Recently I’ve been working towards a 3-minute video for Channel 4 Random Acts. The piece was commissioned by Bold Yin, a newly formed Glasgow based production company, created by Robert Florence, Iain Connell and Joanne Daly and doing all sorts of work in and around the film, art and comedy genres.

Here is a still of me with a ‘Miracle Mask’ facemask on. I had to direct the dialogue at a C-stand in order that I matched the correct eye-line for when the second character was composited in post.

Random Acts invite artists and filmmakers from a whole host of backgrounds to make videos which are then screened in amongst the normal Channel 4 schedule of programmes and advert breaks. In turn, unlike most previous projects I’ve worked towards, the end context for the work is not strictly within the sphere of fine art or film, as telly watchers could stumble upon the video involuntarily and without the normal preface you get in a gallery or cinema.

I decided to explore an advert style format, in anticipation of the video being screened either at the beginning or the end of a commercial break. I was keen that it might initially camouflage into the stream of ads, but then break down and slowly reveal itself to be a fraud. As a genre, commercials adhere to very specific tropes and I was eager to pick these out and play around with them. In particular I was drawn to the recurrent use of faux scientific cross-sections or magnifications of skin, hair, stomachs, toilet bowls etc. Often showing sterile looking, computer generated particles being swept in or out of the respective area, illustrating the cleansing and/or nourishing properties of a particular product. In many cases there is the implication that the comfort and safety of your personal space, either the body or the home, is secretly threatened by the habitation of destructive microscopic forces, whether they are ‘free-radicals’ in your skin or bacteria in your toilet.

Here I am in the ‘germ’ costume, dancing to the ‘Mr Mask Multi-Task Germ Destroyer’ jingle.

Additionally, I was interested in looking at how accents and their class connotations are used as a way to communicate a particular brand identity. For example, bathroom-cleaning adverts are almost invariably voiced-over in an authoritative middle class male accent, often with a shouty, wartime British twang, as if implying that the extermination of toilet based dirt and grime is part of some larger military operation. However, the personified ‘germs in your toilet’, when vocal, are commonly Cockneys, addressing you with an aggressive or intimidating tone of voice.

After a long trawl through various adverts, new and old, I decided to create a short video that switched between a variety of commercial formats, specifically looking at perfume, facemask, yogurt and bathroom cleaner ads. I designed all the products and costumes so they would have a similar aesthetic, with brand names related to the word and function of a ‘mask’. So ‘Masque’ for the perfume, ‘Yogi-Mask’ for the yogurt, ‘Miracle Mask’ for the facemask and ‘Mr Mask’s Multi Task Germ Destroyer’ for the toilet cleaner. I then began to script, piece together a storyboard and work on costumes, part of which was produced during a short residency at the Mackintosh Gallery, called Three Points of Contact.

Here is me preparing to vomit up a ‘Yogi-mask’ yogurt. Below is the same shot with the green-screen keyed out and the background added in.

I normally work with found audio that I mime to on camera, but in this case I was keen to explore the idea of scripting the piece then recording the audio. I worked with Kirsty Strain, a Glasgow based actress to record the vocals, which involved her performing the script in a variety of accents, from Scarlett Johansson to a ‘shouty Margaret Thatcher’. Her performance was brilliant, incredibly witty and well observed and I was amazed by her ability to switch between different voices. I also worked with Julian Corrie or Miaoux Miaoux on the audio, which was great fun. He did a brilliant job and produced an amazingly funny toilet cleaner jingle for the end section of the film.

The video was shot entirely in a green-screen studio with me as the only actor, miming to the audio recorded with Kirsty and Julian the previous week. The 2-day shoot followed a manic and sleepless few days of costume and prop production, so I was pretty exhausted and confused. However, I just about managed to pull of an improvised dance routine in a life-size ‘germ’ costume, which was constructed using the contents of 2.5 double duvets. Consequently, the suit was so amazingly insulating that I was concerned I might pass out from heat exhaustion, so had to aim a fan into my face at intervals to cool down.

This is a close up of me as a crowd of germs in your toilet.

David Liddell worked as Director of Photography on the shoot and did a fantastic job, the quality and subtlety of light in the shots was wonderfully effective. Producer Joanne Daly and Assistant Director James Houston also put in an amazing effort during the production, despite both being ill at the time and unfortunately landed with various glamorous jobs such as cleaning a second hand toilet and dragging a faux fur couch through a narrow doorway. James had the specialist task of creating a fake blood spray effect for a scene in the video where a giant germ attacks the main character with a cleaning product. This was achieved through the use of a weed killer spray bottle and plastic tubing, which was good fun, if not slightly nerve racking given my worry that both me and the entire green-screen could easily be inadvertently sprayed with synthetic blood. This didn’t happen, so we were safe.

Following the shoot I put together some backgrounds on Photoshop and with James’ help on the green-screen keying, composited it all together on After Effects and did the final edit and output on Premiere.

Computer generated visualisation of the ‘Happy Bacteria’ in your gut.

It was a really fun project to work on and I’m looking forward to seeing the final video screened on Channel 4 and up on the Random Acts website soon. Keep an eye out and follow the links below if you are interested.

Update: View Rachel’s Random Acts film online here.

More: Website | Twitter

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

I’m not one of those people who reveres celluloid film as the apotheosis of cinema. To me, film is an unwieldily middleman putting technology in the way of expression. It’s nice in your hands and even nicer when you hold it up to the light, but films are meant to carry stories: not be objects of fetish in themselves. I shot my first films on Super 8 and then on 16mm. Super 8 seemed better because it corrupted what it saw in unusual ways. 16mm just looked like soft 35mm. 35mm needed the big money. We put up with film because it was poetry when compared to video. But digital cinema is not video: it’s something else.

Surely future generations will feel deprived of this celluloid poetry…?

I recently asked a class of secondary school children (12-17 year olds in a school film unit) if any of them had ever taken a roll of snap shots to be developed and printed. Not one of them had. Not one of them cared. Digital stills have taken over, and we’re all very relaxed about it. Goodbye XP4 and HP5, or my favourites: Scotch Chrome 1000 and Ektachrome 100. We don’t need you anymore; what an awful lot of money you cost us.

For some reason there’s a resistance to the death of celluloid when it comes to movies. Which is strange considering that lab costs have been the single biggest hurdle to getting a film made for as long as I can remember. Now that hurdle has gone. No more begging for ‘short-ends’, no more mind-boggling ‘edge-numbers’, no more agonising over telecine costs. I expect that by April 2013, we won’t be able to purchase or develop a roll of 16mm or 35mm film anywhere in the UK.

Film is dead. Long live Film.

For low budget film-makers, all our attention can now be given over to the stuff that really matters:

the script, the cast, the light, the lens.

Yes, the lens: because what you are shooting through is far more important than what you are shooting on. But that’s what everyone asks when you say you’re making a film: “Oh cool, what are you shooting on?” Not, “What is it about? Who is it about?” Or, if you are going to be technical, “Are you getting prime lenses?”

Why? Because everyone wants to know how close you are getting to 35mm. With tapeless systems like RED, that boring question is properly answered. And of course it comes with a box full of lovely lenses. So all that’s left now is one interesting question:

“What’s the story”

And one very boring one:

“Can anyone’s computer cope with such massive movie files?”

Yes, the Red camera produces a huge ‘negative’. It’s worth noting that at actual size, the RED camera’s rushes won’t even fit within my 30″ Apple Cinema Display. These are huge files.

Both the Interesting and Boring questions would be addressed with my most recent editing assignment: Ever Here I Be by Kate Burton, produced by Philippa Farnese for DigiCult.

The Interesting Answer

Ever Here I Be is a story about a beautiful young woman who is a terrible waitress, but an admirable spirit in a world of disappointments. One of these disappointments is a relationship she hopes to rekindle. To do so, she’ll have to convince her gloomy minded ex. After all, what is love without optimism?

Over 15 minutes we meet a number of unusual characters in an unusually bright and colourful Glasgow. Yes, it’s a bright film that’s set in Glasgow. Not everyone smiles, but not everyone feels hopeless either. They do what real people do: try to be happy despite their circumstances and self-doubts. Moreover, this film is funny and serious at the same time: even in the same shot. Like life, it’s rather rich.

Writer/director Kate Burton had visited some of these themes before in her previous film The Ice Plant, for which she had also created a hyper-real environment; but this new film would take these interests to another level: bigger cast, more locations, more evolved design ideas and only 5 pages longer. I say ‘only’, because, as any poet knows, it’s hard to do a lot with a little. The Ice Plant had 2 characters over 10 pages; Ever Here I Be has 7 characters over 15 pages. Rich indeed. It would also be a big demand on its production team (PM – Su Bainbridge, PC - Rachel Fiddes, 1st AD – Deva Smith, Designer -  Natalie Astridge, Costume – Lucy Harvey, MUA – Nicole Stafford, Sound – Chris Campion).

Ever Here I Be also has a wider colour palette and a wider aspect ratio: 2.35:1 – very cinematic, very landscapey: the stuff of adventures, fables, myths and Westerns.

And it would be shot by David Liddell – esteemed graduate of both the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and the National Film and Television School with his own team of RSAMD and NFTS trained camera and lighting professionals. Not bad at all.

But would it all work on my Mac…?

The Boring Answer

The no 1 piece of advice for rushes from the RED camera is to transcode: that it is to turn them into another type of video; Uncompressed, Apple ProRes or even DV – something normal, smaller, less scary. It’s the same as the old offline/online workflow of last century, in which Avid Media Composer would suck the life out pictures from a DigiBeta deck until up to 95% of its data had been thrown away leaving a very porridgy looking result. Editors would shy away from wide-shots because the detail was so hard to read in the offline. At the end of the process, all the tapes would have to be taken out their boxes and stuck into clunky machines all over again to recapture the footage at full-fat quality.

Transcoding is the same idea without the porridgy pics: ProRes is actually a very high-quality image – calling it ‘offline’ seems a little rude – so I shouldn’t really complain. But I will. Because this transcoding process takes time. In fact, for every hour of rushes, you need 3 hours of transcoding.

3 hours?! This to me seemed very old school. I thought the point of tapeless was no waiting? Just drag-and-drop-instant-cinema? Transcode? That’s a bit like a ‘one light rush print’ back at the film lab, isn’t it? I don’t want to make time for that.

And what’s more, I had a director who wanted to review her rushes only an hour after I came out of mentoring editing students at the RSAMD. There was no time to be transcoding. Would it really be so bad if I just dragged a QuickTime from the location-temperature drive to the room-temperature Timeline and just pressed play?

So, I dragged, dropped, pressed play and it played.

RED uses wavelet derived proxies. This means that alongside the massive Redcode media file (the ‘negative’), are three wafer-light QuickTimes designed for use in editing software. These QuickTimes use the terribly clever mathematics of ‘wavelet transforms’ to sift only a manageable number of pixels from the ‘negative’. You can choose Full Frame, Half Frame, Medium or Proxy, and once again, you don’t have to wait. It’s all created on-the-fly once the DoP presses Rec and re-created when the editor presses play. It’s like using the online pictures, but with an instant offline translator holding back all the pixels you won’t need until you get to the cinema.

For the first slate of Ever Here I Be, the Redcode media file – the ‘negative’ – is 1.2GB of drive space – rather large – but the QuickTime I used for editing that shot is only 12KB: about the size of a longish email.

I’ll say now, you only need the Medium sized frame. It’s 1000 pixels wide and a quarter of the size of image intended for the cinema’s projector holding its own next to 35mm. But it was certainly big enough for my 30″ screen; and you have to put the Half size and Medium next to each other before you notice that the bigger of the two has blacker blacks.

When I told people I hadn’t transcoded, I was variously warned that I would have trouble exporting viewing copies. But despite longer than normal compression times, I was able to export DVDs and web-sized QuickTimes without a problem. All in all there were 17 uploads and 2 DVDs (yes, DVD is following VHS to the Clunky Format Graveyard, and I for one won’t miss it).

I should say that the RED documentation includes a hybrid workflow, which involves using the Log and Transfer window to create native, Redcode QuickTimes. These are self-contained 2k files. This takes some weight of the processor when you’re editing, but this is definitely not an instant process.

My workflow: drag-and-drop to Final Cut Pro on a high-spec Mac.

Finishing

The picture-locked cut also translated to the Baselight system at Serious Facilities (for grader, Ben Mullen) without a problem. That rich script has come out looking like a rather rich QuickTime. But how will look it projected? Get your tickets: 

Edinburgh International Film Festival – 21st June 2010

Postscript

Ever Here I Be’s DoP, David Liddell has offered a thought or two on the subject of RED vs film, which goes beyond the easy pixel punch up between 4k and 35mm, and gets right to RED’s equivalent to the celluloid film plane at the back of the lens: the big and hilariously named ‘Mysterium’ sensor:

“Before, digital was only 3 x ⅔ inch sensors going through different prisms and filters each correlating to one of the primary colours: red, green or blue. So the smaller sensor produced images with too large a depth of field to be pleasing to the eye and an image area that – although a camera might have a high resolution – the sensor and lens really seemed unable to resolve those pixels in the most flattering way. Pixel count is no longer the primary goal.

“What cinematographer’s want is greater latitude ie more tonal range from black to white.”

Scouring the internet for further discussions will take you to reports on how many f–stops of exposure can be resolved using a given digital cinema camera or film stock, but a very important factor in image quality is the quality of the lighting, and that means the crew. Digital technology has turned us all into photographers, but your digital cinema rushes will never compete with the classics of celluloid without a first class DoP and team.