March 2008

Okay, NOW What?

Well, it's done.

You planned out your script.

You wrote it.

You cast it.

You shot it.

You edited it.

You put titles on it.

A couple more things to talk about: music, for one.

If you're just going to burn this to a DVD and show it to your friends, and that's as far as it's ever going to go, then grabbing the theme from Superman or Raiders of the Lost Ark and putting it under your dialogue track is fine.

As long as that's as far as it's ever going to go.

If you ever decide to enter it into a contest, or upload it to YouTube or Google Video, then you have a problem. Because, under copyright law, you don't have permission to use that music.

You could get your video yanked from YouTube or Google Video. You could get a "cease and desist" letter from the law firm representing Paramount Pictures (in the case of Raiders), or Time Warner (in the case of Superman). You could get sued.

Don't gloss this over... Disney/ABC, for one, is VERY protective of its trademarks and copyrights, and has gone after a small day care for having "unlicensed" likenesses of copyrighted Disney characters as outside decorations on their building.

My solution? Royalty-free music.

Most music for films requires licenses: A "performance license" is an agreement between the filmmaker (you) and the performer for a flat fee, a percentage of any money made with the performance, or both. "Sync rights" means that the filmmaker (you) is agreeing to a license to use a musical composition in a "timed relation" (it's going to be the same each time it's seen) in a visual presentation. If you're talented enough to make a new recording of a piece of music, you need "mechanical rights", which is a license from the copyright holder, and means paying fees and royalties.

Royalty-free music, on the other hand, is either acquired (in the case of totally royalty-free music) or purchased from the composer. That purchase price gives you a license with all these rights with no further payment involved.

If you Google® "royalty-free music", you'll find any number of sites that offer original compositions for reasonable prices. However, if you're downright stingy, like me, there are places where you can get royalty-free music FOR FREE. Peter John Ross, at Sonnyboo.com offers a selection of pieces he wrote (he's a musician, too... when you got it, you got it) for free, with the only stipulation that he gets a credit line in your film. Kevin MacLeod at Incompetech.com also provides free music, under the Creative Commons license. This basically means, as they explain it on their website, that this is their way of maintaining their copyright, but releasing some of the rights of their work to the public use. They see it as a midway point between copyright (all rights reserved) and public domain (no rights reserved).

Either way, this is something to keep in mind... you don't want a lawsuit, because they never fit properly.

Sorry... I'll try to keep the "puns"manship under better control...

Now, when you burn your final edit to DVD, don't forget to make one you can do on the Web... Google Video, YouTube, and many others use Flash Video format, from Adobe, and they convert your video of 100 megabytes or less into Flash Video to play on YouTube. Here's a neat trick... if you convert it to Flash Video before you upload, you have better control, and the video can be bigger! There are all sorts of freeware and shareware programs to convert video files to Flash Video, so I leave that exercise to the reader.

You can also, as I do, post your own videos to your own website... that's an advanced topic we'll go into some other time.

As for this miniseries, it's a bit longer than five posts, but I believe I've covered all I said I would... More once again, and whenever that is, I'll talk to you then!

Cheers!

Al B.

24 Frames, 4.2.2, and $0.00 - Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Shoot It

Here's the thing...

Back when I started to make movies, umpty-mumble years ago, it was much more important for me to plan things more closely than I do now. (I still plan closely, but not nearly that closely.) After all, a 50' cartridge of Super8 film was only 2 minutes and 30 seconds of film (at 24 frames per second), or 3 minutes and 20 seconds (at 18 frames per second). There was the price of the film, the processing, the recording of a soundtrack (usually a cassette tape, roughly synchronized with the film), and if it took more than one roll, the costs added up.

That was a daunting economic model for an 18-year old, living at home, with no regular job, no car, and virtually no money.

Today, the camera equipment is roughly as expensive as it was before, when you compare the prices of those days to today, and the raw stock prices are about equivalent (MiniDV tape to Super8 cartridge); the thing is, one MiniDV cart holds approximately 60 minutes of footage, at standard speed. Compared to Super8, I'd have needed 24 cartridges of 50' each to match the run time. (We're assuming "sound speed", 24 frames per second.) Sound is included on MiniDV, where I'd have had to use a more expensive single-system sound camera, more expensive pre-striped sound cartridges, and more expensive processing options.

Editing is about the same, I'm judging, only because I'm already over the learning curve from the computer editing software (for my Wintel machine, it's Adobe Premiere Pro; on my Mac, it's Final Cut Pro.) Special effects? For a STAR TREK film I did back in the day, my "phaser" effects involved putting my original footage on a light box and scratching the phaser beam frame by frame with the point of a hobby knife. For the "transporter" effect, I scratched the frame again where the people were beaming in. Today I'd be using some kind of compositing footage like After Effects to produce my visuals.

Is the meaning in this that today's paradigm is superior? Not necessarily... In those days, we had an idea of what we wanted to shoot, a rough script, a bunch of us together, and a 400' (or so) film was shot in a day. Today, with all the activities (work, family, et cetera) that we're involved in, it's difficult to get people together in one place long enough to do much of anything, it seems.

However, that was then... this is now... and I'm going to get some things shot real soon.

You damn betcha!

Cheers!

Al B.