Deluxe Wows Me

On Tuesday March 17th our class went to Toronto to visit Deluxe, which is a house for film, video and audio production for big budget television shows and movies.  The studio has won ten Academy Awards for technical excellence - and let me tell you their studio is impressive.

The day started off in the Deluxe boardroom where we were greeted by three high-ups from the studio.  These guys were pretty funny - all really into what they do.  I found it pretty interesting how two of the guys weren't really much older than I was, but I was blown away by how much they knew and the advice they had to give to amateurs like the class.

From there we checked an isolated sound booth where actors come into the studio and do voiceovers and replace audio that wasn't captured great or doesn't sound great off the original take. The head guy, I think his name is Paul, was saying that actors hate doing this sort of thing and many have a hard time getting into character to re-enact the voices and such.

We checked out several things inside the studio but I'm only going to talk about a few of them. We were allowed to enter what they called the Foley Room, I believe, where diegetic sounds are produced in a studio to make them sound much better than if they were taking organically from the original film.  This sound-proof studio they had set up was amazing - it was actually littered with ordinary and bizzare objects and items that the sound artists use to make audio. Several different types of doors were on one portion of the wall, different floor types on the ground, sand, water, bathtubs, toilets, guitars, shoes, an old car, chairs, anything and everything!  In my opinion this was the coolest studio in the Deluxe house.

One of the last rooms we checked out was the room where they convert and copy film and video.  This room was crazy! Definitely a few million dollars worth of equipment sitting in there.  Paul was saying that older copies of movies and such are copied in that room, and there was tapes everywhere.  The room house many machines which also meant a lot of people, it was the busiest room in the house.

What I liked most about this trip though were the three people that gave us the tour of Deluxe. They were young, extremely knowledgeable, and most importantly, they are pretty similar to what I'm like - well at least I think so anyway!  It was really refreshing to hear people talk about their work with such enthusiasm.  Great trip.

Response to Walter Murch

So I had some time this past week to pick up "In the Blink of an Eye" by Robert Murch and read a piece or two from it.  Murch is an Academy Award-winning film editor and sound designer, and is best known for his sound designing work in Apocalypse Now and Return to Oz - which he directed.

What I'm going to specifically focus on for this entry is the problems Murch defines when film made (or makes) the transition from analog to digital.  In the early 1980s, hard drives were bulky, primitive, and didn't really work all that well, so film was stored on analog forms of media, such as videotapes or laserdiscs.  But then in the later 1980s, technological devices such as hard drives and more advanced ways of storage started making its way into the film world.  Film began being digitized directly onto a computers hard disk, and I'm pretty sure its safe to say it scared film industry people back then - technology still scares people now.

Now more onto a more personal level.  My dad used to teach film and television broadcasting at the university and college level up till the early 1990s, when he passed away due to stomach cancer.  This obviously meant that my dad new a great deal about cameras and filming, and I can remember massive cameras laying around the house and stacks of film sitting around.  Yes, the film industry had already made their way to the digital era, but for people who weren't in the industry, analog was still the way to go.  Now instead of hauling around huge video cameras like my dad used to do, I can easily carry a video camera comfortably in my hand.  Not only this - the cameras consumers use today are high-definition, something that would of been out of the question back in my dads time.

Alright, now back to Murch.  Right.  Murch points out a couple negative aspects that come with this move from analog to digital, all of which I find quite interesting.

1. The Amount of Memory - early hard drives didn't really have much memory anyway.  This meant that films couldn't be stored as one large chunk, and moving from one chunk of the film to the next meant swapping hard disks which the film was stored on.  Not fun.
2. Bottleneck - Early machines and digital forms of storage were so expensive that buying more than one was next to impossible.  This meant that the key people involved in producing the film had to work in shifts, simply because there was only one machine to use.
3. Complicated, Inconvenient and Expensive - The big editing machines were bulky and expensive, and copies of dailies had to be specially made to be read by the machine that Murch calls the EditDroid. 
4. The Quality of the Image - Image quality is something that is most important for people who watch television or movies today - people go gaga over large screen displays.  In order to store films onto digital media, the data would be shrunk down, where a lot of resolution would be lost in the process.  Murch says that this makes it impossible to see hidden problems. 
5. Ease of Making the Cut Itself - These editing machines like the Avid were keyboard intensive, which was not what most film editors were comfortable with.  We still see this today - video editing programs like Final Cut or Premier are extremely keyboard intensive.  I'm not even sure if you could properly edit a film or video without a keyboard.
6. Works Best When Needed Least - The machines couldn't handle too much, and editors would often get a message that they had maxed out the machines processing abilities.  Murch says that this would cause things to go out of sync.  Dropped frames, anyone?
7. Reliability of the Edit Decision List - the edit decision list is conformed to match what is in the computer, which turned out to be super problematic on early editing machines.  This all comes down to difference in frame rates.  In Europe, film and video run at 25 frames per second, and in the United States and other Western countries, film runs at 24 frames per second while video runs at 30 frames per second.  This meant that some mathematical equations needed to be done before doing any transferring or copying.  Messing this up would probably result in a massive headache for editors.

And thats Murch's list!  I think there will always be an argument over analog vs. digital.  

 

Response to Stephen Arthur's "Tran Scan"

The first thing that came to my mind as I watched this was "what an extremely unique video". Tran Scan is a five thousand photograph journey across Canada following the Trans-Canada Highway. The video makes use of a relatively new technique of telescopic, traveling time-lapse photography.  This allows the audience to travel 5,700 kilometers in approximately eight minutes. 

The production quality that went behind the making of Tran Scan is astonishing.  No motion picture or video camera was used at any time, yet the video seems extremely smooth to the eye. According to Create Space, the frame-by-frame video piece took eighteen months and $100,000 to create.  Another interesting note is that the sound used in the piece was composed from scratch with sound effects that were created by movement. 

It is easy for me to say that the $100,000 was worth it. Tran Scan is not only impressive and eye catching, it also has an educational element. For people like myself who have never driven across the country before, this video teaches the viewer a lot about Canada.  I didn't really know what the Prairies or the Maritimes exactly looked like before watching the video. 

My only dislikes of Tran Scan aren't even really dislikes at all. After focusing on the video for a few minutes I began to feel very nauseated and dizzy, making me look away from the screen for a few seconds and miss parts of the video.  I realize that this is probably unavoidable, or might have even been Arthur's intentions.  Secondly, it would be been beneficial for the viewer to know the location they are in as they are watching the video.  Since road signs fly by you at an unreadable pace, you have no idea of what you are looking at.  This was occasionally counterbalanced by being able to identify landmarks or the city skyline, but even this was extremely difficult at times.

Traveling across Canada in eight minutes is pretty cool. You have to admit it. 

A preview of Tran Scan can be found here: http://www.transcanfilm.com/TranScanAlberta.mov