Vital Butinar

Yesterday I had to fix my girlfriend's camera's shutter that some how broke. It was a more than 10 year old camera and I figure if I had fixed a couple of lenses I could very well at least try see what went wrong. After disassembling everything I found that the problem was a broken rivet on one of the shutter blades and I was actually able to MacGayver a fix with a nail and a hammer. I put everything back together and it's alive. I do still have to calibrate the auto focus but I'm saving that for tomorrow. 🙂 Other than that I'm helping my girlfriend with her sculptures, working on a couple of screenplays, two of which are in development. A feature and a TV series pilot episode. Editing some videos and doing some grading and animations. But what I'm really thinking is how to shot a short film. What are you guys planning after all this? All of our short term gigs fell through because they were during this time. I'm hopping they'll be rescheduled. Thankfully the long term stuff is still on as well as some stuff that I've been able to do from home. Hope you guys are all well and spending your time creatively. 🙂 Here's a couple of shots:

Wow. Thank you. This was very informative and interesting.

So my girlfriend got invited to write an article about her connection between sculpting and cinematography, or in other words creatively connecting different types of art. https://www.stage32.com/blog/How-to-Become-a-Dynamic-Film-Creative-with-Different-Art-Mediums She's a really good sculptress that was supposed to have an exhibition in Venice this month but it got postponed due to the current situation and on the other hand she's also a great cinematographer and editor. Hope you enjoy it and best regards, hope you're all safe

That's a really interesting explanation and one I would tend to agree with as well as that most TV shows don't complicate with some shots as much.

Doubtful...

Well so much for 4K. I guess it's time to bring back our old Sony Trinitron. 😄

I'm about to shoot a proof of concept TV series pilot episode in a couple of months. It's going to be a full 15 minute episode to show the story but I haven't seen any difference in pre production. I'm also considering shooting a short proof of concept for the feature I wrote that I'm talking to with a producer. But I haven't figured out a way to do it yet. I think that I would do it like if it was a proof of concept for a feature, I would create a short and if it was a short I'd shoot a shorter short. It definitely a dilemma.

I myself do not have any real experience with either feature films or TV series. But I've producer and directed a few short things and I'm just now getting ready for my first pilot episode for a tv series. I actually don't see much of a difference between the cinematography of the shorts that we've shot or the pilote episode. The main difference for me might be for having a budget to work with if we get approved. As far as how much everything might change if we actually get the series I can not tell but I'm guessing it will be somewhat the same except planning will be a little different.

Well basically it doesn't matter what software you use to sync the clips. The only difference between Resolve and Premiere that I can see is that in Resolve you can only automatically sync via audio when you create a timeline (haven't found a way to do it directly on the timeline) and in Premiere you can do exactly that throw it in the timeline and sync up stuff. But if you've got to sync stuff manually anyway it literally doesn't matter what NLE you use as long as you've got the scratch and original audio. I don't know I guess I'm old school or something but whenever we shoot a music video or something where we have something being played over that we're going to put over in post I always edit in some kind of audio marker at the beginning and end. Makes life so much easier and when we've got external audio I always want to use the slate. Hope you don't have too much f a rough time syncing it manually and best of luck.

Waw thank you. This looks amazing. I did a try right now but I wasn't able to figure it out quickly so I guess I need to take my time.

Thank you Bruce. I thought that it was something that I might have to do by myself since when I was researching it I came up with nothing substantial. But in either case I'll have to play around with it myself since it's a personal project. The roto is actually the part that I was afraid of and I did kind of try it that way. Thanks again.

Hi guys. I've got a question for the more experienced people among you. I have some footage that was shot on 8mm stock in black and white and I'm trying to find a way to colorize it. First thing is that it's getting scanned into something digital. But I've got no idea where to start about colorizing it except for masking everything and trying to color it by hand. I'm sure there must be a better way to do it. Anyway so if anyone has had any experience with this your help is much appreciate on what software to use and how. Thank you and best regards

I actually bought the Tascam DR60 M2 and it's a really nice sound recorder and for our small production of short films it's great. I don't see the need to buy too much equipment because if there are bigger project the clients always pay for renting the equipment but for our smaller projects stuff like the Pocket 4K and the Tascam DR60 are great.

During the summer we shot as short film and if I remember correctly there were about 18 or 20 pages. I think there were 11 scenes. Everything from top to bottom was shot in one night where we shot in the narrow streets down town of my home town from about 11 pm when the streets cleared until 6 pm when it was getting light so about 7 hours total. I think these were 2 scenes. We shot 2 master shots, 1 follow gimbal shot that followed the two actors, 4 coverage shots, 1 vfx shot that was used for compositing, a few close up shots like the actor taking their gun or falling down or the third actor watching the other two and then a bunch of B roll from the locations. Then the next day we shot we began to shoot at 8 am and finished at 2 am next day so 17 hours but there were about 5 hours of down time because we had a scene set up but one of the actresses was stuck in traffic 100 miles away. We used that time to shoot some ambient sounds and a few thing we could get away with. The biggest problem was the last scene that we shot because it was the end of a really long day and everyone was getting really tired so I made the last minute decision to just shoot all the shots with one take since it was a sitting conversation, so if anyone made a mistake they'd just repeat that part of the conversation. We shot the same way all the coverage and just a few B roll shots. I wasn't happy with a lot of it but it was the best way to finish before everyone died of exhaustion. I did however neglect to mention that shots except three that were shot on a gimbal were shot hand held to save time. We did it, we shot everything and was able to edit together a whole short film. But I'll be the first one to say that I have no idea how long it takes to shoot something. All I do is estimate how long it takes to shoot something and add it up. Usually I decide to shoot something in one go because two day shoots are usually out of the question because getting the crew back together the next day is harder than pushing it the same day three more hours. But we're a small crew and the projects we do get paid the same if we work two days or one and if we don't finish we don't get paid. So my moto has always been keep it simple and if it doesn't work simplify even further and it has worked. Best of luck.

Yeah it's the same with prices around here too. Everything has gone crazy. Rent has gotten several times higher even though there are a lot of empty places that could be rented out or sold. You can't buy an apartment let alone a house as the prices have gone up so much that a sane person can't imagine the numbers involved. On the other hand people aren't prepared to pay for any kind of services regardless of the quality involved. Like it doesn't matter what you do or how well you do it as long as it's cheap or even better free. Who cares if you survive or not as long as the person finds the someone to help them with whatever they don't know how to do. Just for reference the stuff that I complain about how much it costs is the stuff that I know how to do myself which is a whole lot of things and I rarely have to rely on someone else for some kind of services. On one hand some things are expensive or going up like taxes, when the road tax has gone up so much like I was driving a Bentley and not a 20 year old Jeep that keeps breaking down because of the crappy state of roads. On the other hand some stuff is so dirt cheap that I don't even understand how that can be. Cell phones, electronics and even service stuff like internet or phone bill which is so cheap that I can't even contemplate how these prices come about. So yeah doing something creative as it seems everywhere is loosing it's value. The problem is that if they don't get it from you they get it from someone cheaper regardless of quality. That's why some stuff things seem to be of such low quality or it just looks the same as something else. Unfortunately this is unsustainable because once creative people stop creating and turn to "regular" jobs there will be a deficit of supply and there will be no one left. That's teh worst case scenario but I keep wondering what would happen in a situation like that. A sort of Art type Boston tea party if you will. What would happen if someone would wake up and notice that there are no more graphics on websites, that advertisements in the mail have no more design or photographs and when they switch on Netfilx the only thing they could watch was the weather report or couldn't read anything but the tax law or phone book if that still exists. Not to mention no architecture or product design. I wonder how that would impact peoples lives. And this is not mentioning a lot of other areas like art in the sense of music, paintings, sculptures, etc.