The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

A long, tiring day, full of great art, good food, and lots of walking.  We went to the Vatican, including spending several hours in the Vatican Museum (which has amazing art), not to mention St Peter’s Basilica and the Sistene Chapel, visited the Pantheon, visited the Doria Pamphilj gallery, visited some random church, and had a marvelous dinner at the restaurant where they supposedly invented Fettuccini Alfredo (and the FA there was the best I’ve ever tasted).

Not much theme to the day, other than the great art.  I have developed a great fondness for the paintings of Caravaggio, and I saw three of his originals plus one very good reproduction.  But there was plenty of other good stuff.

But before I get into a bunch of pictures from the day, let me share a picture of one of the most important shrines in Rome.

That is the tomb of Queen Margherita in the Pantheon.  Margherita was the second queen of Italy.  It is because of her that we have the modern pizza, with cheese, tomato sauce, and basil (which represent white, red, and green – the colors of the Italian flag).  It was invented by a Naples chef who wanted to impress the queen, and even now in fancier pizzerias you will find that kind of pizza called a Margherita Pizza.

Now on with the pictures:

In this depiction of the geniuses of ancient Greece, Rafael decided to paint in all his artist buddies as Greek geniuses, including Michaelangelo, Leonardo, and himself.

There’s that woman I keep running into in Italy, this time at the Vatican.  Good thing she’s pretty.

My favorite Caravaggio of the day, one that’s in the Vatican Museum.  I love Caravaggio’s use of light to tell story – and it should be noted he’s a favorite of many cinematographers.

In Rome, Annubis is so cool that he wears a toga to all the parties.  He invited me along as his wingman at this one.

Meanwhile, Julie started tumbling down a truly awesome staircase.  (Okay, she didn’t really.)

In Rome, if you walk into a random church that you just happened to pass on the street, you’re likely to see all sorts of cool art like this.  Pretty neat.

Travel gives a chance to see and think new things.  But it can also bring thoughts of those we once knew.

This trip, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about my dear friend, Walter Neill, who passed away last November.  Walt loved to travel, and one of his favorite trips had been to Rome.  He also was a fond reader of this blog and frequently commented on my travel posts.  I’m sure that if Walt were still alive, he would be reading and commenting on these entries, and probably passing on valuable tips for travel in Rome.

I’m particularly missing Walt today because I have a story he would have loved that is in part about him.

Today, after visiting the Vatican, Julie and I popped into a minor art museum in Rome, the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj Gallery.  The Doria Pamphilj is a family of Italian nobility who collected art over the centuries.  Their family palazzo is now opened as an art museum, and it is well worth a visit.

As I was listening to the audio guide, I noticed an interesting coincidence.  One of the things that Walt and I shared over the years was role-playing games, games in which one plays characters in a scenario created by another player.  In one game that I ran set in Victorian England, Walt played a character based on a nobleman of the time, John Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury.

As I was listening to the audio guide today, I found that Mary, the real-life daughter of the real John Talbot, married the then Prince Doria Pamphilj.  Her portrait now hangs in the gallery.  Walt had played the father-in-law of the then Prince Doria Pamphilj.

Walt would have loved that little detail about his character.  And I would have loved sharing it with him, and finding some way to work it into the game.

Imagine that you wake up one fine morning and head downtown for a couple of meetings.  After a full morning, you’re just finishing lunch when you look past city hall and notice something strange. Is that mountain really supposed to be exploding?

That’s what happened at 1:00 PM on August 24, 79 AD, in the little city of Pompeii. I’m happy to report that it didn’t happen today: the smoke over Vesuvius in the background is only a low-hanging cloud. Phew.

A fascinating day, full of fascinating ruins, lovely preserved art, and a constant weird feeling of what it must have been like on that August day so long ago.

We not only visited Pompeii, we climbed Mt Vesuvius itself. Here’s the crater, which is bound to erupt again one of these days.

And lest you doubt that it’s still live, here’s some steam rising from part of the crater:

Note that there are several hundred thousand people living in the red zone.  When – and that’s when, not if – Vesuvius goes up again, it’s going to kill a lot more people than it did back in 79.

Any trip with Julie is going to involve the occasional Art Attack.  This time, she’s got a strange little book that gives her little assignments.  One was to stomp some dirt onto a page.  She of course chose volcanic dirt.

But that wasn’t the only art up on the mountain.  On the road to the drop-off point, before the last steep hike up to the crater, there’s several odd and lovely things  made of volcanic rock.

And special bonus for the day, with a special call-out to my WWII-history-geek friends: on the way to Pompeii from Rome, the bus made a bio-stop in sight of a little monastery named Monte Cassino. Yes, that Monte Cassino. (Clearly, they have rebuilt it since 1944.)

Shockingly, it’s been three years since Julie and I went on our last big trip, our voyage to Egypt. Further, a year and a half ago, Andy went to Italy. A year ago, Kate and Diana went to Italy. It’s getting so that Julie and I are left out of the family conversation. All of which is to say, going to Italy has become a necessity.

So here we are now. After a day of many transit delays, we are here.  (Yes, many transit delays.  Late planes, missed connections, screaming babies on red-eyes.  All the joys of modern travel, with the only consolation being that a hundred years ago it would have taken a week-long ocean voyage to get to Europe, not an annoying day of airport roulette.)

In any event, we had a nice afternoon wandering around Rome near our hotel. Though all in all, some of the things we saw were a bit disappointing. For example:

The Trevi Fountain is a lot less impressive when there’s no water in it.

The Spanish Steps lose some of their romance when there’s several hundred people sitting on them.

Augustus’s Tomb is a pile of dirt with some trees growing around it.

But Rome does have its consolations, chief of which is that everywhere you look, there’s:

– An amazing statue in front of a old church:

– A relic of the Roman days (in this case, Marcus Aurelius’s column):

– A cool fountain, many of them with actual water:

– A beautiful woman standing in front of a bunch of latin inscriptions:

Though I have to admit, the thing that I find most entertaining in Rome (other than the beautiful woman, anyway) is the way they incorporate their ancient history into their day-to-day existence.  For example, this is what a drain cover looks like in Rome:

And this is the city’s Logo on the side of police cars:

(For those not up on their Roman history, that’s the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, a key detail in  Rome’s founding myth.)

And of course, there’s gelato.  Lots and lots of gelato, sold on every corner.

So all in all, it’s a good place to visit.  And we’re just getting started.

I’ve got a new website all about the movies I’ve been making. It’s http://crimesoftheart.com. That will be the home of all my movies, thoughts about my movies, and future blog posts about filmmaking.

I’ll still be posting here about things in my non-film life, but when I have something to say about movies, I’m going to say it over there.

After all the fun I’ve had doing 48 Hour Film Festivals, I decided I really wanted to try doing one by myself.  Do the writing, the directing, the camera work, the sound, and even all the acting.  And by myself, of course I mean with Julie’s help.

Looking at their schedule, I found that Richmond was holding a 48HFP, just a little ways down I95 from home.  So I entered.

Here’s the director’s cut of what we produced. By director’s cut, I mean this is not the version that I completed in 48 hours and submitted, but rather a version that I spent another week editing.

Flowers for Daniel from Joe Dzikiewicz on Vimeo.

I am happy with the result. I think it’s the best movie I’ve made yet. But I learned a lot of lessons, and I think there’s at least one major flaw in the movie. More on that when I have time for a post-mortem post.

I’m working on a video project that requires one actor to play multiple roles.  Those roles interact with each other, and there’s going to be times when we’re going to want multiple versions of the actor on screen at the same time.

I’ve been wrestling with how best to do this.  After watching one of the films in the Best Of of the DC 48 Hour Film Project, I noted how they did something similar.  (I think the movie in question was “Miss Fortune” by Crowded Elevator Productions, but I could be wrong on that.)

Here’s a test clip that uses the method that I think they used.  Comments to follow.

Quote of the day goes to Kate, who upon seeing this clip said, “Now you know how we all feel.”

This was fairly simple.  Put the camera on a tripod, lock down the tripod, make sure there’s sufficient depth of field and everything is in focus, and start running the camera.  Stand in the first position, act a bit, move to the second position, act some more.  All done in one take.  Suck the footage into Premiere Pro, break it into two clips, one with Joe 1, one with Joe 2.  On one clip use the Four Point Garbage Matte effect, cut out the half of the image that doesn’t have Joe in it.  Put that clip on top of the other one.  Move the clips around a bit so the timing looks reasonable.  And Voila, all done.  We now have a simple way to have the same actor appear twice when no overlap is required.

A couple notes on this:

• Making sure that the camera is exactly the same in the two clips is crucial.  You need a locked down tripod – no handheld on this one!  No dolly action either, at least at my current skill level.  (I suppose if I were really good with my timing, a dolly move would be possible.  But one step at a time.)
• Blocking is also crucial.  Joe-1 had to keep to his side of the shot.  It would be possible to shift the keying so that the two Joes could alternate sides of the shot, but that would require careful attention to blocking.
• It would not be possible to have a third actor walk from Joe-1’s side to Joe-2’s side.  Thinking about how to do that continuity correct makes my head hurt.  (Though that could be done with green screen – see the next experiment for some hints on how this might work.)

But what if you want visual overlap?  Welcome to the wonderful world of Green Screen.  I bought a giant role of chroma green paper at the Calumet going-out-of-business sale.  (I’m going to miss that store.)  Chroma green is the green used for green screen.  A couple years ago, I bought a stand for photographic backgrounds which is designed to hold giant rolls of background paper.  So I put the roll of green paper on the stand, set it up in my basement, and produced the following:

I locked down the tripod, set the camera settings, and set up lighting.  I filmed myself twice in front of the green screen.  (Well, four times: once for each scene.)

But honestly, I wasn’t completely happy with this.  If you look at the figures of me, you’ll notice that there’s a light green around my edges.  That’s because of the bright lights I had on the green paper.  That light scattered and backlit me.  I used the forest background image in order to make it look natural, but I won’t always want to do this against a  greenish background.

So I read up on green screening.  It seems like the secret to back lighting is to make sure there is plenty of room between the foreground figures and the green screen.  I tried it again with more space, and this time outside so that I did not need any artificial light on the green screen.  Here’s the result.

Now that’s more like it.

A few lessons from this go-round:

• In both of these cases, lighting is crucial.  I made it easier for myself by filming the green screen and non-green screen versions in the same place with the same light.  It would have been a huge challenge to get the lighting right if I had filmed the green screen pieces in a studio.  I’m glad I’ve got a green screen background that I can set up where I need it – it makes life ever so much easier.  Doing this outside opens up the possibilities of shifts in light: I clearly want to make sure that I film the green screen and non-green screen versions close in time, and I need to hope that no errant clouds pass over the sun for one of the shots.
• Blocking is also critical.  I should have marked where I stood in the first version.  I filmed punched-Joe first with the green screen background, then removed the screen and filmed punching-Joe. But I didn’t mark where I had stood as punched-Joe.  The first time I tried filming punching-Joe, I was off by a foot or two which made the sizes greatly mis-matched given that I was using a short focal length.  I had to do another couple of takes trying different placements.  As it is, the placement wasn’t perfect: punching-Joe is a bit smaller than punched-Joe.  When doing this in the future, I’ll be more careful with blocking.
• Timing is important.  I had thought of filming two punches, but there was no way with one person doing this that I would be able to time two punches.  Lining up a single action between the two clips isn’t too difficult: making sure the timing was correct between the two would have been more than I could manage without some significant help.
• Having two people to handle the background is important.  The roll of paper is around 10 feet long.  I tried to do it myself, but at one point I had to move the green screen background.  It was painful, so I pulled Julie in as a grip.  Thanks Julie!
• Given that I want the green screen fairly far back in order to avoid light spillage, shot angles is a potential problem.  I’ll need to use a long lens for that.  I’ll also need to make sure I have plenty of space where I’m filming.  I can also use the Garbage Matte effects to remove some non-green-screened stuff from the green screened version as in the first experiment, though in that case I’ll need to be careful that the foreground figure doesn’t stray away from the green screen background.
• Blocking wasn’t a problem with the first experiment, when I had the chair in a fixed location as a fixed point to film around.
• To handle the green screening itself, I used the Premiere Pro Ultra Key effect.  I played around with some of the settings under Matte Generation to improve the keying.  I suppose I could have tried playing with some of the other settings to improve other stuff – I’ll wrestle more with that when I’m doing this for real or in future experiments.

All in all, I’m happy with the results of these experiments.  I feel confident that with these two approaches in my toolbox, I’ll be able to get the effects I need for my project.

Another 48 Hour Film Project.  Here’s “Quietus”, made on the weekend of May 2-4, 2014:

The required elements: Silent movie, an event planner named Sam or Samuel Canterbury, an envelope, the line “You can trust me.”

I directed, but I had a large cast and crew of talented people.  Watch the movie, see the credits, applaud all the fine efforts by everyone.

I think it’s the best movie I’ve made yet.  That’s in part due to the fact that I am getting better at visual story-telling, and in part due to the efforts of that wonderful cast and crew. It made a huge difference having help – this is a far cry from what we had for “Shutdown,” in which we had a cast of two and a crew of three.  What a relief that I didn’t have to do camera work (only two of the shots in the final were mine).  What a relief that I had an assistant director keeping track of things.  What a joy to have a terrific combat coordinator, wonderful help with sound and editing, people stepping up to provide everything from graphic designs to fake blood.

I should note: the above is not the competition cut.  I spent some more time in the subsequent week editing stuff, so this is the director’s cut.

Julie and I watched “The Haunting” the other night.  This is an excellent haunted house movie made in the late 60’s.  One thing that caught my eye was the interesting distortions in the movie and the way that everything seems to have greater depth than you’d expect.  This is a clear example of use of wide-angle lenses.  You can see some of the effect of that in the pictures of the dolls that I posed recently in how the shorter lenses led to a greater visual depth.  But I decided to do another experiment, this time looking at the impact of focal length on portraits and visual distortion.

Here’s some photos of me taken with lenses of various lengths.  In each case, the picture is uncropped: in order to get basically the same composition, my lovely assistant Julie stepped further back with the longer lenses.

24mm lens

35mm lens

50mm lens

70mm lens

Note in particular how my nose seems to shrink as the lens grows longer.  And how distorted the 24mm version is, though there’s still noticeable distortions in the 35mm one. Note also the size of those jowls – man, I need to lose weight!

I can’t wait to figure out a way to use this in a movie!

Here’s a second experiment.

The question for this experiment is related to taking a picture in low light.  Specifically, I want to know if there is any difference between taking a low-light picture with a relatively low ISO and using post-processing to increase the exposure and taking the picture with a high ISO and minimal post-processing.  To test this, I took the same low-light picture at ISO’s ranging from 200 to 25,600, a truly absurd ISO but one that my camera supports.  For the pictures at lower ISO, I then increased the exposure in Lightroom to the point where they were roughly equal brightness.  (The lowest ISO pictures could not get as bright as the others – it would have taken too much brightening.)  Here are the results, from lowest to highest ISO with each jump being a full stop.

To my eye, especially when looking at larger versions of these pictures, there is a distinct decrease in noise when going from 200 to 400 to 800 ISO, and some decrease in noise at each level after that, but it’s minimal.  So it appears that the in-camera brightening is better at avoiding noise than is Lightroom’s.  But the difference is negligible once you pass a certain threshold.

In other words, trust to the camera ISO where possible, but it’s not a disaster if you need to brighten in post.  And of course, using only the in-camera ISO raises the possible problem of blowing out highlights, so since there isn’t much difference in using ISO setting and post-processing, it might be better once I’m close to err on the side of a lower ISO.

This post includes information from my previous post on what I’m reading, the Movie Edition.  But this one organizes books by topic.  It also includes only my favorites of the books I’ve read on making movies.  Consider this my recommended reading list on various topics in movie making.  This list may evolve over time as I find more books of interest.

Starting from the start of the process:

Scriptwriting

– Screenwriting 101 by Film Crit Hulk.  Film Crit Hulk is an film critic who writes in the persona of the Incredible Hulk.  From reading his stuff, it’s also clear that he works in the movie business in something related to screenwriting.  In this book, available only as an e-book, he has put together a bunch of stuff from his blog, all about constructing stories and films.  I really like his approach, which does not rely on formula.

– The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri.  More about playwriting, but applicable to screenwriting as well.  A nice solid approach to making sure that there’s drama in your dramas.

Shot planning

- Setting up your Shots: Great Camera Moves Every Director Should Know, by Jeremy Vineyard.  This does the best job of the various books I’ve seen on laying out the basic camera shots and moves – pans, tilts, dolly moves of various sorts, etc.

– Master Shots vols 1-3, and Master Shots the various iBooks versions, by Christopher Kenworthy.  I absolutely loved these.  Each of vols 1-3 look at 100 shots from various movies and discuss the effect they have and how to make the shot.  Then the e-books are even better, though they don’t have as many shots – each one takes 25 of the shots from the other books, includes the information from the paper books, and then Kenworthy re-made the shots with actors.  The iBooks versions includes the video of the shot, then includes a version of the video with Kenworthy providing voice-over commentary discussing it.  All in all, consider this a set of cookbooks of useful shots.  But even better, after going through these, you start to understand what makes for good shots.  These books gave me a better understanding of setting up shots than anything else I’ve come across.  Special bonus: I sent Kenworthy a question about this (his email is on his website) and he sent back a nice friendly note that answered my question.  So special bonus.

Directing

– Making Movies by Sidney Lumet.  Lumet directed a whole bunch of Hollywood pictures in a bunch of different genres.  In this book, he takes you through all the steps he goes through in directing, from selecting a project to what he does to help market the movie.  Really quite excellent on directing.

– Directing Actors by Judith Weston.  A very nice book about how one should give direction to actors to get the best results from them.  I’ve learned a lot from this.

Cinematography

- Light, Science, and Magic by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, and Paul Fuqua.  Strictly speaking this one’s about photography, not video.  But it’s applicable, and excellent.  For my way of learning (I prefer to go from theory to practice), this has been the best book on photography I’ve ever read.  It explains how light behaves, then goes from that to detailed discussions of how to light and photograph different types of subjects.  Absolutely terrific, and strongly recommended if you want to get serious about photography.

– Cinematography by Blain Brown.  I loved this book.  It’s a detailed description of the elements of cinematography, including detailed discussions of the technologies involved.  I learned things here about photography that I didn’t know.  A bit dry at times, but amazingly informative.

Editing

– In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch.  Wonderful philosophical stuff, a great theory of editing, lots of interesting stuff.  A quick read as well.  This was the only book about editing I came across, but it is a good one.

Hollywood

– Adventures in the Screen Trade  by William Goldman.  William Goldman’s an incredibly accomplished screenwriter whose works range from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” to “Princess Bride.”  This book gives a gossipy discussion of how Hollywood makes its movies, including detailed stories of the films he’s made.  Again, not much help for the actual making of movies, but quite entertaining.