REASONABLY SHORTS

by James Random.

This guy has done a couple of posters for me in the past.

I like the cut of his jib me.

I don’t remember Catwoman being in Year One

Must dust off my paperback.

Nice to get a mention in the Harmlessnoise blog on entertainment.ie.

Good write up on the Large Mound project.

Can be read here.

EPK I made for Large Mound documenting the halfway point of their Another Year of Rock album project.

I may have been offline for quite some time and updates, tweets etc have been non existent, but that is not to say I haven’t been busy “behind the scenes”.

Above is a one sheet to help promote the film Back to Mine.

I took the photo’s one night at the phone box down the road.

I got funny looks as drunken locals passed by on their way home as I wiped fake blood off the telephone and my step daughter went through copious wet wipes to get her hand clean.

Quite a bit of subtle photoshop trickery was employed to piece together the perfect image from several “takes” - The most obvious being the removal of the Eircom logo and replaced with a “Dial 999” logo instead.

Some of you may remember the promotional image with a similar logline called Till The Night Closes In. Well this is the same project. Its just that the name has changed as the story was written & the original concept for when it was called Till The Night became null and void.

Photoshoppery was “done” by the photoshop guru amgd.net 

There is also a basic website set up for the project.

www.backtominethemovie.com

Early days yet, but you know, this kind of stuff helps.

I also got some great tips & advice from someone I met on Twitter who does this kind of thing professionally.

It got the thumbs up from her, hope you like it too.

PS There is a reverse, I’ll post that some other time.

So I thought I’d share a great and simple method of achieving smooth slowmotion from HDV footage shot at 50 interlaced frames per second.

Shutter speed is important too. 120 is grand or else you get some serious flicker.

I was hoping to go the Cinema Tools route but 50i actually runs at 25 frames per second, just as interlaced fields not full frame.

So then I found JES Deinterlacer. Something I had a long time ago, but never really used it.

I was just going to convert 50i into 50p & then extend the clip by double, but with the JES app you can create whole frames from the separate fields individually thus doubling your frame count but not your frame rate and viola! 50% slowmotion without any frame blending or interpolation!

And best of all, it is smooooooth.

Goodbye Twixtor, Optical Flow and all those other million year render time hungry methods (not to mention digitally estimated & created artificial frames).

Can’t believe it was so easy.

Only way I’m doing slowmotion from now on.

Until of course I get my hands on a variable speed film camera.

Thats me tucked away on the bottom left & my Fig Rig.

Finally getting into working on this video for The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock.

Of course I’ve had my fair share of technical nightmares thus far. I just wouldn’t be me if I did.

Very rarely do I play it safe when I make a music video. Its always an excuse to experiment for me. And this one is no exception.

I’ve yet to get any actual editing done, I’m still on the assistant work stage. (Jesus, I’d kill for an assistant). A whole day spent troubleshooting a slowmotion workflow.

Think I’ve finally nailed it.

I’m sick to death of doing frame blending style slowmotion. Optical flow, digital inbetweens. Nothing ever looks as good as proper ramping slowmotion like I did in my first ever music video back in 1995. Which was shot on super 16mm using an old clockwork Bolex camera.

This video kinda harkens back to that but in the digital realm.

Including some stop motion sequences.

So I’ve shot at a high frame rate and messed about with the shutter speed & hopefully I can create a decent slowmotion without having to render anything for a million years.

Fingers crossed.

Coen’s discuss intro’s

Shooting the new video for The Spuke of the Thirteenth Lock.

In the cinema the other day I asked the lady at the desk would they be showing Kung Fu Panda in 2D.

She said she doubted it as they would probably make more money from the 3D print.

(I went to see the disappointing Rio instead as it was in 2D. (I was with my kid))

Anyway, I beg to differ.

This better live up to its promise of being amazing.

53 years old today.

Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.