How Blood Looks in HD

Do these vampires know that their apartment was once a synagogue? It's true.

EPISODE 1:


I haven't ever cheated at Battleship. But I am proud to say that I've turned over a letter in Scrabble to provide an extra blank square. I got caught but it was worth it for the madness I caused a self-described "unbeatable" Scrabble champion.

EPISODE 2:


These are the first movies we made in which Matt Elkind employed his P2 HD camera. While youtube doesn't do the quality justice, you are indeed looking at HD (compressed four times over to arrive at the pixelated version you see before you), a form of shooting I was initially skeptical would be practical for our uses. For an embracer and sometimes craver of new technologies, I am sometimes short-sighted. I think my fear was that HD could only be watched on HD televisions with HD DVD players and how would we even produce an HDCAM version of the final product to dub to DVD.

In fact, HD just really means you're dealing with bigger, higher quality quicktimes. Even everything being 16:9 didn't end up being a stopping point. You can just reformat in Final Cut to make it letterboxed and any aspect ratio you want. The lesson here is that with simple editing software and some form of compression (I like quicktime pro though at work we use sorenson squeeze), you can make something as awe-inspiring as HD any size and shape you want. I was thinking in film to video terms when really, you just have to expand your video mindset. It is no longer about the transfer of media, it is about the export. There are different HDs if you want to make it complicated for yourself (720p, 1080i, 1080p, etc) but they're just describing different sizes/presentations of HD video.

My question is: which presentation is the best for shooting? Which one is the best for watching? A lot of people have different opinions. Is the world better for having different options or should we have a standard by now? Maybe the deal is just that we DO have options. Nothing to do but choose what's more convenient until one format asserts itself.

Meanwhile, I'm just happy to see HD accurately capture a vampire hunter's bloody tampon in a martini glass.

Episodes 3 and 4 coming VERY SOON.

Return to the Future - Part 2

This is the second part of The Future:



Things I remember about the second day of shooting on The Future are mostly obscured by the horrifyingly low temperatures we encountered at the rec center. Though it had been chilly by the caves, the temperature dipped far far down when we concluded our weekend's shoot. I think my parents made us meatballs for lunch and when we called it for a break to eat, the heat in the cars couldn't come on fast enough. Even with high-tech thermal underwear, it was a struggle to speak without a quivering voice.

Hardship begets bonding on film shoots. Whether it's the cold of The Future or the thunderstorm that swooped down on us when we shot Saltwater, I feel lucky to have gotten through those hardships, creating a vivid, common experience with my collaborators.