Paul Zadie

After submitting ARMY Men to a handful of film festivals a couple of months ago, the responses have just started coming back in. As I expected, we were not accepted to some of the more prestigous festivals that we submitted the film to. The 27th Annual Telly Awards was one of those that I was sure ARMY Men wouldn’t have a chance in. It turns out I was wrong. ARMY Men took home three Film/Video Tellys in the Entertainment, Low Budget and Editing categories. This experience is a bit surreal. I had no idea that this little film even had a chance. I’m not sure how many entries there were this year, but there were over 12,000 submissions to last year’s competition. It’s exciting for me to be able to add “Award Winning Filmmaker” to my resume, and “Award Winning Production Company” to the CreativeLogic brand. If you haven’t seen ARMY Men yet, now is your chance. View it on the Downloads page at the CreativeLogic web site. Let me know what you think.

I received an email a couple of weeks ago from an acquaintance from film school. He told me that he had shot a ten-minute short film in February, but was having some difficulty putting together an edit, as he is not an editor. This first time director needed some help, so I agreed to edit the piece for him.This project had its share of problems, technical and otherwise. The film is set almost entirely to music (I’ll get back to this in a later post) with a fair amount of voiceover. The biggest problem that I had was that the lead actor’s dialog was horrible. This could have been the film’s saving grace because the actor never speaks on screen. At my request the director had the dialog re-recorded, but did not hire an actor to do the recording. He opted to record the voiceover himself. It turned out better than the original voice track, but not a well as it could have with a decent actor.Now for some of the picture related problems. This is actually a list of some things to watch out for during production that could come back to bite you in post.

1. Watch for gear and crewmembers in the frame. This is not just a responsibility of the camera operator. Every member of the crew should be watching out for this one. Usually there are ways to cut around this problem, but that doesn’t work if it happens in every take for the duration of the shot.
2. Do not use auto iris on the camera when moving from indoors to outdoors or vice versa. As a matter of fact, don’t use auto iris EVER.
3. Do not use auto white balance. White balance the camera properly. If you don’t know how to white balance your camera, check the manual, or try an online resource for help. dvxuser.com is a good source of information if you are shooting with Panasonic products.
4. Stripe your tapes before shooting. I can’t tell you how many times I have worked with footage shot in 24P that gets edited at 29.97 because there are loads of time code breaks in the tape. Time code breaks occur when a tape is rewound in the camera for playback and the tape isn’t forwarded to the same frame where recording ceased. Many cameras have an “End Search” feature that brings the tape back to where it should be. Striping the tape is more reliable because you don’t have to remember to use “End Search” when the pressure is on during production.
5. When shooting complex hand held camera movements, it is a very good idea to do a few less takes, and try a couple of takes on sticks for safety. It’s usually a good indication that the shot is not working if you are on take fourteen, and there are no lines for an actor to flub.
6. Lighting continuity within a scene is essential to creating a believable scene. It’s okay to have some small discrepancys with the lighting, but when a wide shot is so dark that you can barely see the character, and the close-ups are so well lit that night looks like day, there is a problem. The old adage “Fix it in post” can work sometimes, but more often than not, it just doesn’t fly. No matter what anybody tells you… garbage in = garbage out.

I’ll stop there for now. The moral of the story is to hire an experienced Director of Photography. If you have an experienced D.P., you will turn out a much better film. I have some other notes to share regarding the producer’s responsibilities, but I’ll save that for another post.

As if I don’t have enough on my plate already with my current projects. I have an idea for a short film starring my dog, Bogey.

My girlfriend, Sara, is a domestic animal trainer at SeaWorld in a show called Pets Ahoy, the number one rated show at the park. She works with dogs, cats, pigeons, ducks, pigs, skunks, rats…. lots of different land animals, and she’s good at it. The show is owned and operated by Joel Slaven. Joel is the mastermind trainer behind some of the animals in Ace Ventura Pet Detective. In short, Sara is learning from the best in the business. Sara and I have been training Bogey since we rescued her from the Orlando Humane Society about eight months ago. Sara teaches her the tricks, and I train her on how to be a good dog.

This short film that I have in mind is going to put Sara and Bogey to the test. Behaviors are no problem for Bogey as she is highly intelligent and learns most things in one training session. The biggest hurdle I can see with the dog is getting her to express emotion. I know that Sara will figure this part out. She works with some great trainers who will help us out. She had better get Bogey laughing and crying, or my story doesn’t work. More updates later.

Things have been a little bit slow moving on this project lately. I have been so busy with so many different things that I have been neglecting Bobby. The dialog has been recorded and mixed for almost two months, so I figured it was aobut time that I started working on a rough animatic. What this preliminary animatic is comprised of is all of the storyboard panels edited to the dialog track. The audio has been mixed down and sounds great, but it still needs some heavy duty editing.

Once complete, the storyboard animatic will serve multiple purposes. It will give the animators a blueprint for the next step in the process, animating low resolution models to create 3D animatic shots which I will use to create a more fine tuned edit. The storyborad animatic will also be used by the composer to create the title theme and score. I’m hoping to have it done by the end of this weekend so that I can pass it along the assembly line.