I ended up creating 3 separate videos, a 6:45 length feature about the Training Expo which had sections for the Stereoscopic 3d presentation, the Ben Davis Action workshop and the Music for Productions and Composers sessions; a 30 second version was also made. In addition, a separate video was made about the Poor Man’s Process workshop that took a week after the training expo.

FTM asked to have a version delivered that could be given to broadcasters and other media outlets when doing some promotional work. So in addition to a standard definition DVD, they were given MPEG4 files with the H.264 codec, both a SD version and a 720p version, which is the resolution of the original video. In addition, unmixed versions were supplied that had no graphics like name keys and lower thirds and also no music, just actualities and natural sound on separated channels.

Usually when completing projects I would lay them tape in this manner, with both a mixed and unmixed version, but with the advent of more tapeless acquisition formats I find myself less inclined to master to tape as well, instead I will keep hi-rez and medium-rez data versions, it really does depend on the project though, some long form projects I will still put to tape, and I imagine I will work it like that for a while still.

The full videos will be up on the Film Training Manitoba website soon.

MediaCircus.TV was hired to provide HD video recording and playback for the sessions, and create DVD’s for the actors of all of their takes. I was using the Sony XDCAM EX1 camera, which shoots on SxS memory cards, which is a perfect way of working for a project like this.

After a take was completed, I would switch the camera over to “media mode” where the material on the SxS cards would be accessed and  Mr. Davis would review the take with the class on a HD LCD TV, having instant HD playback of the scene that was just completed. It was a very efficient way to work.

Each participant did 3 scenes over the length of the course, with the rest of the time spent observing the others and taking part in the discussion. Myself as a non-actor, watching the process they went through in order to make their performances as real as possible was quite an education. I’ve worked with actors before on commercial and promotion shoots, but rarely in any sort of scripted dramatic venue, which is what most of the performances in this course were focused on.

The classes participants ranged from people new to the industry to folks that have been in it for quite some time. Some people were getting back into acting after taking a hiatus to raise their family, and some of the participants I recognized from from other Film Training Manitoba workshops that I have either attended or been hired to provide video services for.

I’ll admit that I was somewhat intimidated at first working with William B. Davis (or ”Bill” as he suggested I call him)  having been quite an X-Files fan during it’s original run. I rarely get star-struck when working with well known people, and I wasn’t here either, though Bill carried a certain demeanor with him that left me in awe for the fist few days.   

As we would get ready for a scene I would do some basic lighting to flood the area with a lot of light, there wasn’t enough time to do proper dramatic lighting custom for each scene, and that wasn’t the point of the workshop.  Lighting is one of those things that makes a huge difference in the quality of a shot, so even just having flood lighting made a difference.

Between the lighting, the HD playback and the speed with which we were switching scenes (the workshop participants often would help move things in changing scenes) we moved along at an efficient pace and Bill remarked that this was a “high-end” workshop. That felt good to hear. He has been on numerous film and TV sets (including 9 years on the X-Files) , and has been in theatre for many years, and he called our little workshop production high-end. He wasn’t comparing to those big productions of course, but to most workshops that might have a small handycam with a TV set to playback material on, while we had proper lighting, mics, instant HD playback and DVD production and duplication on site. Film Training Manitoba is raising the bar when it comes to bringing in people to train Winnipeg Actors and putting on workshops that will help the participants improve in their skills, and I’m glad to be a part of it. 

 The Winnipeg Actors involved were;

Shannon Jacques, Dana Horrox, Dean Harder, Ashley Hirt, Cindy Marie Small, Sherry Coffey, Krysia Andrzejczak, Dan Augusta, Janet Shum, Jason Malloy, Tyhr Trubiak, Yvette Jones and Ali Tataryn.

In addition, this year as part of the package I am training people on Camera Assist, Editing and Motion Graphics with After Effects, they are Film Training Manitoba after all.

Over the course of the next month the footage that wa shot at the Expo will be edited by 2 students along with the creation of motion graphics to spruce up the final product. Once the training is done then I will take what the student did and make a final video that Film Training Manitoba will use for their archives.

The video I made from last years Expo is now up on Film Training Manitoba’s newly revamped website.

Here are some stills from the video that we shot this past weekend.

 Course Participants Craig Matthews and Nicolette Rieger

On April 26 I helped out with an ACTRA Auditioning workshop put on by Film Training Manitoba.  The workshop was run by veteran actor and casting director Rebecca Gibson.

I brought out my light kit, green screen for a backdrop and my know how to put together DVD’s of the auditions for folks. I used the Sony XDCAM EX camera, which is just great for a project like this. Since it is a data-based camera, rather than tape based, moving the files around and putting together a DVD is pretty quick, even with the extra work of transferring and transcoding files.

I make DVD’s for all of the workshop participants at FTM’s request, which I think is a great idea since it adds to the value that the participants get out of the workshops.

With most of the shooting already done (just a few pick-ups here and there) I have been going pretty steady in the edit suite for several days. I’ve already worked on three projects tonight; The Punjabi video, The Film Training Manitoba Film Expo video and the Mindset Serious Games conference videos.

The Punjabi Workplace Health and Safety video is going to be packaged and delivered by Monday, and I’ve completed tonight what will hopefully be the final cut. This one went through 8 rounds of changes to get to the final, which isn’t too bad. For a 20 minute video, there were relatively few changes to make, credit goes to a solid script for that. The client has been very good in catching the spelling errors I’ve been making .

Jon Le has been the graphics designer on the Punjabi project and he’s done a great job. I used to work with Jon at A-Channel in 2000; we’ve both come a long way since then. I like to hire people that I’ve worked with in the past, and this is the first time I’ve worked with Jon on a project of my own, and he’s really captured the flavour of the Punjabi style with his graphics. Here are a few examples of what he created.

Back in November I shot footage for Film Training Manitoba’s Film Expo, and now is when it’s time to put the material together from it. I’m cutting 5:00, 2:00 and :30 videos promoting the Expo and Film Training Manitoba in general. I’ve finished the 5:00 version tonight and will tackle the other ones in the next few days.

I shot 3 hours of interviews and 2 hours of b-roll, and I’m condensing that all down into just a few minutes. There is some amazing b-roll in there, I wish I could use more of it. Maybe just a half-hour montage of nice b-roll to music; I think only camera operators would watch something like that. Picking the best to use is not an easy job, and going through the interviews took a lot longer than I thought since there was so much great material in them. FTM has a copy of all of the material I shot so there may be some future use for it.

And onto Mindset. Last year I did a series of videos for them for the Microsoft Canada Innovative Teachers Conference.  This year I am doing something similar for them for the Serious Games conference. 5 interviews were shot and I’ll be packaging them into 2 minute clips for conference attendees to look at before the conference starts. I’ll put them on my website for Mindset to download and they’ll either put them on YouTube or their own server; last year they did both.

I’ll be using the same music and graphics that I did for their project last year, which will help me get all of them edited in one day, since that’s what is budgeted. Here are some captures from that shoot.

I’ve been waiting for some graphics to render while I’ve been typing this post, looks like they’re almost done. Time to get back to the edit!

It turned out to be a pretty simple process, with a lot of material to manage though. It’s a good thing that I have a second system that I use for encoding because to get 4+ hours of material ready for DVD takes 16 hours of processor time!

Below are a few screen shots from the DVD. I’m glad that I got to be a part of this process, maybe I’ll be seeing some of the actors from this workshop on the big screen in the near future.

She was teaching the students how to have great audition and how casting decisions are made; hint – it’s not always about the acting, sometimes it’s the producers niece that gets the role

Jackie was very precise with the feedback she gave, and worked hard to get the best performance out of people. As usual, I learned a lot just from observing the process, which is one of the benefits from helping at a workshop like this.

What I was doing was taking video of the “auditions” by each performer, playing back the takes onto the HDTV monitor that was set-up and helping with DVD playback. I set-up some lighting and used my green backdrop (which I usually use for green screen chroma keying) to add a nice color to the background.

Over the course of 2 days I shot over 4 hours of footage of 15 different actors. I was using the Sony XDCAM EX-1, a beautiful camera I used a few months ago on another FTM production. The tapeless workflow it uses was perfect for this job.

I am compiling all of the takes of each actor into a DVD that will be given to the  attendees. I wasn’t quite sure what the best workflow would be to achieve this. When I ended up doing was unloading the contents of the SxS cards (the format the EX-1 shoot on) onto my laptop and using the Sony Clip Browser software to convert the clips to the MXF format, which is what Avid Media Composer (my editing software) uses. One they were converted I imported them into the Avid and put all of the takes from each actor onto their own timeline. Up to this point everything is in High-Definition, 720p 24fps.

I am now in the process of exporting QuickTime movies in Standard Definition which I will then import into Sorenson Squeeze to create the MPEG files used for the DVD authoring. From there, the MPEG files are imported into Adobe Encore for DVD authoring.

Wheh! For short projects this doesn’t take so long, but with over 4 hours of material this process does slow down a bit. I’m still experimenting with ways to make this workflow more efficient.

So in a few days (likely early next week) all of these lovely actors will have DVD’s from this session, so they can see the progress they made through 2 days of rigorous training.

Day 2 and 3 have been pretty eventful here at the Manitoba Film Training Expo. A lot of the discussion has focused on the RED Camera and it’s market penetration into the feature film industry. The RED Camera is really a computer with a lens on it, with various versions of the O/S software running on the computer. This seems to be part of the appeal with the Red Camera; in that you can receive firmware updates for it that can improve the functionality of it, without replacing hardware.

Coming from a TV background and not a film background, the RED workflow seems pretty foreign to me since it works more like the feature film workflow does. It records RAW data (the digital negative) and you manipulate it in post production.

RED can shoot up to 4K, which is an insanely high resolution, it is about 4 thousand pixels high, while standard NTSC TV’s are 486 pixels high; that’s a lot of data!

There were people from Mid-Canada Productions present with an edit suite set-up to show some of the RED post-production workflow.

The edit suite in this photo was running the SPARK software, which is made especially for RED r3d files, which was then lopped through an Avid Symphony Nitris DX.

We have spent a lot of time interviewing people in the film industry; DOP’s to PA’s, to get their perspective on what Manitoba has to offer the film industry. We also talked to people in FTM’s Aboriginal Training program to see what their experiences have been like in entering the film business.

Over all, a very enlightening Expo, and even though I wasn’t an official participant, I still learned a lot just be getting b-roll and interviewing people. There was a lot of great discussion from film professionals about the changing nature of the industry, and how the art of storytelling is progressing with these new tools.

This is me on set on the first day of shooting for Film Training Manitoba at the Manitoba Film Training Expo. I’m working with the new Sony XDCAM EX-1 camera which shoots on SxS cards. Working with this media is pretty easy, and each 16GB card hold about 1 hour of 720/24p HD video, which is what I’m shooting. 

I find the camera to be pretty front heavy, more so than other Sony handhelds that I’ve used such as the Z1U, which is the one that I own. Not a big deal though, I’ve been shooting most of the time on my tripod, the way I should be  

The studio you see behind me is the main sound-stage at Trinity Studios in Winnipeg. It’s a pretty nice facility, and it’s for sale, so if you have a few million to spare you might want to think about getting into the studio business. 

We interviewed about 10 people the first day, and I already have 3 hours of footage; that’s quite a bit for what’s going to be a 5 minute video, but they want to have this material for archival purposes as well, so I’m shooting a fair amount of b-roll.

Once I get into the editing more I post about how the Sony XDCAMEX tapeles workflow is working out.  I’m back to shooting the Expo on Saturday and Sunday.

MediaCircus.TV is pleased to announce that we will be providing videography services for Film Training Manitoba and their upcoming Manitoba Film Training Expo. We will be using their newly acquired Sony XDCAM EX camera in a non-linear work flow, working with the latest in High Definition Non-Linear technology.

The final deliverables will be a 30 second, 2 minute and 8 minute videos to be used for promotional purposes for this and future expos.