This week I’m back to work on “Godkiller,” Halo-8’s first Illustrated Film. An Illustrated Film is a highly stylized animated movie that mixes original graphic novel illustrations with motion graphics and dramatic voice performances to create an edgy new style of story telling. Its like Liquid Television meets Ralph Bakshi, allowing us to tackle stories that we wouldn’t be able to do with video.
Halo-8 doesn’t have experience producing animated titles, so I didn’t have a post production work flow in place. I sought advice from a couple of people who work with traditional animation, then tried to adapt that work flow to Illustrated Films. The VO recording was handled by The Engine Room in Hollywood. We recorded the voice actors in separate sessions as “wild lines,” meaning there was no cut picture for them to reference. After the session, I would get the audio files organized by script page, which left me with the chore of compiling all the takes together. Basically, I gather each take of every line of dialogue and stack them on top of each other in the timeline. When all of the takes are compiled, I have what I call the “Take Matrix.” There can be anywhere from 2 to 12 takes of every line. By putting each take on a subsequent audio track, I can solo individual tracks and quickly hear every take of a line. After the Take Matrix is assembled, I go through every take and copy the select take to track one. When I’m done with that process, track one represents a completely compiled performance for that actor using the best read of each line. If I need to make tweaks, I can easily go back into the Take Matrix and audition other reads.
This was especially useful in working with Lance Henriksen’s performance. Lance likes to do long takes and fall into a groove. He’ll do a bunch of these long takes, kind of riffing on the dialogue and making subtle variations along the way. His compiled dialogue performance ended up with a lot of edits because I went deep into mixing and matching his variations, pulling individual phrases of a monologue from several different takes. It makes for a really dynamic voice performance.
"Take Matrix" for Lance Henriksen's performance in Godkiller.
Once you’ve got a Take Matrix for each actor, its very easy to combine all of the actors selected takes into the final dialog track for the film. You just go to track one of the Take Matrix for each actor, copy from the compiled performance on track one, and paste the dialog into the master edit. Its easy to make tweaks as necessary by going back to the Take Matrix and auditioning new lines.
I spent much of last week authoring the DVD for “POP SKULL,” a new release from Halo-8. Pop Skull is a manic, twisted, drug-infused and award-winning psychological horror film directed & co-written by Adam Wingard (“HOME SICK”), starring & co-written by newcomer Lane Hughes, co-written and co-produced by E.L. Katz (”AUTOPSY“), and produced by Peter Katz (”MORTUARY“). These guys made a great film in Pop Skull, and Director Adam Wingard went the extra mile on special features for the DVD. Special features can quickly turn into a wank, especially the formulaic publicity schlock that ends up on many DVDs from the major studios. But not for Pop Skull. Adam gave us seven short films, nine deleted scenes, on-camera intros for each of the deleted scenes, a short documentary featurette on the origins of Pop Skull, an audio commentary with himself and the film’s star Lane Hughes, DVD menu backgrounds using elements of from the film, and still photos of the lead actors for the DVD cover. Its all well crafted, and in perfect sync with the aesthetic of the film. Pop Skull is definitely a film geek’s DVD, and we are excited to be involved.
The DVD comes out July 28th from Halo-8. Here’s the trailer:
Early this this year, Halo-8 made an ambitious leap into the new medium of Illustrated Films. The first production is “Godkiller: Walk Among Us”, featuring the voices of Lance Henriksen, Daniel Harris, Bill Moseley, Nicki Clyne, Davey Havok, Justin Pierre, and more. I’ve been working on the Godkiller post-production on and off since February, and the first release is slated for September. You can read more about our release plans at Bloody Disgusting, and more about the movie at Godkiller.tv.
I want to say thanks to the people who helped bring GK to life. Its a small, talented team of enthusiastic professionals, and we couldn’t have done this without them. I’ll be writing more about the production process in later posts. If you’re curious, stay tuned.
In a previous post, I described how the proliferation of free video editing technology might create a new generation of Consumer-Producers willing and able to produce reasonable quality content at a fraction of today’s market rates. Who are these Consumer-Producers? They are the generation of kids raised on social media in an era where shooting HD video and publishing the edits to YouTube is common place. The widespread use of no cost editing software and affordable HD cameras by these Consumer-Producers will bottom out the market for low budget TV and web video production and the professionals that remain will work for little or no money per job. After I wrote the original post, a few people asked me what I thought would become of the current middle class of working video editors - the professionals who cut reality TV, magazine shows, news packages, how-to shows, etc. Will there still be a need for that content? Absolutely. In fact there will be massively more need for content as the delivery mechanism shifts away from networks and cable TV and onto the web. Web video on the TV is already a viable platform, and there will likely be a point in the near future where the viewer doesn’t distinguish cable TV content from Web delivered content. It will all be on-demand, and piped to your 50″ TV in High Definition. Sadly for the producer/editors working on that kind of TV content, the massive increase in production is going to result in lower production standards, reducing the skill level necessary to work in TV. The requisite skill level will fall until it meets the rising skill level of the Consumer-Producers, and we’ll have a new crop of pseudo professionals who won’t know that the previous generation of TV Producers and Editors were drastically over paid.
There is a fairly recent precedent for what I am describing. Some of you may remember the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It sounds totally boring, but it was a defining event that reshaped the television business. Basically, the big media conglomerates lobbied President Clinton and the Congress to reduce the restrictions on how many cable channels one company could own and operate. The President was happy to comply, and moguls like Rupert Murdoch were able to acquire and create as many cable channels as they could afford. In 1996, they could afford quite a few. That led to the wide proliferation in cable channels that clutter our dial today, and an explosion in content production to fill those channels. They needed it fast, they needed it cheap (compared to network TV budgets), and they didn’t necessarily care if it was good. So we had a massive increase in content demand, and a lowering of the delivery standards. This created a massive employment boom in Los Angeles, and there were jobs for every warm body, including me. Happening at the same time was the integration of desktop video into post production. Avid had been around since 1989, but it took 6 or 7 years for the technology to be broadly useful for producing TV content. Even at $100,000 per system, the Avid still represented a substantial savings over traditional post production, with a huge gain in editing productivity. By 1996 every production company in town was buying an Avid, but experienced editors were slow to adopt the workflow, creating a staffing vacancy filled by young editors who grasped the technology and worked for less money than their veteran counterparts. So there you go — less experienced editors employed for less money by the the virtue of cheaper, more accessible technology to service a boom in content demand.
Fast forward 15 years or so. We have another boom in video content production, and the technology of editing is about to become freeware. So what happens to the professional Producer/Editor when basic post-production skills become common knowledge? It occurred to me that the few Producer/Editors who were still paid for their services will be treated more like freelance writers, producing segments from home offices using web based editing tools and footage shared over the internet. These freelancers will produce and edit the bulk of TV and web content; magazine shows, clip shows, news stories, reality TV, short form webisodes, etc. Will any of them be Walter Murch? No, they won’t. But they will probably have the skills to produce and edit effective content on par with contemporary reality TV, except they’ll do it for a fraction of the money without creating overhead for the production. Basically, the business of post-production will become less about setting up a shop and arranging technology, and more about aggregating and managing freelance Producer/Editors working on a broad range of lower quality video productions to fulfill the boom in content. Yes, its a “long-tail” model. In the long-tail, aggregators win and producers lose, and the middle class of Producer/Editors gets squeezed out by better equipped freelancers with a greater understanding of the market.
If you want to stay in the business of post-production, but you’d prefer to live like a fat cat, then you can try to join the elite 1% who work on ultra expensive, high profile tent pole entertainment. More on that in a future post…
My company, Halo-8, produces niche video content for taste maker audiences, so our movies and shows don’t compete so directly in the entertainment marketplace with the big game consoles and the huge $200 million games. Now, if there were cooler, niche video games produced by smaller taste maker game developers, that would be tougher for us to compete against. That can’t happen, can it? All video games cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and market, don’t they?
I admit that directly comparing TV and movies with video games is a flawed argument. They are two very different mediums, and there will always be a place for the passive viewing experience of TV and movies. But consumers only have so many hours per day to be entertained, and the gaming industry is giving them a lot of cool reasons to spend less time with TV and movies. As producers of video content, how much audience share do we give away before we start to win them back with innovations of our own?
If you are a professional video producer/editor, there’s an 800lb. gorilla outside your door, and his name is “consumer-producer.” The launch of Apple’s Iphone 3 is just days away, and one rumor that has been more or less confirmed is the addition of video recording and editing. The editing app is rumored to be a stripped down version of IMovie. Just 10 years ago, video editing was the hallowed ground of TV professionals, filmmakers, universities, and the over zealous amateur. If you needed access to video equipment, you begged for a session in an edit bay and you groveled to the editors to run the equipment for you. Those days are gone. The hallowed ground of the edit bay was desecrated long ago by affordable desktop editing, and whatever is left is about to be buried like a land fill by the proliferation of free editing applications.
Here’s what this means: In the near future, video editing will be common knowledge. Within a couple of years, every cell phone will have basic video recording and editing capabilities. There will also be a proliferation of web based editing apps. Youtube and the like already have basic editing interfaces. Rest assured that those will improve to rival the basic functionality of Final Cut Pro, Vegas Video, and the rest. This will create a future generation of media savvy consumer/producers who know how to shoot and edit as well as they know how to Skype and Tweet. When editing video is no longer a specialty skill derived through formal training, the value of editors and their support staff will plummet and the fiscal dynamics of post-production will flip like a melting iceberg. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the photography industry. It is virtually impossible to start a career as a photographer today because affordable technology and the wide spread dissemination of photography skills have turned the production of commercial quality photographs into common knowledge. Are any of these new photographers Annie Leibovitz? No, not so much. But they’re close enough to drop the bottom out of photography budgets and severely reduce the perceived value of a good photograph. A substantial amount of the photographs we see in print and on the web were taken for free by young photographers who just wanted the credit. Now shooting for credits has become the default currency in that industry.
What does this mean for career producer/editors? It means there will be no more middle class in the employment ranks, and the real money in post-production will be made by exploiting the growing underclass of consumer-producers and their willingness to produce video content for a fraction of the current market value. All of this isn’t going to happen overnight, but I think you’ve got less than 10 years to reshape your post-production career into something sustainable.
Halo-8 started production on a documentary project last week. Its a typically low budget production, so we used the Panasonic DVX-100A as the main camera for shooting interviews. We’ve been using the DVX100A for almost all of our low budget productions for the last several years. I have a consumer HDV camera that I use to take video of my kids, so I decided to bring it along as a hand held “B” camera. Its a Canon HV20, and it has some cool prosumer features like 24p mode. I didn’t buy it for professional use, but I thought I’d bring it along and get some extra b-roll, and use this scenario to produce a real world test between HDV and DV. To get to the point, the images from the Canon HV20 were vastly superior. I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising that the HD images looked better than the SD images, but I assumed that the superior lens on the DVX100 would count for something. The only problem with the test was that the DVX100 wasn’t setup very well, so the picture came out about one stop too dark, and very flat. I didn’t pay enough attention to the other camera operator because I was dorking around with my HV20, but I think it’ll work out because the footage from the HV20 looks great, and the footage from the DVX100 is salvageable. Even if the DVX100 had been setup correctly, the HDV still would have produced a superior result. The fact is that neither camera produced a picture that was usable right off the tape. I usually do extensive color correction or color style work to my footage. For this test, I digitized the DV footage and the HDV footage through firewire. I used Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista to whip up a couple of color styles for both sets of footage. This is where HDV really proved invaluable. The HDV footage had substantially more latitude for color manipulation, meaning that I could make severe style adjustments to the whites, blacks and saturation values without noticeable distortion in the image. I tried that same kind of manipulation on the DV footage, and it became noisy very quickly. I’ve never edited in HDV before, so I’m not sure what the pitfalls may be, but in this basic test it was more or less like working with Apple Pro Res 422. The HV20 isn’t perfect, but we were very impressed that we got such image quality out of a $700 consumer camera, and we’ll be using it as the “A” camera on some of the interviews for the documentary.
Here’s a couple of loosely edited clips from the shoot with a variety of color styles applied through out the clip. The first few seconds of each clip shows the untreated footage. The interview subject is adult film star and punk porn director Joanna Angel. The documentary series is tentatively called “Unsimulated: Sex in Cinema.”
Footage from the DVX100. In this clip, Joanna talks about directing comedy porn.
Footage from the Canon HV20. In this clip, Joanna describes the social implications of starting her porn site Burning Angel.com.
As a television and video production professional, I’m a very late adopter of HD technology. I waited until it really didn’t cost any more to do HD than it did to do standard def, then I jumped in. That meant waiting for compression schemes to improve so that I didn’t need an expensive storage system, and for the price of deck rentals to fall. Its nice to let everyone else work out the kinks, then take advantage of that knowledge base. Its not a very forward thinking strategy, but I’ve been the early adopter on too many other occasions, and that’s a suckers game. The bottom line is that as producers, we all have to meet the demands of the project at hand. The cable TV work I’ve been doing in recent years didn’t have an HD delivery requirement, so there wasn’t any point in producing HD until we could do it without incurring additional costs. At Halo-8, where I make movies and lifestyle videos, the main delivery method is DVD, which is standard def. Yes, there is Blu-Ray, but I’m betting that Blu-Ray will be replaced by any number of video on demand services before I ever have the occasion to release a Halo-8 movie in HD. I’m also betting that affordable software for scaling standard def video into HD will improve imeasureably over the next couple years. I’m happy to be working in HD, but I’m glad I waited for the streamlining of the workflow and the drop in price.
