Saturday, 7 January 2006
11:59pm

H

appy new year! Yes, it really did take practically a week for me to be able to get around to posting this, haha. My break from school turned out to be not much of a break at all, as I ended up spending like 15 hours a day editing the video I shot in Afghanistan in October. The final product was shown at my church on Sunday and it was pretty well received. Unfortunately, I can't post it on the Internet because I would quite literally be endangering the lives of some of the people who appear in it, so you guys will have to just take my word for it. Although maybe some day in the future I may end up compiling a montage of images from it that won't cause any such problems. Unfortunately, it consequently wouldn't really cover the work being done out there. By the way, my mom tells me that this Korean outfit I'm wearing is a "more modern design" hahaha.
I spent the day today at school with a couple other students helping out one of the cinematography instructors at L.A. Film School test out the new, not-yet-released Canon XLH1 HDV camera. We were basically there to see just how good or bad the HDV format is going to be, testing it out in all kinds of different situations... studio lighting while mounted on a fisher dolly, hand held documentary style stuff, outside in direct sunlight... we even tried shooting some green screen stuff. We also shot some stuff over and underexposed to see how it looked and also to see how much fixing of the image you could do in post. Oh and we went and visited one of the student thesis productions that are shooting on Sony F900 HD to do side-by-side comparisons of true HD vs. HDV.
From what I, and most of us have heard, the HDV format has a lot of shortcomings, but the school would really like for these things to actually work well since most of the craploads of accessories we already have for the Canon XL series of cameras will work with them. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to watch any of the footage, but there is still some more to be shot in the coming days. Mainly though, I thought it was pretty rad that I actually got to spend a good deal of time operating this thing in a lot of real world type situations (as opposed to on a convention floor) when supposedly it's the only one of its kind on the entire west coast. Good thing I didn't drop it, haha!
This is actually an example of one of the main reasons why I wanted to go to this particular school despite the fact that it's pretty new and few people seem to have heard of it -- they are really on top of their technology. We're not out here using a bunch of ancient crap that nobody uses anymore, and they're always looking for the next big thing. I guess I'm really liking the fact that a lot of the money we spend on tuition actually ends up in our hands in the form of equipment and faciities. Call me a happy customer.
On the other hand, I've seen a lot of people whining about lack of access to equipment. What!? All I know is I've been going to my film school for 2 months less time than my cousin who just started at NYU, and while I've got a DVD with a bunch of projects I've shot on it, he has yet to even touch a motion picture camera of any kind. Not that NYU isn't one of the best film schools on the planet... I'm just kind of pointing out that it's pretty ridiculous for an L.A. Film School student to complain about lack of equipment, haha.
Some other folks have been bitching that we've only been shooting on video and not on film, but to be quite honest, except for a small handful of projects, I haven't seen many people turning in stuff that looks properly exposed on video (when you can see right then and there what your final product is going to look like)... do these bitchers really think that just shooting on film is going to somehow suddenly make crappy lighting look good? Haha. And for the most part, the people that do turn in quality looking material haven't been the ones bitching. And I'd like to note that the day we had a class on how to load film into magazines and were let out of class early while the teacher stayed as long as necessary to let everyone who wanted to stay after class and actually get there hands on this stuff and practice -- well I don't think any of the people who have complained about not shooting anything on film actually stuck around to learn how to actually load film, haha. Some people just want to complain, I guess.
Some people do have some legitemate gripes thoough. The super intense 1 year program is both a blessing and a curse. The curse part? There's just some things you really can't learn all that well in one year because well, there's just too much to learn. And if your primary objective is to develop your screenwriting skills, this is probably not the school for you, because well, when it gets down to it, this is really more like a trade school than an art school. So far my experience has been that you'll get out of this school what you put into it. If you only do the bare minimum required to complete every project, you will get very little out of this school. But if you take each project as an opportunity to push yourself and stretch your limits, you will learn tremendously just from doing it and you have a potential to learn a huge amount of skills in a short amount of time.
Of course the other real downside to the super intensive one year schedule is that it's super intensive. Sometimes I feel like I don't even have time to poop... I don't know how the folks that have significant others can maintain their relationships... but it seems like somehow, they do.
Wow this is a really long entry that is probably of little interest to anyone who isn't a prosepctive student, haha. Sorry guys. But you know, if I had time for anything else in my life right now, I might talk about something else, haha.
By the way, check out the Giant Repository of Pics for some updates if you haven't checked it out in a few weeks or months.