https://youtu.be/EvyJ_qhfjJI

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies and videos of all kinds and is based in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He owned the first Mini XTC 9250-XL in Califiornia.

www.donstarnes.com

Also by Don Starnes:

Monitors and filmmaking
The difference between a movie and a video is that a movie is created in the filmmakers’ minds and a video is created on a monitor.

Money
It’s the Producer’s Invitational Pancake Breakfast. Just as the producers are cutting into short stacks with their plastic forks, all of the doors are locked…

Blocking before coffee
Feature film: first day. The first-time director is 45 minutes late. Finally, he shows up: harried, stubbly, preoccupied and exhausted…

Ask me no questions and I’ll speak in no fragments
A sign taped to the door says “Quiet– filming.” This only makes you more nervous.

How to get trained
Hint: it isn’t by reading this.

DIY DCP
How to make your own digital theatrical ‘print’ using Final Cut Pro, After Effects, guerrilla DCP software, pluck and maybe a little help from your friends.

Keying and compositing in NukeX
Skitch a ride up its steep learning curve using my template and tutorial.

G+

He nearly stumbles to the ground in front of me as he thrusts out a rumpled stack of papers: “I finished the storyboards.”

I’ve seen this before. I want to hug the poor man. I want to turn to the crew and shout “it’s going to be a long day, boys and girls.” I want to explain to him, right then and there, everything that I’m about to explain to you in this article. But, instead, I simply say “Great. Let’s block the first scene.”

How to prepare to direct a movie

A movie’s design should start with a few guiding principles. This is true whether the movie is a feature film, a commercial or anything else that tells a story.

During the salad days of pre-production for this movie, we discussed the character arc of the protagonist: he starts out isolated by his fears, unable to connect with people. Forced to action by circumstance, he joins with his love interest, overcomes his fear, and changes his life. This movie’s themes, its guiding principles, were isolation vs. connection, danger yielding to safety.

A movie’s very specific and peculiar themes are the key to making the movie (Francis Coppola boils it down to one word; for The Godfather, it was succession). They are the basis for your production plan.

Storyboards can be helpful, as can shot lists, blocking diagrams and previz, in fleshing out your plan. Like directors, DPs do extensive script breakdowns to produce camera and lighting plans. They work with the Art Director to develop color schemes, sets, and so on. The very act of preparing these helps a director and DP think deeply about the scenes. Along

with production boards, wardrobe sketches, prop lists, etc., they help all departments plan and agree about the cinematic treatment of the story.

But let’s say the call time for a day’s shoot is 7 a.m. By 7:01 there is a problem for the director to solve. Despite visionary plans and good intentions in pre-production, the situation usually can’t be resolved by a storyboard or shot list or blocking diagram. The solution to most problems must be created immediately, on the spot, from almost nothing except the movie’s guiding principals plus the only suitable tool– creativity. Fatigue impairs creativity. Being creative while afraid is like sneezing with your eyes open– impossible. The production’s most vital asset is a prepared, calm, well rested, fearless and, most importantly, creative director. The pre-production documents themselves are a distant second.

The pencil, all powerful

Storyboards, shot lists and blocking diagrams are created on a couch with a pencil and paper (or iPad). All things are possible. Alone, perhaps, with his or her thoughts and unencumbered by the physical laws of the universe, the director is a capricious, omniscient god.

Creating movies, however, is another matter: there are other people involved. The earth turns, constantly moving both the sunlight and time. Rooms have actual walls. Lenses have physical properties. Neighbors have leaf blowers. Dialog is actually spoken, its meaning shaped by the actors.

Storyboards are great at describing graphic, 2D things: the bottle cap rolls across the counter, hits the soda bottle, spins and lands face up with the logo just so. Lovely. They are great for effects shots: this plate lines up with that plate. They are pretty good at describing most commercials, which must fit a few witty lines or iconic images into a preordained number of shots. These are all more graphic than narrative.

However, try storyboarding a dialog scene: you end up with lots of drawings of people’s faces, describing almost nothing of the human interaction that makes the scene work.

Bottom line: the more a scene is about humans, the less a storyboard helps. A shot list is essentially a storyboard for the drawing-impaired, except that it has even less ability to describe the human emotion of a scene.

Storyboards can be horribly misused on the set.

• You can waste a lot of time trying, through brute force, to faithfully reproduce a frame in a storyboard which cannot be shot with actual lenses, people, movement or light.
• You can ignore the perfectly good, perhaps better, movie that is actually in front of you while making a mediocre replica of your storyboard.
• Storyboards encourage you to light and shoot a bunch of shots, laboriously, one at a time, that don’t necessarily cut together all that well.

A storyboard doesn’t have the capacity to contain a good story, anyway: like a screenplay, it is meant as a skeletal blueprint for a far richer movie.

By now, you may be objecting:

• but the Coen Brothers storyboard everything!
• how will I know what shots to shoot without a shot list?
• do you expect me to make the shots up, on the day of, under all of that pressure?
• all of the forums, all of the books, my film school– they all say that you have to storyboard!

Lets say, though, that you follow my strong, somewhat serious advice, and tear up your storyboards and shot list when you get to the set. How then will you have shots?

Block. Light. Rehearse. Shoot.

This method of film production has been practiced for 100 years:

1. Block

As the department heads watch silently, the actors and director walk through the scene, the actors acting their parts. Maybe he would stand farther instead of closer; her influence on him is stronger if she says this instead of that. He’ll look away evasively here and then look at her sternly here. The actors and director create what is actually going to happen; this could vary from the script or storyboard but is governed by the guiding principals in the pre-production plan.

Note: this is not the-director-acts-out-all-of-the-parts-and-then-asks-when-can-we-shoot. Unless the director is also the movie’s only actor, that is an expensive waste of time; it reveals nothing of how the actual actors will play the scene and answers almost none of the crew’s questions. Work proceeds at half-speed thereafter.

The DP notices, among other things, the glances of the actors: what are they showing and what are they hiding? Where are the performances directed? How does the set work with the story portrayed on it? Can the dolly grip really hit a tight mark like that? The blocking rehearsal makes obvious what shots to shoot, where there should there be light, shadow and movement, and how to

accomplish these things.

After the director and actors have finished the blocking rehearsal, and are nodding excitedly at each other, the DP suggests shots and lighting to the director: let’s shoot a master from here, lets let them walk out of the shadows to a closeup here, let’s be here with a 50mm lens to reveal his glance as he turns, etc. All of this is based on the drama of the scene just created.

The director may or may not buy these shots; they may work out other ones. Once they agree, the blocking, shot and lighting design is done: the actors and director go away for a calculated period of time. The actors get makeup, hair and wardrobe work.

2. Light

The electric and grip crews light the set. The other departments (camera, art, sound, and so on) prepare to shoot the scene.

3. Rehearse

At the appointed time, the director and actors come back for a camera rehearsal, which is essentially a final dress rehearsal. Small tweaks are made to the lighting, camera movement, etc. during this time.

4. Shoot

When everyone is ready, they shoot the shots. The script supervisor keeps track of what was shot at what angles and scales. The DP edits the movie in his or her head during the shooting. Between the two of them, they can assure the director at the end of the scene that all of the shots that they’d designed were shot.

[Repeat as necessary.]

The beauty of this is that all of the creative people work together, the sum greater than its parts, to create the movie. The scene is considered as a whole, governed by the characters and the story. The same lighting works for most of the shots. Everyone watching knows exactly what is going on. It is effective and efficient. Most of the best movies were made this way.

The correct answer to the question”what are we doing?” is “replacing you with someone who can watch a blocking rehearsal.”

When do we start?

Nothing much can happen on a movie set before a blocking rehearsal. There is no scene; none of the present creative problems have been solved; there are few obvious tasks to do before blocking. When should you begin blocking? At the call time. That’s right: the actors, the director and the crew should have the same call time and, after the safety meeting, they should immediately start blocking the first scene. All becomes clear: where to put the gear so that it is hidden from the camera, what makeup is required, which lights and grip gear to use, etc.

Most of the work before the blocking rehearsal is baseless speculation, a waste of time and money, a folly that destroys the shots that you consequently don’t have time to shoot later in the day.

My icon for this method (in the Russian Orthodox sense) is Assistant Director John “Johnny” Bennett, who worked with me on a horror movie I shot called Red Ice. At the call time, John would gently (if possible) or firmly (if necessary) herd the crew away from the breakfast table to the set. Whimpering cries of “but I haven’t had my coffee” were met with a look that was like a two-second short film about pity, amusement, conspiratorial incredulity and perhaps the threat of impending violence.

Storyboards, shot lists and diagrams are good at recording the essential design elements during pre-production. You can refer to these design documents, if you need to, before blocking to make sure you’re on track and haven’t forgotten a good idea. However, important elements of the scene can’t be known at the time of drawing a storyboard or making a shot list. Most of the co-creators of the movie, the actors, maybe the DP, not to mention the key grip, etc., are not present when these documents are made. These plans are therefore rather thin and lifeless.

Dissolve to: the harried and hapless first-time director clutching his storyboards. We make it through the first day. He is, however, unable to pay much attention to the blocking rehearsals, staring instead at the ‘boards. Same for the second day. Eventually, the questions from the actors and other practical concerns inflame his creativity and draw him away from his security blanket. By the end of the third day, the storyboards seldom appear on the set. And, for the first time, he is happy.

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies of all kinds and is based in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He prefers to drink tea.

www.donstarnes.com

Also by Don Starnes:

Monitors and filmmaking
The difference between a movie and a video is that a movie is created in the filmmakers’ minds and a video is created on a monitor.

Money
It’s the Producer’s Invitational Pancake Breakfast. Just as the producers are cutting into short stacks with their plastic forks, all of the doors are locked…

Ask me no questions and I’ll speak in no fragments
A sign taped to the door says “Quiet– filming.” This only makes you more nervous.

How to get trained
Hint: it isn’t by reading this.

Preview: the Mini XTC 9250-XL
Just in time for NAB, the 9250-XL is everything that a producer could want in a camera. The revolution has begun…

DIY DCP
How to make your own digital theatrical ‘print’ using Final Cut Pro, After Effects, guerrilla DCP software, pluck and maybe a little help from your friends.

Keying and compositing in NukeX
Skitch a ride up its steep learning curve using my template and tutorial.

G+

A very friendly stranger, silhouetted in the dark, is shaking your hand with inappropriate enthusiasm. Another shadowy person looks you up and down and then rushes to adjust lighting equipment. Everyone is saying “just relax.” The more they say this, the less relaxed you are.

Welcome to your interview. Just relax.

This is how you might feel if you were being interviewed for a documentary, corporate video or commercial. Fortunately for you, you are probably one of the people on the other side, standing in the dark: a producer/director or DP, perhaps.

You’ve seen what you want in other people’s movies: honest, insightful comments made by clear-eyed people who seem, quite naturally, to support the essential story of the film. If you are about to ask the interview questions, you may look at the distrustful, distraught subject who just walked in the door and panic: how can I get a good interview from this person?

Just do what I tell you to do and you’ll be fine

The problem is that people in movies speak concisely and effectively. People seldom do this in real life. Good friends may be able to chat excitedly and informatively. Strangers: not so much. The interviewer is usually not a character in the movie: the interview subjects should appear to be speaking extemporaneously, un-prompted, to an unspecified, unheard listener. Interview time is usually limited by the subject’s availability and by the production budget. Organizations normally want interviews to convey carefully researched, edited and vetted information that has been honed into position statements.

You could have instructed the subject to come prepared with rehearsed answers. When the person arrives for the interview, you could give him or her a list of rules and behaviors to help solve your problems:

• put my question in your answer
• use complete sentences
• don’t look at the camera
• be concise
• don’t say “like I said before”
• use the name of your organization instead of “we”

and so on.

You could interrupt the subject to correct his or her language and enforce the rules.

You could then rely on B-roll (cut-aways to other footage) to cover the inevitable editing of the person’s sentences to construct better phrases.

In my experience, this is how most people do it. I keep a database of details about my jobs (if you’ve worked with me, you’re probably in it). It has about 1,200 productions in it. Of the 400 interviewers I’ve worked with, about 390 have solved the problems of interviewing this way.

The problem with this prevalent method is that is it pretty difficult for everyone involved. If the interview subject hasn’t had extensive media training (as most CEOs and politicians have), all of these rules, all of this focus on stage craft tends to confuse and terrify him or her. As a result, the subjects tend to have the life squeezed out of them. This is less like filmmaking and more like taxidermy.

Many directors, through amazing skill and/or force of will, can make great movies this way. However, I’ve learned a much more reliable, much easier method from the ten exceptional documentary filmmakers that I’ve worked with.

Here’s how they do it.

Start at the beginning

Movies are great at moving people, at bypassing their rational brains, influencing their beliefs and motivating them to action. Movies are temporal: one moment leads to the next, taking the viewer on a journey, perhaps an adventure. Movies tell stories.

Data, on the other hand, isn’t a movie’s strongest suit. It is not, in itself, a good story.

Data:

• is atemporal: a fact is always a fact
• is an essential element of a rational argument
• works best in PowerPoint presentations
• or bullet-pointed lists

Interviews work best in movie projects conceived more as stories and less as presentations of data. A movie is best if it is about the passions of customers for a product, partisans for a cause or participants for an event. Data about the product, cause or event is of little interest to a movie audience outside of this context.

Convince the clients that if they want to improve on PowerPoint slides then they have to use movies for what movies do that slides can’t: move people. Movies aren’t reasonable. In fact, the last thing you want a movie to do is invite the audience to think of rebuttals to your arguments.

Write the script or screenplay such that data is handled primarily in titles or voice-overs. This frees the interview subjects to focus on their passion, enthusiasm and experiences. This also features the data where the client can see it: in plain text in the script. This helps them relax and lets you focus the interviews on storytelling.

The reason for B-roll is to cover sound edits and hide your interview problems. However, it tends to flatten the story into two dimensions: we’re talking about something; oops, go look at this somewhat related thing while I fix a little problem. OK, we’re back!

When you cut away, why not cut instead to a parallel story, one that enriches, complements and expands the main story? The writer can design this story while designing the main story, so that they work together. This isn’t B-roll anymore: it is more of the story. It takes some of the storytelling chores away from the interviews. Cleverly done, it can lessen the requirement for precision in the interviews, making them easier to do.

Select well-spoken interview subjects who are passionate and knowledgeable about the topic, if possible. When scheduling the shoot, leave plenty of time to both setup and shoot the interview. Most subjects aren’t trained birds who can squawk on command: allow enough time to talk with them.

Send the interview subject these instructions in preparation for the shoot:

• we’re going to talk about [general characterization]
• don’t prepare answers; we’ll just have a conversation
• don’t wear herringbones or white or green/blue (if shooting for green/blue screen compositing)
• we’ll powder your nose, bring your own if you prefer it

Getting the interviewee, charged with conveying the company line, to show up rested and un-rehearsed is the hardest part of doing corporate interviews. Start gaining the company’s trust as early as possible. Good luck.

The day of

The interviewee has just walked into the room. Reassure him or her with these promises:

• we’re talking to you because you are the perfect person to [talk about the subject]
• we edit the interview
• whatever doesn’t work, we won’t use
• we are experts at making you look and sound great

That’s it. No rules.

Have the room ready to shoot: changing the room lighting after the subject enters can feel like sealing the gas chamber. I try to have the door that the person entered positioned behind him or her during the interview: having the camera and crew blocking the potential exit can increase desperation.

The interviewer should immediately sit down in his or her interview chair, invite the interviewee into the hot seat and begin small-talking. The rest of the crew can do no work to prepare until this happens. While these two chat, the camera people frame up, focus and fix problems with the background. The lighting people adjust the light, sound people adjust mics and levels, makeup people apply powder.

DPs:

Make each subject look his or her best. Quickly adjust for each person before the interview starts. Be ready for quick tweaks so the interview doesn’t have to be stopped once it starts.

Good answers are more important than most tweaks. Make the set work for the sound department: use their sound blankets in your lighting plan as negative or positive fill. Keep your mouth shut as much as possible; let the interviewee focus on the director.

Producers, directors and interviewers:

People who are sitting and listening to you (or looking at notes or drinking water) look and sound different than people who are talking. Once the interview begins in earnest, they can lean past the microphone or turn their heads away from the light or start to sweat or change in a number of ways that can ruin the interview for sound or picture. When the crew moves stealthily and skillfully to tweak these things during your off-screen questions, thus saving your movie for you, do not freak out. Remain calm and carry on with the interview.

The most important tip

OK, I realize that I lost most of you eight paragraphs ago when I advised against giving interview subjects any rules. How can you get them to speak in complete sentences? How can you get them to put the question in the answer and make eye contact and not say “um” and use the full name of the organization if you don’t give them rules?

Here’s how: don’t ask the interview subject any questions.

If you ask me “what color are your eyes?” I’ll probably reply “blue, mostly.” If you cut to a shot of me saying “blue, mostly” the audience will have no idea what either of us is talking about. On the other hand, if you say “tell me about your eye color” I’ll most likely say “my eyes are more or less blue.”

Making statements instead of asking questions during an interview is hard to do, but it moves the responsibility for editable footage away from your hapless interview subject to you (where it belongs). This, in combination with shifting the movie’s data disclosure requirements away from the interviews and designing the movie around the interview subjects’ passions means that the interviewees, who are, after all, the subject matter experts, will most likely say the right things in the interview.

Keep all others, especially the interviewee’s handlers, out of his or her eye-line. Look the interviewee in the eye. React to what he or she is saying. Authentically. Do not look down at your notes. If you need to look at notes; pause the interview to do so. This will encourage the interviewee and focus his or her eyes on you.

Let the interviewee talk. Guide the conversation, but don’t stop him or her every half sentence with corrections. Listen for passions; follow up on them. Listen for edit points, for complete bites. Don’t worry about what doesn’t work: listen for what does. If you haven’t heard something that you need, prompt for it.

If the subject brings a prepared statement and insists on trying to recite it, get him or her to read it for voice-over before the interview. This will get the interviewee’s responsibility for data out of the way so he or she can simply talk about what is important.

You may still have problems: some people always speak in fragments. You may not be able to get the subject to open up to you and speak honestly. He or she, unclear on how media works, may not be able to repeat an answer, especially without saying “like I said before.” Used to acronyms or abbreviations, he or she may not normally use the full product or company name. The person may ramble.

If it’s not working, gently introduce the necessary rule. “Great! Tell me that again, but call the company Neologism Limited. We need you to use the whole name.” Or “great! We always bring up the same topics over and over, but we only use them once. Try not to say ‘like I said before.'”

At the end of the interview, feel free to feed lines to the subject if necessary. If you simply cannot get the nouns and such that you need, get them as wild lines at the end of the interview.

The main thing is to leave the interview subject free to converse honestly about the topic with a genuinely interested (though strangely silent) interviewer.

Interviewing for movies can be difficult. It is a joy to watch an accomplished professional doing it. It is much easier to understand, though, if you first put yourself in the interviewee’s shoes.

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies and videos of all kinds and is based in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He has photographed interviews with many of the people who invented the future.

www.donstarnes.com

Also by Don Starnes:

Monitors and filmmaking
The difference between a movie and a video is that a movie is created in the filmmakers’ minds and a video is created on a monitor.

Money
It’s the Producer’s Invitational Pancake Breakfast. Just as the producers are cutting into short stacks with their plastic forks, all of the doors are locked…

Blocking before coffee
Feature film: first day. The first-time director is 45 minutes late. Finally, he shows up: harried, stubbly, preoccupied and exhausted…

How to get trained
Hint: it isn’t by reading this.

Preview: the Mini XTC 9250-XL
Just in time for NAB, the 9250-XL is everything that a producer could want in a camera. The revolution has begun…

DIY DCP
How to make your own digital theatrical ‘print’ using Final Cut Pro, After Effects, guerrilla DCP software, pluck and maybe a little help from your friends.

Keying and compositing in NukeX
Skitch a ride up its steep learning curve using my template and tutorial.

G+

Good cinematography is obviously a great place to start. However, even a perfectly photographed green screen shot can be difficult to key: frizzy hair, shiny skin, semi-transparent or reflective surfaces are common. In fact, pretty much anything that you’d want to photograph is inherently challenging. 

If you have a compositing project and want the best quality, my advice is to hire a professional compositor. They don’t call these people artists for nothing: great compositing requires a trained eye, a lot of experience and good taste. The software is a distant second in importance.

Perhaps, however, you are a mere mortal, stuck with the compositing chores on an under-funded movie, wondering if there is any way to improve your keys. That was me, recently, working on #LookUp, my short, no-budget passion project. I photographed the movie using an inexpensive camera and compressed video (never my first choices when shooting green screens). It was essential that the movie seem realistic, but I wasn’t happy with my compositing. How could I retain the actress’ fine, windblown hair?

I googled and googled; I watched tutorials and got advice from seasoned professionals. I learned better technique that made a huge difference in my compositing. 

The Three-Pass Method

Initially, I did my keying and compositing in Final Cut Pro (7 and X), After Effects or Resolve. All of these have fine keying tools; some of them have automated tools that practically make the key for you. No matter what software you use, though, some part of the image is often stubbornly resistant to the algorithms’ best efforts. A solid key of the body makes an artificially hard edge. Adjustments often don’t help much in getting a good overall key. Even if the green screen is perfectly even, different parts of the foreground image have different properties: therefore one-pass keying is almost always insufficient.

Friends don’t let friends use one-pass keying. Following treatises by Mark Christiansen and others, I started making three basic, overlapping mattes for each key:

• edge, which is focused on preserving the sometimes semi-transparent pixels of the delicate edge 
• the core, which hammers out a solid body for the object but excludes the edge
• a light wrap, which wraps a bit of the background around the edges of the foreground (in the way that light refracts around objects in real life)

In addition, I divided any problem areas of the image into separate mattes. For example, I’d make a matte for the hair portion of the foreground image if it required different keying than the body.

Although my skills were, shall we say, developing, I was able to get significantly better composites using these professional methods. Still, I was dissatisfied: despite my best efforts, the edges were a bit noisy and I couldn’t preserve as much hair detail as I’d wished.

Expensive software is suddenly free

I was almost ready to stop there. Then The Foundry announced that they were releasing a non-commercial version of their £4,800 industrial-grade compositing software— for free. 

NukeX is a descendent of code originally developed in-house at Digital Domain. It has since been used at Disney, DreamWorks, Sony and ILM, among other places. It is one of The Foundry’s suite of applications, which includes two other versions of Nuke (NukeX has more features than Nuke and fewer features than Nuke Studio). 

I wondered if Nuke was more capable than the apps I’d been using and if its node-based approach would be easier to use and more effective. I found both answers to be yes— after a steep learning curve.

Nuke was designed to be used by trained artists at professional effects companies with in-house engineering staff. Keying and compositing are essentially doing mathematics on pixels’ data values. Where After Effects attempts to conceal fundamental compositing concepts behind apprehensible metaphors, Nuke rather expects you to have some understanding of these precepts. Where After Effects automates some compositing tasks for you, Nuke requires you to properly handle certain things manually.

Plus, Nuke is buggy. This is ok if you have engineers who are going to customize the code anyway. For the indy filmmaker: not so much. I expect that The Foundry has released Nuke into the wild so that we can help them improve the code.

Nuke required me to be a better compositor. Once I put in considerable time and came to understand NukeX, I found it to be far better at compositing than the other software I’d been using.

In this tutorial, I’ll share my NukeX keying and compositing template with you and explain how to use it with sample footage.

Follow the instructions on your seat-back card

Resources

Terms

• The non-commercial version of Nuke uses compiled composite files (the commercial version can use text script files). Although this template is compiled, I’ll refer to this template as a “script” (because that’s how others refer to Nuke’s files). 
• The principal photography background surface is referred to herewith as a “green screen”; it can be a blue or red screen as well, or whatever contrasts with the foreground element.
• I call the foreground element, well, the foreground. I call the background plate the background. 
• Despill means to replace the green screen colored pixels with other pixels.
• You can add an optional clean plate to the script, which is a shot of the green screen without the foreground element.
• I refer to the script’s edge, core, light wrap and shadow elements as “layers” (despite Nuke not being a layer-based compositing software).

Concepts and requirements

In Nuke’s node-based approach, image data flows through branches (called pipes) in a node tree. In this template, the image data enters at the top (input) and flows to the bottom right of the tree. Importantly, this template observes Nuke’s primacy of the B pipe: many Nuke nodes mathematically combine one image (routed in the node’s A pipe) with another (routed in its B pipe). A node can get confused if you, say, try to superimpose an image from the B pipe over the A pipe.

My TEMPLATE_composite.nknc script is designed for general-purpose green screen compositing of a single shot.

• Node tree fragments are grouped together into “sections”.
• Green colored sections are things that you must adjust for each shot. 
• Grey colored sections contain fairly automatic functions. 
• The edge, core, light wrap and shadows sections are layered over the background.
• The script can use a clean plate if you have one, but will generate one if you don’t.
• To the right of the node tree are optional sections (in green and blue) that can be inserted for keying, despilling, etc.
• It uses mattes (in the Foreground_mattes section) to isolate different parts of the image; these mattes are stored in the script’s matte channels.
• There is room in each section for working on multiple parts of the image using these mattes.
• Edge and core alpha mattes mask out the green screen.
• A despilled version of the foreground shows through these mattes (to make their respective layers).
• A traveling garbage matte masks out everything around the foreground image.
• The Shadows section can add shadows of the foreground image.

Some compositors believe that Nuke doesn’t work very well with movie files, which they describe as insufficiently designed and unreliable for serious FX work. In this tutorial, you’ll convert your movie files to EXR image sequences. Feel free, however, to skip the conversion to image sequences and try it with movie files instead.

I prefer to retain each shot’s original frame numbers when I convert it to an image sequence (as opposed to renumbering each image sequence’s first frame as 1). For example a shot from early in a take could have frames numbered 289 – 388 and one from later in the take could have frames numbered 1491861 – 1491960. Retaining these numbers enables me to find a sequence’s original movie file, if necessary.

This tutorial uses

• Final Cut Pro 7 (for editing)
• After Effects CS6 (for media conversion)
• NukeX 9.0

although other editing and media conversion software should work.

For each shot, you’ll:

• convert the media to EXR image sequences
• read the media into a copy of the NukeX script template
• adjust the script for the shot
• write the resulting composition to an EXR image sequence
• convert the image sequence into a movie file

Each shot should take at least 75 minutes to composite.

Compositing using this script is a long and complicated process. You have to want it. If you are dedicated to more realistic compositing, read on…

Using the NukeX compositing template

In this tutorial, we’ll composite the foreground and background elements of the first two shots in a sequence:

	shot 1, the long shot, and
	shot 2, the medium shot.

Shot 2 is best for explaining the script’s essential concepts and the Three-Pass Method, while shot 1 covers adding shadows.

We’ll do shot 2 first. Its foreground and background shots are in the tutorial’s /~Nuke template and tutorial/edge, core and lightwrap/02/ folder:

Prepare the project

1. In the project folder on your edit drive, prepare folders for the project files and for each of the shots: 01 is for shot one, 02 is for shot two:

/After Effects/Renders/EXR to QT conversions

/Final Cut Pro/to After Effects/

/Nuke/Renders/[shot number]

/Nuke/to Nuke/[shot number]/background

/Nuke/to Nuke/[shot number]/foreground

/Project Files/After Effects/

/Project Files/Final Cut Pro/

/Project Files/Nuke/

The project files, which are all in one folder, can be easily and frequently backed up (hint hint).

2. This tutorial doesn’t include a clean plate; if you had a clean plate, you’d make a [shot number]_[description]  folder for each clean plate that you have in your project directory’s Nuke/to Nuke/clean plates folder. For example, the clean plate folder for the first 4 medium shots would be called 02-05_MS.

3. Unsurprisingly, you’ll keep all of your Nuke project files in the /Project Files/Nuke directory:

4. Import the tutorial shots into After Effects. 

If you were compositing shots from a Final Cut Pro project, you’d instead:

a. Media Manage the footage to make a new clip for each shot’s foreground and background. 

b. Export an XML and save these to the /Final Cut Pro/to After Effects/ folder. 

c. Import the XML into After Effects.

5. Convert each shot’s media into EXR image sequences:

a. Make a to Nuke/[shot number] folder for each shot in the After Effects Project pane.

b. Move or copy the shot’s foreground and background footage into the [shot number] folder; rename the foreground shot [shot number]_[original file name]_[description]_fg.[ext] and the background shot [shot number]_[original file name]_[description]_bg.[ext]. Make the description very short. For example, the Quicktime file for this shot, a medium shot, would be called 02_clip_15_MS_fg.mov. 

Don’t use the # character in the file name; After Effects and Nuke use this character as a frame number variable in image sequences.

c. If you had a clean plate for the shot (or a series of shots), you’d move it to a to Nuke/clean plates folder and rename the shot [shot number]_[original file name]_[description]_cp.[ext]. For example, the Quicktime file for the clean plate for the first 4 medium shots would be called 02-05_clip_1_MS_cp.mov.

d. Render the foreground footage:

i. In Render Settings, confirm that the frame rate is correct (the Use the comp’s frame rate setting should work).

ii. In Output Module settings, set the 

• Format: OpenEXR Sequence
• Format Options.Compression: None
• Color: Premultiplied
• Use Comp Frame Number (which retains the shot’s original frame numbers)

e. Set the Output to the project’s Nuke/to Nuke/[shot number]/foreground directory.

6. Do the same for the background footage; set the Output to the project’s Nuke/to Nuke/[shot number]/background directory.

7. If you had clean plates, you’d render the EXR sequences for each of them, setting the Output to the appropriate Nuke/to Nuke/clean plates/[shot number]_description directory.

Now that you have converted the shot’s files to image sequences, you will composite the shot:

Create the shot’s NukeX script

8. In your project’s project files/Nuke directory, make a copy of the TEMPLATE_composite.nknc Nuke script file. 

a. Rename the copy [shot number]_[description]_composite.nknc. Make the description very short. In this example, name the script for this shot 02_MS_ composite.nknc.

b. Move the project file to the /Project Files/Nuke directory.

c. Open NukeX, then open the 02_MS_ composite.nknc script. 

Nuke Studio has a visible timeline; Nuke and NukeX do not. Instead, each shot is placed on a virtual timeline. There is no dragging and dropping: each shot is read into the project with a Read node. It’s an interface that only an engineer could love.

Because I’ve specified to retain each shot’s original frame numbers when you convert its movie file to an image sequence (as opposed to starting them all at frame 1), you have to manually sync up each image sequence’s “track” in Nuke’s virtual timeline. It’s done by specifying frame ranges:

9. In the Foreground section, add a Read node (press the R key while the cursor is in the Node Graph pane):

a. In the Read node’s properties, navigate to the /Nuke/to Nuke/[shot number]/foreground/directory to set the file to that shot’s foreground image sequence.

b. Name the Read node Read1_foreground.

c. Set the frame range to black for both the first and last frame. This specifies that Nuke will show a black frame when you view frames before and after the frame range.

10. Open the project settings (press the S key while the cursor is in the Properties pane). Set the project’s frame range to the first Read node’s frame range:

11. Open the Viewer node’s properties (press the S key while the cursor is in the Viewer pane). Set the viewer’s frame range to the first Read node’s frame range:

12. In the Viewer, click on the timeline to move the current time indicator and refresh the Foreground Read node’s thumbnail. Return the CTI to the first frame.

Be sure to return the CTI to the first frame, so that any mattes that you later draw have their first keyframe there.

13. In the Background section, add a Read node:

a. Set the file to that shot’s background image sequence.

b. Name the Read node Read2_background.

c. Set frame.start at to the frame number of the first frame of the Read1_foreground node.

d. Set the frame range to black for both the first and last frame.

14. The script has an input for a clean plate:

If you don’t add an external clean plate, the script will generate a fairly decent one for you. This tutorial doesn’t have a clean plate, but this is how you’d add one if it did:

a. In the Clean_Plate section, add a Read node.

b. Set the file to that shot’s clean plate image sequence.

c. Name the Read node Read3_cp.

d. Set frame.start at to the frame number of the first frame of the Read1_foreground node.

e. Set the frame range to black for both the first and last frame.

f. In the properties for the Switch_clean_plate node, set the value to 0 (to switch the script from the generated clean plate to the external clean plate).

Congratulations! You’ve imported the footage into Nuke. Yes, it was unreasonably difficult.

Adjust the default mattes

15. In the Foreground_mattes section,

adjust the basic key (a rough key used to make traveling garbage mattes, etc.):

a. Set the viewer to the basic_key section’s keyer_garbage1 node. Set the viewer to show the Alpha channel.

b. Adjust the keyer so that it makes a hard matte:

In addition to this keyer’s hard matte, the script is designed to use two basic and essential Roto node mattes:

• a green screen garbage matte, which reveals the green screen but masks areas off of the set, lighting equipment, etc.
• a body matte which reveals the foreground (through the m_body.a matte channel)

You have to draw each of these mattes.

16. Add the screen matte:

a. Set the viewer to the foreground + matte channels dot:

Add the green screen garbage matte:

b. In the screen_mattes section’s Roto_green_screen node, draw one or more garbage mattes:

c. Simply include the entire foreground image in the matte if there is no equipment, etc., to exclude with a garbage matte.

d. Use a Tracker or animate the matte if necessary.

17. Add the body matte:

a. In the screen_mattes section’s Roto_body node, draw one or more mattes that reveal the foreground:

At this time, be sure to include all of the foreground in the Roto_body node’s matte(s).

b. Add a Tracker node and a MatchMove node to the matte, if necessary:

c. Animate the matte if necessary.

Adjust the foreground pre-processing

18. Adjust the script’s foreground position, if necessary:

a. In the Pre_Process_FG_Primary section’s Scale_and_Postion section, add a Reformat or Transform node to scale the image and / or a Position node to move it:

19. Adjust the script’s foreground noise reduction analysis region:

a. In the Pre_Process_FG_Secondary section, set the Viewer to view the Denoise_Fg node. Open the Denoise_Fg node’s properties panel. The node’s Analyze Region box will appear in the Viewer.

b. Adjust the Analyze Region box so that it covers a smooth section of the image, with no image details or shadows. The green screen is a good choice. The Denoise node analyses this one frame.

20. Evaluate the script’s noise reduction:

The section has two areas:

• 4:2:0 color noise reduction (for color compression noise caused by low-resolution video codecs)
• overall noise reduction (adjusted with the the Denoise_Fg node)

The Pre_Process_FG_Secondary section is only used by the Edge section; the Pre_Process_FG_Primary section’s foreground image is used for the Core and other sections. 

Red channel, before noise reduction

Red channel, after noise reduction

a. Inspect the individual color channels; evaluate the noise.

b. If your video doesn’t use color compression, turn off the color noise reduction by disabling the two Blur nodes in this section.

c. If you feel that the overall noise reduction is incorrect for this foreground, disable or adjust the Denoise_Fg node.

The Clean_Plate_Generator section generates a clean plate from the foreground footage. It uses a gizmo called auto_cleanplate .

21. Set the auto_cleanplate node to use the project’s entire frame range by clicking on the Input Range button:

22. In the Edge section, adjust the Screen Colour in the edge_body section’s Keylight_body node. Use the color picker to select a range of green values near the body.

23. Set the Viewer node to the Final Composite dot (at the bottom of the script) to view a rough composite:

You’ve adjusted the script template for the foreground shape and green screen values of your imported footage. Next, let’s make a better edge for the foreground.

Adjust the edge

The Edge section defaults to one keyer (the edge_body section), which creates an alpha matte, and one despiller (the edge_despill_body section), which despills the green from the green screen and replaces it with background pixels. It premultiplies the edge alpha matte with the despilled RGB channel to create the foreground edge.

The edge_body section uses the Keylight node to make an alpha matte. Keylight is a good, all-around keyer. In the optional sections area of the script, you will find the edge_IBK section:

which uses the IBKGizmo node to make an alpha matte. The IBKGizmo is a difference keyer, which can be good with fine details.

The edge_despill_body section uses the bl_Despillator gizmo. Other despiller sections are available in the optional sections area:

You could also use any other keyer or despiller available in Nuke instead of these, as long as you use the m_body.a matte channel to matte the foreground’s body.

The first thing to do is adjust the edge so that it works well with the simplest (or largest or least-detailed) part of the image, which, in this example, is the body. To adjust the edge:

24. Confirm that the merge nodes for the Shadows, Core and Light_Wrap sections are disabled (effectively turning off these layers):

25. Adjust the edge matte (using, in this example, the edge_body section’s Keylight node):

Don’t worry about the foreground image quality; focus on the edge. This is just a source for the edge alpha channel. 

Keylight’s Status view

a. The traveling garbage matte will mask the majority of the background. The core layer (which we’ll make later) will fill in the center.

b. Keep the largest possible difference between the white and black settings; this difference is where semi-transparent alpha pixels live.

c. In Keylight, set the view to Intermediate Result to disable any spill suppression.

26. Play the shot and look carefully for problems with the edge that can be solved by adjusting the keyer. Remember, you are working on the simplest (or largest or least-detailed) part of the image.

The goal is to make a clean alpha channel on the edge, where solids are solid and transparencies are transparent, preserving the most edge detail possible. 

It is OK to preserve fine detail with a somewhat grey edge matte: the despiller section(s) can merge this somewhat with the background.

Here’s the best that Keylight could do:

The edge matte still needs work, notably in the hair. You’ll need to separate this problem part of the image from the body using a matte and adjust it individually.

Adding mattes

27. In the Foreground_mattes section, 

a. adjust the Roto_body matte so that it excludes the hair portion of the edge_body key. Feather the matte:

Next, you’ll draw mattes to separate the image into optimally workable parts:

28. Draw a matte that includes the hair and overlaps with the top part of the body matte:

a. Add a Roto node-Copy node combination.

b. Draw a matte for the hair edge.

c. Copy the matte into the m_hair.a matte channel.

The script includes several other channels that are used by the edge, core and light wrap sections to fine tune the various parts of the image. The names of these channels begin with m_ (for matte) and end in .a (for alpha):

• m_body.a
• m_body_underarms.a
• m_hair_left.a
• m_hair_right.a
• m_shoes.a
• m_torso.a

and so on.

You can create your own channel if necessary by selecting new from the Copy node’s channels list.

d. The tutorial foreground and background sample clips are only 10 frames long: there isn’t much movement, so it isn’t necessary to animate the mattes. You’d add Tracker nodes to any footage with much movement and apply a MatchMove node to the mattes. Name any new Tracker nodes to specify what item in the image is being tracked (for example, Tracker_necklace).

e. In Roto nodes that are transformed with a tracker, set clip to: to no clip.

The body and hair mattes will do for this tutorial. In the much longer shot that I used in my movie #LookUp, I made separate mattes for the top of the hair, the left side of the hair, the right side of the hair and the underarms as well as the body:

Refining the edge

29. In the edge section, add a keyer and despiller for the hair portion of the image. 

a. Make a copy of an edge_IBK section (which is loitering in the optional sections portion of the script). Name the copy Hair_edge.

b. Similarly, make a copy of an edge_despill section. Name the copy despill_hair.

c. Set the hair’s keyer and despiller to use the m_hair.a matte channel:

d. Connect the keyer and despiller sections down the edge tree, merging each with the previous one:

30. Adjust the hair edge:

a. Fine tune the keyer until it creates a good edge matte for the hair.

b. Fine tune the despiller until it creates a well blended edge.

Creating a separate matte for the hair and keying it differently improved the hair portion of the edge:

When I composited the longer shot for my movie, I used several more mattes, keying and despilling sections:

The completed edge matte and despilled image looked like this:

31. Rotoscope any stubborn flaws in the edge composite.

Even with great keying and compositing, it is possible to have webbed appendages and other flaws. For example, diffraction from fingers or arms being close together de-saturates the green screen, keeping those spots in the RGB and out of the alpha channel. Despilling doesn’t affect these parts because they aren’t actually very green. The only way to deal with these is by rotoscoping them out. Painting them works best.

a. Set the Viewer node’s input to be from the the Roto_touchups section’s RotoPaint_roto node.

Press the M key in the viewer to view the matte overlay.

b. Set a second Viewer node’s input to the final composite (from the Final Composite dot at the bottom of the script).

c. Open the RotoPaint_roto node’s properties panel.

d. Select the paint brush tool. Paint pixels that you want to erase with white paint. The brush strokes create a matte in the alpha. You can see the matte in the matte overlay in Viewer 1

and see the result of the matte on the composite in Viewer 2.

RotoPaint requires a lot of processing power. This can slow the responsiveness of the script to a crawl. Once you’ve finished rotoscoping these touchups, disable the RotoPaint_roto, Invert_roto and Copy_roto nodes (thereby turning off the rotoscoped touchups) as often as possible while you work on the rest of the script.

When completed, the edge will look something like this:

finished edge layer

finished edge layer, composited over the background layer

The edge is good. However, in an effort to make the edge of the hair more nuanced, the middle of the image may look a little thin:

Next, we’ll fill in the middle of the foreground with the core layer.

Adjust the core

The Core section defaults to one matte (in the core_body section), which creates a core alpha matte. It uses one despiller (the despill_core section), which despills the green from the green screen and replaces it with neutral grey pixels. It premultiplies the core alpha matte with the despilled RGB channel to create the core. This core layer is set inside the foreground edge; it fills in the majority of the foreground and lets the edge layer focus on the edges.

32. In the Core section’s despill_core section, adjust the Keylight_core_despill node’s Screen Colour to select the most accurate green screen color (so that the section can properly despill the core).

33. View the final composite (from the Final Composite dot at the bottom of the script).

34. Connect the Grade_test node between edge test out and edge test in:

This will turn the edge layer red.

35. Enable the Merge_core node for the Core section (effectively turning on the core layer)

36. In the core_body section, adjust the Erode_body node until the core layer is just inside the edge layer:

37. Play the shot and look carefully for problems with the core that can be solved by adjusting the Erode_body node. The goal is to have the core extend as close to the edge of the foreground image as possible without obscuring any of the edge.

Because you used multiple mattes in the Edge section to adjust the hair separately, you will need to add core sections that composite this part of the image in the core layer.

Refining the core

38. In the Core section, add a copy of the core Erode section for the hair. 

a. Make a copy of a core_ section (in the optional sections area). Name the copy core_hair.

b. Set the hair’s ChannelMerge node to use the m_hair.a matte channel.

c. Connect core hair section down the core tree, merging with the previous one:

39. Fine-tune the hair core Erode section until it creates a good core matte.

In my movie, this shot needed several more core mattes:

The completed core matte and despilled image looked like this:

40. Disconnect the Grade_test node and reconnect the edge test out and edge test in:

When completed, the core layer will look something like this:

finished core layer


core layer composited over the edge and background layers

Adjust the Light Wrap

The Light_Wrap section defaults to one light wrap node (in the lightwrap_body section).

41. In the the Light_Wrap section, enable the Merge_lightwrap node (effectively turning on the light wrap layer):

42. View the LightWrap_body node in one Viewer input and the final composite (from the Final Composite dot at the bottom of the script) in another.

43. In the LightWrap_body node’s properties, adjust the light wrap on the body portion. Subtle is good.

44. Play the shot and look carefully for problems with the light wrap that can be solved by adjusting the LightWrap_body node. The goal is to very slightly blend the foreground image with the background, the way diffraction does in real life, in a naturalistic way. Less is more.

Because you used multiple mattes in the Edge section to adjust the hair separately, you will need to add light wrap sections that composite this part of the image in the light wrap layer.

Refining the light wrap

45. In the Light_Wrap section, add a copy of the light wrap node section for the hair. 

a. Make a copy of a lightwrap_ section (in the optional sections area). Name the copy lightwrap_hair.

b. Set the hair’s ChannelMerge node to use the m_hair.a matte channel.

c Connect the core hair section down the light wrap tree, merging with the previous one:

46. Fine-tune the hair LightWrap node until it creates a good (read: subtle) light wrap.

In my movie, this shot needed several light wrap sections:

Do not use a light wrap on parts of the image where it doesn’t look right or make sense. For example, the bottoms of people’s feet shouldn’t have a light wrap. You can make a matte (in the Foreground_mattes section) to exclude part of the image from a light wrap:

When completed, the light wrap layer will look something like this:

finished light wrap layer,
shown against magenta background and
exaggerated in the Viewer for illustration

finished edge, core, light wrap and background layers
composited together

Matching

You can adjust the foreground’s scale and position in the the Pre_Process_FG_Primary section; use a Reformat or Transform node to scale the image and the Position node to position the image. 

There are two places to adjust the foreground’s color:

There are two places to adjust the foreground’s grain (or noise): 

You can adjust the background’s color, scale and position in the Background section.

47. In the foreground’s Pre_ and / or Post_ processing sections and in the Background section, grade, scale and position the foreground and / or background to match each other.

48. Match the foreground’s grain (or noise) to the background’s in the Core section’s Core_grain_matching section or in the Post_Process_Foreground section.

Shadows

Now that you have the hang of compositing the foreground and background in shot 2, we’ll cover adding shadows using shot 1. Its foreground and background shots are in the tutorials /~Nuke template and tutorial/shadows/01/ folder:

49. Convert each shot’s media into EXR image sequences in After Effects.

50. Move the /~Nuke template and tutorial/shadows/01/01_LS_composite.nknc script file to the /Project Files/Nuke directory.

51. Open the script file in NukeX.

52. Read in the foreground and background image sequences. Confirm that the project, viewer and background node’s frame.start at frame ranges are all correct.

53. Set the Viewer node to the Final Composite dot (at the bottom of the script) to view a rough composite:

the foreground is comped in but has no shadows

54. Copy the shadow_ section; rename the copy shadow_body and add it to the Shadows section.

55. The Merge_shadows node is near the top of the script, just before the Edge section. Enable this node (effectively turning on the shadows layer):

56. Adjust the shadows:

a. In the Shadows section’s shadow_body section, open the Transform_shadow node’s properties panel. Using the transformation overlay in the Viewer, adjust the shadow so that it lays in the proper direction and is the proper size to appear as a shadow.

b. Adjust the Dissolve_shadow node to blend the shadow with the background texture. 

c. Adjust the Blend_shadow node to adjust the shadow’s opacity.

d. Adjust the Blur_shadow node.

57. Add more shadow_ sections for more shadows, if necessary. Name each section shadow_[description]. For example, the second body shadow section would be named shadow_body2. Merge each shadow with the previous one:

 When completed, the shadows layer will look something like this:

shadows layer composited on the background
and behind the foreground layers

Rendering

58. When each shot is composited: 

a. Save the script.

b. Add a Write node after the Final Composite dot at the bottom of the script.

c. In the Write node’s properties, navigate to the /Nuke/Renders/[shot number]/directory and set the file to [shot number]_[description]_#.exr. The # character is a frame number variable that inserts the frame numbers.

d. Confirm that the file type is set to exr.

e. Click the Render button; accept the defaults in the Render dialog box. The Progress bar or Progress panel will show the Render queue’s progress.

Convert the EXR sequences to Quicktime

59. In After Effects, import the EXR sequence:

a. Select the from Nuke/[shot number] folder.

b. Select File.Import.File…, navigate to the /Nuke/Renders/[shot number]/directory and select the first .exr file. Ensure that the OpenEXR Sequence checkbox is checked. Click Open to import the image sequence.

60. Render the image sequence:

a. In Render Settings, confirm that the frame rate is correct.

b. In Output Module settings, set the 

• Format: Quicktime
• Format Options.Video Codec: Apple PreRes 422 HQ
• Depth: Trillions of Colors
  (this is the maximum; if the image sequence has only millions of colors, the Quicktime file will have the same)
• Color: Premultiplied

c. Set the Ouput to the project’s After Effects /Renders/EXR to QT conversions/ directory.

d. Render the Quicktime movie.

61. Import the shot back into Final Cut Pro.

A plausible composite is not for the faint of heart

This is a long and very complicated process. You may be thinking “why in the world would I want to do this?” The best question is whether you need to have convincing, invisible compositing (for, say, a narrative film) or whether a collage look (which looks composited) is best for your project. Both are valid choices. However, if you absolutely, positively need to fool every single viewer in the room, I recommend this method and NukeX.

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies and videos of all kinds and is based in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He prefers real scenes, but shoots a lot green and blue screens.

www.donstarnes.com

Also by Don Starnes:

Monitors and filmmaking
The difference between a movie and a video is that a movie is created in the filmmakers’ minds and a video is created on a monitor.

Money
It’s the Producer’s Invitational Pancake Breakfast. Just as the producers are cutting into short stacks with their plastic forks, all of the doors are locked…

Blocking before coffee
Feature film: first day. The first-time director is 45 minutes late. Finally, he shows up: harried, stubbly, preoccupied and exhausted…

Ask me no questions and I’ll speak in no fragments
A sign taped to the door says “Quiet– filming.” This only makes you more nervous.

How to get trained
Hint: it isn’t by reading this.

Preview: the Mini XTC 9250-XL
Just in time for NAB, the 9250-XL is everything that a producer could want in a camera. The revolution has begun…

DIY DCP
How to make your own digital theatrical ‘print’ using Final Cut Pro, After Effects, guerrilla DCP software, pluck and maybe a little help from your friends.

G+

If you’ve made a movie and attempted to show it theatrically, you may have been asked to deliver a Digital Cinema Package. A DCP is the international standard for digital cinema exhibition. It is a set of files that are played on a computer connected to a digital cinema projector and a cinema sound system, the 21st Century replacement for the 35mm film print. It has better quality than a Blu-ray or a Quicktime file is likely to have: 2K or 4K resolution, surround sound and a color space designed for digital projectors.

DCPs are business as usual for the movie studios. For the indy filmmaker, however, there is a problem: DCPs cost relatively big bucks; they are made by highly trained and skilled professionals who use serious tools. The cost of rendering your own Quicktime file: essentially free. The cost of a 100 minute DCP: at least $3K or so. Plus, you’ll probably deliver the movie on a relatively expensive hard drive as opposed to a nearly free Blu-ray or DVD-R.

What should you do if you need to convert your movie (your baby, the fruit of Herculean effort, the quintessential expression of your raison d’être) to a DCP?

My advice: hire the pros. DCPs aren’t necessarily made very well by algorithms; as in all other aspects of filmmaking, experienced professionals are the crucial difference between likely success and a high chance of embarrassing failure. A good post production house can expertly finesse the DCP’s picture and sound so that your movie, all else being equal, will look like a studio picture. In the overall scheme of things, their rate is a bargain, especially for a feature film.

Maybe you can’t (or won’t) get the money together to make a DCP, have a weakness for adventure or have (perhaps imprudent) faith in your technical aptitude. 

That was me last Fall. My no-budget short film, Mindfulness and The Triune Brain, had been accepted by some film festivals. I googled other people’s experiences with making their own DCPs: I found some success stories and many fails. Some people’s picture came out dark or the wrong color. For others, the sound was out of sync or too loud or not loud enough. Some settled for 2 speaker stereo. A lot of people couldn’t successfully deliver their DCP or had it rejected by the theater because it was made using the wrong standard. In any case, it was difficult to find a complete recipe for making one, using methods where everything worked, using software that was affordable and/or reliable.

Undeterred, I googled a lot more, read the specs, downloaded applications, experimented, enlisted the help of some generous people and made my own DCP. It worked perfectly for me. Here’s how I did it.

You’re going to need time. And probably some coffee.

I converted a 1920 x 1080, 23.976fps, ProRes 422 HQ movie to a DCP that is compliant with DCI, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, SMPTE and ISDCF standards. I used:

• Final Cut Pro 7
• Soundtrack Pro
• After Effects
• j2k plug-in for After Effects
• OpenDCP
• easyDCP Player
• Dolby Pink Noise audio reference

but the principles probably apply to other software.

I didn’t make a DCDM (a duplication master) or encrypt the movie and make KDMs (decryption keys) because I wasn’t interested in those features. DCP Builder seems to be a good app to make those. 

The essential workflow is to

• convert your movie to 24 fps (that’s 24.0, not 23.976)
• convert your picture to the proper 2K or 4K, X′Y′Z′ color space, 2.6 gamma, 5900K .mxf file
• convert your sound to the proper 5.1 surround, 24 Bit, 48 kHz, Linear PCM .mxf file
• specify the necessary metadata
• package these into the standard DCP files

I illustrate my process in the eleven steps below. I made a 2K package. To make a 4K DCP, use the specified 4K values and change the labels and file names specified to reference 4K.

1. Prepare folders on your edit drive for each of the project’s elements

/DCP Sources/AIFF
/DCP Sources/JPEG2000
/DCP Sources/WAV
/Deliverables/DCP
/Project Files/After Effects
/Project Files/Final Cut Pro
/Project Files/Soundtrack Pro

I use Post Haste for this purpose to standardize my project settings and organization.

2. Output the full resolution picture file

In Final Cut Pro 7.0, export the movie sequence at full resolution to the project’s DCP Sources folder. For example, if the movie is in ProRes 422 HQ, output the movie as [movie name]_ProRes_422_HQ.mov.

3. Mix the sound to 5.1 surround and output the six channels to separate .wav files

The sound has to be mixed for (at minimum) left, center and right speakers to comply with DCP specifications.

If your movie’s sound has been edited and/or mixed for stereo, you’ll have to re-edit the sound and/or re-mix it to use at least these three channels. While you’re at it, go ahead and mix it for all six channels of 5.1 surround sound. Do that now. I’ll wait.

	Welcome back. In the Final Cut Pro project, duplicate the movie sequence; call it  [movie name]_to_Soundtrack_Pro . Send the [movie name]_to_Soundtrack_Pro sequence to a Soundtrack Pro Multitrack Project. Save the Soundtrack Pro project to the project’s Soundtrack Pro project folder.
	In Soundtrack Pro, make sure that all of the audio made it across and is in sync. Be sure to set the submixes to use  Surround 1-6.
	If you haven’t already arranged the audio channels in surround audio space, use Soundtrack Pro’s 5.1 Surround panner to do so.

If you have 5.1 sound output hardware, you’ll be able to hear what you are doing. If not, you’ll hear a stereo conversion using Dolby surround-to-stereo conversion standards.

Add the Dolby pink noise reference file to the project. Play the pink noise file and set the master fader to about -20 db.

Play the sound and confirm that it tops out at about -5 db for normal sounds. Anything above that is going to hurt the audience’s ears if played for too long.

4. Export the surround audio channels

In Soundtrack Pro, select File.Export…
Navigate to the project’s DCP Sources/AIFF folder
Save As: [movie name]_Audio
Exported Items: Master Mix
File Type: AIFF File
Create multiple mono files
Bit Depth: 24 Bit
Sample Rate: 48 kHz

5. Use the j2k plug-in in After Effects to make a 24fps JPEG 2000 image sequence

If you haven’t already, install the plug-in.

Make a new After Effects project:
[movie name]_2K_JPEG2K

Load the full resolution HD movie (for example: [movie name]_ProRes_422_HQ.mov) into After Effects. Make a comp from the footage. Name the comp [movie name]_2K_JPEG2K.

Select File.Project Settings:
Depth: 16 bit
Working Space: DCDM X′Y′Z′ (Gamma 2.6) 5900K (by Adobe)
Compensate for Scene-referred Profiles: checked
(displays the scene-referred profile [Rec. 709 for video] instead of the display-referred profile [DCDM X′Y′Z′ for cinema] when viewing in After Effects)

Composition Settings:
Uncheck the Lock Aspect Ratio checkbox.
Use the appropriate width and height for your movie’s size and aspect ratio:

After the Width and Height are set, check the Lock Aspect Ratio checkbox.

Leave the frame rate at 23.976 fps.

If you elect to scale the movie to fit the digital cinema width, do so in the comp using Transform.Scale. Use the scale setting appropriate for your movie’s size and aspect ratio.

For 1920 x 1080 footage:

Consider moving the picture down so that the cropping is all on the bottom (“common top framing” in aspect ratio conversion parlance) so that you preserve the headroom of your picture. For my movie, I actually moved the picture up a bit to preserve the bottom of my composition.

Add the comp to the render queue: File.Export.Add to Render Queue.

Render Settings:
Color Depth: 16 bit
Frame Rate: 24

Output Module:
Format: JPEG 2000 Sequence
Depth: Trillions of Colors
Format Options: Digital Cinema
Check the Advanced checkbox and make sure that the quality slider is all the way to best. DCP standards specify:

However, anything up to 250 Mb/s should be acceptable. Brendan Bolles at fnord software recommends 238 Mb/s for 2K.

Output To:
the project’s DCP Sources/JPEG2000 folder.

Use the Command-I keys to input the image sequence. Rename the image sequence [movie name]_2K_JPEG2K_seq. 

Right click the image sequence and select Interpret Footage.Main… Set Assume this frame rate to 24fps.

The frame rate is very important: you will use this file later to adjust the speed of the sound files.

Make a new comp from this image sequence:

Composition Settings:
Name: [movie name]_2K_JPEG2K_seq
Frame Rate: 24fps. 

Add the comp to the render queue: File.Export.Add to Render Queue. 

Render out a Quicktime ProRes 422 proxy version of the 2K movie called [movie name]_2K_JPEG2K_ProRes_422_proxy_XYZ_picture.mov:

Render Settings:
Color Depth: 16 bit
Frame Rate: 24

Output Module:
Format: Quicktime
Format Options– Video Codec: Apple ProRes 422 proxy
Depth: Trillions of Colors

Output To:
the project’s DCP Sources folder.

Check the ProRes movie to make sure that it is the correct speed and length (you set Interpret Footage properly when you input the image sequence in After Effects, right?).

6. Adjust the speed of the audio tracks to sync with the picture

The picture has been sped up .01% from 23.976 fps to 24 fps. The audio has to be sped up in Final Cut Pro to match. (Edited your movie at 24.0 fps? Import the picture and sound files but skip the speed change part).

In the Final Cut Pro project, create a new sequence; call it [movie name]_2K_JPEG2K_ProRes_422_proxy_XYZ.

Import the 2K QT picture (DCP Sources/[movie name]_2K_JPEG2K_ProRes_422_proxy_XYZ_picture.mov) into the project and add it to the sequence. Let Final Cut Pro change the sequence settings to match this 2K picture.

Import the six audio files from the project’s DCP Sources/AIFF folder into the project. Place them in the 2K sequence. Adjust the speed of the sound tracks to match the picture. Change Speed: 99.9% should do it. Make sure that the sound is the same length as the 2K picture. If not, adjust the speed of the sound to match.

7. Export the AIFF sound files as WAV files

In Final Cut Pro, export each of the six audio tracks, one at a time:

Option-click the Track Visibility control next to the audio track you want to export; this disables output of the other five audio tracks.

Choose File.Export.Using QuickTime Conversion:
File.Export…
Navigate to the project’s DCP Sources/WAV folder
Save As: [movie name]_Audio_[track name]
the track name is the same as the AIFF file’s name: C, L, LFE, Ls, R or Rs
Format: Wave
Options.Sound Settings-
Format: Linear PCM
Channels: Mono
Rate: 48 kHz
Quality: Best
Sample Size: 24 Bit

Repeat the procedure for each of the six tracks.

8. Make the MXF sound and picture files

You’ll note that OpenDCP could be used to make JPEG2000 source files. I had read some complaints about the quality of OpenDCP’s jpeg conversions and so elected to use j2k in After Effects for that purpose instead. I used OpenDCP only to convert the JPEG2000 and wav source files into a DCP.

The current DCP standard is SMPTE. You can use the older MXF Interop standard if you are concerned about screening on legacy equipment.

In OpenDCP, in the MXF tab make the video MXF:

Type: JPEG2000
Label (this specifies the DCP standard): SMPTE
Frame Rate: 24
Don’t change the Picture Parameters
Picture Input Directory: the project’s DCP Sources/JPEG2000 folder
Output Files: [project’s DCP Sources folder]/[movie name]_2K_Picture

Click the Create MXF button. 

Change the Type and make the audio MXF:

Type: WAV
Label (this specifies the DCP standard): SMPTE
Frame Rate: 24
Sound Input Type: Mono
Sound Output Parameters: 5.1
Input Directory: in the project’s DCP Sources/WAV folder, select the sound file for each channel
Output Files: [project’s DCP Sources folder]/[movie name]_Audio

Click the Create MXF button. 

9. Make the DCP package

In OpenDCP’s DCP tab:
Composition Parameters–
Title: use the Title Generator

The second Type Modifier is the frame rate. The Package Type OV (Original Version) means that the package contains the entire movie.

Fill the form out completely; this title is what shows up on the cinema’s media server. It conveys important information to the projectionist (for example, the resolution and aspect ratio of the movie).

Don’t change the Title Generator’s title. A non-standard title could, for example, prevent the DCP server from playing your movie.

Annotation: [12 character movie short name]_CPL
Issuer: [your company name]
Rating: [rating]
Kind: [kind]
Reel–
Annotation: [12 character movie short name]_REEL
Picture: [project’s DCP Sources folder]/[movie name]_2K_Picture
Sound: [project’s DCP Sources folder]/[movie name]_2K_Audio
Options–
MXF File Behavior: Move, Overwrite Existing

Click Create DCP: create the DCP in the project’s Deliverables/DCP folder, which includes:

• Packing List
• Asset Map
• Composition Play List
• audio .mxf
• video .mxf
• Volume Index

10. Copy the files to a delivery medium

The theater will most likely ingest your DCP from your delivery media to the hard drives on their server. Your DCP will be listed as an asset on their server’s user interface; it can then be programmed to run in a screening.

Select a delivery medium that works with the theater’s server. Copy the contents of the project’s Deliverables/DCP folder to the root of the media (not in a folder). 

The ISDCF, one of the standards bodies for digital cinema, defines a rather strict specification: USB 2 external drives formatted in Linux as EXT2 or EXT3, with a Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table as the only partition, with a inode size of 128, in read-only mode. The drive must have only the DCP files on it (with only one ASSETMAP.xml).

Knut Erik Evensen, who does DCP mastering in Norway, recommends these best practices to deliver a Digital Cinema Package, in preferential order:

1. The way the pros do it: a CRU Data Express DX115 DC hard drive caddy. These can be loaded directly into the Doremi DCP-2K4, Doremi ShowVault / IMB and other digital cinema servers. To support servers that need a USB 2 external drive, you must also supply the CRU DX115 MoveDock USB 2 / USB 3 docking station with a USB 2 cable and an AC power supply (120v/240v with proper plug adapters). Add a Pelican 1400 case. This setup costs around $250 including hard drive. 

2. A USB 2 / USB 3 external hard drive like the LaCie Rugged Mini in a Pelican 1120 case. Supply an AC power supply (120v/240v with proper plug adapters) and also a USB Y cable with the drive to support powerless USB 2 ports.

3. A USB flash drive in a Pelican 101 case.

It is a good idea to send a backup of any media that you send. I ask the projectionist at film festivals what a suitable backup is; some have suggested a Blu-ray or Quicktime file, others simply wanted a duplicate of the DCP on a second drive.

11. Test the DCP package

It is extremely important to test your shiny new DCP: all of the parameters that you’ve adjusted so far have left you ample opportunity to make a mistake.

DCP packages are designed for projection in digital cinema theaters. You can use apps such as easyDCP Player to play your DCP, but any emulator has some chance of misleading you. To make matters worse, some theaters have varying degrees of compliance to DCP standards or use outdated standards. Like any computer, a theater’s DCP server is equipped to work with specific media (certain kinds of hard drives, for example).

If you absolutely, positively want your DCP to work, you should take it for a test drive in the theater where you plan to show it. Can’t afford an extra trip to Cannes? Contact the theater and ask them intimate details about their projection system. Find out the brand and model of their DCP server and projector, then look up the hardware’s technical details.

In any case, find out the: 

• acceptable size (2K, 4K)
• acceptable media (hard drive, USB flash drive, BD-R, DVD-R)
• external drive format (EXT2, EXT3,NTFS, HFS+, FAT32, ex-FAT, etc.)
• external drive connection (USB 3, Firewire 800, eSATA, etc.)
• color space (it should be X′Y′Z′ with 2.6 gamma)
• projector color temperature (it should be 5900K)

The premiere festival screening of Mindfulness and The Triune Brain was at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater. I contacted them: they are the proud owners of a Dolby DSS200 DCP server, a Dolby CP750 cinema sound processor and a Barco projector. After googling a good source of DCP server manuals and reading up on this gear, I confirmed with the projectionist that their server would accept NTFS formatted USB 2 or USB 3 hard drives and flash drives (my film is only 2:40; its DCP is 1 GB). So far, the five film festivals I’ve delivered to all accepted those same formats; some also accepted DVD-R (UDF) disks. Your mileage may vary.

Begin your test by examining your DCP in easyDCP Player:

Make sure that the sound and picture sync (are the same length). Use Hash Check, Audio Viewer and the other viewers in the View menu to check on the package. Use the color menu at the bottom of the viewer window to view the movie in a Rec. 709 color space emulation.

Then find a local theater with the same set-up as your screening venue and project your movie there.

Everyone has freedom of the press— as long as you own a press

Did you ever strike your own 35mm film print in your garage? I didn’t think so. Amazingly, you now have the potential to make a professional theatrical print of your own movie and distribute it to theaters in the same way that, say, 20th Century Fox does. If you have the resources, by all means hire the pros to make your DCP. But, if all you have is scrappy independence, a computer editing setup, lots of time for trial and error, access to a DCP theater and perhaps flexible standards, you can roll your own using my recipe.

Meanwhile, you’ll sometimes find me at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema, watching 35mm film prints from his collection. Perhaps, one day, the projection room door will be ajar and I can hear it’s mighty, industrial revolution curio, the film projector, whirring into action before the show.

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies and videos of all kinds and is based in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He finds that equipment manuals and standards recommendations are as interesting anthropologically as they are technically.

www.donstarnes.com

Also by Don Starnes:

Monitors and filmmaking
The difference between a movie and a video is that a movie is created in the filmmakers’ minds and a video is created on a monitor.

Money
It’s the Producer’s Invitational Pancake Breakfast. Just as the producers are cutting into short stacks with their plastic forks, all of the doors are locked…

Blocking before coffee
Feature film: first day. The first-time director is 45 minutes late. Finally, he shows up: harried, stubbly, preoccupied and exhausted…

Ask me no questions and I’ll speak in no fragments
A sign taped to the door says “Quiet– filming.” This only makes you more nervous.

How to get trained
Hint: it isn’t by reading this.

Preview: the Mini XTC 9250-XL
Just in time for NAB, the 9250-XL is everything that a producer could want in a camera. The revolution has begun…

Keying and compositing in NukeX
Skitch a ride up its steep learning curve using my template and tutorial.

G+

A filmmaker, by the way, isn’t necessarily a person who shoots on film or makes theatrical movies. For lack of a better phrase (and content ideator isn’t a better phrase), I declare a person who works in any capacity to make movies of any sort to be a filmmaker. This article focuses on production, but analogous principles apply to VFX and post-production.

The good news is that if you pursue training in earnest, you immediately stand head and shoulders above the rest. But what is the best way to get trained?

There is one essential ingredient to film training. It isn’t:

• Film school

Schools approach their subjects academically in a classroom, a unique environment perfect for investigating abstractions. Student films are great opportunity to experiment with other students, none of whom know much more than the others.

I’ve taught in film schools. I have a degree in film production. Film school is great. I am grateful to use my academic knowledge every day that I work. When I was in film school, though, professional filmmakers had a dim view of film school grads, who they viewed as arrogant yet clueless. It was well understood, both at school and on real movie sets, that the last thing you’d want to admit to, say, a gaffer, is that you went to film school. Times have changed: film school is big business with street cred. But it remains appropriately academic.

• Buying gear and trying it out

I own two great guitars. I’m a terrible guitar player. Buying movie gear doesn’t make you a filmmaker or get you trained.

• Working on hobby films

Hobby films are similar to student films, except that they lack classroom instruction. The people involved are passionate about filmmaking or getting their story told. Some of them may even have been trained in professional filmmaking. I’ve made hobby films myself. Unlike professional films, though, they lack necessary resources and don’t absolutely need to be finished or be good. The primary endeavor is to have a good time. There is little opportunity for proper training here.

• Camera demos at trade shows

Equipment salespeople offer informational demos to attract people who might buy their gear. Their main focus is sales; what sells and what is helpful training are very often different things.

• YouTube, newsgroups, forums, mailing lists, etc.

Imagine that you are in a dark room with a lot of people and an elephant; each is trying to describe the elephant. The trunk is like a big snake. The leg like a tree. The Elephants forum on reduser.net would be like this.

• Articles like this one

I find, more and more, that people hoping to learn filmmaking stop at these. The inefficacy of this is readily apparent.

The one essential ingredient of a filmmaking education is personal training on a professional set. Other educational experiences have no real meaning without this.

I shot the behind-the-scenes material for the movie Scream. On the first day, I showed up on the set with a sound guy and the PR person. As we walked onto the location, discussing the particulars of the assignment, the three of us automatically lowered our voices, took a particular path and then, consensually, stopped walking and became silent. We waited. We heard “and cut!” and continued, talking in normal voices. As we crossed the hall, I looked to my left and noticed the camera pointing in our direction. Trained professionals, we had noticed the subtle signs and avoided disrupting the shot.

You can’t teach this in film school.

To learn professional filmmaking, you have to get up from the computer and work with experienced people who know what you wish you knew. Learning filmmaking is less like learning accounting and more like learning a martial art. You have to learn it in person.

Don’t worry: we’re professionals

A professional set has an abundance of professionals on it. You will note calmness, organization, efficiency and, if you look carefully, creativity. Not I-know–let’s-duct-tape-the-DP-to-the-bumper creativity, but the kind that shows up on the screen.

The first sign that you are on an amateur set: there’s no call sheet. Other indicators: no permits, no real job titles, a walking lunch, an auteur. No pay is a big clue.

These days, people who don’t know what they are doing make up weird, alternative-universe methods that don’t work nearly as well as the way that films have been made for 100 years. These get passed down to the next wave of unsuspecting neophytes as fact. The next thing that you know, you’re accomplishing almost nothing in a 16 hour day.

This sort of thing may indeed be modern, cool, new wave, guerrilla or cutting edge, but it is also lame, unproductive and unprofessional. Your chance of learning almost anything positive about filmmaking from these people is nearly nil.

How to get on a set

You can’t easily get on a professional set unless you are valuable. Reading about something or watching a YouTube video doesn’t make you particularly valuable.

Not valuable yet? How can you get on a set to learn about filmmaking and become valuable if you aren’t yet valuable enough to get on a set?

Three traditional ways are:

• Be an intern. Unfortunately, due to recent court decisions, it isn’t prudent for anyone to hire un-paid interns anymore. In order to be a paid intern, you have to be valuable enough to get the job. Back to square one.
• Go to a school with an apprenticeship program. The quality of this apprenticeship depends on the school and the people they apprentice you to. Your mileage may vary.
• Join a union. They have formal apprenticeship and training programs. This method is guaranteed to get you the proper training.

A lot of people will advise that you get on a set as a gofer, for free or cheap, and build your career from there. The problem with this is that there are really no entry level jobs in movies: a Production Assistant is an actual, skilled job, as is Loader, Camera Assistant, Background Actor (AKA Extra), etc. People often ask me if they can come on a set and carry things. “The carrying of things takes about 15 minutes,” I reply. “What will we do with you for the rest of the day?”

One way around this problem is to learn something about being a Background Actor or Production Assistant by calling a professional who does the job. Then volunteer to work with him or her (or with a Casting Director or Producer) on a non-union set. I suggest these because there are often not enough of these professionals in production budgets; there is sometimes room for a few more unpaid trainees. If you appear bright and he or she is desperate for the help, you might be able to persuade this person to take a chance on the un-paid intern liability.

Similarly, I suggest that you try learning something about Public Relations, another job that is often inexplicably vacant on low-budget movies. Having no PR person diminishes the chances that the filmmakers will sell the movie or make another one. Note the opportunity there.

Once you get one of these volunteer positions, do a very good job.

As soon you get some experience, a good reputation, contacts and referrals in one of these jobs, you become more valuable. At that point STOP WORKING FOR FREE. Three reasons:

• You aren’t very valuable if you are working for free or cheap, no matter how good you are. The object is to become more valuable.
• You will soon stop working with and learning from people who know what they are doing, because those people usually pay pros to do these jobs.
• You undermine the work of pros who do these jobs. They don’t appreciate it.

In any case, whether you are a volunteer, a paid intern or an apprentice, you’ve made it to a professional set. Congratulations.

What to do when you get there

When I was young, a grizzled old filmmaker gave the me the same advice that he got when he was young:

1. Show up early
2. Dummy up

You are not known by what you say, but by how you listen and by what you do and don’t do.

While on the set, do your job, which is job one. Job two is watching and listening to the pros.

Do not take pictures. Do not look at your phone. Do not attempt to do anyone else’s job. Keep your mouth shut. If your presence seems unwelcome, step back. Be aware of where the camera is being pointed and will be pointed. Put your stuff where it will never be in the way. Ask permission.

Let’s say that you end up guarding an equipment truck, far from the production. If doing your job means that you don’t get to see or hear anything at all that day, then that is how that day is. Be grateful that you are even there. Chalk it up to experience and get on the next job.

Beware of mission drift. Have a goal.

See a power vacuum that you can jump into? Bad idea. Why? First, it’s probably not your job. Second, and most importantly, if you manage to wrest authority over something then you probably won’t be able to learn anything. Do not try to be an impromptu department head. Just obey, listen and learn.

Don’t worry about being noticed. If you are diligent and serious, you will be noticed.

Pick a pro or two to keep in contact with, people who you feel you can learn from. Send them LinkedIn (or whatever the link du jour is) requests. Having linked, explicitly ask permission to pose an occasional question. Do so sparingly, sincerely and concisely. You will never surpass these people, because they will always have more experience than you and are always learning too. Humility is essential.

Most pros are willing to help bring a bright, serious junior person up. On the other hand, most are weary of flakey suppliants. Show seriousness and tact.

What if the set turns out to be not-so-professional?

Evaluate the professionalism of the people you are learning from. Triangulate: ask someone different; “is this right?” You can learn from people who don’t know what they are doing as long as you can tell the difference. Back when I was a camera assistant, I worked with a DP whose arrogance was unassailed by his inability to expose film or direct a camera crew. I learned as much from him as I learned from the great DPs that I worked with.

By the way: if something doesn’t look safe, refuse to do it. There is a safe way to do it, the way that you would be doing it if the production knew how to. If they can’t do it safely then they can’t do it.

Is it everything that you thought it would be?

If you find that professional filmmaking is not for you, then stop. No hard feelings. Many people discover that they prefer filmmaking to be a fun, if expensive, hobby. It is ok to be one of those people.

If you get well trained, and you pursue filmmaking as a business (which is another article altogether), then you will probably do well. If, on the other hand, dependable hours and a cozy office turn out to be more to your liking, at least you’ll always know what MOS means and what a Best Boy does.

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies and videos of all kinds and is based in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He was never a Production Assistant, but he worked his way up through most other movie jobs.

www.donstarnes.com

Also by Don Starnes:

Monitors and filmmaking
The difference between a movie and a video is that a movie is created in the filmmakers’ minds and a video is created on a monitor.

Money
It’s the Producer’s Invitational Pancake Breakfast. Just as the producers are cutting into short stacks with their plastic forks, all of the doors are locked…

Blocking before coffee
Feature film: first day. The first-time director is 45 minutes late. Finally, he shows up: harried, stubbly, preoccupied and exhausted…

Ask me no questions and I’ll speak in no fragments
A sign taped to the door says “Quiet– filming.” This only makes you more nervous.

Preview: the Mini XTC 9250-XL
Just in time for NAB, the 9250-XL is everything that a producer could want in a camera. The revolution has begun…

DIY DCP
How to make your own digital theatrical ‘print’ using Final Cut Pro, After Effects, guerrilla DCP software, pluck and maybe a little help from your friends.

Keying and compositing in NukeX
Skitch a ride up its steep learning curve using my template and tutorial.

G+

It’s the Producer’s Invitational Pancake Breakfast. Large hotel ballroom: happy grips, electricians and DPs are pouring batter and flipping pancakes for their guests. Directors, camera assistants and editors are distributing steaming paper plates and coffee. Just as the producers are cutting into short stacks with their plastic forks, all of the doors are locked.

The room settles into a nervous silence: all of the below-the-line people are standing. “Thank you for coming,” one of them says. “There are a few things that you need to know.”

I occasionally work as a producer for things that I direct. I’ve only done this six times for mostly corporate clients (not counting about a dozen of my own non-commercial films). As my professional producer friends correctly point out, I’m a babe-in-the-woods as a producer: relatively inexperienced and blissfully ignorant of the wolves that stalk me.

However, I’ve been on both sides of the phone call, the producer with a budget trying to procure crew and the crew guy trying to preserve my rate. As a Director of Photography and Director, I’ve worked on many well-produced movies and many badly-produced ones. I have a lot of experience making lousy budgets and schedules work. I have also had success as a producer negotiating better budgets from clients.

Here’s what I’d say to producers at the pancake breakfast:

Just get the money. Let us help you use it well. Make the movie that works with the money.

It’s not easy getting green

Let’s acknowledge that producing movies is tough. The best producers make mistakes. I certainly have. It’s heroic work, under-appreciated and, at best, invisible.

A producer’s job is obvious, if not simple:

1. Get everyone and everything needed for a production to the right place at the right time.
2. Create a successful movie.
3. Don’t lose money.

Each movie has its own yardstick for success, such as being funny, motivational or selling something, but being good is usually a basic requirement.

Fear, subterfuge, delusion, denial, deceit: these are okay in the plot of a movie, but are terrible in the production of one. When I’ve found myself working on one of these train wrecks, I’ve wondered: how has it come to this? What causes otherwise decent people to lose their minds and behave badly because they are making a movie?

There’s something about money, either a stack of money or a deficit of it, that can make you lose touch with reality. Apply money to a medium that diverts people with illusion and there is dangerous potential for fantasy or at least cognitive dissonance. It’s sometimes hard to get the necessary money from the client. It’s especially hard now that equipment salespeople have convinced everyone that, if they’d only buy their stuff, they can make a movie for almost nothing.

Money, or its lack can make you:

• feel embattled, adversarial and defensive
• lie to your client (and yourself) about the costs of things
• subscribe to half-baked schemes to save money
• and worse

The next thing you know, you’re quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and shooting without liability insurance.

The problem with all of this drama is that it severely decreases the chances of making a good movie. Plus, it’s unnecessarily hard work.

It seems much better to just get the money to make the movie. But how is this possible?

Stop competing. Cooperate.

Two keys to producing well are to

• adjust the money and the movie so that they match
• get the money

The problem, of course, is that the clients normally aren’t filmmakers (that’s why they hire you). They may know what the purpose of the movie is, but they usually have no idea what a movie costs, how to tell a story, and how money, story and the purpose of the movie relate.

You want to tell them. You want to convince them that you are the person to produce this movie instead of the many others who would like to get the job. You want them to trust you, to give you the money and to leave you alone to make the movie.

Where do you start? With a budget? With descriptions of cool shots? With your résumé? With the cryptic names of the cool gear that you’ll use?

What has worked well for me is to ask them what they are trying to achieve with the movie and why they are making it, trying to discern (and perhaps unearth) the passion that they have for the project. This should be as personal as possible. This passion could be “I want to get my boss off of my back” or “I want people to see how cool this technology is” or “I want people to understand my experience as a cancer survivor.” Extracting this could take some skill with particularly buttoned-down corporate types. Listening helps.

It is important to share this passion with them, authentically. You then become partners in something that is important to them.

Only then should you discuss the movie and its budget. All considerations about the story, how to treat the story, the length of the movie, etc., should be rigorously framed in the context of the purpose of the movie and the passion behind it. This makes the project stronger.

Tell them what it costs

Tell them what it actually costs. They probably don’t know what their idea will cost to accomplish; you must tell them. They may have sticker shock. They may claim to know for a fact that it can be done for less by other producers. You may see the warmth begin to cool and the partnership start to go south.

Here’s the thing: you share their passion for the project (right?). Focus on that. For the movie to work, they have to spend what it costs; anything less decreases the chance that it will work. At a certain point, the chances of success are too low for professionals (and other reasonable people) to proceed.

Here’s the other thing: if it costs too much, you can adjust the movie idea to match the money that they have to spend. Why? Because you know not only the purpose of the film but what the clients’ passion is, you can (with your superior filmmaking skills) design a film that accomplishes these goals in a way that works with the budget.

Let’s say that you come up with another idea that achieves the clients’ goals, but they really prefer the original, over-budget idea. If you can show the clients that the only way to achieve their passion with that idea is to spend more money, you may be able to get more money out of them.

If, after all of this, you cannot convince the client to trust you to make their movie at the actual cost, there is only one thing to do: sincerely wish them well and walk away. The chances of you making a good movie with them is pretty low: there is no opportunity there.

You may be tempted to ignore my advice, to take the under-funded job and try to make it work. I certainly have. You could get lucky and succeed. However, you probably won’t. Here’s why:

Saving money costs so much that you can’t afford it

There’s an old industry joke: the only gear that will help you save money on a movie is a red pencil. (Hint: it’s used to cross scenes out of the script.) Despite the wisdom of this, there are lots of ways to save money on a movie, things that only experienced crew people and producers know how to do.

For example, I once shot a commercial that had 5 very different interior locations in the script. This could easily take 3 to 5 days to shoot. We shot it in one 11 hour day. How? The commercial had very little synch sound. We had 5 different sets on the same location (four were in the same large room). While we were shooting on one set, the crew was preparing the next. A few sets did double duty by changing lenses, a few props and a bit of lighting. The finished spot looked great, worked perfectly and was widely praised.

All of the people on this spot were seasoned professionals. It took everyone’s considerable skill to pull this off: each crew member made many autonomous creative decisions, guided by set protocol and a firm understanding of the commercial. We saved the production a lot of money. With a cheaper, less experienced crew, I can pretty much guarantee that the spot would have either turned out badly (and failed in its purpose) or cost more.

OK, you may ask, what about paying an experienced crew less money? If they are hungry, they’ll take the job. How about paying them a half day rate?

They may take a low paying job; I’ve certainly taken them. The problem is this: they make movies for a living. If they get a call for a job that pays their rates, they will cancel on you. Would you turn down a good paying job to take a low paying job? Do you really save money if you have to scramble at the last minute to find potentially inadequate replacements? Another reason to pay people their rates, by the way, is so that they can stay in the movie business and be available to you the next time that you call them.

Non-pro crew– cheaper, right? I don’t think so: in the last two months, I’ve taken two jobs reshooting footage that was badly shot by inexperienced or hobbyist crews. Plus, I got a call last month: “can you come down right now and shoot our documentary interview for us? The (inexperienced) crew that we hired didn’t show up!”

Um, how about long hours? That will save money! Um, not really. In addition to being very dangerous (because tired people sometimes drop gear or drive into trees), productivity plummets in the last few hours of a very long day. The quality of the filmmaking tends to adjust accordingly and the chances of success decrease.

Let the experienced crew help you make your schedule and budget. Pepper them with questions in pre-production: if it will make their work day go better, they will be glad to help. Collectively, they probably have more experience than you do. Let them make you look like a genius.

If you can’t get the money from your client to hire a good crew, I’d look into the red pencil as your only hope of success.

When to get the money

When you hire a crew, you agree to pay them. Up front costs of producing a movie include food, props, etc. You aren’t a bank, you’re a movie producer: get the money for production up front. There is a graveyard of production companies that all have the same headstone: “Stiffed by their client.” Lawsuits. Bankruptcy. Forget about it: just get the money. If your client can’t agree to and meet a payment schedule, then the chances of making a good movie with them are pretty low. There is no opportunity there: walk away.

Most production companies do a variation on a staged payment schedule. Here’s mine:

5% prior to preproduction
60% prior to production
30% prior to post production
5% upon delivery

This sort of agreement enables the client to fund one piece of the production at a time; if they don’t like the way things are going, they can cut their losses and cancel the project. It also adequately funds each stage of the production, so that the show has a chance to be successful. The last bit of money, due upon delivery, is usually expected to be the production company’s profit from the project.

It is very important to limit what work is specified by the agreement, what additional work will cost and when additional work will be funded. My agreement briefly explains how its provisions help to ensure the success of the project.

Paying your crew quickly shows that you are an experienced producer who gets the money up front. They retain this fact at a cellular level; it puts you in their highest esteem. The next time you call them, they’ll probably leap at the chance to work with you.

But don’t take my word for it

Of course, I mostly work as a DP and Director; I humbly bow to the skill, wisdom and experience of professional producers. Perhaps some of you will comment on this article and school me on things I haven’t considered. I certainly have little authority to tell other people how to make money, given that I don’t have a lot of it.

One thing’s for sure, though: I’d charge $5 for coffee at the Invitational Pancake Breakfast.

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies of all kinds and is based in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He produces projects occasionally through his production company Lightly Held Films.

www.donstarnes.com

Also by Don Starnes:

Monitors and filmmaking
The difference between a movie and a video is that a movie is created in the filmmakers’ minds and a video is created on a monitor.

Blocking before coffee
Feature film: first day. The first-time director is 45 minutes late. Finally, he shows up: harried, stubbly, preoccupied and exhausted…

Ask me no questions and I’ll speak in no fragments
A sign taped to the door says “Quiet– filming.” This only makes you more nervous.

How to get trained
Hint: it isn’t by reading this.

Preview: the Mini XTC 9250-XL
Just in time for NAB, the 9250-XL is everything that a producer could want in a camera. The revolution has begun…

DIY DCP
How to make your own digital theatrical ‘print’ using Final Cut Pro, After Effects, guerrilla DCP software, pluck and maybe a little help from your friends.

Keying and compositing in NukeX
Skitch a ride up its steep learning curve using my template and tutorial.

G+

Viewfinders on cameras have always been an afterthought. Early film cameras didn’t have them at all: the operator simply pointed the lens in the general direction of the action. Later, when rotating mirrored shutters were invented, enabling a reflex viewing system, film camera viewfinders were almost useless: dark, flickering images. You could get a sense of the framing if you were lucky. A camera assistant did the actual focusing (by setting the lens’ focus distance) for this reason.

Early video taps (which re-photographed the viewfinders’s ground glass) let everybody see the same useless image. Viewfinders and video taps improved, of course, but even with a good video image of a good viewfinder, you still couldn’t see the movie; film emulsions “see” differently than a person does, interpreting the image and thus the story.

Because they couldn’t actually see what they were filming, early filmmakers had to create the movie in their minds, using, among other talents, their skill with lenses and film stocks. The part of the mind used for this sort of thing is the imaginative part, the part that you dream with or remember your grandmother. Cinema was invented during this time.

Video comes from TV, where what you see is more or less what you get. Video makers created the video on monitors: this goes there; this moves from this part of the picture to that part of the picture. The part of the mind used for this sort of thing is the pattern recognition part, the part you use to find a lost contact lens. Video was invented during this time.

Film and video were different for the audience, too. In a movie theater, a film projector shows 48 images a second (each film frame is shown twice) alternating with 48 black frames a second. This means that half the time, when you are watching a film print (if you can still find one), you are looking at a black screen. You must fill in the black frames of the story with your mind: how his hand got from there to there, what he was thinking during that flicker in his eyes, where the bullet went. The audience uses the same imaginative part of their minds to watch the movie that the filmmakers used to create it.

On video monitors, there are no black frames: each image is followed by the next, answering all questions, describing the image for you. No audience participation in the storytelling is required.

Movies made in a filmmaker’s mind and videos made on a monitor have tended to tell stories differently.

• Movies often have upstage and downstage entrances, while, in videos, characters tend to enter from stage left or right.
• In part because film camera systems had less depth of field than video camera systems, but also because of mind vs. monitor filmmaking, movies tended to have a deeper sense of space and be more dimensional. Videos tended to have a shallow sense of space and be flatter.
• Because of the large size and resolution of film displays as opposed to the small size and resolution of video displays, but also because the scale of the mind is far greater than the scale of a monitor, movies tended to have larger shots held longer so that you can see them whereas videos tended to have closer shots cut faster.
• Movies tended to have greater color depth and palette than videos for the same reasons.

The mind is multidimensional (x, y, z, time, memory, hope, regret…), while monitors are stubbornly 2D. The stories created with each tend to adjust accordingly.

Technology has changed: Film and Video had a child, and its name is Digital. We’ve got big imagers, small imagers, high-resolution displays, digital projection in movie theaters, RAW, log, LUTS, HDR and HFR. We’ve got people trying to pull focus on still photo lenses with cheap follow focuses. At every step of production and post-production, armies of people with computers can touch the image and have their way with it. Some of the viewfinders are very sharp indeed. Everyone has his or her eyes glued to the monitor.

Because the technology that we use to make movies has changed, with monitors at the center of each filmmaking activity, movies have changed: they are more like videos.

More 2D, with thinner stories; less meaningful (even, and maybe especially, 3D movies have 2D stories). Everything is compressed to fit into the tiny bandwidth of the monitors used by the filmmakers.

This is terrible for the poor actors, by the way: an actor wants a human interaction, a feedback signal, some connection with the Director after finishing a take. So, he or she looks up after hearing a muffled “cut!” only to see a circumspect camera operator and maybe the Director’s butt sticking out of the video village tent. Performances tend to adjust accordingly.

However, even though technology has changed a lot, filmmaking hasn’t changed at all: people still have to imagine the story into existence.

Some filmmakers can make cinematic movies on monitors. I suspect that these people have learned to rely less on the monitor and more on their minds and human interactions to create the movie. They resist the temptation the monitor offers to be lazy and cut corners, and inspire their team to do the same. Given the current obsession with gear, this is a pretty astounding feat.

The central part of a director or DP’s job is to artfully, gently (and sometimes firmly) lead the rest of the team to tell the story as movingly, as cinematically as possible. The monitor is often this person’s chief antagonist, a seditious malcontent bent on turning the movie into a TV show.

I’ve learned to hold my friends (the team) close and my enemies (the monitors) closer. I’m working hard to be a guy who can make cinematic movies using a monitor. And, even though the damn thing is like a ball and chain (try nipping across the street to catch a shot when the camera’s on a short Teradek leash or attached to an SDI umbilical cord), I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the village.

Here’s some tips for shooting cinematic movies using monitors:

• Block. Light. Rehearse. Shoot.

The Holy Quadrinity, the best practice for filmmaking, well established 100 years ago and never bettered. Ignore the camera when blocking: there aren’t shots yet, only the actors and Director telling a story. The DP and Director design the shots once the blocking is finished. Ignore the monitor most of the time when lighting, This is the more creative portion of the process: use your mind for that. By the time it gets to the camera rehearsal, the story has been mostly created; use the monitor as a tool for adjustments.

• Look with your eyes first.

Stand near the camera and look at the set, the lighting, the actors, the story unfolding. Use your understanding of cinema and your imagination to make the movie. This goes for the Director and the DP, who have more access to the camera, but also, as much as is possible, the DIT, Gaffer, Grip, Art, Props, etc.

• Look at the monitor after the creative work is done.

What is left is tweaking: cables are in the shot, spill from a lamp, etc.

• Show the monitor to everyone.

Hearing a voice call from the video village tent “ok, um, move the flag to your left…” just fetishises the monitor and gives it undue mystery. During the tweaking phase, I try to have a big monitor pointed at the set so that Art, Grip, Electric, etc. can do their own adjustments while looking at it.

• Hire a crew that you trust.

Communicate what you are trying to do, move them with the specific things that are important to you, and let them get to it. Then you don’t have to stare at the monitor, constantly keeping tabs on them.

• Place the monitors in places where they don’t have to be moved much.

This minimizes their impediment to new set ups. Wheels are good.

• Get a DIT

(Digitial Imaging Technician); he or she will watch the monitors (picture, wave form, etc.), taking care of problems so that you don’t have to.

One problem with monitors is that they slow filmmaking down to a crawl: the constant checking of the monitor to see if everyone has obeyed its 2D demands, the consensual decision making, the moving it around at each set up, the watching playback. Meanwhile, money is going up in smoke and the day is getting very long. Want to save money making a movie? All of these monitoring tips speed things up and improve efficiency. Think a good crew is expensive? Try a lame crew (and fixing it in post and possibly displeasing your client with the results). The savings from temperate monitor use will help pay for a better crew.

Yes, this requires skilled people. Yes, it requires faith in them. It requires a lot of the entire team: to create a movie in their imaginations, to minimize and handle the technicalities, relax and enjoy filmmaking. But the rewards are better movies that move people. Plus, it is a lot more fun making them.

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies and videos of all kinds and is based in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He owns seven monitors.

www.donstarnes.com

Also by Don Starnes:

Money
It’s the Producer’s Invitational Pancake Breakfast. Just as the producers are cutting into short stacks with their plastic forks, all of the doors are locked…

Blocking before coffee
Feature film: first day. The first-time director is 45 minutes late. Finally, he shows up: harried, stubbly, preoccupied and exhausted…

Ask me no questions and I’ll speak in no fragments
A sign taped to the door says “Quiet– filming.” This only makes you more nervous.

How to get trained
Hint: it isn’t by reading this.

Preview: the Mini XTC 9250-XL
Just in time for NAB, the 9250-XL is everything that a producer could want in a camera. The revolution has begun…

DIY DCP
How to make your own digital theatrical ‘print’ using Final Cut Pro, After Effects, guerrilla DCP software, pluck and maybe a little help from your friends.

Keying and compositing in NukeX
Skitch a ride up its steep learning curve using my template and tutorial.

G+