Official Trailer for Irfan (HD) from Charles Michel Duke on Vimeo.
Official Trailer for Irfan - Click to watch!
Showing posts with label making. Show all posts
Showing posts with label making. Show all posts
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Irfan Distribution 1 - The Trailer
Good distribution starts with a good trailer.
Official Trailer for Irfan - Click to watch!
Official Trailer for Irfan - Click to watch!
Irfan Post 18b - Correcting the Colours in the night...
(Note - I know a lot of these photos look pretty much the same, and for all you know I could be bulls**tting all of the corrections - but blame jpegs - a nasty codec that strips all humanity and soul from my blog posts...but take a look at the first and the last photos in the post and you will see the greatest difference of before and after)
This blog will look at the colour correcting of Irfan during night scenes, something very different from the last blog post which looked at an outdoor daylight scene.
Here, the grading is a lot more subtle. The whole point of a night scene is that it is dark. There are going to be few problems with digital fade which is often seen during daylight hours where the picture looks washed out. At night, it is the lighting on the set that matter - and thankfully the lighting was good during the shooting of Irfan.
This is the original footage from the prayer scene.
It is actually a beautiful shot, and something I will probably use in the publicity stills (later on). But there were a few additions I added to this shot. Firstly, I tinted the whole picture blue, in fact the whole scene is tinted blue. I wante to give that cold feeling to the audience, a chill, a sense of death. This may sound waffly, but I am a director, waffle is my bread and butter...or my syrup coated waffles...anyways, as part of the mechanics of the plot, this scene is meant to resemble death, and the blue tint across the whole of this segment of the movie for me gives a sense of cold.
Lastly, I put some subtle colours in at the Secondary correction stage. While not clear in this pic, earlier in the clip, when Irfan's face and mosque cap is in shot, I tinted both those features to give a crisper looking Mosque cap and a more vibrant face so we can see the charater's emotions.
You know what, let me back up a few frames in the clip, so you can see the effect the secondary corrections have on the picture quality. This is a shot from the same clip, with the blue tint (primary corrections) only.
And here is that same shot with the secondary corrections now in place. Note the Mosque cap is a lot cleaner while you can see a little more of Irfan's features.
Colour correcting with regards to dark conditions is more subtle. In fact, it is easier. In the daylight, I have to account for the changes in weather, the angle of the sun etc. Night time correction is easiest of all. As it is dark, I am not trying to brighten up (or dull down) the whole picture - hey, it is dark. So the corrections I am making are more focused on subtle points to enhance the story telling aspect. It is more creative, yeah, fun, and less technical as the tech stuff has been done by the lighting crew during the filming.
More fun from the crayon room coming soon...
This blog will look at the colour correcting of Irfan during night scenes, something very different from the last blog post which looked at an outdoor daylight scene.
Here, the grading is a lot more subtle. The whole point of a night scene is that it is dark. There are going to be few problems with digital fade which is often seen during daylight hours where the picture looks washed out. At night, it is the lighting on the set that matter - and thankfully the lighting was good during the shooting of Irfan.
This is the original footage from the prayer scene.
It is actually a beautiful shot, and something I will probably use in the publicity stills (later on). But there were a few additions I added to this shot. Firstly, I tinted the whole picture blue, in fact the whole scene is tinted blue. I wante to give that cold feeling to the audience, a chill, a sense of death. This may sound waffly, but I am a director, waffle is my bread and butter...or my syrup coated waffles...anyways, as part of the mechanics of the plot, this scene is meant to resemble death, and the blue tint across the whole of this segment of the movie for me gives a sense of cold.
Lastly, I put some subtle colours in at the Secondary correction stage. While not clear in this pic, earlier in the clip, when Irfan's face and mosque cap is in shot, I tinted both those features to give a crisper looking Mosque cap and a more vibrant face so we can see the charater's emotions.
You know what, let me back up a few frames in the clip, so you can see the effect the secondary corrections have on the picture quality. This is a shot from the same clip, with the blue tint (primary corrections) only.
And here is that same shot with the secondary corrections now in place. Note the Mosque cap is a lot cleaner while you can see a little more of Irfan's features.
Colour correcting with regards to dark conditions is more subtle. In fact, it is easier. In the daylight, I have to account for the changes in weather, the angle of the sun etc. Night time correction is easiest of all. As it is dark, I am not trying to brighten up (or dull down) the whole picture - hey, it is dark. So the corrections I am making are more focused on subtle points to enhance the story telling aspect. It is more creative, yeah, fun, and less technical as the tech stuff has been done by the lighting crew during the filming.
More fun from the crayon room coming soon...
Irfan Post 17 - Colouring the Picture!
The good news is that if I am colour correcting, it means that the editing of Irfan is done. Really, it is complete. At 17mins and 54secs (not including credits) it is the longest film I have done in a fair old while. But thankfully, it is not technically the most complex. That honour goes to my last short film, Caution Wet Paint. The difference this time with Irfan has been the length, which has meant it has taken a lot longer to finish. Plus the fact that I basically had the whole of August written off, as I was at the film festivals on the continent.
One thing I have to add is that during the Sound Editing, I was always tweaking Irfan. Taking bits and pieces off the edges. When I sent the first draft to Nick for musical inspiration, the film was 22 minutes long. So you can see that in the meantime, it has been whittled down a considerable amount. While my main concentration has been the sound, you cannot help but fiddle with the lengths. However, a seventh of the film is much more than a fiddle. Yes, unfortunately I have dropped the feather scene (the cast and crew will know exactly what I am talking about) and a hell of a lot of lines are gone. There are really only two bits in the film where I have any real dialogue between the characters. The rest is purely visual.
And before I delve into the sticky and sweet world of colour correction, let me say that there were also a couple of moment shots that I also removed from the film. What felt moving in my mind was tedious on the screen. Interestingly, a couple of the ad-libs off the set have made it into the movie. The thinking on your feet, on-the-day stuff turned out to be damn useful!
---
All right, as colour correction is actually a really dull exercise, I will show you some fun things that I do while sitting at my computer.
(My life at this moment in time is utterly sad. You will see below.)
This is an original sot from the movie, uncorrected.
And this is the shot when I have finished with it!
Look, the car is now green! isn't that amazing! Wow, I like, sooo love computers and all! Mummy, can you make your car turn green?!?!?!
All right, I am only mucking about, this is the shot, wuth the blue colour of the car bumped up, so looking a lot more vibrant than in the original (first pic):
(You can see why I have no life. I am excited at turning something blue into something green. Ugh...I despise colour correction!)
More next week on the process! I will be doing a lot of this, not just on the inanimate objects, but also bumping up people's skin tones, clothing and even eye colour. Do not underestimate the detail ;)
One thing I have to add is that during the Sound Editing, I was always tweaking Irfan. Taking bits and pieces off the edges. When I sent the first draft to Nick for musical inspiration, the film was 22 minutes long. So you can see that in the meantime, it has been whittled down a considerable amount. While my main concentration has been the sound, you cannot help but fiddle with the lengths. However, a seventh of the film is much more than a fiddle. Yes, unfortunately I have dropped the feather scene (the cast and crew will know exactly what I am talking about) and a hell of a lot of lines are gone. There are really only two bits in the film where I have any real dialogue between the characters. The rest is purely visual.
And before I delve into the sticky and sweet world of colour correction, let me say that there were also a couple of moment shots that I also removed from the film. What felt moving in my mind was tedious on the screen. Interestingly, a couple of the ad-libs off the set have made it into the movie. The thinking on your feet, on-the-day stuff turned out to be damn useful!
---
All right, as colour correction is actually a really dull exercise, I will show you some fun things that I do while sitting at my computer.
(My life at this moment in time is utterly sad. You will see below.)
This is an original sot from the movie, uncorrected.
And this is the shot when I have finished with it!
Look, the car is now green! isn't that amazing! Wow, I like, sooo love computers and all! Mummy, can you make your car turn green?!?!?!
All right, I am only mucking about, this is the shot, wuth the blue colour of the car bumped up, so looking a lot more vibrant than in the original (first pic):
(You can see why I have no life. I am excited at turning something blue into something green. Ugh...I despise colour correction!)
More next week on the process! I will be doing a lot of this, not just on the inanimate objects, but also bumping up people's skin tones, clothing and even eye colour. Do not underestimate the detail ;)
Irfan Post 15 - Sound Editing Details
This is going to be quite an deep, geeky and long blog post about the post-production work currently raging round Irfan. While I have been back for three weeks, I have been busy working on finishing the sound for Irfan. Unlike previous films, I have decided to take a very different approach to utilising the soundtrack.
On my previous shorts I have been obsessed with trying to get the sound to match the picture as accurately as possible. On Irfan, this is very different. Why? Well, there are three very good reasons for this.
Firstly, the soundtrack is near perfect. Good sound quality in the first place makes you less self-conscious about what you have available to you, and what was captured during the filming process is of a high standard.
Secondly, all the actors were happy and willing to dub. A cast that is co-operative makes post-production easy, and you are not so obsessed with capturing the sound during production perfectly.
Thirdly, I have the sound track, at a very early stage of the editing timeline. See here for Nick's brilliant post about composing the music for Irfan. All these factors have meant that I could change my attitude to sound and the soundtrack of Irfan as a whole. How? Well, instead of trying to accurately match video to sound, I want to use the sound as a part of the story telling process, using it to convey the emotions I wish to tell in this movie itself.
This is quite a hard concept to explain in words, and it will become clearer when Irfan is complete. But I will take three instances from Irfan to show how I am using the soundtrack not as a device for aiding the picture, but as a means to convey emotions and the plot line separately from the picture.
This is the editing suite at the beginning of the film. Look at the long horizontal window at the bottom. That is my timeline. The blue bars are piece of video footage, and the green bars are pieces of sound footage. While you will see only one picture at a time - represented in the top right window where you see Sippy and Safirah (the characters of Irfan and Saira) - as you can see, there are many soundtracks that can potentially be heard at the same time.
Now this first scene has been dominated by Nick's music, with only one piece of 'live soundtrack' take form the actual footage. Why? Well, the beginning of this movie is peaceful, a moment of reflection, as the character of Irfan is contemplating...well, that is for the audience to decide (must not give too much away at this stage) and so I wanted to keep the soundtrack as silent as possible. The only bit of real sound is that of the car door opening and shutting. A significant moment, as the character of Irfan is creating a world when he sees Saira appear. The opening and closing of that car door, to me as the director, represents Irfan entering that world and shutting the door behind him.
(I did warn this post was going to get deep).
All right, this scene is halfway through Irfan, and is basically a straight dub. The sound capture was of a good quality, but you know what, I had the actor's voices on dub, and it would be easier to use that rather than mess about with sound correction itself. Although Nick's soundtrack is in tracks A7 and A8 (left hand coloumn of the timeline to see the number for the different Audio tracks), for the moment, there is no instrumentation coming through.
Tracks A1 and A2 represent Cristian's voice (playing the character of Vasile). Tracks A3 and A4 represent Marie Claire's voice (Playing Brenda). Tracks A5 and A6 represent the background or ambient sound of Vasile's attic space. Now, silence in a film is not truly silent. That is actually very uncomfortable to watch, but I do not pack out my films with dialogue itself. So naturally you need filler in between the dubbed bits and the ambient sound of the attic (taken from the original days' shots) provides that silence.
(I told you this gets geeky).
This final scene occurs towards the end of Irfan. At this moment Vasile's phone rings - in fact it vibrates. No, I did not want a phone ringing on set, as it is a pain in the neck to organise. I added the ring tone later on. But instead of picking out a ringtone from library of sound, I just set up my camera and recorded the ringing on my phone. Why? Well, firstly, it is at the same sound quality as the rest of the soundtrack, and secondly, it sound less generic.
It was not a perfect capture, but being such a short snippet, I removed the interference from the SFX by passing a filter through it.
What I did was bung the clip of the ringing mobile phone into my soundtrack software, and put a reduce noise filter through it. Got rid of the background static leaving a nice, crisp, vibrating sound.
(I said this was a long blog post)
---
Right that is enough geekery. Apologies to the cast and crew for the long gap in between postings, but I hope you can see why I have not bothered to post a blog up on the editing of Irfan for a while, as I actually wanted to show you all something far more worthwhile than just, here I am so far, so good.
Next time I report, it will be from the world of Colour Correction.
Great.
In other words that means sitting in front of the computer screen while it endlessly renders the bastard.
Ugh..
On my previous shorts I have been obsessed with trying to get the sound to match the picture as accurately as possible. On Irfan, this is very different. Why? Well, there are three very good reasons for this.
Firstly, the soundtrack is near perfect. Good sound quality in the first place makes you less self-conscious about what you have available to you, and what was captured during the filming process is of a high standard.
Secondly, all the actors were happy and willing to dub. A cast that is co-operative makes post-production easy, and you are not so obsessed with capturing the sound during production perfectly.
Thirdly, I have the sound track, at a very early stage of the editing timeline. See here for Nick's brilliant post about composing the music for Irfan. All these factors have meant that I could change my attitude to sound and the soundtrack of Irfan as a whole. How? Well, instead of trying to accurately match video to sound, I want to use the sound as a part of the story telling process, using it to convey the emotions I wish to tell in this movie itself.
This is quite a hard concept to explain in words, and it will become clearer when Irfan is complete. But I will take three instances from Irfan to show how I am using the soundtrack not as a device for aiding the picture, but as a means to convey emotions and the plot line separately from the picture.
This is the editing suite at the beginning of the film. Look at the long horizontal window at the bottom. That is my timeline. The blue bars are piece of video footage, and the green bars are pieces of sound footage. While you will see only one picture at a time - represented in the top right window where you see Sippy and Safirah (the characters of Irfan and Saira) - as you can see, there are many soundtracks that can potentially be heard at the same time.
Now this first scene has been dominated by Nick's music, with only one piece of 'live soundtrack' take form the actual footage. Why? Well, the beginning of this movie is peaceful, a moment of reflection, as the character of Irfan is contemplating...well, that is for the audience to decide (must not give too much away at this stage) and so I wanted to keep the soundtrack as silent as possible. The only bit of real sound is that of the car door opening and shutting. A significant moment, as the character of Irfan is creating a world when he sees Saira appear. The opening and closing of that car door, to me as the director, represents Irfan entering that world and shutting the door behind him.
(I did warn this post was going to get deep).
All right, this scene is halfway through Irfan, and is basically a straight dub. The sound capture was of a good quality, but you know what, I had the actor's voices on dub, and it would be easier to use that rather than mess about with sound correction itself. Although Nick's soundtrack is in tracks A7 and A8 (left hand coloumn of the timeline to see the number for the different Audio tracks), for the moment, there is no instrumentation coming through.
Tracks A1 and A2 represent Cristian's voice (playing the character of Vasile). Tracks A3 and A4 represent Marie Claire's voice (Playing Brenda). Tracks A5 and A6 represent the background or ambient sound of Vasile's attic space. Now, silence in a film is not truly silent. That is actually very uncomfortable to watch, but I do not pack out my films with dialogue itself. So naturally you need filler in between the dubbed bits and the ambient sound of the attic (taken from the original days' shots) provides that silence.
(I told you this gets geeky).
This final scene occurs towards the end of Irfan. At this moment Vasile's phone rings - in fact it vibrates. No, I did not want a phone ringing on set, as it is a pain in the neck to organise. I added the ring tone later on. But instead of picking out a ringtone from library of sound, I just set up my camera and recorded the ringing on my phone. Why? Well, firstly, it is at the same sound quality as the rest of the soundtrack, and secondly, it sound less generic.
It was not a perfect capture, but being such a short snippet, I removed the interference from the SFX by passing a filter through it.
What I did was bung the clip of the ringing mobile phone into my soundtrack software, and put a reduce noise filter through it. Got rid of the background static leaving a nice, crisp, vibrating sound.
(I said this was a long blog post)
---
Right that is enough geekery. Apologies to the cast and crew for the long gap in between postings, but I hope you can see why I have not bothered to post a blog up on the editing of Irfan for a while, as I actually wanted to show you all something far more worthwhile than just, here I am so far, so good.
Next time I report, it will be from the world of Colour Correction.
Great.
In other words that means sitting in front of the computer screen while it endlessly renders the bastard.
Ugh..
Irfan Post 11 - Time to slot in the sound
Before I left for BUSHO and Strasbourg, I managed to get the dubs completed for Sippy who plays Irfan/ That has meant that every character is now sound checked and ready for the clean up. Added to that the receipt of the first draft of the soundtrack from Nick and it looks like I am rocking and rolling.
Apologies to my cast and crew. I promised a press pack by the end of August. That kind of got delayed due to the Film Festivals. So I now promise that by the end of September ;), unless there is another film festival - a wish, but I doubt that will happen in such short notice.
Unfortunately, film festivals are not just swanning around in soirees but there is a lot of prep beforehand, including the delivery of final tapes to the festival, publicity as well as the invariable need to book and plan accommodation and time off from the 'day job'. But it is worthwhile, and I hope for 'Irfan' to have greater success when it is completed later this year.
Toodles, I'm back off to the editing!
Irfan Post 9 - Almost done ;) (how many times will I saw that in the next few weeks)
As the events of the last week have been very hectic, editing of Irfan has taken a back seat (as has writing for this blog). Nonetheless, with the mixture of film festivals plus family, I have almost finished the editing work for the short film. This is excellent news for myself, but the real fun is only just beginning...
At the moment, the film is 16 minutes long. The script, was only fifteen pages long. Yup, that means, what I am cutting down is likely to get slimmed as the 'fine cutting' continues, but for now, it looks as if this short film could hit the twenty minute mark - and that is a lot for me!
While my aim was to finish the editing last week, it looks likely that I will complete the cutting on Monday. So by next week, I can then come back to you with the final running time. I will also have a fuller knowledge of what needs fixing with regards to the film's sound and more importantly, colour correction. That is the stuff that takes up the most time, simply because it van get very anal. I have already talked about my adventures in post production here and here, so take a look at what I am going to go through again.
But, if I get 'Irfan' into a few film festivals in the coming year, then it will be worth it!
At the moment, the film is 16 minutes long. The script, was only fifteen pages long. Yup, that means, what I am cutting down is likely to get slimmed as the 'fine cutting' continues, but for now, it looks as if this short film could hit the twenty minute mark - and that is a lot for me!
While my aim was to finish the editing last week, it looks likely that I will complete the cutting on Monday. So by next week, I can then come back to you with the final running time. I will also have a fuller knowledge of what needs fixing with regards to the film's sound and more importantly, colour correction. That is the stuff that takes up the most time, simply because it van get very anal. I have already talked about my adventures in post production here and here, so take a look at what I am going to go through again.
But, if I get 'Irfan' into a few film festivals in the coming year, then it will be worth it!
Irfan 'Post' 4
Has been a very busy week. As always, but managed to get Cristian's dulcet tones recorded ready for dubbing as his character - Vasile. Next will be Marie Claire (who plays Brenda), and hopefully Safirah (who plays Saira) after that. It gives me a weird way of editing. Instead of starting at my favourite scene and working around that, I am editing according to sound needs, and unusually, the dialogue bits. But the dubs should all be finished by July and so onto the edit proper to finish (what I hope) to be before scheduled. And now that I am off to East Europe for the film festival, I really want to finish the initial editing as quickly as possible!
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Welcome to the Babarouge Blog!
I will import some blog posts from El Director and Caution Wet Paint, but this is where all OFFICIAL movie related news will be posted! Speak soon!
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