DC Metro FCP UG

If you are interested, please contact me via the contact page ASAP… Looking for support (if a female volunteer is out there, we have one male ready to support now)! Again, don’t delay in responding. Its a great opportunity to meet people while interviewing them for national radio coverage on the Internet. The Digital Production BuZZ has a worldwide audience and your voice will get great coverage too!

GV Expo is November 29th to December 1st and is being held at the Walter E Washington Convention Center. The exhibit hall is open on the 30th and the 1st so you would only need to commit to those two days. Additionally – we only need to gather between 5 – 8 interviews per person over the two days. So there would be plenty of time to look around the Exhibit halls. We would provide all the recording equipment and passes to the Expo. I’m just looking for someone who could help with both days. Do you have anyone you might be able to help or can you ask at the User Group Meeting.

Debbie – Larry Jordan Associates

Rodney
DCFCPUG

Hollywood comes Home to Northern Virginia (Centreville)
Article by Centreville Patch

More pictures on Facebook!!

Photo credit: Joe Carabeo

Najla Bashirah, actress gives me a welcoming hug for a job well done!

Photo credit: Joe Carabeo

Rising stars Jessica Luza and Marion Storm pose with the Director - Video Village for the film!

Photo credit: Centreville Patch

Lights and Limos - Time to do it Hollywood style!!!

Our combined May meeting of the Washington DC Apple Final Cut Pro Users Group (DCFCPUG), DC After Effects and the DC Digital SLR (DCDSLR) will be an exciting knowledge sharing event!
Adam Lubkin and Zhibo Lai will be presenting the following agenda:

• Intro to the RED Epic camera
• How to shoot with it
• Show some sample footage and HDRx clips as well
• Shoot a few seconds of live footage
• Shoot same footage using a DSLR
• Downloading media
• Workflow demos using FCP, Color, Redcine X, and AE
• Compare/contrast footage from Epic and DSLR
• Q&A

REGISTER EARLY AND SHOW UP ON TIME AS THIS WILL BE A FULL HOUSE EVENT!

Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Time: Doors open at 6PM for networking time, event starts around 6:30PM..

COVERED PARKING – AVAILABLE

SHOT ON RED

Love and the RED camera... It's EPIC!

GEAR:
Epic-M with a rapidly growing list of support gear from Arri, O’Connor, Steadicam, etc. An additional Epic is coming soon, and Scarlets when they’re ready.

Website at archaimedia.com will be up by the time of the meeting (24th May).

BIO:
After attending NYU film school, Adam left the field for several years to explore other interests including drawing, sculpting, woodworking, bicycles, construction, and fitness training. He recently created a bronze statue for the city of Frederick. His return to filmmaking began with shooting and editing documentaries. He has directed the feature documentary “Eb”, and worked on projects for numerous anti-poverty nonprofits. He’s currently writing a comedy feature set to shoot next year. His new company, Archai Media, has several productions in the works both here and in South America. Archai Media also rents its Red Camera gear, and is developing a line of ergonomic camera support accessories.

WHAT DRIVES ME AS A FILMMAKER:
My approach to filmmaking is to focus on a subject that moves me, and to find my way intuitively from there. Everything seems to happen naturally once I catch that spark. The first film I really connected to was Bicycle Thieves. So many moments in the film felt like complex life moments, not movie moments. This changed my conception of what cinema is capable of. I see film as a means of connecting us with our core and helping us live with ourselves and with each other.

Steven Spielberg went to town this week casting his upcoming Abraham Lincoln biopic, which already had Daniel Day-Lewis in place as Lincoln and Sally Field as his wife, Mary Todd.

Sally Field

Joining them in the film, based on Pulitzer-winning biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, will be Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Hawkes, and a dozen other thesps.

Tommy Lee Jones

Who else will log time inLincoln?

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jones will play Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens while Gordon-Levitt steps into the role of Abe ‘n’ Mary Todd’s eldest son, Robert.

Also joining the cast will be Hal Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce McGill, Joseph Cross, David Costabile, Byron Jennings, Dakin Matthews, Boris McGiver, Gloria Reuben, Jeremy Strong, and David Warshofsky.

From DreamWorks Studios:

Based on the best-selling book, Team of Rivals, by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, the screenplay has been written by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Tony Award winner, and Academy Award nominated writer Tony Kushner. It will be produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg.

The film will focus on the political collision of Lincoln and the powerful men of his cabinet on the road to abolition and the end of the Civil War.

Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones will play Thaddeus Stevens, a Republican leader and powerful congressman from Pennsylvania in the U.S. House of Representatives. Stevens was a staunch supporter of abolishing slavery and was critical to writing the legislation that funded the American Civil War.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, known for his roles in “Inception,” “(500) Days of Summer,” and next year’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” will take on the role of Robert Todd Lincoln, eldest son of President Lincoln and the only one to live past his teenage years.

Thanks George Kennedy for the Vimeo post! Check out our DCFCPUG member winning the biggest prize at the SUPERMEET – 30K worth of BlackMagic Design DaVinci software + associated color grading console gear [1 min, 31 seconds in on video]

Hollywood, Calif. – To no one’s surprise, “The King’s Speech” took home the Oscar gold last night, earning the statuette in four categories, including Best Picture. In a more heated race, “Inception” won for Best Visual Effects, beating “Alice in Wonderland,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1,” “Hereafter,” and “Iron Man 2.” Meanwhile, “Toy Story 3″ bested the competition in the Animated Feature category, beating “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Illusionist.” In the Film Editing slot, Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter won for their work on “The Social Network.” The work on “Inception” received the gold for Sound Editing (Richard King) and Sound Mixing (Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick). The award for Best Art Direction went to Robert Stromberg (production design) and Karen O’Hara (set decoration) for “Alice in Wonderland.” And, “The Lost Thing” was selected as the Best Animated Short Film.

Here’s a list of the winners:

• Best Picture: “The King’s Speech”
• Best Actor: Colin Firth, “The King’s Speech”
• Best Actress: Natalie Portman, “Black Swan”
• Best Director: Tom Hooper, “The Kings Speech”
• Best Original Song: “We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3″
• Best Film Editing: “The Social Network,” Angus Wall & Kirk Baxter
• Best Visual Effects: “Inception,” Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley & Peter Bebb
• Best Documentary Feature: “Inside Job”
• Best Short Film (Live Action): “God of Love,” Luke Matheny
• Best Documentary (Short Subject): “Strangers No More”
• Best Costume Design: “Alice in Wonderland,” Colleen Atwood
• Best Makeup: “The Wolfman,” Rick Baker & Dave Elsey
• Best Sound Editing: “Inception,” Richard King
• Best Sound Mixing: “Inception,” Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo & Ed Novick
• Best Original Score: “The Social Network,” Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
• Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, “The Fighter”
• Best Foreign Language Film: “In a Better World,” Denmark
• Best Original Screenplay: David Seidler, “The King’s Speech”
• Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network”
• Best Animated Feature Film: “Toy Story 3″
• Best Short Film (Animated): “The Lost Thing,” Shaun Tan & Andrew Ruhemann
• Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, “The Fighter”
• Best Cinematography: “Inception,” Wally Pfister
• Best Art Direction: “Alice in Wonderland,” Production Design: Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Karen O’Hara

UPDATE: It appears the information I received is not valid since there has been no official word yet from RED officials.

If this changes, we will update the post…

Previously posted:

NAB Wednesday: REDUSER 2011 Party
Join us with our friends Steve Sherrick and the good people at RED for the REDUSER 2011 Party at the Tropicana Hotel & Casinoas on Wednesday, April 13th from 11am-11pm. Steve and RED crew are going to put on another great night of our favorite color. An Epic event is approaching. Be prepared.

Walter Murch responds to Roger Ebert on 3D

From Roger Ebert’s Journal in the Chicago Sun-TImes, 23 January 2011 and Peter Salvia at Pro.active.ly

I received a letter that ends, as far as I am concerned, the discussion about 3D. It doesn’t work with our brains and it never will. The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous. The case is closed.

This letter is from Walter Murch, seen above, the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema. As a editor, he must be intimately expert with how an image interacts with the audience’s eyes. He won an Academy Award in 1979 for his work on “Apocalypse Now,” whose sound was a crucial aspect of its effect.

Wikipedia writes: “Murch is widely acknowledged as the person who coined the term Sound Designer, and along with colleagues developed the current standard film sound format, the 5.1 channel array, helping to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. “Apocalypse Now” was the first multi-channel film to be mixed using a computerized mixing board.” He won two more Oscars for the editing and sound mixing of “The English Patient.”

“He is perhaps the only film editor in history,” the Wikipedia entry observes, “to have received Academy nominations for films edited on four different systems:

• “Julia” (1977) using upright Moviola
• “Apocalypse Now” (1979), “Ghost” (1990), and “The Godfather, Part III” (1990) using KEM flatbed
• “The English Patient” (1996) using Avid.
• “Cold Mountain” (2003) using Final Cut Pro on an off-the shelf PowerMac G4.

Murch at work on "Apocalyse Now"

Now read what Walter Murch says about 3D:

Hello Roger,

I read your review of “Green Hornet” and though I haven’t seen the film, I agree with your comments about 3D.

The 3D image is dark, as you mentioned (about a camera stop darker) and small. Somehow the glasses “gather in” the image — even on a huge Imax screen — and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses.

I edited one 3D film back in the 1980′s — “Captain Eo” — and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in.

Murch editing...

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now “opened up” so that your lines of sight are almost — almost — parallel to each other.

Salt shaker and landscape Photoshops by Marie Haws

Salt shaker and landscape Photoshops by Marie Haws

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn’t. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the “CPU” of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches.

They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true “holographic” images.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are “in” the picture in a kind of dreamlike “spaceless” space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?

All best wishes,

Walter Murch

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More on Murch on YouTube:

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Enjoy the sharing from a master editor….

Rodney – DCFCPUG Leader

  Editing, Interviews, People

  dcfcpug, walter murch