Directing note 67: Never express actions in terms of feelings

Don’t give actors undoable emotional directives such as: “Be disappointed.” You are almost guaranteed an insincere result.
[...]
An excellent way of expressing an action, however, is to prompt the actor to focus on how they want the other person to feel.
Paul Newman once said the best direction [...]

Some 5.1 notes

In which I transcribe some notes I took at a trade fair about the BBC works with surround sound in their TV productions.
At the Broadcast Video Expo today I heard some useful tidbits from Chris Graver, a dubbing mixer with the BBC. He presented a seminar on 5.1 sound.
- Although you might see multiple speakers [...]

Storyboarding vs. shoot planning

In which I take an Apple patent and suggest that it could form the basis of a new collaborative on-location application for the cloud, iPhone and iPod Touch for TV and film makers.
Storyboards are fine in principle, but crews need to use enough setups to cover enough angles to capture the drama so that directors [...]

Encode copyrights into the file format

15 years ago I wrote an essay called “What if Media was Media?” It was based around an idea that might interest others, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. As I wasn’t on the internet back then, all I could do was print it out and give it to a few people [...]

When will subtitles catch up?

This is an example of what I’ve been talking about. A twitter thought leads to a blog post… or two.
When I woke, my guest was watching TV. Part of the show was an interview with a French person. His voice was dubbed. As I know a little and my friend knows all French, it was [...]

Once, twice, three times a loader – Let editors edit

Given the nature of modern production techniques I wonder if the job or second assistant camera and apprentice editor might be combined in the near future. Any problems with digital files need top be caught at any stage in the process.
This could be the job – loading the solid-state memory onto the camera, where once [...]

Plagarise your memory

Last night I went to Clare Kitson’s presentation of films celebrating the launch of her book on the history of British animation since 1982. She was the commissioning editor for animation at Channel 4 from 1989 to 1999. Find out more about the book at the publisher’s website.
One of the films she showed was “Love [...]

Film acting BCU

To edit drama, we need to understand acting for film. Almost twenty years ago I saw a film acting masterclass presented by Michael Caine. One of the first things he said is:
[1:12] – “What we do, we actors in the movie, hang on to each other’s eyes. That’s the most important thing in film: eyes. [...]

On-set playback: an excuse for not paying attention

Technology has helped movies evolve in many ways over the years, but sometimes it’s a good idea to eschew an advance to see what happens.
In a podcast from USC featuring the team behind ‘Son of Rambow’ the director describes a method for helping their two child leads. From 6:40 in:
“We got rid of any monitors [...]

Comparing the new YouTube HD with Vimeo SD

A few months ago I posted a shortcut that let you see better quality encodes from YouTube (add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL). That was part of YouTube re-encoding all their videos to a better codec: H.264.
They’ve now been re-encoding videos that were uploaded to YouTube at higher resolution than standard definition. [...]