3d Animation

Hello again and welcome back. This is Michael from Film Real Studios. This week I finished a rough cut of the movie and have sent some stuff off to our sound department and our vfx department. So they are going to get working heavily into that. We also shot all of the pick ups we needed so my next step is going to be all of the ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement.) I also will be running through the movie about a hundred times so I can tighten all of the shots. So everything flows well.

In the interim though Adam, Jared, and myself have talked about doing a sort of R and D project. We decided with this project we wouldn't limit ourselves on any concept or Idea so we are going to go full out. It is basically meant to push us too our limits and beyond. So one of the primary things we are going to do i learn to do some 3d animation. So we decided that we would all go ahead and learn Houdini.

I am really the only one in the group who has no experience with any type of 3d animation or 2d computer animation for that matter. Jared and I have at least started taking some online classes from 3dbuzz.com. For me though I find it hard to just sit and watch a class online with out really being able to follow along and do what he is doing myself. So I often get bored and will go and mess around with the program on my own. So I watch enough of the tutorials to get a some what basic understanding of the program. I finally got bored though and decided to strike off on my own to see what I could do. Well I have done this before with other programs and I have to say most of the time It either took me forever to figure out what to do or any thing I tried to do was basically a disaster.

Surprisingly this time seems to be different within a couple of hours of messing around I have some pretty good results. I am going to try and get back into the tutorials some more so I can really get into the program and see what I can churn out then. So far it is really fun and I am having problems not spending to much time in the program really working at it. So hopefully I will begin to post better and better pics of what I have done.

This week we watched another horror flick "Friday the 13th" the first one. I have to say wow this was cheesy and not scary at all. I don't think there was a single point were I was in any way scared, though the mom of Jason was very creepy although I do find it laughable that she supposedly overpowered all these young kids or had the strength to kill them all in one blow, but what ever. It was at least a very good example of the time period. So we will move onto bigger and better things.

Oh and one other thing we have finally gotten our podcast on Itunes you can find it by searching for "RealCast" Until next time, this is Michael Carpenter.

Thats a Wrap well maybe

Welcome back, this is now my third blog and hopefully I am getting progressively better at this but honestly who knows. Well this last weekend we got a lot more shooting done, and the two scenes we shot were probably our two most difficult things to shoot. Unfortunatly though we are going to have to almost entirely reshoot one of the scenes because the framing was bad. Not all was lost though we have a much better jumping off point when we go back to reshoot. Other than the aformentioned reshoot we really only have one scene left to shoot and we aren't going to do that for at least a couple of weeks.

Now begins the post production process, I know we technically aren't finished with production since we haven't filmed all the planned scense but we now are primarily working on post and the few shots we need will be shot with pickups.

I am now heavily into editing and it is going fairly well, but I am beginning to see the limitations of having only one camera to shoot wiht. Unfortunalty in many situations I don't have exactly what is needed to tie two shots together so those will be the primary make up of our pickups. I am slowely begining to see the movie take shape and it is pretty exciting. Jared is now getting into the effects and color correction process and I have sent the first scene to our foley artist Adam so he can get to work now. We seem to be quickly approaching the completion of our first short as a company and hopefully by the end of April we will be begining the touring process or at least have a good idea of when it will start.

As all of this is going on we have also begun the early stages of preproduction on our next film and if I can say this one has even more potential than the film we are working on. I am definitly excited about what we can do with the next movie. It is going to be sort of a Christian horror film and should be pretty amazing. Also our website www.filmrealstudios.org is currently undergoing some updates. We have just added the first episode of our podcast which is titled the "Real Cast" which you can download from our website and hopefully soon will be able to download via Itunes.

This last week my wife (Wendy) had a great idea. While we at Film Real Studios all love movies especially my wife and I, by no means have we seen everything there is to see. So we decided that we wanted to watch as many movies as we can and use what we learn from them to help make us better movie makers. We have split them up by genre and we are currently watching horror films because that is our next project. This week we watched "Silence of the Lambs" and the "Descent." Now I have never seen either of these movies but I ws the only one. My wife had seen the first but not being a horror fan hadn't seen any recent movies like the Descent.

Silence of the Lambs has obviously had a pretty big impact and is a fairly well known film. Watching it almost 20 years after it was filmed certainly detracted from my experience. You can definetly tell the era it was filmed in. There was a lot of interesting things done in that film though and a lot of interesting camera angles. I don't think it would have been even close to what it is without Anthony Hopkins and Lector. Over all the acting was great and the movie was very suspensful.

The Descent was definitly not a great movie in my opinion but had some beautiful shots thrown into the movie. The biggest detractor at least for me was the main antagonist was a creature that to me resembled Gollum from "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Now I guess you could argue the similar curcimstances can and do lead to similar results, but to me seeing gollum attack these characters over and over again just took me out of the film. I two main characters figurative descent into madness quite interesting, but thought that a lot of there story was just thrown in so that the final character that survives would have a reason to kill the other one. The beginning of the movie in my opinion really didnt belong in the film it served no real purpose. I also hated the classic run for your life horror scene in the hospital it really had no purpose other than to try to inject horror elements into the movie 20 minutes before the horror really began.

This is Michael Carpenter from Film Real Studios and that's all for today thanks for reading and check back in a week or so for my next blog.

Guns, Podcasts, and Acting

Hello and welcome to my second blog ever. This is Michael from film real studios. I hope you enjoyed the last blog and that you will enjoy this one as well. Since the last blog we have had two additional shoot days, We had our friend Adam come up from Fresno to help us out. Our plan had been to get two or three volunteers from a local church to be basically soldiers/scavengers, and we had budgeted money too feed them and possibly provide gas money if they traveled from far away. So when he decided to come up and since he was also willing to take one of the small parts I decided that rather than have to ask someone else that we don't really know to do the second part that I would go ahead and do it.

I had originally decided that I would no longer be in front of the Camera at all because I wanted to focus on the production of the film, and I am not confident in my acting ability, I did used to be in drama as a youth in church and we did win some awards as that drama team, but I still didn't want to be in the position of having to direct and act. Anyways to save money and time I decided it would be easier if I was the second so we went out and shot with Adam.

The shoot went really well I have to say, especially since I figured this would be one of our toughest few shooting days. The biggest problem I foresaw was that since Adam and I were both soldier type characters we would be carrying Gun's during the entire time we are on camera. Some of this time we are walking around my apartment complex, and I could just imagine someone thinking we were walking around with real guns and calling the police. Now none of the guns we were carrying around were real (they were all of the air soft variety) they looked very real and even had the requisite orange tips removed. So we were very careful about keeping the guns out of site for as long as possible. We even spent well over an hour practicing a particularly complex shot before we went back to shoot it. All ended up going well with the shoot and we only have a few more scenes left to film. So hopefully we will be getting this completed by the end of April and begin our tour of Churches this summer.

I also participated in my first podcast this week (with Adam Jared and myself) it is going to be a regular podcast that will be posted on our website: www.filmrealstudios.org, I also hope to get in on Itunes as soon as possible. The first one isn't up yet but should be there in the next couple of days. One of the segments I look forward to recording is what we are calling the Random topic of the Day. Basically this is going to be either a topic that has been recently discussed by us (the podcasters) or a topic sent in by the listeners. We will soon establish and email that can be used for the podcast itself but until then if you have any suggestions for the Random topic you can email us at filmrealstudios@gmail.com. Also if you are interested check out the other Film Real Studios blog at www.filmrealstudios.blogspot.com.

Well thats all for today and until next time thank you for reading.

Procrastination

Well this is my first post and I am posting it from my iPhone so
pardon any errors. Well let me start by telling you a little about
myself and what I intend to do with this blog. Well I am currently co
owner of a start up film studio named Film Real Studios.
Our goal is to elevate the Christian film genre so it is no longer
looked down upon by the masses. It seems to be a lofty goal and I am
sure it has been tried before but hopefully our unique backgrounds
will enable us to achieve our goal. I have grown u loving movies. I
often quote my favorite movies in everyday conversation. In fact my
wife and I will often randomly quote a movie then force the other to
guess said movie and if unable guess will proceed to mock them for
their ignorance. Well back to the blog. My intentions for this blog
are to discuss the varied aspects of the film making process but being
a fan of many things including but not limited to: NASCAR movies,
fantasy or scifi novels and various TV shows, I'm sure that from time
to time I will invariably comment on those things.

Well as I'm sure you noticed this blog is titled procrastination. So
on to the topic of this post. Well as my wife will undoubtedly confirm
I tend to procrastinate. I am currently editing the portion of the
short film we have already shot. Well all week I fave been telling
myself I need to sit down and get some editing done but my older son
is off visiting my aunt so my wife and I have had the chance to get
caught up on the various shoes we don't watch when he is awake or at
least in the living room. These aren't terrible shows mind you but
things like heroes and csi which are just to violent to watch with my
three year old son. On top of that my wifes laptop is not functioning,
she is our administrator, is using my pc to research all the things we
will need to start the tour of our short film once it is completed.
So there was another excuse to not edit. Well last night it was crunch
time I needed to have as much editing done as possible so I could show
it today before we went out to shoot. So I sat down to edit at around
5 and ended up spending till 9:30 editing. I realize now that I
should have just stopped there and gone to bed, u see I work at 4:30
am, but I wanted to be able you show it on my tv. So I decided I would
export it and then burn it to a dvd after all exporting was only going
to take 20mins and how long could it take to burn a simple DVD. Well
once I decide to do something it takes a lot to derail me. So right
before the video finished exporting the program crashes. Well it is
about 10 by now and I convince myself to have one more go at it. So I
export it for the second time and at about 10:30 it finishes
successfully. Well onto the simple DVD burning process or do I
thought. My stupid dvd r drive refused to recognize my dvdr. Well to
prevent an already long blog from becoming longer I will cut this
short and say I ended up spending the next hour trouble shooting my
dvdr drive. I never got it fixed and ended up just going to bed in frustration. Thats all for today. Until next time thank you for reading.