Before it was called “The Village”, the working title of M. Night Shyamalan’s fourth film was called “The Woods”. Since this weekend marks the fifth release from the innovative director with his fairy-tale yarn “Lady In The Water“, this information seems particularly relevant.

The Smoking Gun has a fantastic summary of “The Woods” budget, as well as excerpts and notes from Shyamalan’s previous three film budgets. The excerpts offer incredible insight into just where all that money goes.

Additionally, they have posted the entire detailed, line-by-line breakdown of the The Village budget. It’s rather enlightening to browse through the overwhelming 79 spreadsheet pages, there is a veritable plethora of information contained in those pages.

Beyond the subject of budgets, filmmakers will find the documents very informative about about film production in general. Indies interested in producing a feature of significant length or complexity would do well to study these details and make copius notes. Obviously everything is on a $71.6 million scale, but the underlying principles transfer. Read and learn.

One of my favorite daily reads is the website Self Reliant Filmmaking. SRF founder Paul Harrill has a firm grasp on the art of filmmaking, and the site should be required reading for those who consider themselves to be filmmakers or students of the craft.

Paul has just posted an interview with Tom Schroeppel, author of “The Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video”.

“You won’t find Tom Schroeppel’s face adorning the cover of Film Comment, Filmmaker, MovieMaker or any other film magazines that champion American cinema, yet, in his own way, Schroeppel has exerted a quiet influence on aspiring filmmakers in film schools across the country for the last twenty-five years. How? As the author of The Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video, one of the simplest — and by simplest, I mean best — textbooks to cover the basics of motion picture production.”

Read on…

An online magazine based in the UK is sponsoring a short film contest challenging filmmakers to make a 60-second short/viral with the theme ‘The First Post’. It can be a film or an animation (that includes Flash, for all you Macromedia webmonkeys).

The winner takes home £5,000 (approx $6,300 USD, currently). Second and third place winners will receive £2,500 and £500 respectively. The deadline for submissions has recently been extended to August 30th, 2006, so get crackin’.

For a little vintage camcorder love, check out this classic 1985 Panasonic camcorder commercial. Does anyone know what model that was?

(Via DCN)

Videocopilot.net has a great tutorial on how to use After Effects to generate a shallow depth of field look in post, something that is very hard to create while shooting with 1/3″ chip cameras.

Their DOF fakey technique uses the Lens Blur filter in concert with a black/white gradient to apply the blur to a specific plane in your image. It’s a very convincing effect, and the excellent tutorial makes it seem oh-so-simple.

They have quite a few other useful and informative tutorials available as well, check them out.

(Via DVGuru)

NOTE: ARTICLE UPDATED BELOW
Fellow FresHDV writer Kendal Miller was recently looking for a 10-bit codec to support a project’s convoluted chromakey workflow. And it turns out that Blackmagic has them freely available, for both Mac and PC platforms. Handy. Look for the links on the right column.

And while I’m on the subject of uncompressed codecs, here’s a few codec tests by Mike at HD4NDS.

UPDATE: Mike Curtis gave me the heads up on the Sheer codec from BitJazz. He wrote about it earlier this year:
“I used to use the BlackMagic codec for cross platform work, but it
introduces a very noticeable shift in the luma (brightness) of the
footage, so this time I tried the Sheer codec from Bitjazz. It is
mathematically lossless QuickTime codec (exact match of the source
material) that is usually around 40% smaller than the Apple or
Blackmagic codec. Yeah, the files are smaller. Yeah, the video looks
and is exactly the same. No, I don’t know how it works, I just trust
that it does.

(I tried to capture directly to Sheer, but ended up with half sized
files (640×360). This is a known issue with BMD cards and Sheer, and
Andreas Wittenstein, the developer of Sheer, is working on it.)

There is a free reader version of the codec downloadable for QuickTime
(and an AVI version is under development) from the site at the link
above for both Mac and Windows, thus it’s cross platform.”

He also mentions that Apple has updated their codec recently, reportedly to fix the issue of gamma shift in AE.

So there you have it. More choices.

This is going to be a short post, but don’t underestimate the value of this info. Studio Monthly has very informative case study that might prove invaluable for anyone producing a show or series for broadcast. The team behind the Fine Living TV series “Any Given Latitude” has taken the time to document copious notes on the processes they have successfully used to produce the series. They are working with both HDCAM and HDV-source footage, and editing offline in FCP. There are so many nuggets of useful info in the article, all I can say is this article is fantastic.

(Via HD For Indies)

JVC has updated the HD100-series with the introduction of the spankin-fresh GY-HD110U camera. This update to the pro camera line adds quite a few features including a B&W viewfinder mode, adjustable Focus Assist, more choices when playing or monitoring over composite, and an option to turn of Digital Noise Reduction, to name a few.

Check out the summary at Studio Daily or read the JVC features page for more details. And as Mike/HD4NDS says, if you are buying a GY-HD100U…don’t. Get this one.

(Via HD For Indies)

Ripple Training is an excellent FCP and Studio apps resource. Their training DVD’s are second to none, if you are looking for FCP Studio training, look no further.

I heard the other day that Steve at Ripple was working on a feature-length DVD Studio Pro training DVD, to be released this August. So while I was poking around Ripple’s site for more info, I ran across the following quick tutorial on adding disc Jacket Pictures in DVDSP.

Along the same lines, Ripple recently added another great tutorial over at Ken Stone’s excellent website, this one focuses on how to create DVD subtitles in FCP’s titler and author them onto the disc with DVDSP. It requires the use of a utility from Spherico.

The French artist Belluard Bollwerk has done some amazing classic arcade game simulations using people as pixels and theater seating as his canvas. So far he’s done Space Invaders and Pong. They are both brilliantly executed. Well worth watching (take a render break!)

(Via Camcorderinfo)

Saw a discussion at the Apple FCP forums on ensuring text in productions meets broadcast/FCC size requirements. There are a number of innovative suggestions and tips in the thread for determining the scanline height of your text, and adjusting it to meet the regulations. (FCC regs require text be 20 or more scanlines in height)

For those that want simplicity, Digital Heaven offers a $40 plugin called DH_LegalText that does all the work for you.

Video Disk Space Calculator is a a handy little utility for editors that calculates necessary disk space to capture or store footage in a given codec/data rate.

Simply choose your desired codec from the drop down list, input the length of your footage in minutes, and VDSC will display the data rate of that codec and the required storage space in either MB or GB.

We mentioned a similiar program previously, it’s a free Dashboard Widget called VideoSpace that performs basically the same functions as VDSC.

(Via Self Reliant Filmmaking)

What can I say, it’s a CGI news day at FresHDV…

*Cinematech showed me the way to an excellent article on the CG and motion capture work that went into the Pirates of the Carribean Davy Jones character. The article goes in-depth on the processes used by ILM to render what the author is calling the most realistic all-cg movie character to date.

*HD For Indies pointed the way to a sweet video showing the VFX passes used to create the Marlon Brando footage used in Superman Returns. Watch the clip at Ain’t It Cool News.

*HDFI also links to a few discussions on the VFX issues in Superman Returns, due to the use of the Panavision Genesis camera. Of note are two major differences this camera brings to the table…the Panalog 10-bit custom color space, and sharper than sharp images. VFX artists had to jump through some new hoops to make it work, they were forced to sharpen plates instead of blurring and adding grain. Also, they had to deal with a few dead pixels in the Genesis footage. Whoops. If you’ve seen the film, I think you’ll agree that they handled the task well.

*Apple’s Shake 4.1 is now just $499. Rejoice. Existing customers can crossgrade for a mere $49. Any chance this is related in part to the latest Blender developments?

Blender is the cross-platform open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and post-production. It is freely available for Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms, as well as a few others. And now, the greatly improved version 2.42 has been released. There is a strong sense of excitement about Blender with this release, there are those that suggest this one should have been titled 3.0 due to it’s extensive roster of updates.

Blender was heavily used in the production of Elephant’s Dream, a computer-generated short which has the distinction of being the first movie created entirely with Open Source software and tools. The production of Elephant’s Dream is what has driven many of the features and changes in this latest release of Blender. Reportedly, Blender developers coded many of the features on request by the artists during production. Hence, a vast number of improvements, and this latest release.

From the official release:
“Mark my words, friends: this will be the version that is going to propel Blender into the professional world. The features that have been added since 2.41 (mainly thanks to Elephants Dream) will allow 3D and video professionals to embed Blender into their workflow.

The full changelog is extensive so I’ll only cover a few highlights here

* A new render pipeline with a wealth of new features such as: 128 bits image buffer, rendering in different passes, better memory management, live render preview, tile based rendering
* Node editing systems for compositing and materials.
* The sequence editor has been completely redone: better memory management (you can now edit full movies), SPEED, chroma vectorscope and luma waveform windows, FFMPEG support for Linux.
* New Mesh tools: merging & collapse options, better select mode conversions, Loop multi-select, Path selecting, and improved Mirror modifier.
* Support for anisotropic materials.
* Improved fluid simulation which can now also handle moving obstacles.
* Better character animation tools. This includes “Custom Bonesâ€?, to create useful 3d interfaces to manipulate Armatures, and support for “Bone Layersâ€?, allowing you to organize a rig much better.”

Elephants Dream is a computer-generated short film that is the realization of a different kind of movie-making…an Open Source Movie.

It is the culmination of 8 months of work by a team of 7 artists and animators, and was built entirely using Open Source tools, Blender being one of the more high-profile apps used.

You can download the movie and all production materials via bittorrent, or simply buy the full DVD set on their website. Another interesting side benefit of this being an Open Source project was the open release of all the original sources, lossless versions of the video and audio. The movie is available as 20GB worth of FLAC files and a PNG sequence.

The Wikipedia entry lists some interesting stats…
*The film is 11 minutes, with credits.
*Rendering took 125 days to complete, each frame consuming 2.8GB of memory.
*Most of the rendering was done on and donated by the BSU Xseed supercomputing cluster at Bowie State University. Xseed is a 2.1Tflop cluster based on 224 Mac Xserve machines.