Excalibur (1981)

Talk about a god awful movie! As a fan of Arthurian legend I was excited when Excalibur was recommended to me, only to find that the movie was overly dramatic and highly theatrical.

Even though this movie had a lot of recognisable faces (Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne and Patrick Stewart from Star Trek), I was just stumped as to why so many of the characters felt the need to shout their lines.

A lot of the costuming and weird use of green spotlights also failed to set the scene. What kind of self respecting knight would wear shiny tin armour with a mirror finish anyway? I bet it wouldn't even protect a knight from the blade of a kitchen knife let alone a sword.

Anyway I don't have very many positive things to say about this movie so I'll leave it at that.

I'm giving this rubbish movie half a star.

August Rush movie review (no spoilers)

This movie was recommended by my UoN friend Karen Pouye of Animal Logic, creative genius extraodinaire. It's a great movie to watch with the family that has uplifting messages of hope, faith, and a bit of music appreciation thrown in the mix, wrapping up with a predictable (but nonetheless enjoyable) hollywood styled happy ending.

During most of the intro I spent my time trying to figure out whether the Irish rock band's lead singer, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who plays Louis Connelly in the movie, was actually DiNozzo or related to Michael Weatherly from NCIS in any way.

Once I had gotten that out of my system I was able to enjoy Keri Russell's brand of muted emotional delivery that we've all come to know and love from her Felicity days. Freddie Highmore, the kid (Evan Taylor) who the movie centres around, also has the same quiet confidence about him.

Louis Connelly's singing was a little distracting as I felt it left a lot to be desired, but once the intro was out of the way I was able to immerse myself in the story quite comfortably.

Robin Williams comes off well as the troubled Fagin in this modernized version of Oliver Twist, portraying a vulnerability and subtextual trauma that he is rarely seen displaying in the majority of his roles. I think this was channelling a lot of the creepiness his character Walter Finch had in the movie Insomnia, with a bit more added aggression.

While the movie doesn't incorporate any cutting edge techniques in cinematography, or mind blowing concepts in its narrative that stays with you long after the movie is over, it's still one of those feel good movies that's worth watching. I'm rating this 3.5 stars out of 5.

Next up on my movies list will be the 1981 movie Excalibur, recommended by my friend Faustin Molina. Stay tuned :)

Not happy Jan

Last week I upgraded to a waterproof HD camera with a pistol grip. This was my first try at a proper HD vid:



Considering it was my first time with this camera I suppose I am being pretty hard on myself when critiquing it. However, I do truly hate this montage with a passion. The main reasons being:

1. The pistol grip cam won't mount properly - It wouldn't sit still for long on the tripod and kept coming loose every 5mins or so. I had a horrible time filming. The area I was taping was quite large and the action was fast so I didn't have time to keep adjusting it on the tripod mount. The damn thing has no hole for the tripod pin to stabilize it, only the screw. Actually, I'm still trying to figure out if I should drill one in.
   
   
2. Auto focus is awful when capturing scenes with fast action! You can clearly see that in this video. I still haven't tried playing with the shutter speed functions though, maybe that would've fixed the auto focus problems.


3. The joystick isn't ergonomic - The buttons are so fumbly that I would add to the camera shake by trying to man handle the controls to focus on the action quickly. Which added to my frustration on the day, because I had to follow high speed action over a large area with no second takes.


4. My PC is down to it's last 80gb of HDD space - Gasp :o I had Premiere (CS3) crash on me every time I worked on the vid, which is pretty uncommon. Surely that's just a CS4 trademark :) I actually had to start over again from scratch after the first project just shat itself and wouldn't render (it wouldn't even pre-render!). After that I saved multiple copies of the project as I went along under different names, and crashed maybe 5 times while exporting before I decided to clean up the project timeline a bit.
   


5. Could've done it with more style - Not only is the footage bad, but I went easy on the effects and got pissed off with the editing. If anything would've saved this project, it would've been VFX!!! I honestly just cracked it at the PC and gave up, my lack of HDD space crashing the old faithful just drove me bananas. Don't mind the new titles though, at least AE wasn't letting me down yesterday.

In my desperation I even tried using Total Media Extreme's Showbiz and Showbiz 2 to edit the footage, but that lead to more problems. Firstly, the first Showbiz is pretty damn crap, won't even let you lay down additional audio tracks (e.g. music) to go with the vision.

Secondly, Showbiz 2 won't do mp4 files. This cam saves onto SD cards in mp4 :\

I'm sick of my mediocrity right now. This vid = epic fail...

YouTube experimental encoding

I've been producing some videos for the local paper's website of late, and I've been playing around with encoding settings again for YouTube in Premiere Pro.

For the sake of meeting the recommended player size of 1280 x 720, I've gone with packaging my .mov files with the H264 codec as we did back in the CMNS6040 days. Ah CMNS6040, what awesome fun that was. And I really don't like to use the word awesome unless I feel that it's necessary.

Looks bloody horrible of course, but meh...what can you do when YouTube decides to enlarge their players, except comply.

I haven't had much luck tweaking the settings using the H.264 codec itself, although I did find this nifty website called the Streaming Learning Center which explains YouTube's "New" HD Formats quite simply.

Not that I'll need to worry about all this after next week, as I've ordered some new HD equipment. But still, it would be nice for me to finally get the hang of tweaking the settings in Premiere Pro using the H.264 codec. At least down to a 480p size anyway, hate the false advertising using the 1280 x 720 setting. Just coz it's that big, it doesn't actually make it HD!

Hello Roto

I am so close to joining some kind of 'Technology is driving me bonkers' support group. If only there were such a thing.

I have been unable to fine tune any of the vids, and I am uploading what was the last draft (prior to all these PC issues) onto Facebook. What I wanted to do last week was run some filters through the VOs and fine tune the outlines, but hopefully after a good reformat I will be able to revisit all of this and fix it up, just for the sake of good craftsmanship :)

But here is a pretty close idea of what the project should look like, shy of a bit of fine tuning. For slightly higher quality versions please visit my Facebook page as the fractal noise seems to work better on there for some reason. The videos also play faster on there.

If you're on Facebook and want to be friends (lol that sounds so weird), my profile is set on private so I don't show up in the search page, but I can add you if you let me know what your details are so feel free to shoot me an email.


Title Sequence




Sleep Sequence




Bush Sequence




Underwater Sequence




Wake Sequence

BSOD and other PC Issues

I have been having PC issues this week, and what's more because I've networked my PCs, this new strain of Virtumonde has infected the 2 computers in this room through Java. It's a tricky one to remove, Norton doesn't really pick it up and the old Virtumonde fixes don't work, so it's been an uphill battle trying to clean it in Safe Mode.

I've isolated most of it on one of the PCs (the server) which has CS4 installed on it, so that PC is still functional and online. I keep having issues (freezes and crashes mainly) with CS4 as I mentioned a few months back in the discussion forum. It's also painfully slow.

I am now working off my laptop and furiously trying to backup what I have on my other beloved computer (lol), my Quad Core pride and joy. It's also the main one I have been using for this project (CS3).

Hopefully it all works out and I can get the DVD sent off for marking, but I will have to fix this crashing somehow because the functional PC doesn't like to render for too long, and I don't know if it will stay on for long enough to compress the vids.

To be continued...

Aaww...freak out!

Crunch time is drawing near. I have revised the look of my project over and over again, and now, once more.

Not being able to work out the sharpness problem I was having earlier, I have decided to just run with it by rotoscoping over what I already have, to at least give the pix some definition. It has actually saved me a lot of time because I got to shoot the footage instead of trying to create them all from scratch which I found very time consuming.

It also really helped with the sleep sequence, it gives off the filmed at night vibe, and I think it looks artistic yet believable. I'm still tinkering with the VOs and sound FX but I think I will still be able to make the deadline at this stage. I will start posting some video previews soon.