Directing | Barry Clegg

IBED Local 103

August 27, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Back in 2005 I participated in my first 48 Hour Film Contest with director Scott Palmer and the rest of the Glasseye team. We made some great films, even being the first team to win twice in Boston. After our second win for “Conversion” the team decided to take a break from the competition. I helped out some other friends with their film the next year acting as an online editor, but over the years I really wanted to see if I could direct one of these.

At the urging of my good friend Andrew Martin, I went ahead and entered the contest, this time as team leader and director. My original plan was to gather my friends, make a film the we liked, and hope to get it in on time. Those were my only real goals. A good philosophy in this contest is to just have some fun and embrace the madness of making a movie in 48 hours.

The movie was shot on the Sony Z7U HDV camera at 1080p/23.976fps to compact flash cards. Avid does a great job of importing the .m2t files right in. When moving file based media off of cards, I always copy them to my hard drive system first, in this case an Avid Unity, but I do it twice. Having worked with tape for so long, I like having the piece of mind that I have a backup of the files in another location just in case something gets corrupted. One of these days I will probably stop doing that, but when you are dealing with a 48 hour deadline it is better safe than sorry.

As far as post goes, you can see there are a couple of cool things in there as far as FX shots, specifically the van explosion and the license plate tracking shot. Both of these were done in Adobe After Effects CS5 with Mocha. For the explosion, I shot the van and just jerked the camera around a couple of times (I even yelled out BOOM! to give me some motivation.) I took the most realistic looking take, drew a garbage matte around the van in Mocha and used that as my tracking data. Using Video CoPilot’s Action Essentials 2 I compiled some fire explosions, dust, smoke and linked them to the tracking data. If you parent a null object to the tracking data, then parent all your elements to that you can add motion blur for a more realistic feel.

The license plate shot was something I hadn’t really planned on, but I knew I would be able to figure something out. My original plan was to find a .jpg on Google of a Massachusetts plate and then just paste it in, but once I sat down to composite the shot I had a revelation. Why not just use the license plate I already had on video? I took a still of the first frame, masked out the plate and painted out the actual license plate number. For about 20 minutes I researched what the font was on Mass. plates, but just kept coming up empty. Could have been the fact I was on hour 35 or so without sleep. After the number was painted out, I put in the “UNCL HNK” and used that still composite as what I married to the tracking data. Since it was the original plate I shot anyway, it looks seamless.

You can read all their names in the credits, but I couldn’t have asked for a better crew to work on this. It is cliché to say, but it really was a total team effort.

Waltham Music Video

August 24, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Keeping with the theme of projects I also directed, this was the first music video I directed after starting my career at Cramer. Waltham was a band out of, you guessed it, Waltham, MA that was having quite a bit of success on the national stage. Also, the lead singer, Frank Pino was my landlord at my apartment. Story goes that my rent check got lost in the mail so I had to drop it off in person one night. He emailed me at work and when I dropped off the check he asked “what exactly do you do?” I told him I was an editor at a production company in Norwood, MA and that if he ever wanted to do a music video in our studio I had some ideas. Little did I know Frank was filming an episode of Made for MTV.

Fast forward 2 weeks and I get a phone call from Frank that says they need to shoot a video that weekend. They had a short window to get a video on air at MTV since they were already in with the filming of the show. Luckily I knew some great crew from my short time at Cramer and enlisted John Coyne (DP), Ed Johns (Producer) and Brian Corbett (Key Grip.) The concept of the video was actually two fold. First, the performance of the song “Joanne” shot over white limbo in the studio. The song is actually about Franks’ van, whom he endearingly called Joanne. The studio was meant to be about30% of the video. My original plan was to actually have this black and white, but after seeing the colors pop off the limbo we left it as such. The second part of the video was the story, which we never actually shot. The story line was this, we were going to have Frank in a beat up basement singing the song to these Polaroid pictures of an attractive girl standing next to the van. Trick the viewer into thinking he was singing to the girl. Payoff shot at the end would be Frank buying the van from the girl and the girl walking off with the rest of the band. Due to time constraints we never actually did this whole story line and everyone was happy enough with the studio footage we had.

We shot this back in 2005 (I think) and we used a Sony790 Digital Betacam and a doorway dolly with a fluid head mounted to an apple box. Afterwards, I ran the DBETA deck through a Sony DME 7000 via SDI lines to get the film look. This was great because instead of trying to put an effect on in Avid or some other software, the footage comes in real-time. This workflow doesn’t really exist anymore with the advent of HD, but at the time it was pretty good.

As far as editing goes, the way I approached it was this. The first thing I edited was the guitar solo. This was the only take we didn’t record the whole song of. We did about 5 takes handheld. After that what I did was make each take its own track in Avid (I think I had about 14 tracks.) Then, I went through each take and left the good moments. My timeline looked like swiss cheese, and there were many parts that had good moments in multiple takes at the same time. I then went to those sections and picked out the best of the options I had. After that, I just collapsed everything down to one track and viola! I had a cut music video. Some color correcting with GenArts Film Look, some Avid paint to take out the top of the cyc wall, and some behind the scene footage with some film cutter and bam, you got yourself a finished product.

Andy and Erin, Behind the Music

August 21, 2011 · by bcleggtv

As the first official post, I wanted to start of with projects that I have both directed and edited. Two good friends of mine for years were getting married, and instead of having your typical flat art video, I recruited a group of mutual friends and we decided to take it one step further. Andy and Erin are both seasoned musicians, so we of course came up with the mockumentary shell of Behind the Music.

Luckily, Andy and Erin were getting married at Brookridge Community Church, which has a state of the art audio and video system, complete with dual 16×9 screens at the front of the church. Usually something like this would play at a rehearsal dinner, but with the ease of playback at the ceremony venue, it was determined it would play there for all to see. Andy and Erin both knew there was a video being created, but they thought it would be about 3 minutes of baby pictures and such.

The interviews were shot on green screen with a Sony DVCAM 570. I did this because I wanted to work in DV25 off my external hard drive, but I knew going in I wasn’t going to get a great key with 4:1:1 color space, but I also knew that my viewing audience would never tell because this whole thing was a surprise and they concentrating would be on that and not the blocky edges. The second reason was the playback was actually going to be a Windows Media File off a Media Shout playback system in SD. The third and final reason was the majority of my BROLL was digital flat art at varying dimensions, so having a 864×486 canvas gave me more room to do moves than an HD raster.

All the interviews were done at the same focal length and angle, the only reason people go from a left composed shot to a right composed shot is a simple flip in the SpectraMatte. The backgrounds I found on Google images and just tried to find ones that matched the “characters.” For example I found drum kits for myself and Bill, a corporate office for Mark Lonergan and, the best one, a basement that I spray painted in Photoshop for Brian, the ultimate BlindSight fan. On the backgrounds I used the Avid 3D Warp tool with a little bit of defocus and GenArts Sapphire vignette for some depth of field. I also used the vignette on all the flat art. When using the Avid Pan and Zoom tool I used the Sapphire plug-in, when I did off access moves in After Effects I just put a soft mask around a black solid and overlayed it over the pictures.

We had a blast writing it, but the most fun came in the production of it. The night of the interviews people were coming and going at weird times. In fact, my interview wasn’t even an interview, it was just me answering my own questions in my head in an empty studio. Erin’s two sisters were shot in the cafeteria of a Holiday Inn in Andover, MA. They flew in for the bachelorette party and we played production crew/interference with Erin and her friend to keep it secret.

The secret was almost given away when, half way through the edit I realized this was going to be way longer than my original 6 minute goal. I called Andy and asked when it was going to be playing during the ceremony, and he told me right in the middle. I informed him that what was going to be playing may run about 15 minutes. Needless to say he was taken back by that and asked what could possible take 15 minutes. I believe my answer was “don’t worry…it is going to be awesome and you guys are going to love it.” And you know what, they did.