Producers

In 2012 Jason and I took a tour of the Warner Bros. public lot. During the tour we got to see stages, props, actors, warehouses and everything in between. Our tour guide told us many "lot stories" including one of studio producers. In sitcoms producers come in, listen to a story, tell the writers to fix it, arrange for advertising sponsors, tell the show runners they needed to fix things again and repeat. Listening to our tour guide I thought that these "producer people" were kind of bossy and obnoxious.

Fast forward to 2013 when Jessica steps into her own shoes of a producer. I would not say I asked to be a producer, but it just happened.

Time and time again Jason thinks of an idea for a video, writes it down, mulls it over and finally is ready to bring it to me to discuss. He reads me his idea and I tell him what to change or how we need to scrap the whole thing (Sorry, Jason). 

When we are shooting the video I come in and oversee how everything is going. I make sure our crew gets breaks and has food and drinks. I constantly tell Jason that something is in his shot or point something out that he does not hear or realize. I am Captain Jason's First Mate.

After production, Jason edits the video and I step in to watch it and tell him how I think it should be reworked to include shots he forgot he even had. He plays it for me again after he gets lost in the edit room and I give him another list of changes. Step and repeat.

Once the video is uploaded it is my job to post it to our Twitter, Facebook and Blog to get our viewers to watch it for the very first, and hopefully many more, times.

Looking back I realize that "producer people" are not bossy or obnoxious; instead they are people who facilitate getting a product from point A to Z in an efficient and effective way. Producers have to have a certain skillset to be able to think of all of the possible issues that may even slightly arise. And more than anything, producers have to be great managers who are strong and assertive.

-Posted by Jessica

Technical Breakdown: Zipped

We released "Zipped" as our official entry into Bloody Cut Films' BCHorrorChallenge a couple of days ago. The short is about the battle between sanity and psychosis after being kidnapped and left alone.

This short is definitely our best to date and we are very happy and excited to share it with all of you. Now for the good stuff. Here is our technical breakdown:

Production: Rigs, Cameras & Lenses

This short was shot on our Canon T3i with a Tokina 11-16mm F2.8, Canon T2i with a Tamron 17-50mm F2.8, & a GoPro Black using various mounts (although none of the GoPro footage was ultimately used in the final edit). Ninety percent of the garage shots are completely handheld and rigless, while the other ten percent were shot on a tripod. The outside scenes were shot using a Glidecam. 

We shot with both cameras set wide open at F2.8 to let in as much light as possible and ISO was set between 800 and 1250. Both Canon cameras were tuned to Prolost Flat picture styles. Originally, I intended to use the Flaat picture profile since we shot everything in very low light.

Unfortunately, I was rushing on set and did not double check equipment before we started rolling. Luckily, I had both cameras already set in Prolost as a habit. Since this short was going to be highly stylized in post, this could have been a huge problem if the cameras were set to different picture profiles; this would have resulted in numerous additional hours of color correcting.

Post Production: Edit & Sound Design

This was my second project working on Adobe Premiere CC, and it was a decently smooth experience. Sound Design was first done in Premiere, and then moved to Adobe Audition for sweetening. While I wanted to color in DaVinci Resolve, I simply did not have enough time so it was colored & graded in Premiere using a combination of the Colorista, Filmconvert, LUTs, and Lumetri plug-ins layered together.

Here are some of our before and afters for the color correction/grade:

The biggest challenge for me as an editor on this project was the rapid cutting and the sound mixing. Since I am not a huge horror fanatic, this was an extremely fun, educational and experimental short. To start, I watched a bunch of horror shorts on Vimeo and took note of themes in sound design and editing I liked. I used the popular television show, "American Horror Story", as a reference to how I wanted our short to feel and sound. My goal for the short was to making it feel and look weird, strange and creepy. 

Even after filming the short, it really did not come alive until I went crazy with the sound mixing. Little aspects like warping the fog machine sound, adding the zip tie sound effect at ten percent and increasing the volume of the music as the short progresses all subconsciously guided viewers towards the finale.

Just for fun, here is our finished timeline:

We hope you enjoyed "Zipped". We are currently working on the Behind The Motion for YouTube so stayed tuned for scenes that ended up on the "cutting room floor".

-Posted by Jason

Happy New Year!

Today we reflected on how far we have come from that evening we watched the life-changing Dr. Pepper commercial to yesterday when we released our best short to date, Zipped. 

We have taken countless tutorials, spent hundreds of hours locked in our edit room and have gotten recognition by not just our own families this year. We are truly so happy with our accomplishments in 2013 and we cannot wait to show you what we have in store for 2014. As a sneak peak, here are Cinetic Studios' New Year's resolutions:

• Create, produce and finish more videos
• Write more "day-to-day" blog articles so our followers can know the ins and outs Behind The Motion
• Start writing film reviews for our blog
• Improve at overcoming and excelling in inevitable production disaster(s)
• Continue to learn and practice post production skills
• Learn how to write a short

-Posted by Jessica

Planning

In my opinion one of the most important stages of any project is the planning phase. Getting a solid concrete understanding of the any job allows everyone in a team to execute in a more cohesive and efficient way.

Even though we at Cinetic Studios know this to be true, we are also culprits in failing to plan. Sometimes we get caught up in trying to "get the shot" or "quickly get this done". The time it takes us to get the quick shot more than likely takes longer when we do not think it through beforehand.

In the last video we shot for the BC Horror Challenge, we developed a story, Jason wrote a script, we talked through shots with our cast and we got our crew excited about the end video. As a result of our careful planning we got tighter, cleaner and better content out of our 6 hour shoot. Instead of "getting that shot" we got multiple awesome shots to choose from.

"Getting the shot" is extremely important and sometimes there may not be time to plan; however, if we can plan, we definitely will from now on.

-Posted by Jessica

Taking On Only What We Can Chew

Here at Cinetic Studios we are guilty of trying to fill our plates with more food than we can eat. Now, the smart thing to do is to serve ourselves one serving at a time.

We are definitely always coming up with new video ideas, but we are also coming up with other "stuff". We have all been victims of coming up with an idea like starting a Vlog channel, writing more blog posts, making tutorials, doing "test" videos and various other elaborate ideas. The great part of this is we are constantly thinking and working to make Cinetic Studios better. The bad part is that at the end of the day we sometimes feel disappointed in our lack of execution.

It is extremely important for us at Cinetic Studios to be realistic with our time and what ideas simply need to be "shelved" indefinitely so we can awesomely execute the ones we need to work on. So yes, we want to pile on the good stuff, but small portions are the way to go.

-Posted by Jessica

Artist v. Art Gallery

Making YouTube videos is definitely an art. Those who make art are artists. I have to say that working with Jason definitely feels like I am the art gallery and he is the artist.

At the beginning of Cinetic Studios our goal was to produce content, a lot of content. We even went so far to say that we wanted to upload a video every two weeks. Well, that obviously was unrealistic because we do this on our free time and apparently we have a lot of responsibilities.

About a month into watching Jason edit Finger Guns I realized that deadlines were an unrealistic concept this early in the game. We did not have the skillset to be able to produce consistently and at the level we wanted to. Instead, we needed to consider adding more time to our budget to compensate for our lack of skill.

Adding more time turned into letting Jason be the artist he is and watching him fix and fix and fix things that I thought were already great to begin with. We started the artist meets art gallery dynamic. I would ask for the finished product and he would delay based on something he was not done working on: sound, tightening the edit, color, etc.

Weeks went by because the art gallery did not give the artist a clear drop dead due date. Without the deadline our artist would not give up the product and our viewers could not experience the art we created.

We have learned that our artist needs drop dead due dates that even the art gallery cannot extend. Recently we started to make videos for video contests because it allows Jason to be accountable for being late or failing to make the application deadline. Finally, the art gallery has a way to tame the artist and our viewers get to watch our art.

-Posted by Jessica

Released The Remote

We released our second short, The Remote, this week. This video played on the same storyline as Finger Guns with a little bit of a twist. The video portrays two friends fighting over a TV remote which results in a long drawn out Nerf gun battle.

Before the video was ever shot, Jason decided that he wanted to use wires for in camera effects. Needless to say there was a "wire" effect that allowed him to "slide" on the floor to avoid being hit by the very threatening Nerf gun. In a way the video was developed around an effect Jason wanted to try.

One of the biggest challenges we had was managing our time while filming the short. We started shooting the video in the afternoon hoping it would only take a couple of hours; instead those couple of hours turned into several hours and we ending up wrapping close to midnight.

Our lack of time management would have been minor if we shot everything with the same lighting; of course we did not. The opening shots took place during daylight and by the time we could move on, it was dark outside. If we left the original story line the same, our viewers would definitely be a little skeptical of the continuity of the video. To fix this we added the classic "a few hours later" to one of the shots to indicate we had definitely intended this to happen.

While we could have left the inconsistency in our lighting stop us in finishing the project, we saw it as an amateur filmmaking challenge we needed to overcome. Another video, another badge of accomplishment.

In case you have not seen the video:

And if you would like to watch our Behind the Motion:

-Posted by Jessica