November 27th, 2011 by Glendyn

Happy Birthday Rosebud!

November 24th, 2011 by Glendyn

Been spending the week sitting in the dark, colour grading guys sitting in the dark.

Most our conversation about the grade has been about how ‘dark’ we can make ‘the darkness’. I wrote  a few months ago about how black a mine really is and I know if we were grading for ‘cinema’ we could perhaps go a sniff  darker than we have. But as Beaconsfield is for broadcast we have to take into consideration that people may watch the film, heaven forbid, with a light on or even wierder, they may not be watching the film on a ‘broadcast calibrated monitor’.

Regardless, I’m really happy with the direction the grade is heading and it feels great to be on this side of a long production schedule and to be almost ‘finished’.

November 21st, 2011 by Glendyn

When I first saw the clip below, my first thought was how useful this would be to see if how effective your visual storytelling is, to asses composition and to study how an audience views a sequence.

My second thought was how all the marketing folk will use it to asses if an audience is staring at their hamburger/cereal box/car long enough.

And my third thought was how incredible Paul Thomas Anderson’s  has ‘blocked’ this scene! The way the camera leads you to reveal the other characters and open up the dialgogue between those characters.

Either way this is pretty bloody fascinating!

‘This is an excerpt from There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). 11 adult viewers were shown the video and their eye movements recorded using an Eyelink 1000 (SR Research) infra-red camera-based eyetracker. Each dot represents the center of one viewer’s gaze. The size of each dot represents the length of time they have held fixation.’

More info and research examples from TheDIEMProject here.

Thanks John Brawley!

November 15th, 2011 by Glendyn

Spent some time in Sydney over the last week with Stephen Rae who is composing the soundtrack for Beaconsfield. Being a story that takes place predominatley underground, early conversations were about ‘elemental’ and ‘organic’ sounds. The sound of rocks, air and water and music that forms in and out of the environment. For the past few weeks (amongst our discussions about cameras, watches and motorbikes) we have been working through demos and musical sketches and these ideas are now becoming more defined.

Through Stephens sonic explorations we have settled on the clarinet as one of the key instruments. I must admit I’ve never been drawn to the clarinet, I tend to steer clear of  ‘reed instruments’ in general, (except I’m quite fond of the oboe), but  the way Stephen is using it is really different. Then I realised there is a whole album I love that uses the clarinet in a beautifully textured and ambient way. So I’m really looking forward to see how it all keeps progressing.

Below: Sydney mid afternoon storm, recording studio flowers and Peter Jenkin (lead Clarinet of the Sydney Opera) recording clarinet sounds for Stephen to compose and edit with. 

November 3rd, 2011 by Glendyn