This week's flicker, Trapped!, is mostly an experiment in special effects since the main image in my head didn't develop into a full blown story until way too late. Thankfully, it is a short flicker and won't make you wait around. I kept movement to a minimum just in case of difficulties with the compositing, but it would have better with more motion and maybe some ropes! I'm eager to see the other submissions to WeeklyDV this week.

The WeeklyDV theme this week is "Distortion" and I thought it would be cool to shoot distorted video by somehow modifying the image coming into the camera. It worked out OK. The footage turned out decent and I actually got an idea for it two days later and thus "The Jar-head Dog" was born. Perhaps you'll be amused. The attachment for the camera was simply a glass bowl and I zoomed through to my liking. Noted error: I forgot (duh) to turn off auto-focus and it kicked in for a short period of time.

Since upgrading to FCP HD and all the new versions of LiveType, QuickTime, Compressor, etc, I have noticed a major problem with LiveType fonts in my Final Cut Pro projects: they are all dirty and pixelated and chunky. What the...?! When bringing the text into FCP it looks just fine and dandy:


But after you render the text it looks like this:


Viewing the video via FireWire to an NTSC monitor shows nice, crisp text BUT the BIG problem here is when you make a QuickTime movie for the web the text looks all chunky and pixelated and gross! I cannot get around it. Anybody know the answer?

I'm back with another flicker. Seems like it has been eons since I made a short movie and it feels good to create something new. The WeeklyDV capsule this week was "Stream of Consciousness" and I further challenged myself by trying to find a stream of constant thought - no editing allowed. I got a decent piece (I hope you agree). I did do some manipulation of the footage, but it is all one edit. Anyway, sit on down and watch my giant head talk for a few minutes in "Thoughts on Dying and Living." You in a hurry? There is a short version here. I made this flicker by just holding my camera in either of my hands, pointing at my face, and walking around talking about stuff. I used the on-camera mics and did not perform any edits besides the colorizing. The big challenge here was my computer - after upgrading to FCP HD I found I could no longer capture to my internal media drive. That took about a week to solve. Turns out I was missing the latest QuickTime update. Don't know why that would prevent my drive from capturing... Then it got really sluggish in FCP - very unresponsive. That took only a night to solve. The project's clip somehow got hosed a bit and wouldn't play all the way through. Turning off audio waveforms helped some but I ended up recapturing the clip and all is back to normal! Whew.