Power Morphicon

Sorry for the lack of updates in the last weeks.  I've been moving to Los Angeles to pursue and broaden my film career finally and that's taken all my time lately.  So now that I'm settled in, time to make my first blog post from the West Coast!  And what will that first post be?  Differences in the film industry that I've noticed here?  The layout of studios around the city?  Maybe something about the internships I'm looking for.

Nope.  It's Power Morphicon.  It's a convention all about Saban's Power Rangers and a couple of their other shows, and anyone who knows me in person will tell you I'm a huge Power Rangers fan.  When I found out the third installment of this convention would start literally the day after I moved into my apartment here, I had to sign up to go.  If you've browsed around this site you'll notice that I talked about how Star Wars was the driving force into me pursuing film making.  Well Power Rangers was the major driving force for other parts of my life in a similar fashion, so I was honored to have the opportunity to meet the actors who played my childhood heroes and finally thank them for all they've done.  I could go write chapters about how awesome everything was, so I'll keep this post short and relevant.

Let me reel this back and relate it to the whole film making thing for a bit.  In addition to meeting the cast and crew of the show, I got to learn a lot about the behind the scenes production of the show.  I learned about the process of voice acting.  I finally learned how the show evolved from an episodic format to having longer storylines and multi part episodes in later seasons.  And lots lots more.

So whether you're a big Power Rangers fan like me or not, let me give you this advice.  If there's a convention you want to go to, for whatever reason, buckle up and go to it!  Obviously you'll get to meet your favorite actors and maybe buy some cool, collectibe stuff.  But you'll also get to ask those burning questions about how they made something in the show to the people directly involved in production!  Maybe you'll use those same production techniques on your same shoot, or learn to avoid a problem that the producers frequently ran into.  Again, I'm being vague here, but it's only because if I start going into detail we'll both be here all day watching this blog post go on and on.

So that's all.  And it's Morphin' Time!

Video Capture Changes

So while I've been home this summer I've been burning all our home movies from tapes to DVD so they last longer and we have multiple copies of them in case something ever happens.  Right around when I was 13 I noticed I started doing all the filming instead of my dad, since he recognized I liked using cameras and let me use the camcorder from then on.  By the time I got to high school I started making movies with the film club and some friends.  One of the last tapes I captured had one of my first movies on it, Extreme Scrabble!  It's funny, because back then we thought the idea of making a movie based off a board game was ridiculous, but now we have blockbusters like Battleship, Transformers, and GI Joe every year.  What's even funnier is my movie probably has the same amount of story and character development as those blockbusters.  You can only do so much with a toy franchise, after all…

 Anyways, watching the raw footage from that tape made me realize a couple of things.  First off, I need to find my edited copy of the movie, since I haven't seen it in years and it turns out I still have all the dialogue in the raw footage burnt into my mind from the hours I spent editing that thing.  It took me a lot longer to edit things back then.  Maybe if I find it I can upload it to Youtube for kicks.  Second and more importantly, we've come a really long way in terms of capturing video and we shouldn't take it for granted.  Let me elaborate.

 Back in those days, with my trusty Hi8 camera, it was a pain to get the footage from the tape to my computer to edit.  The camera I had didn't have any kind of firewire or USB port, and I couldn't afford to buy an upgraded model that did.  The year before I had to mail my tapes to my uncle, who had the equipment to digitize the video, and he'd mail them back to me on a DVD to edit.  At the time of this film, I had to buy a composite video to USB adapter from Best Buy.  I haven't seen or used that thing in years, and I have no intention of trying to dig it out, because it was horrible!  The video quality imported badly, I'm pretty sure it chopped my resolution in half, and the sound and video would get out of sync for some reason.  And I'm pretty sure I couldn't get it to capture large chunks of video, so my raw files were segmented a ton.  A few months later my dad bought me an upgraded MiniDV camera with a USB port that I could easily use with Windows Movie Maker to capture footage.  The ability to capture entire tapes as one piece of crisp, synced, 720x480 video blew my mind!  My computer with a whopping 32GB of memory couldn't handle too many of those back then, but computer memory is another blog post all together.  A couple years later I got even more control over my video capturing when I started using Final Cut Pro and Firewire decks at Texas Student TV.  I loved it so much, I made sure my first HD camera had a Firewire port to let me capture video with all the ease and precision I had grown accustomed to at the station.  That HDV camera is still my main camera of choice today.

But now let's examine exactly where we are today.  DSLRs are all the rage in the filmmaking community right now, and many more professional cameras sport a similar feature that I want to touch on: Memory Cards.  While wrestling with all the types of video formats is a pain, memory cards have made it even easier to get our footage from the camera to the computer.  If you've got the right slots on your machine, you can do it without any wires!  Just plug that SD card into the SD slot and voila, a new folder with all your footage appears on your computer.  I would have killed to have that ability back in 2004, while I wrestled with my cheap video adapter to get video captured.  Sure, there were cameras that could record to cards back then, but was the quality that good?  No.  It always looked so blocky with compression, so I'd rather wrestle with an adapter that would at least give me a consistent image.  And if all else fails, the master tape itself would look much better, whereas with those old card cameras, the blocky file is what you were stuck with.  Keep in mind, I'm talking about consumer level electronics here.  But nowadays it's pretty hard to spot the compression in these card based cameras.  Even on smaller devices like smart phones and digital cameras, the video recording modes have gotten pretty good.  And on those machines you can send video to your computer a number of ways wirelessly.  Is that the next big innovation in video capture technology?  Maybe.  Whether it is or it isn't, it's pretty impressive where we are with our technology right now.  Nowadays we can have videos shot, edited, and delivered within 14 hours, like this video from Freddie Wong.

Thanks to card based cameras and having an editor on set, they were able to edit the video while they were shooting it.  When they'd finish on one card, the editor would start working on that footage while the camera switched to another card.  It probably took me a month or two to get the Extreme Scrabble video on my computer after filming it.  So next time you complain about how this one format takes forever, or how tape based capturing is such a drag, consider how far we've come to even get those technologies first.  Then appreciate the new technologies more as they come about.

New App Commercial

Litrally in my last hours as station manager for Texas Student TV we released the TSTV Mobile App, currently for Android.  The iOS version is on its way.  Anyways, my last bit of unfinished business before leaving Austin is to make a commercial for said app.  With most of the TSTVpopulation away on vacation, I was lucky enough to work with some TSTV alums from the show TNN.

Oh yeah, and the creepy old guy in the background.  Anyways, I really lucked out having these awesome ladies in the commercial because they have great chemistry together. I've used them individualy before in projects, (The two on the right were in the Combo Breakers Yugioh Minisode while the girl on the left was in Photography 101 video I did for a class.  Yes, I'm aware the film is washed out in that one.  One of these days I'll do another project on 16 mm that won't be washed out because of the camera not closing all the way.)  But putting all three of these girls together is HILARIOUS!  Hopefully that makes for a good commercial.  It's a pretty straightforward one.

Another cool thing about this commercial is I get to try my hand at superimposing the app into the phone screens.  You know how in cell phone commercials they say screen images simulated?  Yeah, that thing!  So I'll be putting the app into this:

I tried my hand at imposing reflections into people's eyes in my VFX Demo Reel, so Im guessing this'll be pretty easy to do.  But it does present the opportunity to do a straight up sperimposition like you see in a lot of commercials, which bugs me since they stand out too much, or I can try to really integrate it into the shot by preserving the reflection of the thumb and such.  Anyways, that's what'sup in the world of Steven Zurita right now, so look forward to seeing that in the future!