Over the weekend a friend of mine brought over some footage that he wanted to review with me. This was from one of those ‘say let’s have the party right here’ moments he was part of a few months ago. He was on location hanging around with his part of the crew with a couple of days off between shooting days. The gang dropped in on a friend and after a few hours of R&R, they came up with an idea. They had lights, cameras, sound equipment, a good location and talent. Why not shoot a quick short? Actor friends were called, they turned up.

The film was a single scene short with a twist in the coda. The single scene required a group of five to ten actors to improvise on a theme for a while. Then one would deliver a line in the coda that would change the way we saw the previous scene.

So, Saturday was the day to review the seven tapes that were produced that day. 18 months after the shoot. The people involved are busy people, it took time for my friend to ask me whether I could help out. That meant that memories of what was shot, what worked and what might not have worked had faded a while ago. At least he would be seeing the footage with an eye that was almost as fresh as mine.

It turned out that there were problems with what they had. As the sun went down, the many windows in the location turned into mirrors. Some of the lighting was visible in the reflections. Maybe that could be matted out. We had problems finding out which tapes had the production sound. It was a three camera shoot, so the recordist connected their mixer to one of the cameras. It was the one on a locked off wide, but the levels were so low that dialogue could only be heard clearly when my amp was at 10. It’s usually set somewhere between 2 and 3.

But the main problem wasn’t in the sound and picture. It was the direction. The scene was that the actors are stuck in one location for an hour or so. The improvisation they came up with followed the initial direction well, but it didn’t lead anywhere.

Each actor was told to come up with a character on their own and reveal it during the improv. The actors were then filmed non stop for 50 minutes. The tapes were changed, some notes were given and they went at it again for another 30 minutes.

As my friend watched, his estimate of how many useful minutes of footage we might get reduced as time went on. ‘We should be able to make 15 minutes out of this,’ was his initial estimate. This changed to ‘hopefully we might be able to salvage 5 minutes’ then onto ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to get 30 seconds’.

I think that my friends will learn from this. Being amongst film crews is very different to leading the crew and developing the story with the actors.

I suppose the next time they’ll have more plans of how to direct the actors to produce work that can be used. I would suggest a non-camera rehearsal to discover what characters the actors had come up with. Then the group could be directed to improvise for five minutes – such that person C wants something, with person E resisting. A, B, D and F ending up supporting one side or another or abstaining from the conversation. After some sort of resolution, the director could come on and choose new protagonist and antagonist and a new target. After another five minutes the director and group can review where that led. They then have the choice to explore futher along that line, or to redo the segment to see if it leads somewhere else.

If they developed the story this way, they would have ended up with a series of clear beats between people. Mini-scenes that could be extended, modified or removed. Stuff that could have given the director a choice about what to include and what to omit.

And if that didn’t work, they would have learned from that and gone on to do better.

‘Pain is the best teacher’

I was listening to an edition of Creative Planet’s Digital Production Buzz podcast where they talked to some people from DTS about digital restoration work (32 min 39 sec in).

DTS have a system that has enough maths in it to calculate what was originally captured on the film negative. The work isn’t done by eye, by expert restorers. This system understands the maths of lenses, emulsions, stocks and film grain to calculate what detail has gone missing over the years.

This runs counter to the a blog post referred to me by Jean P. It covers what information about our current movies will make it into the future for scholars to research the 20th and 21st centuries.

The element of he DTS story that is relevant to today’s production is that they can use the same restoration technology to solve problems that are all too common right now. They talk about recovering footage from footage that is processed incorrectly and even dealing with footage that is shot out of focus! They also can increase resolution from SD to well past HD…

Their system is not real-time, but it can deal with digital files as well as celluloid. This isn’t a photochemical process. They apply mathematical equations to digital files. They say they are solving digital signal processing problems.

One of their secrets is using information from adjacent frames to gather information about the current frame. Even when a camera is locked off individual film grains or digital pixels receive slightly different light information from frame to frame. Very few shots have cameras that are locked off completely solidly. Cameras move. Subjects move. The differences between frames provide the extra resolution. They take this information to understand what light would have been captured between the film grains and digital pixels. They use that information to give more detail for every frame.

This means that your old Hi-8 or home DV footage may hold enough information to be scaled up to HD or better in the future. Now this software is only available from DTS. One day we’ll have the software and processing power to do this for our own footage.

At last we’ll have technology in the real world that will be able to do what they do in movies and TV shows like CSI and other police procedurals: select a small part of a video image and press the button marked ‘Enhance!’

My tip for security camera designers: improve the number of pictures you take a second at the current resolution for signal processing tools to be able to reveal details never seen before.

…is to spend less money than you’ll earn!

My visit to the Cannes Film Festival last year taught me that below the line is where I want to be. For the forseeable future.

I read a table of figures in the Hollywood Reporter that listed the going rates for selling all rights for movies in non-US markets in 2005-06. Here’s a excerpt:

Going rate for all rights in non US-markets in $000 for a film budgeted at $3 million
Hollywood Reporter, May 2006

For example, if you have a movie that had a budget of $3 million, then selling the distribution rights in the UK would get you an average of $200,000. If you sold it to every country in Western Europe, you’d get $1.4m. Eastern Europe brings in $375,000. China pays on average $40,000 for distribution rights! This adds up to $3,245,000 for all non-US rights.

Not very much.

The US rights usally get you four to five times as much as the UK rights. That means another $900K on top. So if you get US rights and sell rights to half of the world, you’d get £2.5 million in total. Selling the rights to half the world is the most you can reasonably expect. Then you need to factor in your sales agent (aka producer’s rep). They charge 15%-25% to close the deals at film markets like Cannes. It also takes a long time for this money to come in as deals are done. You get your first money 6 months into the process, as the major countries are sold, your income slowly falls to nothing for another two years.

But what are you selling for your $200,000 UK rights? If you are a new producer without much clout, you are selling everything. The UK distributor can show it in as many cinemas as they like, press as many DVDs as they want and get whatever they can for cable, satellite and TV showings. You get none of that. They get to exploit your film for seven to fifteen years for that one-off fee of $200,000!

These are the figures for average deals for new producers. I suppose the trick is to have an above average film – and be a producer with more experience and clout! That’s why I like being a line item in a budget that is purely based on a weekly rate and number of weeks worked…