Filmmaking

First real go at editing Emily:

Forum Posting at the IQ:

http://filmmakeriq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=2134

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Sooner or later this little personal blog is going to need a face lift
Until then here’s the first part of my article on Casting that I posted over on the IQ forums

http://filmmakeriq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1966&p=13043&ipr_p=13043#p13043

After a whirlwind two days of posting on casting sites and Craigslist I have managed to tentatively book 84 people for auditions over two days. Now I’m sure I’ll loose a few of them for one reason or another, but I have a feeling I’m going to have a decent pool to select from.

And I’m sure I’ll continue getting emails over the next few days even though I’ve pulled my ads from the sites.

It’s going to have to be a quick hurry-up get them through audition which is rather unfortunate but I suppose the way it is in the business. I’ve tried to schedule 3 folks every half hour thinking that’s 10 minutes each – subtract the greeting and basic questions, that’s maybe 5-7 minutes per person.

My lesson from this is: there are more actors willing to do this than you think. I started out panicking because I only gave people a week’s notice – and I ended up closing pulling the ads after about 2 days.

Here’s some other things I’ve learned.

ExploreTalent.com is probably the biggest casting site out there. When you post a listing, it has to be approved by a human so that might take about 24 hours. They have pretty much a zero tolerance on “nudity” – I ran into a snag with them when one of my characters needed to be in Lingerie. I changed it to a bikini and it floated just fine (go figure).

ExploreTalent has a neat Auto Submit feature which certainly saves time. It looks at your requirements for your role and automatically chooses the people that fit your criteria. Then in one click, you can send off literally thousands of invitation.

The problem is… then you have a thousand people emailing you. And sometimes the auto function misses out on the location of the actor. I had actors contacting me from NYC for my LA/Orange County film.

So next time around – I’d forgo the auto submit feature and just hand pick the people I want to email.

Another annoyance with ExploreTalent is there’s no way to locate one talent’s page on the site. Actors would email me saying I invited them but I didn’t know who they were.

NowCasting.com is not the biggest casting site but I find that their selection of actors probably the most professional. There’s also a live person that checks the casting calls.

With NowCasting, you can’t search the database and submit your role to actors like you can with ExploreTalent. The actors find you.

But what I REALLY like about NowCasting is there Scheduling features. You can take the actors on your list and schedule them either all together as one cattle call, individually, or by roles. There’s also options for creating call sheets of your selected actors.

Those are the two big casting sites. I popped an ad on Craigslist as well… it’s come and go with CL… who knows… Sometimes you get serious inquiries, sometimes it’s drive by emails.

So next week should be interesting. The most I’ve had at an audition before is 20, so this will be something new.

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I wrote this piece for FilmmakerIQ.com

Whether you’re going to do the editing or you’re handing off to someone else – there’s a lot of little things that we sometimes forget to do on location that would have really made editing a whole lot easier. Here are 13 little things you can do on location to alleviate some of the nasty hang-ups during editing.

Read the entire article

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And MicroX2 filp accessory.

For those of you that don’t know, the Redrock Micro is one of many 35mm adapters that allows you to utilize 35mm still camera lenses to work with your video camera. The advantage is you have a lot of room to play with depth of field.

I decided to try shooting test charts to judge the sharpness of this set up. This is the first time I’ve shot test charts and I didn’t have a lot of space to work with but here are my results. If there’s something I should be doing with the tests – let me know.

The control:
Ex1 stock lens (no adapter)

Now a couple lenses I tried out:

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the setup. The Encore version of the adapter is much more sensitive to light – making shooting indoors a much more feasible option now. Edge to edge sharpness is better though not perfect and that may be caused by a huge number of things (misalignment, poor lenses) and it’s a huge improvement to what I had before this upgrade.

Most importantly, the image is now right side up… that makes life a lot easier.

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