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watch My site has just been listed

G

georgex5

I've just got my site listed and you might be interested in the trailer or teaser. It's just snipets from a few spots in the movie, but they kind of give the flavor of the project. It's really an old style movie that you have to pay fairly close attention to or you'll lose it. The whole project was done in mini-dv and edited in Adobe Premiere on a G3 Mac.

I'd love to get some reactions. The teaser is about one minute long and I checked it out in Safari, Firefox, Netscape, and IE. It loads very fast in Netscape and slower in the others.

Here it is: http://www.thelittlegreenie.com
 
I went I checked out the site. It's very basic, nothing flashy or eye-grabbing.
The video never loaded for me. I heard it, but never saw it. Which CODEC did you use?
I saw that it was a QT player and the bar went all the way to the end, but still.. no coffee.

I'd suggest that you tell people to hit PLAY instead of the "triangle". There are two triangles and how are we supposed to know which one to press? or will there be one that pops up on the screen after the bar fills up?

The stills looked great!
 
CootDog--

Sorry it didn't play on your machine. I'd like to know if anybody else has this problem.

The codex for the teaser ends in 3ivx. I got it off the net somewhere but I'd have to do more research to give you more info. If nobody can see the video, I'll have to change it to QT. But I'd heard that the QT video codex had problems.
 
I can hear the audio, but the embedded video is just a blank white screen.

According to http://www.3ivx.com/ , the CoDec should be playable with QT 6.0 or greater. Maybe you need to rename your video file as an MP4 ?

If nobody can see the video, I'll have to change it to QT.
Click to expand...

Technically your trailer is QuickTime, right now.

Quicktime is not a CoDec in itself... it's more like a "wrapper" that holds all the different CoDecs (and other parts of the movie) together.

Some video CoDecs are better than others, for different uses. For web-viewing you might want to look at mp4, Soreson 3, or Cinepak. (In that order). All three of those video CoDecs are in the basic install of QT6 for both Mac & Windows.

:)
 
...Zeeennnn....(whine)
The page loaded but all I saw was a green screen. And it wasn't even my slow computer or anything!
...btw, where are you in this?

--spinner :cool:
 
Zensteve said:
Me? I'm not :huh:
Click to expand...
...ooops, Sorry Zen, didn't read the page well enough, thinking that was YOUR site.

Georgex5: this whine is for you! :D ...I gotta pay closer attention..... :yes:

--spinner :cool:
 
Yea, you shouldn't go using some off the wall CODEC that nobody knows about... Stick with something everyone has, lile Cinepak or the others Zen suggested.

Personally, I wouldn't download a new codec just to watch your teaser.
 
Thanks for all the comments. Just the kind of stuff I need to know. I originally worked with Sorensen and mp4 but the codex I used seemed to give a better picture and to load better.

Okay, I will go back and try again with Sorenson and mp4. Apple has a new codex out called 246(?) that is supposed to be fast and good but i've seen various posts that say it is buggy. I think it would probably be the best when it gets straightened out.

Was anybody able to see the teaser? From what has been said, you would not be able to see it unless you had already downloaded the 3xiv codex. I did not realize this. I figured that if I could access it via my G4, that anybody could. Obviously, that is wrong.

;)
 
Played fine for me, but I have codec you mention because it's part of "Diva" which I use to convert VOB files into DV.

Feedback.
General
I couldn't really follow the story from what I heard and saw, it really was just a set of clips rather than a trailer.

I think there are some key areas you could look at to improve your filmmaking:
1) Framing - often the difference between a great shot and something that looks less professional is a fraction of an inch in position and slightly tighter or looser shots. You have a tendancy to use loose shots with too much dead space at the top of the frame. On your wides people's heads are about the centre of the frame, when the shot would look much better if they we're two thirds of the way up the frame. The same is true of your mid shots, which again could be tighter. The way you learn framing is by putting your camcorder away for three months and carrying a digital stills camera with you everywhere. Take lots and lots of photgraphs, and print off lots of rough low res prints. Then get two L-shaped pieces of paper and lay them over your photos to create a box (or frame) alter the position and size of this box until you've got a better picture. Then go and apply what you've learnt by taking more photos. Also make sure that you try taking shots from lots of different heights and angles and not from your natural height.

2) Sound - If you're going to work all in wide shot and very loose mids it's going to be almost impossible to get good sound, without using radio mics. My guess is that you used the on board mic for this filmn and that shows in the film because the on board mic always gives too much room ambinence to the sound.

3) Performance - Comedy is the hardest form to get right and requires particular skills. Most actors make the mistake of trying to make their character and their lines funny instead of letting the script and tining do the work. This calls for very high skill levels from the director, especially around understanding the rhythm of language. Comedy acting needs to be ultra-natural to work effectively, the laughs come out of the humanity of the characters. The easist way to learn about film comedy is to go back and really, really watch Laurel and Hardy or Buster Keaton. Everything that follows is just a variation on their work, and the key to their work is their vunerability. Vunerability is the hardest thing for an actor to give on screen.

Hope this helps, the film shows a genuine love and enthusiasm, add some technique to that and anything is possible.
 
Clive--

Your points are well taken. The clips are just to give the flavor of some interchanges. The hunor is verbal and situational rather than slapstick. The movie was shot in 10 or 12 days over 2 or 3 summer months. The actors are all from the LI acting community and worked for a token payment and profit-sharing, of which there is none. They learned their lines from audio tapes of a reading and very little was rehearsed. Two min-dv cameras were used along with on-camera mics. I operated one of the cameras and used a small tv set as a monitor. Neither of the cameramen are professional cameramen. I wanted to do some call back shots but the actors were not always available. The house was rented and was not always available when the actors were. A typical movie situation. In any case, the movie is completed. Did I say this was low budget?

Personally, I find some of the close-up shots in modern movies way too close and too obtrusive. Boom mikes may capture sound with great fidelity but sometimes you can't understand the words.

I'm going to put a new teaser that more browsers can see. Do you think it is better to use a 120x90 pix at 1.6 MB or 160x120 pix at 5MB? They don't look much different.
 
Firstly, look just congratulations man, just in getting a film made. I was completely sincere in my admiration for your enthusiasm.

Personally, I find some of the close-up shots in modern movies way too close and too obtrusive. /QUOTE]

I agree completely and in my feature film No Place there is only one close up in the entire film, all the dialogue is done on the mid or on long shot. This of course creates technical problems which we solved by using radio mics.

Boom mikes may capture sound with great fidelity but sometimes you can't understand the words.
Click to expand...

Ah, I don't say this often because so much in film is subjective, but in this case you're just wrong about this. In fact I'm not sure how to unpack this one for you because I'm without hearing the audio you've recorded with a boom mic I can't give you a precise diagnosis.
However, here goes. Boom mics are directional, very directional so you only get clear crisp sound when the mic is pointed right at the source of the sound (usually the mouth). The deal is with boom mics is, the closer the better, because it allows the sound person to isolate the dialogue from the ambient sound.
If you aren't getting clear sound it's because the boom op isn't pointing the mic directly at the sound source. If you've got clean sound on one actor and fluffy sound on the other, it's because the mic is directional and the boom operator has to swing the mic from one actor to the next. This means pacing the scene so that lines don't come too fast on top of each other, to give the boom op a chance to get the mic into position, plus it gives the editor a fighting chance of cuting the scene.
I know for instance that directors like Woody Allen and Mike Leigh favour doing scenes in master shot to allow the natural flow of dialogue. Actually I agree with them and am just starting some research into new audio recording techniques that will allow greater freedom for the actors in performance. However, to get clean sound for that kind of work currently requires lots of expensive sound gear and a genius sound recordist. On board mics are not the answer, well not the current generation anyway.
The truth is that sound recording for film is the most technically challenging of all the aspects of production. More people mess this up than almost anything else.

The hunor is verbal and situational rather than slapstick
Click to expand...

Three points on this one.

Firstly - Laurel and Hardy films are all based on situational humour.
Secondly - Laurel and Hardy films are all based on situational humour
Thirdly - Laurel and Hardy films are all based on situational humour, and so are all of Buster Keatons

Oh, in the world of laughter there are only two kinds comedy
a) the kind that makes you laugh out loud and
b) the kind that doesn't.

Go and watch just an hour of them before coming back to me and dismissing them out of hand, because anyone who thinks that they've nothing to learn from Buster Keaton on comic timing, or about the central vunerability at the heart of comic character production from Laurel and Hardy shouldn't be making comedy.

Finally, just a personal thing. You don't ever have to apologise or make excuses for your work, you made it, you did the best you and your team could at the time. Complaining after the event about time, money, rehearsal methods or the cast doesn't help anyone and the bottom line is that the director is responsible for quality control.
If a film fails it's the director's responsibility to stand up and say, "I pulled this production together and you all trusted me to make you look good, I'm sorry if I let you all down, there is no one to blame but me."

Actually I don't think you need to make excuses for this film. It's obvous that you had a blast making it, you put real heart into it and you inspired people to make it happen, Bravo
Click to expand...
 
After I screened an early version of the movie for some of the cast, I asked the gal who played the ingenue what her mother thought of it. She said, "She loved it." I think that's the target audience if I can just reach it.

About the trailer: I just made a new version using mpeg 4 audio and video, 15fps, 320x240, 11khz audio. File size is 2.2 MB. I will incorporate it soon.

This is a very lively forum. Very helpful.
 
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