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 

The Silent Partners of Cinetic Studios

Being independent filmmakers at Cinetic Studios means we don't have the big blockbuster budget to spend on anything our creative hearts desire.  Instead, we are using the resources we have available.

Each of us have different passions in addition to Cinetic Studios that contributes to our projects.  Whether it is knowing how to hack gadgets and gizmos, being a beer and wine specialist or crunching numbers, we all have an extra something.  Well, that was easy.  The three of us already know what we can do.   But what makes a great production company is knowing how to use the strengths of the people that help us.

Each of our friends and family members have skills.  We have parents who are great at providing encouragement, even when they may not understand what exactly we are doing.  We have brothers who will engineer 3D-printed Go Pro mounts and perform stunts in our shorts.  We have sisters who will help provide additional behind the scenes footage and get their friends to watch our videos. We have friends that will drop their Friday plans to be actors for a night.  And we have the support of our fans, to keep doing what we're doing.

The point is we use any contribution, idea or volunteer to get our projects to the next level and fake our blockbuster budget.  Without our friends and families, we'd just be some kids running around with a camera.

-Posted by Jessica

The Newsroom Voice

While editing and rewatching our first Behind the Motion for Finger Guns we noticed that both Jason and Jacob have what we call "the newsroom voice".

We shot the first Behind the Motion with limited expectations. We made a script and they both read lines from one our TVs in the office. What we didn't expect was "the newsroom voice" that just happened.

Our Behind the Motions are intended to be like a conversation with our viewers, and instead Jason and Jacob read lines like they were on channel 7. It's a big joke now actually.

A couple of days ago we filmed a BTM for "Screaming Artist". Before we started I reminded them that they need to be less newsroom and more talking to me. Instead of having them read lines, we filmed without a script and let the camera roll. I asked them "Jeopardy-style" questions and they had to answer them by first restating the question. When the two of them were answering my questions the answers came out more naturally and they did not feel like they were on the spot, in front of a camera.

We are learning with every video, even in our BTMs. We are even developing new content to flex those interview muscles and get us in top shape for our upcoming videos.

From channel 7, this is Cinetic Studios over and out.

-Posted by Jessica

Released Finger Guns

Success! We released our first video and BTM this week.  It was very exciting because the three of us were all together when we finished up the annotations and marked the videos as "public" for the first time.  We posted the links on our Facebook and Twitter and in that moment we shared our dream with the world.

The three of us have explained what Cinetic Studios is to our friends and families, but it really clicked when we were finally able to say, go to our website and watch the video.  It is amazing what sixty seconds of video can do to explain what we are up to these days.

In case you haven't seen our first short, Finger Guns, please check it out.

And if you want to see some raw footage, please check out our Behind the Motion for Finger Guns.

-Posted by Jessica

Technical Breakdown: Post Production on Finger Guns

Not sure about you guys, but I personally love "Making Of" featurettes and Behind the Scenes videos. In fact, it's usually the first (and sometimes only thing) I watch on a BluRay or DVD. Besides taking you behind the camera to discover the how that production was created from script to screen, it can also take you deep into the minds of the creators, hinting at creative decisions you'd never hear about otherwise. My curiosity isn't limited to feature films and TV, as I equally love BTS content for YouTube and short films. My interest is to such an extreme, even I cannot deny it has delayed the launch of our channel as I found myself drawn into the vortex that are VFX \ Color Grading breakdowns, tutorials, and demo reels available on YouTube and Vimeo.

Between shooting our first short and it's delayed release, I had the unique opportunity to attend local professional groups such as LACPUG and DMALA, allowing me to meet and learn from geniuses such as After Effects Guru Andrew Kramer and Colorist Alexis Van Hurkman. If there are similar groups in your area, I highly encourage you to attend, ask questions, and bask in the knowledge being offered to you. While you can learn tons by reading and watching tutorials, learning from the experts is akin to watching a magic show from behind the stage, seeing behind the curtain.

While we will always have a BTS featurette for all of our shorts, we try to keep things fast paced and watchable to a general audience. That being said, some of the topics I find most interesting (and sometimes the most time consuming aspects of production) are the highly technical and often overlooked aspect of post production: color correction, color grading, visual effects, and the importance of maintaining an ideal workflow starting in pre-production. Each of these can be expanded on in future articles, so please do let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.

As the editor, vfx artist and colorist for Cinetic Studio projects, there were certain challenges I faced even before I made the first cut on "Finger Guns". As we shot on a Canon DSLR camera, I jumped on the popular Cinestyle picture profile without doing any camera tests of my own. This decision proved to be a HUGE mistake, as I never discovered the quirks and intricacies of the technology, which included the minor fact that the image seen on the camera LCD during shooting dramatically differed from the image recorded to the SD card. The final result was footage that was 2.5 stops underexposed, extremely dark and excessively noisy. Being recorded in the fragile H.264 video codec in a 8-bit color space (as is a limitation with all Canon DSLR footage) didn't leave a lot of latitude for correction either.

The "Fix it in Post" workflow developed to "rescue" the footage came from weeks of our own testing and  tweaking, and  advice such as Vashi Nedomansky , the color scientists over at VisionColor, and numerous experts at LACPUG & DMALA. Huge thanks to those guys!

The h.264 raw footage from the camera was transcoded to Cineform 4:2:2 files to lighten the final render time. The project was edited in Adobe Premiere CS6 with basic compositing and VFX done in After Effects CS6. All footage was heavily denoised, basic color correction done with native filters in Premiere, and final grading done with FilmConvert. While the final render time ended up being quite heavy (15 hrs with CS6, 8 hrs with CC), it allowed us to get the best possible quality out of our poorly shot footage. Filmconvert really shined above all other solutions, as it allowed me to emulate a specific Kodak film stock (as if I shot it on film exact 5207 Vision 3) and apply a slight overlay of 16mm film grain to give it some texture that was lost in the denoising process. It's certainly not the best looking short even after everything I've done to it, but it was a massive learning experience that taught me tips and techniques that I'll be using on every future project.

Hope you enjoyed this adventure into the mad scientist lab here at Cinetic Studios. Till next time.......

-Posted by Jason