Vital Butinar

Well I have an extensive library of locations and it's located on our local server. I do it really low tech but I've been thinking of upgrading to something a little bit more searchable. But for now I create a folder with a name and inside put a text document that contains the location, contact information and any additional information. Then a couple of folders with photos and/or videos. Sometimes I create another document with shot ideas for that specific location. I also have an excel spreadsheet that contains the basic information about the locations and where additional information is located. I've been thinking of using something like wordpress or something to create a searchable catalog but I'm looking for a way on how to make it a catalog for other things as well like shots and ideas which are cataloged in a similar way as locations for now.

I would abide by the same guideline. Although I'm usually in the roll of the director I do appreciate a hint on things that I might miss. For example a couple of weeks ago we were shooting a pilot episode for a TV series and the crew and cast was very light. Our producer served as our sound guy and our cast helped out. Sufficed to say that most of us knew each other well and honestly I love working with the people that were on set this time because they all love filmmaking and enjoy the process even though we had to squeeze 4 shooting days into 2. But as I said I always appreciate advice or a notification from most people that I've worked with on something that I might have missed and I also allow the talent to explore their character withing the confines of the story. So if they say that they feel that this character would do something differently and it aligns or at least doesn't conflict with the complete picture that I've envisioned in the end I have nothing against it. But sometimes this leads to the inevitable outcome that everyone wants to chip in as it also did at one moment as I and a cast member were trying to figure out a better way for them to say their lines for a particular scene. Of course with everyone trying to chip in it soon became impossible for myself and the talent to even thing what was written in the screenplay much less how it could be altered, so I decided to leave the set with the talent and move to a more privet place where we got the lines turned around in about two minutes. At the same time the producer was smart enough to notice that I had become a little frustrated and wasn't able to do my job (which is their job) so while we were working with the talent he politely asked the crew to pipe down a little and that we needed to stay focused or we wouldn't be able to make the day. Everyone got the message and we finished ahead of schedule even though it was packed anyway and everyone still had a nice time on set. And my point being that I've always tried to keep in not only good relations but great relations with the crew and cast because it's important for us to work as a team who wants the project to succede but at the same time I've always had great producers who have always been tuned to the way I work and have kept the few people that there ever were in check. In essence being a bad guy so that I don't have to be. Literally the only time I've sent people off the set was recently on a music video shoot where we were shooting the talent changing behind a bush and of course the whole band and every guy that was there wanted a sneak peak of her getting undressed. Which of course made her a little uncomfortable, so after the first take which was perfect incidentally since the uncomfortable situation made her more authentic I sent everyone that wasn't essential to the other part of the set but in the end decided to cut the second take short since it was not working and ended up using the first one anyway.

We actually had a problem like this a couple of weeks ago when we were shooting a pilote episode. There was a significant difference in height between the two lead actors which wasn't a huge problem most of the time since they were almost never standing in the shots. But we did have a couple of shots where they were standing and in one shot in particular the height difference stood out a lot so we changed the action a little bit from them holding hands and turning around to him holding her in his arms and it worked out great in this instance. It would definitely help if we used a 16:9 aspect ratio but it was decided before hand that we would use a 21:9.

Cool. That's great! Please keep us up to date how everything is going, because I'm really interested how things work and go. ?

Well as far as the lights I honestly don't know. But recently we had a shoot for a tv series pilote episode and we shot on a remote location where we didn't have access to any power for two days. Just the crew, camera, sound and light bounces. Anyway we used the BM Pocket 4K and had it connected to a V mount battery and the damn thing ran for two days straight and the battery drain was only about about 3/4 drained and the camera ran almost all the time. We literally had to change storage cards more and completely forgot about the batter. It was the same with the sound recorder and mic receivers that ran off another V mount battery but that one got only 2/5 drained.

I personally love the Braw and have used the ProRes only on a couple of shoots where we either had to produce ProRes or there was not going to be much post involved. But we used Braw on all of the narrative stuff and even on music videos.

Yesterday's office was a shoot near a small lake side where we were shooting a TV series pilote episode and the photo is of me helping my wife who's the DP secure her shoulder rig taken by the costume designer since we almost never have any photos of us when on set. ? Beautiful locations, great cast who got everything right in the first couple of takes and great crew who remembered all the preproduction notes and made my day a hell of a lot easier even though long. ?

Yeah she does. https://en.ples-energij.si/leya Enjoy ?

It's really interesting because my girlfriend is foremost a sculptress so we always have a lot of her sculptures where we live. Some are small and some are as big as a person. Along with her being a sculptress her mother is a painter as well and as a result we have a huge amount of paintings hung and I must say that I love it because it's very interesting and colorful, compared to some places where there's literally nothing anywhere. It's really funny when people visit and say how interesting and cosy it is because of all the art. Of course the apartment doubles as her gallery since her studio is for creating stuff but what a better place than to display the art than where it should eventually end up, in a place where someone can look at it. Thanks for sharing. Very interesting reading.

Hi guys! So our government has issued some kind of turist vouchers to every citizen to use at any turist destination in our country and as a result most of the turist accommodations have tried to shift their focus towards domestic tourists. As a result more and more places are trying to show what they have to offer to their potencial clients and we're seen a lot of work from this perspective. Anyway this was a crazy one since the client is a friend and called me up last minute that he actually needed a 10 second TV add that needed to be done in less than a day and a half for his small hotel. My girlfriend and I didn't exactly know if it was possible but we said what the heck and tried it anyway. So we drove down to the coastal town and shot everything we could find that looked pretty for a couple of hours and then drove straight home and edited the footage for another couple of hours. I mostly directed and consulted the shots, but most of them were shot by my girlfriend and she also did the editing and most of the color grading. Where I did the animation, voice and them mastered everything. This was the result after 20 hours of work that we submitted to the TV station. Of course done in our language this just an English version. Of course I realize that it could have been done better and that this was a complete run and gun type of thing but I'm actually really happy with the result and so is the client. The only comment that his significant other had was that she wanted to see a different shot of the food which in my opinion didn't work but we created an alternative version which was sent to the TV station and let them decide. Where they used the original version where I said that the shot was better since there was not a person in the shot and it looked less personal. Anyway I'm happy with it and we've done another few of these in the past two weeks which is great since it brings in some come cash and doesn't take a lot of work, time and energy. But I am however interest a little more form someone who does more commercial shoots and how is it different and if I wanted to expand my business into these type of commercial shoots what to look out for. Stay safe guys!

Oh OK. I find it very interesting but I haven't been able to get around to it. But I have been trying myself with Blender.

Cool! You're working in Blender? Have you Cine Tracer that works on Unreal engine?

Yeah I prefer having less crew as well. Since what we're shooting is a TV series pilot episode for a local streaming service there was always going to be less crew since it's a proof of concept and we're shooting it on our own dime. So light crew and as few locations as possible was in the plan from the get go. But I'm used to that. I've never had the luxury of being able to go to someone and ask them to do something because I've always been the guy to whom people came and asked me to do something. So I've had to do everything myself and now I usually have people who I trust and work in the same sort of way that I do. As for videovillage I don't much care for those. I'm usually there and can see what's going on either directly on camera or on my monitor. Others who just want to lurk and watch don't really have to watch.

Thank you. Oh that's cool. We almost always have a very light crew and never waste time. At most there will be 8 people at a time in the same room while shooting and that's only one scene. Most of the scenes are outside so that shouldn't pose any problems either. I think that all should be well since we're taking the required precautions. I've even gotten an email confirming that all our precautions are in line with the government recommendations. Accept for postponing the shoot another couple of months and missing this years window I don't know ho much more we can do.

Oh yeah. That's cool. I used to do that too. I only did like a couple of websites with some coding and then went to wordpress and similar CMS. But I never liked IT too much. Filmmaking is much less stressful and much less dull. ?

So things here in Slovenia are getting back to normal and the lock down has been relaxed so we're getting back to production and are scheduled to start shooting a TV series episode in a couple of weeks and we'll be shooting three days. Of course a few precautions will be taken like if someone doesn't feel well they'll stay home, inside the crew will ware masks or outside if someone needs to come closer and we're keeping the crew really light with no unnecessary people on set and everyone needs to sign a liability waver, which was done anyway accept now it says that besides all the usual stuff that you need to watch out for your own and others safety as much as possible. My personal request was that everyone be issued their own personal hand sanitizers and that they actually use them as much as possible and also everyone operating equipment is tasked with keeping their own equipment clean which I had always insisted on anyway. Besides keeping the crew light we'll be trying to shoot stuff in a way to have as few talent as possible which might be a challenge next month when we're supposed to be shooting a music video in a crowded bar. But I guess we'll figure a workaround in one way or another. Wish us luck but with the low numbers around here and the restrictions being relaxed for a few weeks now and the numbers still falling we're not expecting any issues.

Yeah she's great and I love doing stuff with her. But yeah people always say that we're crazy. ? Oh you coded the site yourself. That's cool! Did you just use PHP as a container for the html or is it generated? I love the way you organized the code! I used to do that and one time I even created a small content management system that spat out and commented the html code so it was all organized. Admitted I went a little overboard but it was fun. People always make fun of my organizational systems when we shoot stuff and even my girlfriend(her desktop is a mess) did when I organized her sculptures into a organized folder structure. I'm pretty strict about this filing system and only have a couple of unessential folder for a mess on our storage system and even that gets deleted on a random schedule by an automated script. But then when someone needs to find something they always come running "Oh where is the...". So very cool commenting! I keep wondering what what will come in the commented section under the hidden divs for future use.

Oh yeah. But thankfully in my previous life I used to be an IT guy so it makes it a lot easier and I was never a programer so I still need a couple of days to get back to speed. But I guess being an IT person it makes it a lot easier understanding the film equipment and related technical stuff. I'm gonna joke a little now. But sometimes I wish I wasn't such a technical person because now my girlfriend, who's also a great DP and editor doesn't need to know absolutely anything technical beyond using the equipment we shoot with and it makes for some really weird and funny arguments where people say "you guys are weird why do you arguing about codecs and ISOs". On the other hand a couple of days ago she was doing some storyboards for a feature that we're developing and kept nagging me to look at naked women showering (exact search criteria) online to find the one that I liked the most so the she could have something to base her drawing on. ? What platform are you using for your site? I don't know why but a long time ago I decided that wordpress was something that was simple enough for me to play around with so now I just keep using that.

You're welcome. I didn't help much. I just redid our website but unfortunately there's not much difference on the outside because the changes I made were in the back and organized the site so that I can update it easily. It's a lot of work. If you have time go check it out, it should be in my description. But it's a completely different style.

Hi AJ! I took a look at your website and I actually love the concept because it's simple and I like the cross hairs theme like looking trough the monitor. You shot some pretty cool stuff! I like your reel. Maybe the only thing I'd do is add some info about the projects but that's me Anyway congratulations on updating your website I know how much work that is.

Thank you. I know there's too much of the army guys in there but that has a lot to do with the concept being changed mid shoot. The first idea was to have the two chess guys play a game and then shoot army guys, some mixed martial arts guys fighting, then some medieval guys jousting and some sort of royalty watching the show and a couple of other things to really show the concept. But since the guys from the band had some problems getting the other reenactment people on board we ended up using only the army guys and thankfully we had enough footage and changed the theme a little to fit just the army guys. Thankfully I was worried that this exact thing might happen so I pushed to shoot everything so that it could be used as a stand alone sequence for the whole video. The army guys and the chess guys we shot all in one day. About 6 hours for the army guys and another 3 for the chess guys. Thankfully there wasn't a lot of prep work for either because we shot the army guys on a field where they already practice paintball or something so the only thing we had to worry about was setting up a tent for the equipment since it rained a little. Literally it took us more time to talk to the cops and the fire department who were curious about the shoot and came around, since we let both of them know what we were doing to prevent unnecessary panic from any neighbors that could have seen smoke or something. For the chess guys we had a dark room near by where the band practices. I think it's the vocal recording studio or something and just light with one light, two chairs and a table. The two guys were actually playing chess in the mean time so we just shot a bunch of those shots and added a couple additional shots that I needed for the story. As for the band it took a little longer because we shot on another day in an school gymnasium. But we had more prep since everything needed to be moved behind the camera to make as much space around the band. Then they had to move in all the band equipment and set up the lighting twice. But the biggest problem was since we had to shoot everything with many takes the guys needed breaks in between to catch their breath so we shot something like 4 to 5 takes in one go and then took a break for a different setup and repeated this something like 13 times. So there were something like 60 takes of the whole song and it took us around 7 hours to prep shoot and bugger out again. All in all one of the shoots where almost everything went right and I enjoyed myself because the guys from the band are really good sports and do anything I ask them to do and the army guys were great too because they also did everything like they were supposed to and were even consistent.

Well the amount of data that you have to store is really getting to be crazy. But here's how I handle our backups. First of all of our data what I shoot and my personal stuff is on a 12TB network attached storage that has redundant drives so anything can fail and all the projects and everything is still there. But then when projects are done I usually backup the finished projects like the final renders, all the art work and project files, basically anything important accept for the raw footage, as well as my personal photos and some important documents to an external drive which I keep in a separate fire, emp, whatever proof safe. At the same time I backup all the really important stuff like the final renders of projects, only the project files, art and my personal photos and documents on an M disk dvd which gets stored one copy in my safe, another at my parents place and in a safety deposit box just for safe keeping. Every so often which is usually every couple of years I take the DVDs and copy everything back to a drive and create fresh copies checking the crc is OK to know that all the data is coherent and still readable. One of the most important things that I try to do is to store important stuff like project files in open formats that I'll be able to open even after years. So for example graphics get stored in some SVG type thing, Davinci projects also get saved in XML's and similar stuff like that. I also try not to encrypt stuff as much as I can because that only makes it harder to open stuff when needed which is a security risk but at the same time the data is stored securely so it presents a minimal risk. At one time I had stuff backed up to an LTO drive but ti kept being too much data so I reduced the amount of data needed to backup but abandoned it anyway. Thankfully I come from an IT background so all the folder structures are always uniform and so not that big of a deal to backup or even restore only a part of it manually.

So about seven months ago we had shot this music video with the band we worked with and the video had been done for a couple of months now but they were waiting to release it because of stuff to do with the record label. But looking back now I love the fact that they had waited because it fits the theme a lot more now. Anyway the theme was really simple we just went off the lyrics of the song and the backstory of how it came to be. The original plan was to shoot with the army guys and then with some MMA guys and then with some medievale jousting guys and a bunch of more things but in the end when going over the budget and scheduling problems the plan was changed and we only shot with the army guys, the tycoon guys and added the shots with the band so that we'd have enough. I'm personally not that happy with the band shots because we shot in a large gymnasium where the walls were painted white and no matter what we tried we always had bounce everywhere so we planed in advance and decided to light form behind and then use a bounce to light the band individually from the front. One other funny thing was when we were shooting with the army guys we had told the local police and fire departments that we were shooting there and that we'd be using smoke effects so that nobody would get worried what was happening. Most of the time the smoke effects were blown away by winds but we still needed some smoke in the front to create a little bit of layering and the only way we could do that was by having someone smoke an e cigarette in front of the camera lens that was really funny but even funnier was when one smoke effect went off an covered the whole valley and nobody could see anything the only thing that could be heard was me screaming and directing the army guys trough the bullhorn and at the end I asked my girlfriend who was the DP if we got all that and she replied "Oh yeah we got everything... white out trough the whole screen...". That was really funny. Anyway here it is and I hope you enjoy it.

We did that once too. Had a laptop and an external sound card. It was uncomfortable to use especially if the duck tape gave way but the sound was more than usable. And a cheap solution without having to buy any additional equipment.

Oh that's true. Organization is one of the most important things and if you can do it in the device it makes post much easier. On the last few projects that we had sound and video I had a PA take notes on an app on a tablet where she noted the scene, take and both file names for the video and audio as well as any other additional notes. Since I was doing the post it really helped because I just checked the documentation and synced up the audio. The only SD I've be able to hold and play around with was the 788T unfortunately. I wish I could have found something like that and affordable in our area. But in the end it came down to either buy the DR60mk2 or wait for another half a year (with this going on would have been a year) to buy a sound recorder so I bit the bullet on the DR60mk2.