Adventures Of Atom Smith

This page links to various pages which relate to the process of film making, such as tutorials. They are listed off on the right over there.

Here is a still frame from a student film I was in called A Friendly Adversary. You can see the lighting effect that resulted from hanging some blinds between the light and me. Click the picture to see all of it.

I uploaded the image as an example of using lights for a night time feel in response to This Thread at indymogul. The basic setup involved only two lights. The key light was in the next room, shining through some blinds that had been attached to a metal stand, and it had a greenish filter on it. The fill light came from a light pointing into the corner, and pointing away from me with a red gel. Because it wasn’t shining directly on me, the red illumination was extremely soft and diffuse, aiding with the nigh-time “unlit” look.

This may give you some idea about the film.

This is Wild Bill, from the set of Fist Full Of Staples.

I’m not dead yet. Just a bit out of touch lately.

Fist Full Of Staples wrapped shooting this weekend. It’s directed by Nick Falls. It’s an office western. It’s somewhere in between “The Office” and “The Good The Bad And The Ugly.” I played Sam, and it was shot on 16mm film. This was my first 16mm production (as well as the director’s), so I am pleased to say that for the most part everything seemed to go quite smoothly. Except for when they set off the fire alarm and the fire department showed up in a big fire truck looking to put a fire out.

Which leads to the absolute sum total of my ultimate wisdom with regard to film making: No children, animals, old people, or fog/smoke machines. To this day, I have never actually seen a smoke machine work right on set. So, for anybody who might run across this bit of wisdom, and really wants to use a smoke machine despite it being a stupid idea:

-Do it outside. Outside is easier to vent than inside.
-If you must be inside, make sure you can easily vent the space. Really easily. Seriously, be on top of this. Smoke machines will not only set off the fire alarm, but also make it impossible to shoot the next take until you vent.
-Have fans. Fucking enormous giant fans. Many of them. Even if you are outside.
-Have a cold box setup. If that doesn’t make sense to you, you aren’t supposed to be using a smoke machine yet! Generally, people want a smoker for cool “ground hugging” fog effects. To accomplish this, you need to run the smoke through a cold box so that it stays near the ground.

Indymogul did a good cold box tutorial. Check them out at indymogul.com.

It’ll be a while before the film is developed and telecined (Put onto a video tape), so we won’t know for sure that nothing bad happened to the footage until then. But, I think it probably turned out quite well, and I’m looking forward to it.

Also, my main phone number is working again. If you tried calling me in the past week or so, you may have gotten a cryptic error message. It’s a SkypeIn VOIP line through Skype, which I paid for the next three months on. But, they dragged their feet on actually recieving my money (which showed up as having been taken from my bank account very quickly) for several days. So, the number expired for a while until I complained. Once I complained, they were able to realise that they did in fact have the money within a day. So, when Skype says “Pay Pal usually clears within an hour, and always within a day” they actually apparently mean “like a week, depending on how lazy we feel.” I dunno, maybe it was some issue between skype and paypal and actually wasn’t Skype’s fault. Still annoyed the crap out of me. The key point I’m trying to make is that my phone finally works again.

So, I was selecting a halloweeny themed costume for Freak Train last night. I had a Sheiky getup for a dinner theater gig this week, and leftovers from Talk Like A Pirate Day. So, naturally, I decided to go as an Islamic Pirate. I figured it’d be fun to use that comic costume mish-mash as a justification for talking about the first Barbary war. Unfortunately, I wound up running late, and didn’t manage to get a slot.

So, you should all spend a great deal of time researching the novelty of this little war. It was our first time dealing with radical Islamists backed by rouge states who were operating outside the scope of agreed international law. We handled it by paying them off and supporting them, right up until we turned around and had an undeclared war with them which was all the bloodier because they funded their side of the war using the money we had been giving them. (Sound familiar?)

The war even started when Islamists brought down a tall American structure. When his demands for ransom and tribute were denied, the Pasha of Tripoli “declared war” by walking down to the U.S. consulate and chopping down the flag pole out front.

Our conflicts with the Barbary Coast states even gave us one of the earliest documents explaining whether or not the American government is founded in Christianity. Modern politicians refer to us as One Nation Under God and insist that we have always been a Christian nation. The early leaders of our nation saw things a bit differently: “…the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;…” according to the 1797 Treaty With Tripoli. The treaty had unanimous support from the Senate, and was published in newspapers at the time. There is no record of contemporary complaints or public outcry. It was a hundred years after the start of the Revolutionary war before God started to gain any foothold in the government.

Over on the Indy Mogul forums, everybody is all a twitter about Halloween, so the community is posting all sorts of interesting seasonal tutorials. In particular, WesScog posted a quick “cookbook” style tutorial about doing a ghost effect. He used a green screen in order to accomplish it, which is usually the most convenient way to have a transparent character, but not always the best way. You typically want to use a locked down camera, can’t show the subject’s feet, and can’t have a convenient natural interaction between two different characters when you use the green screen technique. So, I dusted off some footage from Jon Stevenson’s Intercourse, PA which shows a character walking freely in the environment, feet and all, which was shot using a handheld camera.

Some composites are meant to be very subtle, and require a breakdown in order to explain to anybody, such as adding rain into a shot. This one should be a bit more obvious. You can’t just ask central casting to send you a transparent glowing guy.

So, here is my first quick test:
First Ghost Walk

Secondly, here is a full “screencapture” tutorial where I recreate the effect and try to explain what I am doing as I go along. I didn’t really plan what all I was going to say, so it is a bit rough, and I apologize for that. Also, I’m used to having Shake full screen, with an extra viewer on my second monitor. I shrunk down the window so that it’d be possible to watch the tutorial for people without huge monitors, and also to make the size a little smaller. Consequently, I fumble around a little bit, looking for things that aren’t where I am used to them, etc.

Full Ghost Tutorial

And, lastly, after I finished the tutorial, I added a few more keyframes to the rotoshape, and rendered the result. It’s very similar to the first test, but a slightly different color. Figured people would also want to see the actual result of following the tutorial.

turorial Result Ghost Walk

Those of you who know me, know that I’m pretty laid back. It takes a lot to really get to me, and I’ll usually forgive almost anybody. Maybe it’s that Buddhist upbringing, or maybe it is just because I find it more convenient to go with the flow. Regardless, it’s exceptionally rare that anybody annoys me enough to merit any sort of inclusion on “The Shit List.” Only a tiny handful of people have ever managed to annoy me enough that I would decline to work with them. Even then, I typically hope they will have good fortune in their endevours without me, and don’t go out of my way to speak ill of them.

Rachel Wear has managed to annoy me to such heights, that even as I ponder the situation as intensely as I am able, I can’t imagine any way in which I could be in more sour spirits at the present moment. Any further annoyance on her part, and I would have simply been content to ignore her, resulting in a net decrease in my own level of discontentment. It’s as if she has perfected the art. So, I don’t forsee any circumstance in which I will ever work with her, and if anybody ever comes to me asking my opinion of her, I won’t hold my tongue.

She is a student at Colorado Film School, and refers to herself as being with Devil Cat Productions. I met her when I went for an audition at CFS. Usually, I have found working with people at CFS to be a pleasant experience. With this audition, I was just asked to give a monologue. I wasn’t shown a script, given any information about what exactly I was auditioning for, and didn’t have a chance to discuss characters. This is probably the single worst way to run an audition because you can imagine an actor far more brilliant than myself picking a monologue that is unlike a character for which he would be suited, and then not being considered for the role. What’s more, since I am something of a working actor, I really only have an interest in playing interesting characters with interesting dialogue. That’s the only thing that’s useful for my demo reel, really. That’s why I was willing to drive to Colorado Springs to be in a student remake of a scene from Trainspotting. Or, why next weekend I’m playing a flashback scene of a priest from when he was a young alcoholic drug addict. Or why I played an uptight apartment dweller on a quest to have sex with an Amish woman. Consequently, I have absolutely no interest in being in a production I don’t find interesting. Student films don’t pay anything, so being in a production means donating my time and effort, and gas money to a student film maker. It’s a gift. At this point, I really don’t need to be in any more student films. I grace some lucky student films with the gift of my participation because I am a nice person.

I mean, I have had multiple days of shooting on three different features. I’ve worked on projects that were nationally broadcast, and my work is seen weakly via the Stream of Consciousness network. I’m not famous, and I’m no super star, but at this point I am well enough acquainted with enough people ‘in the biz,’ that it’s not exactly an exciting thing to work on some run of the mill student project. I’m not trying to sound like a braggart when I talk about the stuff I’ve worked on, I’m just trying to explain where I’m coming from at this point.

So, I auditioned for Rachel, by doing a monologue, and then leaving. At this point, she really hadn’t come across as particularly friendly or appreciative of my bothering to take time out of my day to come and give the monologue, nor appreciative of the time I had taken out of the previous day to look up an remember said monologue. Then, I don’t hear from her for weeks. Weeks.

Then, I get a call from her about a week ago asking me to be in a project with her for today. I was busy, so I wasn’t able to get back in touch with her immediately. I kept getting home after midnight because I’ve been working on a project of my own, and I didn’t want to call her that late because I expected it would have been rude. She didn’t even leave me with the name of the character she wanted to play, explain the type of project, or tell my a title. A few days later, I get an email with a script and a call sheet. I’m expected at the hospital set to play a Doctor in a PSA at 8:30 on a Sunday morning. I’ve never met anybody else with the audacity to just decide to put me on a call sheet for 8:30 in the morning on a Sunday without having yet confirmed that I’m available, nor having sent me a copy of the script, nor having told me which character I was being asked to play. My efforts were not being looked at as a gift. Even better, it was for some PSA about how you shouldn’t leave babies in dumpsters and I only had one line.

But, I’m a nice guy. Despite having been booked all day Saturday, and also booked this evening, by a lucky fucking coincidence I had nothing planned for this morning. Except sleep. And, I had been planning on working later last night on the script for my project currently in development, but had to be down unusually early for me to have a shot at being anywhere by 8:30 in the morning. Now, I brought this situation up with several people who’s opinions I greatly respect. Every one of them was genuine surprised that I intended to show up. I was apparently expected, and I didn’t want to leave an aspiring film maker out in the cold, so to speak. I tried calling Rachel Wear with Devil Cat productions a few times, asking her to call me back, so that I could talk to her and confirm things. She never called me back. Now, she had initially called me almost a month after my monologue reading. I called her back in less than a week. Consequently, as near as I can figure it, that makes me about four times as prompt as her. She has yet to return my calls to her from several days ago.

So, in spite of her not having called me back to confirm things, I woke up early this morning, drove all the way across town in cold, foggy, rainy weather with made the going annoyingly slow. I arrived at the location (a large hospital), parked, and called the number that the contact sheet said to call when I arrived. I walked around in the cold rain, looking for any obvious signs of a production, and was told “I’ll call you right back.” So, I continued walking around in the cold for a few minutes, got a call back, and was told that my part had been recast, and I wasn’t needed. I was naturally miffed at this point, but I asked where the location was anyway, so that I could poke my head in, say hello, and shake a few hands. At this point, I was more than annoyed with Rachel, but I expected she might have some crew that would be good to say hello to. Quite possibly some people I’ve worked with before who I am already friends with that I would have liked to say hello to. Also, I intended to, if there was a few moments of downtime, take Rachel aside and privately explain to her my perspective, in hopes that she could learn from it without having to put anybody in the awkward position of acting as a middleman for that conversation. I was told something to the effect of, “I’m sorry, the director says she’s very busy, and has told me not to tell you were we are shooting.” I didn’t write down the exact conversation. So, I tried, as politely and and respectfully, and directly as I could to explain my perspective on the course of events to the young woman with whom I had been speaking because Rachel Wear was “too busy.” I gave her my time and trouble, and she wouldn’t even let somebody tell me come in out of the rain. Maybe it’s a good things I never actually made it on set. I’d have been tempted to just spit in her face by way of an explanation of my perspective.

Occasionally, people ask me what I do. One of the answers is “compositing.” This usually results in the response, “Oh, I had no idea you wrote music.” In order to clear up some of the confusion, I have created a short explanation video showing a composite, and some of the elements that went into making it.

Read more to see it, and get an explanation. (edited Friday, Oct 12th — see the bottom)

Continue Reading »

So, my total income from Christian film now slightly exceeds that of my take from The Erotic Networks. Fun fact: while TEN uses lots of paper work and reciepts, the Christian film pays cash under the table. The producer carries a big wad of 50′s to pay the extras at the end of the day.

I’m also in a murder mystery improv show group. And, I met with a student director at CFS about a role in his next production. I’ll be the stoner drunk asshole before he becomes a priest in a flashback presented by the Devil. It sounds a lot like the Collector. It’s the second time I’ve run across a Colorado film maker trying to basically remake the Collector without having ever heard of it. It’s a mediocre Canadian TV show. You should watch a few episodes of it. That, and Charlie Jade. That’s another Canadian program, but it kicks more ass. (Despite the over the top color grading that I felt went about two steps too far in trying to look awesome.)

Need to bulk up my compositing demo reel.

‘Tis yet but the eve of the great day, and already there is a shiver twitchin’ in me bones. That fitful urge to search out a deck so that I can get to the swabbin is near to consume me. If I had me druthers, I’d head out to sea with the skull and the bones on me mast. Grog in me belly, I’d heave to and light out for the Spanish Main.

If ye are nae with me, it’s to Davy Jones’ Locker with ye after a long walk on a short plank. I have me eye patch, me cutlass, and tacky and gaudy plastic earring ready for tomorrow’s plundering.

Some reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_like_a_pirate

http://www.talklikeapirateday.com/wordpress/

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/songs1.html

And, of course, according to Wikipedia:
The holiday is of particular importance to Pastafarians (those who follow the teachings of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) who consider pirates to be absolute divine beings and the original Pastafarians.

So, this is truly a high holy day for the Pastafarians. Global Warming Respect.