How to be Pro!

As I type this, I'm uploading the latest batch of samples I've been cutting for this project called Hoopfighter.

This project has been in "concept" for a long, long time according to a close friend of mine who is the creator of the IP.  They've gotten quite a comic strip started online. I'm helping out with Sound Effects for the next phase they're building: a short animated series.  I've been told the plan is to start releasing episodes as early as next April.  Check them out on Facebook and join the following so you can stay in the loop on when episodes are released!

I've been doing an awful lot of documenting my own personal stuff as well as stuff I've been doing for this project just to keep track, which led me to that template I designed for managing field recording sessions with the Zoom H4N.  (you can find it here on my article "Got Zoom?")

Universal Audio has AMAZING documentation and their manual provides a session recall sheet on page 35.  I love my 4-710 D.  In fact, I've used this beast so many times I've lost count (thankfully I keep session logs), but I just started backing up my paper logs back to digital domain and storing them in PDF's along with my other session logs.  Thanks to the power of Photoshop I now have this master template for doing session recall sheet "digitization".  Click on the image below to download the .PSD file.

Here's a few tips on how to edit and navigate this photoshop file.

Layout contains the altered session recall sheet from UA's manual.

Channel Notes contains text layers for each channel of both the top and bottom recall layouts.  Simply double click on the text layer and start typing your information about that channel.  What mic was hooked up, whether the mic's pad or roll-off or other switches or pattern select was used.

Session Title contains the upper text layers,  double click on the "TITLE" layer and start typing out the title of the session.  It also houses the date text layer, and the engineer text layer.  You can change your studio title as well.

Notes area is something I added in.  there's 2 vector lines and a text layer for adding in further text information about the session.

Dials which you can see all the layers of in the image to the right, contains an easy way to create the dial drawing information.  Simply select the hard circular brush (or default brush Photoshop uses).  and make the brush size small enough to your liking.

As you can see above, I started painting in on the appropriate layer.  The easiest way to keep a clean look, is to click once and create a dot at the center of the dial with the brush tool, then hold Shift and left click at the outer edge of the dial to create a straight line from the last "click" you made.

My finished example below from one of my earlier sessions.

So there you have a free Photoshop template, and a basic walkthrough of how to use it for your own sessions.

This isn't all I've been up to.  I've made session time log templates, material checklist templates, Sample archiving templates, etc... etc...  I've spent just about as much time building documentation as I have actually recording and producing audio material!  Imagine that...

Other news, I've been working off-and-on for a DJ friend of mine helping him change aliases and start a new "brand image" building marketing material and video work for his music.  Check out VRTRA on facebook and show him some love!  He's got an EP he's working on right now.  I actually mastered his track "IDGAF (Original mix)".
We've been back and forth with development of the text logos and stripping out a "zebra" design he originally had made by another artist and wants to shift gears to a more edgy look.  Here's a look at the progress and changes I've done just iterating through some design requests.

 Some alternate text banners he decided against.

After a week or so He decided the Zebra head wasn't the image he wanted, but he liked the idea of fractals and wanted them to shape the V as his logo.  I had a couple of issues with this as getting the same way I designed the fractals as BG fx for the Zebra head don't work with text well, so I had to imrpovise.

After some more chatting back and forth and letting him know my difficulties with getting the same geometric shaped fractals to work with the V, I took some more creative liberties to develop some different looks for the V.

Just some super rough ideas for a background V shaped fractal.  I've designed my fair share of fractals with Apophysis and just started manipulating them in Photoshop to get the V look.  But this still wasn't what he envisioned so I took a new approach with the Geometric shape fractals I had created with the Zebra head.

More news to come with several other projects I'm involved in.  Shot video and assisted a photographer friend at a Wedding over a month ago.  I should be getting the footage and some photos to post up for the work we did soon.  Lots on my plate!  Also, if you haven't already, go back in my blog and check out my article on the latest commercial project I did music for: SIMple is as Simple does not.

Stay fresh friends.  As always, I appreciate any and all feedback, so feel free to comment below.  My question to you all is: what do you think o the V logos, which is your favorite? Do you think any of these make for a good logo design for a DJ?

How to The make The Cut

Building several commercial spots on the fly was a blast, and a challenge.  I had gotten a call from Harry just a couple days prior to the shoot day which was May 1st.  The idea was to go out to San Jose on short notice, and Harry already had the idea complete in his head so there would be no actual script or storyboard or shot list.

On May 1st, I got up super early to pick up a make-up artist acquaintance I had met through a mutual friend that does photography.  I was all the way out in Escalon (the opposite direction I needed to go) picking up Ava Nightingale who was to be our makeup artist for the day, then zoomed out to San Jose to meet at the Moda Italia store by 10 AM.  When we arrived there was no one even there which gave me and the makeup artist time to go to the nearest store and pick up some makeup supplies she needed.

When we got back Harry and Daren had just arrived and Daren was already dressed in a ninja costume.  Harry wanted to get rolling on shooting and thus Daren and I shot all the establishing ninja scenes where they pop from all corners of the store and converge on Cary and Harry sitting in the back room.

As we wrapped up those shots The other two extras arrived to begin dressing up as Ninjas and prep for the group shot..

Harry's favorite production method to keep time down and crew size minimal is shooting MOS.  So after getting all the takes of the ninjas approaching before they were to strip down for the next group shot of them having their clothes cut off, I took some time to get foley sounds of the footsteps and weapons.

Cary Tagawa arrived as we were setting up for these shots and proceeded to get him dressed and makeup.

Ava Nightingale working with Cary Tagawa.

Once Cary was dressed, I started getting feedback from Harry about the next shot while Melissa Andarmani (who works for Moda Italia) helped the ninjas get suited up for the next shot.

Harry had all the ideas in place for his "story" which is the ninjas coming out from all corners of the store and converging on Cary and Harry who are sitting in the back enjoying some quiet time.  He would tell me roughly what he wanted to see and I would get the camera position and dialed in.  On such a quick time-table, these shots were all done with a single T2i on a tripod, with no assist.  I have multiple SD cards and with the down-time between shots long enough to allow the camera to rest I kept swapping out cards to transfer to a laptop I brought with me.

During some of the down time I used to review shots, and I quickly noted that we had prepped a box of "clothing confetti" but never used in the shot for both the Ninjas and for Cary's slicing and dicing shot.  We ended up having to re-shoot both of those while we had our actors and extras on-set and in their clothing still.  Had I not reviewed the footage I would never have gotten those shots to help sell the effect of their clothes getting chopped off.

The other thing I've been aware of for some time now is that Troy's camera always produces a faulty pixel in the video image.  I've been unable to track down whether or not this was an issue up until my most recent shoot doing the Zombie Apocalypse Trailer  when I had the same issue regardless of switching out lenses.  Thankfully Tomas had let me borrow his T2i for use with that production.  This commercial project however would have to suffer the issue.

While it's not a complete nuisance, there were other issues with his camera.  His lens even though completely clean and free of artifacts presented focus problems, as if the only area in focus on the lens is slightly to the right of center, and it wasn't an issue with aperture settings or depth of field.  So in some of the shots you can tell I'm trying to get a focus I just can't get.  Unfortunately this was the only wide angle lens I had with me (much less had access to period).

Because of the quick pace of production with me and Harry handling it all, we ended up not using any of our lighting gear which we brought, and during the slicing and dicing scene with Cary, you can see the reflection of Vincent who's already fully clothed ready for the next shot, throwing the "clothing confetti" from off-camera into view to sell the effect of Cary slicing the clothes up.

Left circle: Vincent throwing the confetti.  Red arrow: pointing out the faulty pixel in the video.

Sometime after this we got to shooting the tag-lines with audio Cary was to deliver the brand at the end of the commercial with, and noted several good "lines" that Harry wanted to use in post later.

At this point I was using both SD cards, one in the camera, and one in my Zoom H4n.  I followed Harry's signals to get audio rolling, and worried about sync later in post.

The Zoom has some wonderful features like being able to record at 96k/24 bit but for this I opted to record at 48k/24 bit wave to allow me to capture the performance with not just my Rode NTG-3 (pictured above on a tripod and wind-jammer) but also the built-in stereo mic setup on the Zoom itself.  I placed the zoom a decent distance away from Cary and completely off-axis to his projection angle toward the camera to capture more of the room tone and ambiance should I need the material for anything in post.

The bikers arrived some time while we were wrapping up the master shots of Cary standing with the ninjas.  They had to dress down and get into their formal outfits for the master shots with Cary as well.  Then we quickly moved on to them with their clothes cut off from Cary's attack.  However, on this shot I never caught the fact that we didn't use the confetti and was stuck with the slightly less cohesive footage.

I personally would have liked to pick up a take for this as continuity for me felt broken.  To make matters worse, when we wrapped at 2:30 pm we never got any of the shots of the bikers in their original outfit pulling up to the store to intro them into the scene.

I noticed this and some other "shots" were missing when I got back home and started doing my dailies.  In the case of the digital workflow we're using, Dailies refers to bringing in the video files to my NLE and beginning the labeling and sorting and building rough timelines to get an idea of what the "sequence" will look like.

Immediately I called up Harry and let him know we needed to schedule a pick-up shoot which ended up being a week from that day (Tuesday the 2nd, the production day was Monday, May 1st).  This gave me time to build as much of the commercial as I could.  The way I work is by roughing in the scene for continuity, before I start trimming down for time considerations.

While we were able to get cooperation on the re-shoot, only Vincent could make it out for his "fitting" with Harry to get a pick-up shot we missed, Joneil couldn't make it out on that day.  For the bikers arriving out front of the store only 2 of the bikers could show up that day, and one of them was not from the original group, but another friend of the Biker that did show up for both days.

I was pretty happy with the results we got from the pick-up shoot day especially getting some nice audio for the bikes pulling up.  On top of that we were able to get the shot of the guys getting off the bikes and then heading into the store for the 60 second version.

There's lots more to discuss, up next I discuss the Post production workflow.  For more information and to see the commercials, go visit our site:  Neologic Studios.