Well, I am finally ready to let loose a bit of a teaser. Some of you know that I’m in the middle of writing a script for a film that I would like to see produced and submitted to festivals. It’s been an interesting process so far and we are definitely still in the infant stages of this. All of this is subject to change (including the title), but if you’re interested you can head over to verbatimmovie.com to check out the Verbatim teaser page. Currently there is only some sparse graphics and a song at that page, but a synopsis and accompanying materials will arrive in time. I want to document the process of this film from its early stages, hence this teaser site.

For those of you interested, the song was put together in GarageBand in conjunction with a MIDI keyboard that I use to compose with here at home. Let me know what you think.

I was asked to be an extra in a fun little film that Food for the Hungry is producing. The film is being designed to teach the importance of raising monies for medicine and supplies which are distributed through our Gifts-in-Kind ministry. Our video guy sent this still to me from the ‘deworming medication’ segment.

Let me be the first to admit it- I was excited about the Iron Man movie when I first discovered that it was in production. The trailers only furthered that excitement and I have to admit that I’m partial to superheroes who are self-made, not just blessed/cursed with power. I’m also partial to those superheroes that don’t get as much publicity as the ‘Big 3′: Superman, Batman, and Spiderman (though as an aside I must say that Batman Begins was incredible, while Spiderman 3 was one of the most disappointing, over-hyped movies to hit the big screen in quite some time).

Regardless of your perspective and biases towards certain characters, from the buzz, Iron Man is looking like it will be a noteworthy addition to the comic book movie line-up. Rotten Tomatoes has early reviewers putting this movie at the 95% mark (for comparisons sake, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ended up with a 94% rating).

My original worries were that this movie would buckle under the pressure and try to put too much action and not enough story in the mix. However, early reports seem to indicate that Tony Stark doesn’t dawn the Iron Man suit until a decent length into the movie. This reminds me of Batman Begins, in that the director Christopher Nolan didn’t rush the plot in order to give us Batman; he invested an equal amount of time in Bruce Wayne showed how this broken man becomes the dark knight. I love that- it should be every director’s goal to get his/her audience invested in the character before we are expected to cheer for them.

Needless to say, I’ve ordered tickets for the first showing tonight (which amazingly starts at 8pm… a very welcome ‘pre-viewing’ time that breaks the traditional midnight debut for movies like this). Who knows- I may be disappointed, but its sure worth finding out with reviews like this abounding.

Okay, so just before I left for Photoshop World last week, I become incredibly enthusiastic about Magic Bullet Looks. Rather than try to describe to you what Magic Bullet does, here is how Red Giant Software (the developer) describes it:

“Traditionally achieved with filters, filming techniques or chemical processes, a “look” was any treatment applied to film stock to lend it a color, appearance, or mood. With digital editing, many more sophisticated effects are now possible. Often referred to as color correction, the process is similar to working in a virtual darkroom. Ordinary footage can be made to look like old films or TV, colors can be adjusted to turn a daytime shoot into film noir, and camera tricks can be simulated digitally.”

I can honestly say that Magic Bullets does a great job at helping you achieve that ‘filmic’ look. I was impressed with the designer’s interface and ease of use. I downloaded the demo version, which plugs in to After Effects. After playing around with it and spitting out some footage I decided that this would need to be an eventual ‘must buy’ for my future film endeavors. However, at a price tag of $399, I realized that this was something that would have to wait for a while. Its hard to justify an expenditure like that when its for just a plug-in (albeit a cool one). I resigned myself to saving up the money and waiting.

Then I went to Photoshop World and learned a lot about using Photoshop CS3’s new, powerful video editing capabilities. The skills and techniques I learned at some of the classes opened my eyes to a few new possibilities.

I began to realize that, while Magic Bullet Looks is indeed a fantastic program, I could achieve the same effects for free using Photoshop CS3 Extended (let me re-emphasize this: this will only work in CS3 Extended, not standard) by importing the footage and editing it. Furthermore, I could create my own personalized ‘looks’ (much like Magic Bullet) and make them reusable by recording actions in Photoshop that would ‘process’ the footage the same way every time. I was thrilled to discover this because, not only does it save me $399, but it also allows me to be more precise in the way I process my footage. I can now dial in my edits using the interface that I’ve come to know and love over the past 10 years.

Don’t get me wrong, Magic Bullet Looks has a wonderful interface for editing and it is extremely customizable. If you are a beginner to intermediate user of Photoshop, you may still want to stick with Magic Bullet. However, if you are further a long in your Photoshop knowledge, I’d suggest you check this alternative method out. Smart Filters, masking, adjustment layers, advanced color adjustment, etc. all make this a very enticing option for editing the look of your footage. The great part about this? If you set up your workflow properly, you can nondestructively edit your footage, so that you can go back and re-edit the look of it at any given time. For the advanced Photoshop users out there: just think about what you could do with actions and batching files. Imagine shooting all of your footage, editing it down in your editor of choice, and then running a batch command in Photoshop to apply your customized film effect to your footage. With a click of a button, Photoshop would apply the same effect to all of the designated pieces of film and you could walk away while it renders. Pretty cool.

I am posting a video below for your reference. Please forgive the poor quality- the upload utility in blogger severely degrades quality. This video contains 1) the stock, unaltered footage, 2) a customized look I created using Magic Bullet (notice the lovely, red ‘x’ that stripes the footage due to the fact that I’m using the demo version for this), and 3) a custom setting I created using Photoshop (I tried to somewhat match this look to the MB one, though it is not a perfect copy). Anyway, these are rough, but hopefully they give you a better idea of what the new Video capabilities can do in Photoshop.

My sources have recently informed me that there is an uprising in the works meant to stop my progress as an individual. It goes by the name of S.O.M.B.S. Details are sketchy at the moment, but a look at this new ‘video blog’ reveals quite a bit about the movement’s leader, known to his audiences only as ‘Darryl‘. More info will be posted here as this unsettling drama unfolds…