And Silent

"Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on towards Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the trees, I saw a second Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the Zoological Gardens, and silent." - H.G. Wells

[photo: Sci-Fi Gene]

Hello Dolly! [Skateboard Dolly Part I]

It's time to upgrade the Sci-Fi Gene standard package: starting with the camera department. There are three options, any of which should improve some aspects of film quality.

1. Invest in the latest semi-professional HD camcorder for higher resolution, better image quality and all the latest built-in features.

2. Build or buy a camera rig, matte box and French shutters and 35mm adapter device to enhance the capabilities of the current camera with professional lenses and filters.

3. Sign up for a camera operator training course to learn how to get the best from existing equipment.

As you can see here I chose option 4.

The next project is a track and dolly system. I've based mine on a design featured in The Guerilla Filmmaker's Blueprint by Chris Jones, reviewed here, but there are variants of this design all over the internet. The base will be made from two 96cmx60cmx12mm sheets of plywood.

Building the wheel trucks: 8mm holes on each side of the bracket for the wheel bolts, 4mm holes on the corner for woodscrews. 8mm bolts for the wheels were cut to required length.

On each side of the bracket: bolt, nut, 2 x washer, 54mm skateboard wheel with two bearings, 2 x washer, nut.

Wheel trucks are screwed to wood blocks which can in turn be screwed to the base and easily repositioned if needed.

To be continued...

Reducing DV Artefacts in Blender

MiniDV is a compressed format. It could be far worse - it's still very watchable on TV but the colour blocking is very visible when viewed on a large screen. However the luminance information (Y) is stored at much higher quality than the colour information (Cr and Cb) which provides the DV Rebel with a way of reducing the artefacts. Here's a close-up and closer-up before processing:A noodle network to separate and quad blur the two colour channels leaving the luminance (Y) channel untouched. As luminance is stored at higher quality, the detail in the image is retained, although if you blur the colours too much you can still get overspill, loss of contrast and very very slow rendering. The close-up shows less colour blocking and the picture will stand up to slightly more scrutiny. Quad blur is slightly better than flat blur at preserving sharper edges.

Drop the camera and run - the movie

Cloverfield is in many ways the opposite of Kate and Leopold - this film really should not work. It's a one trick gimmick - a monster movie but how original - it's all on a camcorder... By rights you should be bored after about eight minutes, even with the gene deficiency, and spend the rest of the movie shouting "drop the camera and run! drop the camera!"

This film worked for me for two reasons - firstly, it's only 90 minutes long (as it's supposedly recorded on an analogue camcorder cassette) but perfectly paced, and secondly, the director JJ Abrams is actually pretty good. It takes serious professionalism to simulate amateur filmmaking this way and still produce decent atmosphere and drama, and JJ's sense of timing is good enough to occasionally deliver actual shocks and thrills, something sadly rare in the horror genre.