The Digitale Project is designed to engage with ideas of personal narrative and specific point of view. And whilst the Digitale is a very specific form and format of screen presentation the principles it embodies – Dramatic question, Efficiency, Structure, Presence, Desire and Revelation – are universal to all forms of drama and cinema.

Below are the class notes including the brief for the project.

T1 Digitale Notes (pdf)

The process of colour-grading is traditionally considered to be a part of post-production but in the digital age there is much greater scope for it to be conceptualized as an extension of cinematography – a continuance of ‘image aquistion’. One one hand on-set colour grading and testing is becoming a common part of the shooting process and, at the other end, the influx of RAW shooting such as RED changes the DoP’s process to move a host of camera-based aspects into the computer environment.

Above all Cinematography in the digital age is much more than just the operation of the camera. Below are the class notes from the T2 Cine class last week on colour grading and it coveres both technical elements and a cocneptual taxonomy for how to interpret and apply colour in creative interpretation.

T2C Colour Grading Class Notes (PDF)

The Book Video Awards is a national competition for filmmakers and motion graphics artists to produce a 100 second Trailer for new Australian book. The competition supplies the synopsis and extract from a collection of books entrants can choose from and your task is then to set them to Moving Images.

There’s $14,000 in prizes and big promotion/exposure opportunities that go with the publishing industry. Moreover, having watched through soem of the ones form the last year, the standard of execution is very high – not nearly as high as it should be. A competition is ripe pickings for IFSS students beginning to master multi-layer composition, keyframe animation and tools like After Effects.

All the competition details can be found at http://bookvideoawards.com.au and some examples can be seen on their YouTube site – http://www.youtube.com/RandomHouseAustralia You have until the 12th May which is a touch over 4 weeks – more than enough time for a clear and well executed idea.

You’d be MAD not to jump on this competition…!

Special effects master from New Deal Studios, Ian Hunter, discusses his work on films such as the Dark Knight, Spiderman, the X-Files and X-Men. This was recorded at the school a couple of weeks ago and ive embedded it here for those who missed the talk and for those who want to watch again for the detail. Ian talks about the process of visual effects production, relationships with directors and producers as well as some fascinating insights into the productions he has worked on. Ian in particular offers an informed and holistic perspective on relationship between digital and physical effects.

Too often the screenwriter can lose site of the screenplay as an holistic document. What this means for many is a singular focus on dialogue and what characters say rather than what is Happening. The writign of good, evocative but efficient Scene Description is key for both a screenplay that engages potential producers as well as being a rich platform for cast and crew.

John August is an eminently experienced screenwriter who, amoungst numerous other works such as TitanAE and Big Fish, has collaborated with Tim Burton on The Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. John August pens a superb blog at www.johnaugust.com where he regularly breaks down the writing process and examines the nitty gritty of the screenwriting craft.

His latest post, which ive embedded below, is delivered as a video as he works to improve the Scene Description on a script and talks through the process. His whole site is well worth a good long look.

By defintion a ‘Plug-in’ is a small piece of software that adds functionality to a larger ‘host’ software application. So, as such, a good plugin is one that adds a feature to the application that otherwise is there. Its exactly this mindset that led me to Alex4D’s collection of free Final Cut Pro plug-ins.

Whilst FCP has some excellent strengths, it also has some major weaknesses – audio, effects and titling are certainly three areas where FCP is sub-par by comparison to other NLE’s. But our friend Alex4D, an editor from the UK, has produced a suite of little plugins that deliver to FCP some very bloody useful features otherwise absent.

You can get the whole range of Alex’s plugins from his website http://alex4d.wordpress.com/finalcut/Of particular interest and usefulness are the titling plugins – Closing Credits which allows for easy creation of movie closing credis using multiple fonts and side by side Name/Title; and Lower Thirds which is perfect for an easy way to generate subtitles with shadowed backgrounds.I will endeavor to add these plugins to the schools computers over the coming months but you may want to grab them for you own computers and laptops.

Unlss you have been a sleep under a rock shrouded in a veil of techno-seclusion you will have no doubt encountered the great deal of Buzz around the upsurge in HD video modes on Digital SLR cameras.

Canon, Panasonic and Nikon have all come to the party offering various implementations of HD video at 720 and 1080 modes. And of course all these developments have been in the shadow of RED’s forthcoming Hybrid Still/Video camera – Scarlet.

The potential of such cameras is huge – excellent prime lenses for SLR’s are CHEAP and the sensors on even the most humble DSLR are huge by comparison to that of virtually any video camera. This combined with the cost falling and capacity rising of compact flash memory cards, is a rather good recipe for indie filmmakers.

Its not all rosy; none of the cameras from Nikon, Canon and Panaosnic have really got it ‘right’ yet. All are flawed. Some like the Nikon have very little control over exposure in video modes, others like the new Canon can only manage 20frames per second (presumably because of risk of overheating that Cannon engineers havnt yet found a solution for)

But teething issues aside, there is no doubt enormous promise here that over the next couple of years will no doubt mature.

Fourth Tier student Alex Moir has gotten his hands on a Nikon D90 and has set about seeing how far its video mode can be pushed. The results are below and are remarkable. Certainly the image isnt perfect; the level of compression is a bit overt at times and may cause banding issues in post-production. There are also frequency issues with scan lines when shooting under certain light sources (but these of course can happen with any video camera under certain lights if you’re not careful). But, on the whole the image is rather impressive. The size of the sensor grabs an enormous amount of light out of the air. The clarity of even a half decent Nikon lens is superb. Al this in a camera costing less than $2k. certainly there is not a video camera on the market anywhere near that price that can produce a moving image as good.

The future is very bright and very interesting.

The true power and importance of Chromakey (more commonly known as Blue or Green Screen) as a cinematic process, is not just in creating special-effects but rather in the engament of a cretaive process that treats the assembly of a moving image in layers rather than only as a Sequence.

The act of compositing, of bringing together disparate image elements and combining them into a cohesive whole, is at the heart of contemporary cinematic media and the concepts that underpin Chromakey are universal from Editing systems to Motion graphics, from Final cut and Premiere to After Effects, Combustion, Flash, Photoshop and 3D apps like Maya and Cinema 4D.

Being familiar with Chromakey – and more significantly the principles of compositing – on both a technical and creative level is crucial for being a filmmaker in the 21st century.

Below are the notes on the Tier3 Greenscreen shooting class and the material generated from this class we will use when we dive into After Effects in a few weeks time.

t3-chromakey PDF

Knowledge is power. Whether you’re a DoP, Director, Producer or Editor the key to extracting the best possible result out of any piece of filmmaking equipment is to be in posession of a through knowledge of the makeup and nature of its pros and cons. When it coems to digital cameras this lies in understanding how different cameras treat the image and apply compression.

The fundementals of the DV format – frame rate, compression, interlacing, anamorphic stretching and colour subsampling – are concepts that form the basis of understanding for all other digital formats. Below are the slide notes from class outlining the elements of DV.

dv-and-sd (PDF)

The history of cinema as an art is the history of cinema as a technology. For every technological advancement, every evolution in the tools of both building and experiencing cinema there is profound change in the art cinema presents.

Among the myriad of changes – from the the fluid-head tripod to the steadicam, from chemical film stock to digital binary – the step from the edit-table to the edit-computer is one of the most profound.

This change didn’t just make things faster or easily undone with an CTRL-Z but, more significantly, changed the expectations of what the editor could do, changed the mindset of the editor’s process and, fundamentally altered the job description of Editors themselves.

In setting up a new edit suite at the International Film School Sydney we have implemented a physical manifestation of this evolution. Or new edit bay (geared for real-time uncompressed HD online editing, effects, compositing and colour-grading as well as working with RAW footage from the RED camera) features an 8-core MacPro, terabytes of RAID storage, and AJA video card and SDI interface and a pair of 28inch HD lCD monitors. And all this lovely digital hardware goodness is mounted upon a custom modified Steenbeck editing table. Old-school meets New school.
The Steenbeck had spent several years gathering dust i na  corner of the school until we struck upon the master stroke of mounting a glass top over the sprockets and turning the whole thing into a table.

So, as you sit and cut with all the glories of the digital age, you can peer through the glass and reflect upon the olden days…. A unique editing experience that taps into the IFSS philosophy – Never be Boring when you can be Facinating….

And here’s what an un-modified one looked like: