Paul Zadie

If you’re like most creative professionals, you probably use your computer for editing, graphics, effects, audio production, and any number of other tasks that require maximum performance from your system. You probably also use that same system for many other things that don’t require top performance.

My usual ritual when starting work for the day is to set my Energy Saver settings to never sleep the system because there is nothing worse than trying to play back a timeline and having to wait for disks to spin up. I spend the day working, then I restore my settings to something that is a lot more energy efficient. This lets me have the performance that I need to work, but gives me the lower heat, lower power consumption, and eco friendliness that I want from my system when I’m not working in a demanding application.

I was getting tired of making these changes manually, so I turned to Google. After a little bit of searching, I found a set of AppleScripts for changing Energy Saver Profiles. These scripts are easy to install and run from the menu bar. The days of manually configuring the energy saver twice a day are gone now.

Adobe Kuler is an indispensable tool for anyone that works with color. No matter what variety of media you work with, if you need to whip up amazing color schemes you should be using this tool.

If you work on a Mac, this just got easier. Using the Mondrianum 2 plugin for the Apple OS X system color picker, you have access to Kuler from virtually anywhere in your system. Just change your preferences in any app that doesn’t use the system color picker by default (Adobe apps), and you have one of the most powerful design references available on the web right at your fingertips.

Now go design something Kul.

I have never directed a film before so when my assistant editor Adam asked me to direct an entry to the National Film Challenge, I agreed. Who in their right mind would turn down a fun, sleep deprived weekend of filmmaking? Not me, that’s for sure. And fun it was. We had a weekend of DV Rebel style filmmaking with a one day shoot that took place at a small carnival, and a day of intense post-production.

The weekend started with a brainstorming session with most of the crew present, then our writer, J.M. Moeller, went off and wrote the script that Afair is based on. Then we shot for a full day at the carnival, arriving before it opened to shoot some or our scenes, and staying until after dark to take advantage of the visually rich backdrop of the colors and  lights available to us. Speaking of light… This film was shot entirely with available light and a bounce board. This caused us some problems with shadows and noise, but with a bit of attention in After Effects, I was able to remedy some of the issues. It’s not perfect, but I’m satisfied.

Director of Photography, Ryan Krause, shot Afair on my HVX-200/Brevis35 camera rig. Editor, Adam Lee, composer/sound designer, Justin Sisley and myself did all of the post in Adobe CS3. While this final version of the film is not exactly what was completed over that weekend, it is pretty close. After our entry was submitted to the contest, I went to work fine tuning the edit, color grade and titles while, Justin worked on refining the music and sound. 

You can view Afair in HD at the official Afair website, or on Vimeo. Or watch in low resolution below. I recommend the HD version. While you’re at the Afair website, you can download an iTunes version of the film, an Afair logo wallpaper for your computer or the script. There is also a flickr photo set, and an Afair Facebook Page, so please become a fan.

I am interested to hear your thoughts on Afair, so leave a comment below or comment on Vimeo. Thanks and enjoy!

AFAIR from Paul Zadie on Vimeo.

If you are involved in post-production, or in filmmaking in general, you should lend an ear to That Post Show. Host John Flowers invited me and Scott Simmons on this week’s show to talk about some post-production goodness. John, Scott, and I have a great discussion about the current state of the NLE software landscape. We talk about some of the projects we use Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro for, and why we choose one program over another based on the needs of a particular project. We all take turns airing some of our major grievances with some of the software and hardware that we use. It’s a good show, so give it a listen.

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.