Behind the Apocalypse

So by now, my trailer for the dubstep remix mashup of Rob Zombie tunage is passing 900 views!  I'm really surprised at how quickly this has spread!  However I know it's got a lot of confusion and curiosity surrounding it.  I'd like to clarify just what I'm doing both on the remix, as well as a breakdown of the work I did putting together the trailer spot.

Firstly, I intend to make an hour long mash-up that can be made available by the end of this year; as for how it will be available I'm not entirely sure just yet .

(If you want to support this project, please sign up on Rob's forums and support me on this topic here, you'll see what I'm trying to do).  

What is this mash-up?  I'm building my own remixes as I go, arranging the mash-up in one single project.   The Theme is that it's all Rob Zombie's music, hence the title "Zombie Apocalypse".  Pretty cool huh?

Let's rewind back to about the end of April.  I started a remix project to kind of play around with some dubstep techniques as Troy was doing a homework assignment making a remix of whatever he wanted, to submit for classes he was taking at Pyramind.  We had talked about it a week or so prior and then I had mentioned the idea of doing a "Zombie" remix to some other friends.  Then the dubstep practice project became a full-fledged idea and I thought, eh... why not?

I started working on it little bits and pieces at a time, and didn't really make much progress the first month or so.  It wouldn't be until June where I reached a 3-4 minute mark on the mashup arrangement that I really fleshed out all the details.  I've been busy working small jobs trying to keep income flowing: recording local clients, doing commercial video production as (paid) favors of Harry Mok.

July is already here and I needed to get some motivation behind this project, and decided the first week of July that I want to build a trailer to get some exposure going, and minimally "show-off" some of the completed sections I had built of the mashup.  Keep in mind it's still being built and there's hardly any mixing done on it!

I had an inkling in my head of how I wanted the trailer to come across, and set about building the layout up in After Effects.  The first part was easy, simple intro playing off the theme idea for "Zombie" and end of the world theme: a cinematic optical flare with dust flying around in the air, as the camera pans downward to reveal a world in flames, with someone rising slowly in them.  At this moment I purely just jotted down the idea to come back to later on and try to tackle how I would build it.

Once some quick motion graphics were roughed out I had to plan out the rest of the trailer segments. I needed a "script".  What do I want the commercial to say?  What am I getting across?  Quick tip: Always keep a notepad and pen on your desk for quick jotting down of ideas.  I actually prefer this for day-to-day use as I often will write and re-write TO-DO lists of things on my plate I want or need to get done.  This keeps down on clutter on my screen as I used to prefer the Sticky Notes utility that comes with Windows 7.

As I built the trailer I went through about 3 versions of the script as I expanded on the content to fill 60 seconds of play.

There are a lot of video elements that are layered together and the hardest and probably the most complex part was the fire man segment with me standing up in the flames.  The first thing I built was the flame sequence.  Many video layers placed in 3d space within After Effects, along with separate smoke elements.

Once I got the rough camera motion down and timed everything out. I figured the opening sequence should take a total of 20 seconds even, and the fire segment making for a total of 7 of those seconds.

Timing has to match perfectly, and when it came time to shoot the plate I rallied in my favors I had been doing for the Mok family and they happily provided the lighting equipment and backdrop stands.  Mok and I went shopping for a backdrop cloth that I could use to block out the exterior location from my shot (I shot outside in front of my house at night).

I called in another favor to a good friend of mine Tomas who let me borrow his DSLR as backup (which I ended up using as Troy's was having issues).  Michael Mok & I started setting up at about 9:30 pm.  You can see the setup below in the raw capture on the left and Photoshopped on the right.

Just a quick run-down of the "stage" layout: 

For the stage itself we used a cutting desk in the garage that has collapse-able sides and layed it on it's side, but that alone still wasn't tall enough to hide the softbox from the camera, so I grabbed two 2x4x8's that we had laying around because Troy and I have been busy building him a custom desk.  These raised it enough and kept it steady when I stood on it so it would not move.  

The black cloth I got just over 9 yards of in length and came at a decent width of 60".  This worked out perfectly as the backdrop stands we ended up having raised about 8+ feet in the air to cover not only my height for the angle of the camera but also accommodate the fact that the stage was increasing that height.

We did 3 sets, the first set of takes we brought inside immediately to ingest into After Effects to see how the footage looked.  I immediately noticed just how bad of camera shake there was even on a tripod.  As you can see from the screen grabs above we shot the footage vertically to maximize the use of space in the footage, which meant we couldn't use Mok's solid production tripod and instead had to shoot with a cheaper tripod.  It was windy out that night, and that coupled with a DSLR that weighs more than the tripod holding a camera vertically meant it would shake easily.  

Normally this kind of wind shake wouldn't be noticeable for a standard kit lens, but we were shooting with an older Canon EF 75-300mm that I borrowed from my older film canon SLR.

The last take on the last set was the final pick I ended up using to build the composition with in After Effects.  The first step was selecting out the clip segment I would use in the timeline and trimming out the rest, then warp stabilizing the footage.

The Rotobrush was then used to comp out the background.  This took quite a bit of work as I manually went in on a lot of the frames to get close to the look I wanted making sure the brushing worked to my advantage and wasn't too crisp or too blurry letting in any background.

In Premier Pro you can see how the final timing of the sequence looks.  Notice only 1 audio track which says final mix. 

What I normally do with Premier is export out to OMF whatever audio is in my sequence if i'm working with video files that have audio (DSLR's, or synced Zoom H4n handheld recorder samples).  In this case, I simply render a WMV at 720p low quality but decent enough to work in Sonar with.

By the time I got down to doing the final iteration with the last after effects segment I had built, and dropped into the timeline, the project was unwieldy and premier and After Effects would be really slow to respond a lot of the time so I only had my previous audio mixing render to work from which remained blank.

This left some guess work to the timing.  And unfortunately, it takes almost as long to build preview renders with in premier pro to at least see if audio and video sync and i was just trying to wrap it up and get it online.

If I had all the time in the world to put into making it there are definitely things I would go back and refine but overall this was a solid 2, maybe 3 days of work comfortably I managed in my free time across 3 weeks.  And now, back to remixing!

Still to come: A commercial campaign I worked on in May will be published shortly as well as a behind the scenes reel so keep an eye out for more updates as there will be a couple of posts about it here as well.  Then, another commercial spot I worked on is out for VFX right now, but once that one is published I'll have a segment on that too.

Several other projects in the works, building a demo reel for a model and actress friend of mine. On a side noteI recently did music and audio post for this little preview:

Yuki Noguchi who I worked with back in January also shot the ACE Rail commercial, did an excellent job on this!  The clients wanted something a little more energetic and building motion to what was happening on picture than the temp music they had.

Lastly, I will be resuming and finishing up the RPM challenge episodes (3 left) for our studio's channel, as well as building a behind the scenes documentary for the Ace Rail commercial mentioned above.  Lots of stuff coming!

Zombie Apocalypse 2012

Check it out!  The trailer just went live on youtube for the remix project I'm working on! And no, at the moment Rob doesn't know about it, at least not that I know of.  Here's to hoping he'd like to check it out :)


Still to come: there are a few other commercial projects I worked on in may i'm awaiting on publishing approval for before I post.  Keep an eye out for more behind the scenes and in-depth looks coming soon!

The McClure Sessions

Yep, it's finally here!  We spent quite a while mixing and mastering and editing everything for this 5 song EP and still keep the "Raw" sound the artist wanted.






Troy and I had a lot of fun.  The stress was minimal but it also included more things than just the EP project.  I've been working around the clock on several little things.  This video was one of them, as well as starting our website and getting our services and a pricing map for our business...  Fun times ahead.

I'd love to share more of my business plans with you, but there's some production things I'd like to cut to the chase on.

If one notices carefully in the video, there are the "driving" scenes which is us going to and from our studio location to grab all the gear so that we could set everything up at my place to track drums.  I wanted to 'motion stabilize' those shots but the clips are long.  So, in Premier my first step was rough blocking to get the content on the screen i wanted, and then how i wanted it to fit in the mosaic of video that would be constantly shifting.

My first problem I ran into (probably just lack of experience and not taking the time to hunt around on the web for people's solutions / suggestions / workarounds) was when I would replace the cut I wanted with an After Effects link and go in and motion stabilize it.  If you pay more attention to the opening sequence you'll notice some of the driving shots are super steady and others are not.



In After Effects after creating the After Effects Project File, the footage clips I used are segments of the same video file and they show up in After Effects exactly at the times I have them in Premier.  I only wanted to motion stabilize that clip I wanted to use seeing as how that would cut down render times and playback issues.

However, once you create an AE Linked project, whichever one was newer in the link replaced the older one.  If I were to exit out of Premier Pro and only open the After Effects project, it would show the correct clip.

My next step was trying to render out the motion-stabilized footage using Adobe's Media Encoder tool.  The same problem occurred because it still uses the dynamic link manager as well; which apparently has permanently replaced the link to the original clip segment and only does the latest one.

What gives, Adobe?  Is there a way to create multiple After Effects compositions working on the same video file but still retain their clip-based references from Premier?


The other (and not nearly as perplexing) problem is dealing with OMF Export to work in a DAW with.  I've noticed for a long while now that stereo tracks in Premier Pro, upon importing into a DAW will come in as independent mono left and right tracks.  Note, I've been working exclusively in Sonar for doing my picture audio work, however I have tried the same OMF imports in Pro Tools and the same thing occurs.

Both DAW's are perfectly capable of working with stereo interleaved files, and creating stereo tracks.  I just find it a bit funny this information gets parsed in the export process (or translated as such on import) this way.  Has anyone else noticed or perhaps figured out a fix for this?

If anyone reading this has had similar experiences and even possibly solutions they've found for these things, I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Likewise, I'd love to hear any comments, questions, suggestions, anything at all; about the video, the questions I posed regarding After Effects and Premier Pro; or OMF Exporting.

Keep an eye out for our website launch, and if you don't already; follow me on Twitter, or facebook.  as well as our studio page on Facebook.

Zombie Appreciation

I cannot seem to find enough time in the day to get to this thing!  The last couple weeks have blasted by. 

I suppose first things first:  The first skit we filmed almost three weeks back was a Zombie skit in collaboration with Underpaid Heroes project with Troy Norcross.  The whole thing was improvised on location, not to mention slightly less than legal it turns out!

Troy led the skit idea,  It took us a while to get makeup done on 2 zombies.  A few hours longer than expected running the whole production on account of the Navigator battery dying because of improvised lighting with the cars and 1 mobile spotlight being run from a power inverter (yay for homebrew videography)!

We tried to race through a lot of the shots with a tight time-table.  Mok operated the Camera hand-held and I ran the Shotgun mic the same.  There was hardly any time to plan out camera angles and really understand what the group wanted to do action-wise.

We ran out of time to really make sure we got all the shots we wanted to make the scene complete on account of it being after 3 AM by the time we shot the last bits.  The next day we dubbed the tape to Premier and built a rough edit in just 30 minutes.

With only a mono audio source to play with there would be a limited pallete of real-world audio to play with and a lot of sound replacement.  I refined the rough edit Mok had done and proceeded to the visual FX for several shots that happen in the skit.

Getting to Picture lock was fairly easy with the minimal VFX shots we had to work on.  The final edit still needs bumpers and motion graphics for the titles.

While the picture was pretty much complete aside from those elements I headed to audio and proceeded to break apart the audio.

I quickly went through the audio from each of the takes to pull apart the vocals, and then find useful ambiance to overlay or if it included Foley for footfalls etc. I moved them into timing and copied the audio where necessary. I could only do so much with most of the audio, so I proceeded to then mark spots and add in sound effects for replacement, and then foley and sound effects for enhancement.

First, iZotope's Ozone 4 was used to analyze the entire audio track before any noise reduction was applied to capture the EQ profile of the Rode NTG-3 mic's on-location audio.  The next step was the most time consuming.

I had to go through one clip at a time for each cut I made in the timeline to analyze and apply noise reduction for each separate take that followed the take from the video.  Once the noise profile was captured for that take, I could simply copy the plugin to the next clip I cut.  The plugin is very processor intensive so I had to bounce each clip after the noise reduction was applied.

We also had to replace quite a bit of Voice work from the on-location audio as it was too compressed and the impact noises with the gravel and dirt muddy up the mix.  I setup my shotgun mic outside my room and had everyone record their parts to the video.  I then applied the Ozone EQ matching profiles to the new material.

I still have to head into surround mix, and compose the underscore to the skit and then apply the final film grading and review before it's done.

Not sure if zombie is zombie or clown...

fast zombie = fast...

Hit the deck!

Kaplow!

Who plow?

Homie don't play dat.

Horror scene, or eerie homo-erotic love scene?

Yup, eerie homo-erotic love scene..

So, I have to get back to my busy schedule.  I will definitely be adding more up very soon of the other projects I've been working on.  Now, off to gym!

Training old dogs!

While I've been away. I've somewhat managed to start working on the video blog.  I've settled on a format that needs heavy narration.  I've also started learning After Effects to spruce up some of the video blog titling and give it some flare. 

After Effects is it's own little beast of a program but needlessly overcomplex.  A lot of the stuff I'm used to doing in "real" 3d engines like 3d Studio Max they try to emulate and mimic and I can understand the point of view of the program: it's a compositing package.  But all of the 2.5d tools (as I like to refer to it as) feel super clunky. 

I need some serious help / training.  What I'd like to do is that super-cool, super-advanced vector grunge motion graphics one might see on, well... any commercial stuff nowadays (it certainly is in demand).  Here's my vector graphics I've imported so far from Illustrator to work with

Those spiral flourishes are going to be a pain, as I'd like them to do the "grow" motion that's so typical.  Right now it's a single layer imported in because inside that illustrator document layer is a couple thousand layers that make up all the individual spirals, large and small.  Anyone have any suggestions, quick tricks, plugins referrals, etc... those would be much appreciated!

I'm taking a quick break to write this because I realized I wanted my own special background for my blog.  Okay, that's much better :)

And now... back to the video blog.  Cheers.