, speed crank, carbon fiber rod support system, Cavision handgrips, shoulder pad, matte box, French flag, 7″ LCD monitor, and a selection of fast Canon FD lenses.

Supertown has been moving along a bit slowly lately. There is no budget and too many characters to count, so shooting happens when our producer, Chris (who is currently in the process of moving to L.A.) manually aligns the planets, which he does a great job of. I think we have one more day of shooting coming up. We have been shooting on weekends and days off every now and then since October or was it November? Not sure. It’s a “spare time” type of project. Almost all of the scenes are shot, so the director wanted to cut a trailer. I’m not the editor on this project, but I put the trailer together for Sam, AKA “Stampeding Bison”, AKA the director. Who makes an appearance in the last shot of the trailer.

Cutting was done in Premiere Pro CS3. The color grading was done with Magic Bullet Looks with the effect applied in Premiere. And graphics and effects were completed in After Effects CS3. I usually work in Final Cut Studio, so I wanted to test out the Adobe Dynamic Link workflow, and this trailer was a good starting place. It worked smoothly bringing AE comps into the Premiere timeline, but it didn’t work for me in the other direction. When I sent a Premiere sequence to After Effects using Dynamic Link, there was nothing in the AE project. It’s probably something simple that I’m missing. I have been using After Effects for a while, but I haven’t used Premiere since version 5, so I think I just need more time with it. Or maybe some good ol’ Lynda.com training.

So, here’s the trailer.

This would be my wife Sara getting eaten alive by my dog Bogey.