Further Scarlet Camera Speculation

Although no real further details have surfaced about Red's Scarlet camera, I happened to watch a seminar for the Red One camera in which they made a quick mention of the Scarlet. Basically what was said:

Pocket.
Professional.
Not Prosumer.

The last point mentioned is fairly interesting, because most fairly decent cameras on the market today that would probably be within the Scarlet's range are considered prosumer. Prosumer generally meaning a camera with good features, usually derived from higher classed cameras, but at a more affordable price tag.

Seeing as how the Scarlet will be a professional product, commonsense would dicate that it will have at least one XLR input instead of the usual 3.5mm microphone input on some cameras. Also it should have a higher resolution than the commonplace 1080HD, 2K at the least which is slightly higher.

I believe the main things that are going to differentiate the Red One and the Scarlet are the physical size, and possibly the ability to change lenses. Including a fixed lens with the Scarlet would bring down the overall price, and the size would lower manufacturing and material costs.

Red One has an overkill assortment of manual settings, inputs and output jacks. With the Scarlet they should streamline the camera slightly to reduce it down to strict professional requirements, but of course without the sheer amount of customization available with the Red One camera. Seeing as how the camera will both be professional and not prosumer, we should be seeing a very nice camera announced this coming April.

As a side note I also found this page, RedRelay, from the main Red website, which has some nice camera footage from the Red One.

Slight Visual Refresh

I have been working on a website design for some time now, and thought I should somehow tie my blog in with it once it becomes finished. I finally decided upon a name, so have changed the blogs name to reflect this and to also make the design between the two flow better and make more sense.

Basically the website at the moment is a kind of portfolio, but I will be able to add film projects on there later down the track. The design for the site is fairly complete but the content isn't quite done yet. I will include a screen shot as a preview to the look of the site.

I will also try to be moving this blog to http://www.eyeofthesky.com as soon as I can work out exactly how to do it.

Reflections of the Southern Institute of Technology, Part 3

In the third year at the SIT, things finally started to improve. Although we didn't really receive any more tutors except for a horrible Media Culture one, the management of the course became a lot more sorted, and the head guy from the Audio faculty became the head of our programme as well.

The year started off with an interesting concept of creating a 30 second commercial with the full participation of both the Film and Multimedia students, and as finished would be a combined live action/cg piece of work. It all sounded interesting enough, if not a bit overwhelming on the scale of which we had to plan the whole project out, even though it was only a mere 30 seconds worth. The class finally settled on an idea by Kat, which would be about a couple of sharks fishing for fishermen. Somewhere, somehow, the original idea of the cartoony sharks disappeared along with the plot of the commercial. It then became a commercial about a fisherman that gets pulled into the water by one of the aforementioned sharks for some reason, with no actual tag line or gimmick planned for the end. This wasn't really realised until right near the end of the project which is rather ridiculous.

Anyway I will say that it wasn't the greatest success, although for awhile it was definately fun. We all got assigned different positions according to our talent/areas of interest, and I became the D.O.P. which I was pleased with. The project involved an on location shoot in Bluff for one morning, and a very involved greenscreen shoot at another time. Most of the filming was a piece of cake after all the preparations and organization had been accomplished for the greenscreen shoot. The postproduction and cg aspects however would be more of a headache, with the editor leaving for a baseball game in Australia and me taking over as temporary editor. The main problem was the lack of communication with the multimedia students, they would continuously provide us with weirdly named files and tons of mixed up HD layers which became very confusing to put together. The multimedia students did some good work, but because of a couple of students a lot of things got mixed up along the way. Anyway in the end it turned out alright, except it made no sense, like a lot of stuff made at SIT.

Later on in the year I did a little side project which involved my brother wandering around some places, just as practice on the camera and to try some pull focuses etc. I also wrote another short which I ultimately couldn't find actors for. Actually make that two shorts that I couldn't find actors for. Me Michael and Steve also teamed up to make a 3 minute short based on some of his earlier ideas, which in my eyes is probably the best thing we've came up with even though it was really short. Sonny and Donnie is one of the signs that we were finally breaking free from both the horrible conventional mold of the SIT, and also from the lack of creativity and motivation that had plagued us in the past. It was basically written and filmed one afternoon, but feels the most complete compared to anything else I've done. Even though its only a single scene, if you watch it in full HD the film-craft is fairly topnotch, except for a slight lack of light on Michael's character due to our shortage of lights at the time. After this I basically leant my help to a few of my fellow students to help them with the feature length movies which took up a lot of my time but gave me some good experience, and earnt me the respect of Patrick.

In the end I only received my Diploma in Digital Film, but thats fine by me. Michael and Steve are returning again for a fourth year to achieve their diplomas, and to work on a television pilot. In retrospect I now can see all the problems we faced and how that affected us, and I can only hope that in the future we now have it in us to make some decent films to be proud of. Although my time there wasn't always enjoyable I think I learnt at least a few things, even though I had hoped to learn a lot more. As to whether I would recommend the SIT to any hopeful filmmakers... I'd probably have to say I would, as the course has been straightened out a lot since all these incidents happened. It will probably never be the same as it once was right back at the beginning, but they are getting some really nice gear to rival any other place in the country. So if you have the motivation and some creativity, it should suit you fine.

Reflections of the Southern Institute of Technology, Part 2

We now proceed onwards to Year Two, a year that would try the patience of many innocent students and cause a large fallout in attendance numbers. I guess the year started out innocently enough, with everything seeming to be like normal. Everyone was looking forward to a productive year, now that we had some experience and some skills under our collective belts. The first thing that should have warned us that a storm was brewing was the continuing comments made by our tutor Karen, who was getting tired of the SIT management and the stress from being both a programme manager of the entire faculty as well as a tutor for a lot of different classes. Privately she even warned some students to get out of the course, as it was all about to go downhill very quickly.

It wasn't long before she disappeared completely without even saying goodbye to a lot of the students she had made close friendships with. We were told by replacement tutors that they weren't allowed to tell us how to get into contact with her and that she was on stress relief, but probably wouldn't be returning. Our class was left in the lurch, with many assignments looming and now replacement teachers that had the remotest idea of what they were doing or how to teach us. We had the amazing opportunity of burning through three sets of tutors attempting to replace her classes, the first two of which would fail to even try to listen to our pleas, since we had absolutely no idea what to do to finish the assignments, and all they told us was to just get them finished without actually wanting or knowing how to teach us anything. It was a lose lose situation. In the meantime our tutor Pete also left, as did James which was Karen's son and taught us things like web and graphic design.

We pretty much lost all of our tutors except for one, Patrick. Patrick assumed control of roughly all our classes, and although he has a lot of experience most of the classes weren't exactly his area of expertise, although he did try his hardest. Basically this created a vacuum of negativity and crushed a lot of motivation with the students, as over half our class members dropped out of the course to pursue other things. Some of the most promising students dropped out during this phase. The future of the course was uncertain, and a lot of the students thought that they would be shutting the thing down completely. There was no direction and a lot of misdirection, caused by the stupidity of the newly elected faculty members Alan and Lachlan. They met a lot of resistance, and they spouted a lot of resistance and stubbornness back. Another mistake was assigning a tutor from Sport and Recreation to take on our Fundamentals of Research class, where he had no idea what he was doing and openly admitted it. This caused me to drop out of the class due to the sheer ludicrisy of it. This would come to haunt me later down the track however, as due to the new black and white strict management I was unable to retake the class to get my Bachelor Degree.

Meanwhile our film projects of the year started, mine being No Quarter, and Michael's being Daydreamer. My efforts as good natured as they started off as turned into a mess of contrived and complicated plot structures. Michael on the other hand kept his film idea simple which paid off later on, even though he had a lot of troubles of his own which I will go into shortly. First I would like to say another one of the reasons which seems to make a lot of SIT short films into schlock, is the strict adherrence we must pay towards a conventional, three act story structure with all the plot structures of a feature length movie. I always had trouble adherring to such rules, and any attempts in doing so always seemed to turn my work into a mess. The problem with enforcing such strict rules is that it took the focus off the actual creative flow, and turned a lot of shorts into stories which would have fit into feature length films, except compressed down into a short. It simply doesn't work. This became extremely apparent at the end of the year during the film viewings, there were some good ideas in there but they all seemed like mini features and way too rushed to be any good. Back to the movies.

On my film No Quarter, I had some big ideas for the project and was really looking forward to it. Reality got in the way however, and most of the film ended up with me as the only crew member shooting pieces with usually only the main actor Logan. I got as much footage as I could, but it turned into a rush job again with me getting sick while filming. If the plot had been simplified and streamlined down to my original idea, and if it had made more sense the movie might have been better. I had a lot of fun messing around with the color grading of the film which was fun, except for some weird mistakes that ended up onto the DVDs I made with over the top grading instead of my original sepia looking footage.

Michael's movie turned out better, but he had a major continuity issue halfway through filming. One of his main actors, Steven, cut a lot of his hair off after we had done half the movie, which meant me and Michael had to reshoot the entire thing with us two as both the only crew members most the time and the two main actors. Talk about a headache. Seeing as the story was nice and simple however, it turned out pretty good in my eyes.

So Year Two at the SIT was a depressing time which would have ramifications for the rest of the time at the institute. It laid down the mood on all the students, and made it very difficult to get any motivation or creativity going during these times. Things would look up slightly in the year to come however, but would the advancements come too late for anything to be really achieved? I guess a wait for the third and final part will have to be endured to find out the answer.

Reflections of the Southern Institute of Technology, Part 1

Well some time has passed now since being in attendance at the Southern Institute of Technology, SIT for short. It is only after spending this time away from the place that I can make some clearer observations of my time spent there, and the implications thus far.

I came into the SIT, in particular the Digital Media Bachelor programme, as I'm sure many did in high spirits and with a lot of hope towards the future. Most of us were assured that this course was exactly for us, and that we would be able to grow and hone our skills all the while learning and having fun. It definitely started out that way, and with Karen Love as our programme manager things started off very well indeed. Karen, like another couple of our tutors, was originally from America so of course offered a different perspective. She turned out to be a surprising wealth of knowledge, and during classes with her I was always overwhelmed by the sheer amount of wisdom and the differing perspectives offered by her. She was very interested in Mythology, Feminism and of course Films, and had been a University professor for many years before hand. The other tutors were good as well, we had Pete who was originally from Australia taking us for the pratical side of things, and he always got excited in student projects and generally anything you told him about. Patrick was our tutor for screenwriting and sound design, and he also had a lot of experience and stories to share with us.

Myself and Michael had already tried making a couple of short videos before starting the course, and with the help of Steven, a like minded student, we started off on our first project right at the start of the year together which was The Storybook. I rushed together a script very quickly which was roughly based off one I had done for the screenwriting class, and with our limited knowledge and skills we shot the entire thing in a few days. It turned out pretty good, of course it had many flaws due to many reasons (one of which the fact that it was edited on buggy Premiere 6.0 on a piece of crap computer), but it got us excited about future projects.

Before this we had only worked on short chase scenes with varying success. Steve's short, Frankie and Louie would serve to be the inspiration for many of his later works, but until our third year we never really managed to recapture how well the chase scene worked. My chase scene, Retard without a Cause, as a fun piece of horror schlock with a script I wrote during another class. Although it was fun to make, I had some continuity errors and the footage was rather grainy due to poor light conditions which the PDX-10 camera couldn't quite handle. At least all the projects back during these times were really fun, and as it would turn out before a lot of our creativity and motivation would be quashed from us.

After these our individual film projects would be made, which included The Ones Outside for me, Numb from Michael and Natalie's Dream from Steve. This was were some of the first problems started to arise, one of which being the extremely limited amount of time spent on developing the scripts. This is one of the problems that plagued almost every movie project done at SIT, and one of the main reasons the general quality of movies made there were generally low. We all had to rush to write a new story, then scramble together to actually try and make it. Although I'm sure we all tried our best, if you start with a bad script its going to be difficult to try and make a good movie out of it. My script was based off an idea I had whilst walking home one night, and while it sounded good to me at the time, later on it became apparent just how many flaws such a story would have. The execution of actually making the movie was also really poor, and because everyone was scrambling to make their own films I didn't receive a lot of help and had to attempt to film the entire 15 minute movie in the space of just over two days. Believe me it showed. Anyway it was all a learning process, and I guess you have to make a lot of bad movies before the good ones come, at least for those of us not blessed with godlike directing or writing skills. Michael faced similar problems, while Steve's movie turned out fairly well considering the time spent making it, although he himself was disappointed with the end result.

These events would serve to be an indication towards a turn for the worse in the upcoming time spent at the SIT, which I will cover in the next post.

Fast Times in Tahoe

Well I finally managed to take a camera with me on the way to work, and since it was a nice clear morning I got some pictures. Most were taken just as the sun was coming up. I walk this way to work every morning which takes just over 30 minutes, and on a nice day like this one the view is quite nice. There's even a frozen lake in the middle of the park I haven't tried skating across just yet. I guess this is one of the things that seperates Canada from New Zealand, because apart from a few blazingly obvious things the two countries do indeed have things in common.

Red: New Scarlet Camera Coming

Scarlet, being titled as the "Pocket Professional Digital Cinema Camera" has been announced on the Red site. Details are extremely slim at the moment, with only a promise that the camera, or at the very least some details of the camera, will be released at the NAB convention in Las Vegas in April.

What is assumed is that the camera will use the same sensor as the Red One camera, and is hoped to include 4K image aquisition. The new camera is thought to be released to directly compete with the new Sony HDCAM EX1, so should fall in a similar price range and will probably include a fixed or included zoom lens.

This is very good news, because although the Red One camera is much cheaper than all other comparable cameras, the $17.5K price tag becomes a lot steeper once you factor in all the accessories and components needed to run the camera to a desirable level, for instance lenses, batteries, media, viewfinder/lcd screen and tripod mount. The Scarlet camera would fit the assumably large gap of people interested in the Red One camera that simply cannot afford its ~$30K inclusive price.

Guess we will wait to see what happens, but if a relatively cheap quality 4K camera is released by the Red company, it has the possibility of entirely changing the film world.

Film Societies in Edmonton

I managed to find a couple of interesting societies/groups in the Edmonton area I could join up with, one called F.A.V.A. (Film and Video Arts Society) and the other being I.A.T.S.E. which is "The I.A.T.S.E. is the labor union representing technicians, artisans, and craftspersons in the entertainment industry, including live theatre, motion picture and television production, and trade shows.".

F.A.V.A. is a society that offers membership, in which you must offer up to 24 hours per year of your time to working on peoples film projects. Its pretty much there to establish contacts, and has full production and post production facilities and discounted gear rentals. You can rent an Arri 35mm camera for $125/day instead of their usual price of $500/day, although I probably wouldn't end up using a film camera for one of my own projects. Not that I wouldn't like to, but you have to take into consideration the film stock and processing costs as well.

I.A.T.S.E. on the other hand is obviously a more professional, industry related union. In order to become even an associate member I have to take a day course at the Grant MacEwan polytechnic here called "Set Etiquette and Protocol". Once you are an associate member you have the opportunity of being offered jobs in certain aspects of major productions that full members have passed up, and after that as a full member you can be contracted out etc.

So sounds like I might be able to get some experience here after all which is good news. It'll be interesting to see how everything works in a film industry similar to our own, but of course much larger in scale. Links are as follows: F.A.V.A. and I.A.T.S.E.