What I Saw

An assignment I received quite awhile ago to tell the story of a poem without using people in any of the shots. The hardest part of this project for me was finding a poem that I liked. It had to be between one and five minutes and it needed to tell a story. I chose a poem called Sidewalk Chalk.

I really connected with it and thought it told a beautiful story. I spent the next few days storyboarding and soon after began filming. My vision was to have lots of shots of sidewalk chalk being washed away in the rain. I went home on a night it was supposed to rain and drew some elements I wanted to implement. Of course it didn't start raining until 3am so it was safe to say I didn't get the shots I wanted. I then began to rethink my idea. After an aborted attempt to come up with a new idea, I took a step back.

About a week later I was hanging with a fellow cinephile and I was in the mood to go drive around in the country with the windows down listening to indie music and dancing in fields. And that's what we did. We just took our camera and ran around with it. No tripod, no white balance, no focus, nothing. When I got back to school and looked at the footage, I knew that that was what I wanted to use. I was trying to find a poem and a poem on the album cover of a band I really liked popped into my head. I grabbed the audio and a camera and for the next few days I just filmed what I saw. And I liked what I saw. And this is what I saw.

And with what I saw, this is was I made.

Mo' action Mo' bytes

Codecs are a seemingly complicated concept, so I;m going to try to make it as easy and painful as possible because it's good to know this kind of stuff. I got lots of my information from this video: 
How Codecs Work - Tutorial from David Kong on Vimeo.
It's by a respected contributor on a popular film tutorial website. Here's the breakdown.

First of all:
It understand codecs, you need to understand the difference between codecs and containers. Containers are files like .mov and .avi, they store codecs like h.264 and DNxHD.

Within the category of codecs there are several kinds. There are capture codecs that come in formats like h.264. When shooting, you want as much info possible. There are also editing codecs in formats like DNxhD, in which you would want no temporal compression. From there  you would go onto delivery and archival codecs. I know that this is all still super confusing with new words and concepts, so I'm going to try to clear up the confusion by going through this one chunk at a time.

Bit Depth
Bit depth is the number of values between light and dark. A high bit depth is a super smooth image, a low bit depth is a more choppy image like in pop art. 8-bit means that there is 256 possible values for red yellow and green, so more color.

Chroma Subsampling
Lets say you have four yards in a square. All of the residents of these yards want to use the same landscaper because it would save money, so they all chip in a hire the bottom left yard's landscaper. Now all tho their lawns look like the yard on the bottom left. That would be a 4:2:0 ratio. On the other end of the spectrum there is a 4:4:4 ratio where all pixels maintain their color. Chroma subsampling is minimizing the amount of space that color takes up.

Spatial Compression
This is another way to shrink a file size. This algorithm takes blocks of an image that are the same color and save it as one color. Sometimes this is can be add a "blocky" look to your image.

Temporal Compression
This is a inter frame technique which saves space over a long GOP (Group of pictures) as opposed to all all of the terms we have been using. Chroma Subsampling and Spatial Compression are intra frame techniques so all of the space saving done inside a single frame. Temporal Compression is when the background of several frames are the same and only the difference is saves. This helps with storage because you don't need to restore the image.

Lossless vs Lossy
Lossless means you don't lose any data. They are usually files types like .zip and .rar. Lossy means you are losing info. Most stuff is lossy. But this isn't a bad thing. It just means you are saving more storage.

Bit Rate
Bit rate is essentially how much data a codec uses. Usually it is measured in kilobits/megabits per second, or kbpm/mbps. This is not to confused it megabytes. Here are the conversion rates. 1 Byte = 8 bits. 1000 bits= 1 kilobit. 1,000,000 bits= 1 megabit. The more action you have in your footage, the more bits you need.


So that's pretty much it. Hope this helped with your understanding of Codecs.

Defining e-Comm

Communication is the ability to express ideas. Communication doesn't have to be vocally or through written instructions. Communication can be expressing something through a shade of blue, a specific font, a image of an old white picket fence, and subtle shake of the head. The tricky thing about communication is that people are unable to see things in ways that differ from what is normal. People don't see the melancholy feeling that emits from that shade of blue, or the sophistication in that font, or the beauty of the old fence, or the love in the shake of the head. If more people learned to communication in more creative ways, then we would have a more creative world. 

Collaboration is the sharing of ideas. It's the messy scribbled script on a dry erase board. It's the discussion getting louder and louder and louder until it reaches it's crescendo and starts to die back down. It people talking over each other, but not in a bad way. It' s an idea starting as a small idea and ending as a skyscraper, but you can't make skyscrapers on your own, you need help, you need collaboration. 

Innovation is doing things the way they aren't supposed to be done. It's thinking not just outside the box, but out of this world. Innovation is fire. Innovation is the wheel. The Internet. The mobile phone. Without innovation, we can't move forward. 

Design is taking what you have in your head, and displaying it somewhere else. When you finally feel like your idea is good enough, and you show it to yourself or the world. Design is making visions into reality.

Story Vs. Plot

Being an aspiring filmmaker, I get to learn a lot about stuff like camera angles, exposure, and plot vs. story. When asked for my position on story vs. plot I had my immediate answer, but after doing some research, I realized that it's not black and white.

I always had the preconceived notion that story has to do more with the soul behind the story and plot is the more technical portion. Here's my reasoning.

When someone sees your totally sick scar on your arm, they ask "what's the story behind that?" Or when you are hanging with some friends and a guy walks by and they all look at one girl in your group and you think to yourself what's the story behind that? Never once have you told your friend who just went out and spontaneously adopted five dogs, "yeah, that's got to be a good plot." When someone gets engaged, whats the first thing you ask? "How did it happen? Tell me the whole story" Story is all about the background and all of the emotion and life that went into a happening. Children read storybooks, not plotbooks. Kids don't ask their parents to tell them "just one more plot." Not saying that plots aren't important. Because they are. When your dad tucked you in when you were seven and you asked him to tell you the same story about the princess he told last night, the reason he can't remember how it goes is because it had no plot. 

Plot is the skeleton of the story. It does all of the hard work. It ensures that everything makes sense. It makes sure that there are no holes and every thread is tied at the end. 

A perfect example is that of a love letter I bought at a antique store (long story for another time). In this letter from 1963, Mr. Bill wrote about his life and it's happenings to Mrs. Janice. When I purchased this letter, I was expecting this crazy love story of these helpless romantics but it was just little inside jokes. I'm sure they would make a beautiful movie, but I don't have the story, I just have the plot. "I came to look for you on Sunday but your parents said you had left." "George just got from Vietnam. God Bless him." "Make sure you work hard on those studies." This is the plot of Bill and Janice's story, but since I don't have the story it makes no sense. That why it is essential to have both story and plot.

We all have a story to tell, but we also need a plot, or we will just become a bedtime story.