Tools for Indie Filmmakers: Rob Schmidt By Cecil Castellucci Monday September 27, 1999, 12:10 AM PDT Rob Schmidt is an independent filmmaker working on his second feature film tentatively titled "Crime and Punishment in High School" for United Artists Films Limited/Killer Films. His previous film, "Saturn," produced by Sibling Entertainment, played at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival this year. What kind of production and post-production equipment did you use in "Saturn" and "Crime and Punishment in High School?" For post, Avid was important. Non-linear editing has changed filmmaking quite a bit because of Avid and the ability to do film effects and transitions. It used to be that you would have to send out to an optical house and take a look at something if you thought it might be interesting. And now in 30-40 seconds you can generate simple effects. That's made film much more plastic than it ever was. Because of After Effects and home computers, you can actually generate stuff that will look good in a 35mm print for not very much money. Even on "Saturn," which was a $500,000 movie and had loads of effects in it -- compound dissolves and stuff like that -- you'd never realize how they were done. What kinds of cameras did you use? We used your garden-variety modern motion picture cameras -- nothing exotic, although we did use precision speed controls. Being able to change your shutter speed and frame right on the fly is something that you couldn't do five years ago. Now it's part of the film language. "Very Much In Love" 3.1 MB QuickTime 3 Movie 5.9 MB QT 2 (CinePak) Movie There was something on "Crime and Punishment" that was terrific for us. For years, if you wanted to film a TV screen you could either film it with a bar rolling through it or you could pay to get 24-frame video. That's a really expensive process that costs about $1,000 for an eight-hour day, and then you have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get your footage transferred. It turns out that new TV screens -- because they're LCD -- have no bars running through them. So that whole industry has just disappeared. There were whole companies that made livings off doing 24-frame video, and there's no reason for it anymore. Was there a big difference between the equipment that you used on "Saturn" and "Crime and Punishment?" There was more equipment on "Crime and Punishment." But it wasn't really a big difference. Matty Libatique, the DP on "Saturn," is really young and he's very used to technology. So even though we were a low-budget show, we had pretty high-tech equipment, just less of it. What kind of cameras did you use? We were using an Arri BL4, I believe, on "Saturn." And on "Crime and Punishment," we were using Panavision Platinums. Was the difference between the choice in cameras because of the DP or was that because of money? It really came down to bids. We would have gone with Arri except that Panavision offered us a really good deal. I'm not sure which of those systems is better. On "Saturn," I was really happy with the way the Arri equipment worked out. On "Crime and Punishment," I was happy with the way the Panavision equipment worked out. Plus, Panavision gave me a director's finder. That was important to me, since I'd spent 10 years avoiding buying one. For me in terms of digital technology, the most exciting thing is the ability to do image and sound effects that before would cost you fortunes and take incredible amounts of time. Now you can work almost instantly. We routinely run six tracks of sound on the Avid. It used to be when you worked on flatbeds, you'd have one or two tracks of sound, and it was a very different thing to judge what a movie was going to look like. Now we can quickly put six tracks of sound down, and if it's important we can mix those down. So you can see how the film is going to look right away? You get to make much more informed decisions, with more options, about the movie you're making right away. Even in "Crime and Punishment" -- you saw those stills that we did. It used to be before digital that if we had that idea and we wanted to look at it, it would probably take us two weeks to get that rendered out and then get a piece of film back that we could see. And it's entirely possible that the image we picked as a still wasn't a good one. We'd never know what the best thing could be. Or we might not have tried those stills. Meanwhile, they ultimately worked out really great. But it would have cost a lot of money and it would have been a real risk to spend that money and time and have it not work out. Whereas now we can do that probably in four hours with like a $49 scanner and the tools that are included in the Avid. Are you using the same kind of Avid on "Saturn" that you did on "Crime and Punishment?" We're using Film Composer version 7.1. On "Saturn" we used the same thing. But on "Saturn" we used Film Composer 5.1 and then we switched. Someone offered us a system that was running 7.1 and we thought, "Oh cool, we'll switch over to that." But for the rest of the post-production period, none of our files was digitized right and they kept getting damaged. What we found out after probably 100 hours of down time -- time when technicians were working on the system -- was that basically whatever system you start editing a film on, you should stay on that unless there's some kind of insanely alluring reason to switch. It just really murdered us to switch systems -- it's very painful. Like you're getting ready to show someone a cut of your film and he or she has to sit and hang out with a technician for 12 hours. But 7.1 seemed like the better option at the time because it was a newer version? Yes, because it was newer. Whatever you have that works, you should stick with because ultimately the important thing is the project, not the technology. What kind of sound equipment did you use? We just used the Avid that has eight channels of audio. And then later when we get into the sound thing, we jump over to a program called Pro Tools . Pro Tools has gotten very, very advanced. One of the post sound houses that we're looking at -- their pre-dubbing stage is all Pro Tools, it doesn't even have a mixing board anymore. Which used to be like the centerpiece -- like in the '70s, there are those photographs of rock bands doing lines of cocaine off this giant mixing board in the studio. … In five years, those boards won't exist any more. All that stuff can be put on a computer screen. What about when you were actually shooting -- what kind of sound equipment did you use? Was it digital? Well, this is what we did and it's fairly common, but it's not what people always do. We had DAT recordings for the dialogue but we also had a Nagra backup. That’s sort of important because plenty of people -- especially if you're trying to save money and don't have a backup -- just record with one thing. But on "Saturn," we recorded only with DAT tapes, which are very small. And one of them with an entire day's audio on it was lost and we had to reshoot that entire day's footage. So this time we had two recorders. That is common on bigger shows but not so common on low-budget shows. And in light of the fact that it cost us an entire day -- we had to fly one of cast members from L.A. to reshoot that day -- it would have been cheaper for us to have done 1/4-inch and DAT all the way through. Plus it was heartbreaking to work so hard and then lose an entire day's work. Were there any new tools that you used on "Crime and Punishment" that you didn't use on "Saturn" that you were excited about using? Piece of equipment, wanted to use, didn't get to use. Oh! I know what I got to use on "Crime and Punishment" that I was excited about. A trailer. It's sort of a big deal for me. This is the thing -- my trailer had a VCR in it and I could look at dailies. I would spend all the time when I wasn't on set speed searching through the dailies. This is a thing that's bad about technology. It's something that's been bad for the feature filmmaking process. It used to be -- when there was film projection when there was no video -- that part of each day of shooting would be looking at the dailies from the day before, and the entire crew -- all the department heads and creatives and cast would come to dailies. Everyone would sit together at the end of the day and look at the film and discuss what things were successful and what things were not. Crews were able to brainstorm while they were going through all this footage as a group. Because of the advent of video dailies and also digital editing, there's no reason to -- it's not a group experience. What you do is make four copies of the dailies, the producers get a copy and the director gets a copy and the editor gets a copy and some actors get copies and everyone goes to their trailers or their hotel rooms and looks at these dailies and no one gets to sit down together and talk about it. And it's not as good for the process. How do you think that can be resolved? I think the next movie I do, I'm going to schedule dailies. I'm going to have the assistant director schedule dailies into the workday. Page 1 2 Next Page		... Intel announces it will make the processor for Microsoft's new X-Box video game console... Motorola has notified customers who bought Irridium phones that the service will end March 17 unless a buyer comes forward... Hewlett-Packard signs a deal with Lynx Real-Time Systems to use a HP clone of Sun's Java software in its verison of Linux embedded devices... QuickTime Live! 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