Rowing the Atlantic - the Film.

I'm procrastinating - but it has to be said, my procrastination is beneficial. Whilst it isn't exactly a quiet morning with a cup of coffee outside of a tiki hut by the sea (as this is the mental image of an ideal wake-up really) it is a relatively calm and collected one. Ideal for looking over some random fluff, browse through some rowing stuff and plot some film ideas.

Admittedly the film ideas stem from brief conversations last night about DaNnY's music video; and then wandering over to an old friend's myspace page. Vaitea has been part of the hip-hop scene for ages and she's always struck me as someone interesting to film - not to mention she's in Italy and my itchy feet have been itchier than ever these few months (years).

Then of course, there was the discovery of Roz Savage's Atlantic Row film, which is available on digital download at Journey Films. She's just been nominated for National Geographic's Adventurer of the Year. NG's website also has a link for gear of the year, which includes.... the Vibrams. And the rather cool looking Helmetcam. The showcase videos on the website look rather spiffy it has to be said, and could be worth a purchase methinks.

Next Reckless.

Things are still in the pre-production stage, but the actual content for the next Reckless project is definitely in the bag. With an assignment to make a music video, and having already featured DaNnY's music in Reckless Zen, it's only logical to meld the two together again and continue the story...

Check out DaNnY's tracks at his Myspace page, and watch this space for the production diary of the music video. Meanwhile, Danny is guesting with the Million Dollar Band at the Rugby 7's again. Two hours of stuff like this:

Production Diary: After the Cut - an Epilogue.

This post's been a long time coming, but it's been a 'wee' bit busy.

With Reckless Zen all wrapped up, and a couple months down, it's been a good time to watch it again and get a perspective on what went right, and what went wrong. The greatest challenge on this project was definitely working with the lacklustre equipment and the very squashy time frame. People have taken on animation projects and had months, if not a year to complete them, so trying to finish a short short in 8 weeks AND teach myself the basics of animation was very tight!

The push of time shows in some places of the film - and if I had extra time, I would have cleaned up a few areas, maybe reshot some scenes, but overall I'm pretty happy with my first animation attempt. There was a lot to learn aside from frames-per-second and lighting on a small scale. Eliminating flicker with still images was the first major hurdle (and probably still shows in one part thanks to having to band-aid a fix and not being able to clean it up in post) and after fiddling around with the white balance and exposure settings on the camera, I think it worked well in getting rid of obvious flicker.

As for the camera - you have to work with what you have, and working with what I had meant I had to get over the lack of HD and certain sparkles fairly quickly. During shooting I had severe doubts on how everything would turn out, but watching scenes in dailies would usually clear that doubt up quickly. That's definitely something I recommend to any indie filmmaker - no matter how small your production values, always watch a patch of what you've shot. It helps with perspective, keeps the adrenalin going, and lets you fine tune as you're going. Most importantly, it clears up that niggling doubt you may have about how things are turning out.

If I was to do Reckless Zen over, I would probably still keep my low production values, but have given myself two extra weeks at the very least to fix certain places. Maybe have started earlier so I could have added a couple of scenes that ended up being taken out. Still, it was a major learning curve, and I'm satisfied with how I tackled it.

Now on to the next curve...