Editing
Editing is progressing apace. Well, it’s not – but it is.
I’m currently going through the production looking for visuals for everything that’s mentioned. I’ve spent about £100 on stock footage from istockphoto, shutterstock and revostock and made a hell of a lot of use of footage from Nasa.

The rest I’m constructing myself in After Effects and 3ds max.

This means I’m spending an awful lot of time flicking through footage sites, trying to download things and experimenting with After Effects layouts. This means my PC is being used right up to its limit: I’ve currently got 10 internet eplorer pages open, 3DS Max, After Effects, Photoshop, Word and Premiere all open and I’m trying to render a landscape in Mojoworld at the same time.

Everything is painfully slow!

Anyway, I’ve found a couple of useful tips for making stills into moving images. Instead of just animating a virtual camera over a landscape panorama still, I’ve discovered that if you add a sheer effect to it and animate that (as long as the pic is high resolution and the right kind of shot) you can get a great effect almost as though it’s a track.

Also, the vanishing point tool in Photoshop can allow you to bring a still to life if you’re really careful with it and combine it with After Effects (although I’ve not done this successfully yet – I’ll post a clip when I do!


I’m basically just gathering clips right now and plonking them on the Timeline. Next week, I should be able tobring them all together and discover whether they actually work.

I’ve got a feeling right now that I’m getting clips illustrating phrases – because I’m using stock footage – and not sequences telling a story. It’ll require some careful editing, but this is a big subject (space exploration) so I can’t go and get every shot myself….

I just hope my animations will tie it all together and give it continuity.

Of course I am deliberately looking for pictures that illustrate individual statements right now so that could well be why I’m getting that feelling…..

Would be good to get somebody elses eye on this….

scripting

Scripting
I’ve spent the last two days going through the documentary scripting it. It’s a hard job because I’ve got to string together the talking heads into some kind of story.

In doing the rough edit I’ve cut out all the waffle, and ordered the clips, dropping in a few cut-aways. Where I think narration is needed, I’ve inserted a simple text screen to give myself a visual cue as I cut and to make sure the doc is roughly the right length.

Going through and scripting is a slow and often painful job, and it’s not finished yet. This rough script I’ll record (using my own voice as a stand-in for the professional narrator) and drop in, then as I work towards a fine edit, I’ll refine the script.

I did write a preliminary script a couple of months ago to give the documentary some shape and guide me as I did the interviews. However, I’ve barely looked at it while writing this version, so I’m not really sure if I wasted my time doing it before.

I suppose the preliminary script did help to shape the production in my mind, but I could probably have got away with doing that in a less formal fashion. Having said that, when I look back, the original script (because it was written fast and without the restriction of having to fit it around people’s actual quotes) contains a lot of useful ideas and powerful quotes.

Perhaps I’ll end up taking more from it as I finalise the edit and put the spaces and pictorial sections back into it.

That’s the next job. To find all the parts of the story told at the moment by interviews which can be told better with pictures…

That’s the job for tomorrow- however, I also need to juggle my new documentaries too – there are people I need to email and shoots I need to set up. Particularly there’s the possibility that I can catch a whole group of my potential dinosaur experts for my new documentaries on the theropods (two legged meat eaters) at a conference in March.

If I can do a deal to shoot there, it’ll save a lot of time and energy rushing round the country later on.

Anyway – what is the collective name for a group of dinosaur experts?
An excavation, perhaps?

How to have a great time

I’m editing my latest documentary right now. It’s about the science behind travel between the stars and you’d think the subject would be pretty free of philosophy and have nothing to do with our lives on Earth.

However, what’s striking about the people I’ve interviewed is it’s not true. What comes through in the interviews is a real sense that there’s a higher purpose – a noble idea that there’s more to life than our petty day-to-day concerns.

There’s a quote by Osca Wilde: “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” and the people I’ve interviewed are quite definitely looking at the stars.

This seems odd when the main criticism leveled at astronomers, space mission workers and theoretical physicists is that what they do is not a benefit to the world. “why are we spending all this money looking for life on Mars when we can’t even feed our people on Earth?”.

And it’s a fair point.

However, as a defender of theoretical physics and the space race, I have to disagree…

The most common defense is that blue-sky research does throw up real benefits to mankind – penecilin was discovered by accident and without the space programme we wouldn’t even know about the greenhouse effect.

However, I think that’s not why I defend it.

We could all devote our energies to ending hunger – to stopping global warming – to the huge problems that face our world – and it’s hard to escape the argument that we have a duty to do that.

Of course if we did – if everyone dropped everything to deal with the biggest problem on our planet (whatever that turned out to be) then it would probably be solved – and then tomorrow, all the things that got dropped would have turned into crises at least as big as the problem we solved.

However, even that’s not my real defense.

You see, I don’t believe the problem with the world is that our positive energies are focused on the wrong things. I don’t think it’s the fact that we’re all spending time and money building spaceships or playing football or making art instead of saving the world that’s the problem.

I think the problem is that our positive energies aren’t doing anything.

There’s a saying that if you want something done you should ask a busy person. And I think it’s true – people who see great purposes and think of themselves as playing a part in them don’t tend to just work on one – their enthusiasm allows them to apply themselves to many.

You could argue that it was because DaVinci saw art as a noble purpose that he had the energy to see science as one as well. That it was because Bill Gates dealt with the big themes of the world in his business life that he had the vision to give it all away to charity.

Likewise, you don’t get periods in our history where humanity is just great at art or literature or just great at science or even just great at politics or humanity. When we’re great we’re great – all around.

When there’s an atmosphere of greatness, when they’re living in a Great Time, people look around and see opportunities to be great. They find them in every corner of life and they rise to them. We raise or lower our eyes depending on where the rest of the world is looking.

So it’s not a choice between funding and working towards space and funding and working towards the end of hunger.

It’s a choice between seeing a bigger purpose and going for it – whatever it is – raising yourself – or not using your energy, not looking at the stars, but focusing only on getting through the day and collapsing in front of the TV at the end of it.

The problem is not that we don’t have the resources – that we’re so strapped for time, energy and cash that we have to choose between competing great purposes – it’s that we can’t muster the enthusiasm for ANYTHING. Once we do – we can take on everything.

Don’t fret, then that you don’t devote yourself all day every day to solving global warming or world poverty. As long as you’re looking at the stars you’ll find a way to make a great time.

If I can convey some of the enthusiasm of the people I’ve interviewed in this documentary – as well as trying to get the physics across – I’ll think I’ve done a good job.

Editing
Having hacked out the stuff I’m definitely not using in the documentary, I was left with about 1hr 15 mins of useful quotes. I spent today cutting that back, just listening to all the themed sequences and cutting out any repetitions and parts of the story that don’t contribute to the main themes.

You have to be tough here because you’re dumping really good material now – just because it doesn’t fit.

I’ve put in a few of my cut-aways and animations and I’ve left holes in my project for narration. I can begin now to see how the narration will fit in. I’m now down to 50 minutes, but there’ll still be some cutting to do as my next week’s job will be to see which bits of the story I can tell with pictures rather than interview.

That’ll be quite tough too and probably require me to buy in more stock footage and do more animation.

I’ll also hope to get most of the narration written next week….

Stay tuned to see how it goes!

editing and walking

Editing
The third day of concentrated editing and my brain is beginning to freeze up. Looking at hours and hours of interviews, and slowly cutting them down, removing the usable segments is very intensive work and even though I’m getting to the end, I’m having to stop more and more often.

I think once I switch (which I will tomorrow) to the more creative side of the edit – assembling the sequences from my raw material, things will be a little easier.

All of this isn’t helped by the fact that the tapes (or actually the capturing of them) seem to be subject to dropout and sync problems which I’m constantly trying to edit around. I’m hoping it’s to do with the capturing rather than my camera. Having switched to capturing with Liquid rather than Premiere, the sync problem seems to have cleared up and the dropout isn’t as bad as before, but the shots now seem to have lots of little jumps – which don’t seem to be there on the original tapes.

It’s possible that the problem has something to do with the slowing down of my main PC (which this morning seems to have completely given up – reporting that “windows can’t be used until it’s registered with Microsoft” and then informing me that it already has been and shutting down.

Not good – but I’ve now shifted pretty much everything to the new machine anyway.

I’ve decided to go on as though the dropouts aren’t there, and then re-capture any sections I eventually use in the finished piece if there are problems. This saves me from having to confront the problem unnecessarily.

New Documentaries
I also managed to do a bit of a test for my new set of documentaries. I bought a quadruped walk cycle from Turbosquid.com.

What the hell’s that?
Well, basically somebody’s animated a four legged skeleton which I’ve bought and tied one of my own models to it so that my animal model is doing the walking.

I managed to do this without too much difficulty, so I’ve proved the idea that I can get someone else to do my complex animations on simple bone structures and then tie them easily to my models (of dinosaurs and such) and finish of the animations, lighting, textures and compositing myself.

This should save me a lot of time and effort – if I can find an animator (probably on elance) who can do the motions for me.

Here’s my animation:

How to do a rough cut

Work is going well on cutting down the interviews for my interstellar travel documentary. There’s a lot of good material in my 7 tapes of interviews, but cutting them down is quite a job.

Basically what I’ve done (using Premiere Pro) is to take each interview and create a sequence (timeline) for it. I’ve then roughly cut out anything I think might be worth using and placed clips on different video tracks depending on how keen I am on using whatever’s said. That way I can see at a glance what’s good bad or indifferent on the timeline.

After that – and it takes a couple of hours for each interview – I create another set of sequences. These correspond to the different themes I’m covering in the documentary I simply re-examine the good clips from each interview and copy and paste them into the themed sequences arranging them in a rough order as I do it.

This leaves me with about 10 minutes of footage in total on each of the themes of the programme. I can then sort out who says what best and start deleting clips from the themed sequences – safe in the knowledge that if I need them, they’re all still there in the interview sequences and I can just paste them back in.

By now, the programme is beginning to take shape. I can start thinking about what narration I’ll need, what cut-aways and how I can tell the story using stock footage, other sequences and animation – but that’s a job for another day.

This way, within a few days I’ve gone from 8 hours of footage to a reasonably shaped programme where I can begin to shape and mould the project with more clarity and confidence.

Hottness of irons
I find you need a mixture of distance and familiarity with your material to get a good edit. I need to be familiar enough to know which bits of each interview I might need – so I cut the interviews down and copy the best bits across in the same day. But I need to be distant enough to see each themed segment as a story – so I leave organizing the segments for a couple of days so I can go back to them with a fresh eye.

Premiere Problems
Having captured all my work with Premiere I’ve run into a problem. The package seems to loose sync on most of my interviews. Suddenly the picture will jump and the sound will stutter and everything after that will need to be re-synced (it’ll be out by a couple of seconds). It’s a real pain.

I’ve also recently found that Premiere’s introducing lots of what looks like tape dropout – segments where the picture goes blocky and everything gets mashed up.

However, the tape is fine – it’s not dropout – it’s Premiere. When I re-capture the interview in another package (I’ve used Avid Liquid) – it’s fine. I can then import the footage back into Premier for the edit. Far from ideal, but it’s a work-around.

the last interview - for this project - maybe

Final Interview
Yesterday I interviewed Martyn Fogg – a leading researcher into planet formation and teraforming – the science of turning a barren empty planet into one fit for human habitation.

Apparently by simply raising the temperature of Mars by about 4 degrees you could unlock the atmosphere stored in its rocks and it would become a much more hospitable place within a couple of hundred years. After that, you’d still need to find some way of getting oxygen into the air before you could breath it, but it would become a lot easier to work on… the favourite way of raising the temperature is with giant orbital mirrors. Not immediately practical, but not out of the question in a few years.

Anyway, the interview went well, and he was even able to fill in the gaps in some of the other areas of the programme, so with any luck, this will be the last interview for this programme.

In any case, I can start editing on Monday, so I’ve spent today capturing all the footage. It’s beginning to feel like a workable programme…. By the end of next week I hope to be able to see the whole project a lot more clearly. I’ll know what needs to be shot, rendered, bought in and scripted.

The whole thing will be coming together by this time next week.

I hope.

The Natural History Museum
I met up with Raoul at the Natural History Museum last night. He seems to be working very hard at trying to find a way in for me so I can have access to some of their scientists and collections for future programmes.

I really don’t know how this will go – there’s a lot of internal politics and I’ll have to see.

Meanwhile, scientists are getting back to me from all over the country about the new projects I’m proposing. Most of the programme ideas are beginning to come together and it’s only those at the NHM that have problems with getting involved. To be fair, I think they’re all keen, but it’s the politics that’s getting in their way.

The one programme that I’m having difficulty getting experts for is the one on ungulates. Basically just after the dinosaurs got wiped out, a little tree dwelling raccoon like animal appeared. It was pretty unremarkable in itself, but its decedents basically took over the world: the horses, the rhinos, the elephants, the deer, the camels, the hippos, the antelope, the pigs, and even, bizarrely the whales all descended from this one animal. It’s such a wide range that I’m not even sure it’s one programme – it could be four. In any case, I’m having real trouble finding anyone in the UK who studies the evolution of the mammals. I’m sure they’re out there, but I don’t know where to look….