Box Office News Aug 28-30

Meet the New Mutants, same as the old mutants! And that goes for Bill and Ted only in reverse.

A Technical Note About Monday's Box Office Report

I'm still stewing about the Chroma-key in that report, so much so that I felt compelled to make sure I could solve the problem. Excerpted here.

This might be a good time to explain what the hell the report even is. I'm not making money from it, and I'm not getting famous. Really it's just an excuse I use to get myself in front of a camera once a week. I've used it as a kind of constantly updating acting reel too. But I suppose soon you can look up the early episodes and experience a fond nostalgia for the days when you were able to be inside a movie theatre.

Anyhow, the pandemic has allowed me to up my game, report-wise. Since I'm not busy most weeknights I have started paying more attention to post-production. I may still dash off the report without any prior research but I have been looking into editing solutions. For years I was finishing these things on iMovie, a software package that Apple throws in to OSX like a fake tattoo in a box of Cracker Jacks. It's got a lot of good qualities and a lot of huge limitations.

I was a professional editor for a while and iMovie always felt like a step down from the Avid Media Composer, the system I went to a very expensive school in Burbank to learn about. The Composer itself was expensive in those days. In the nineties, if you wanted one of your own it would cost you somewhere between $15,000 and $125,000. And it sold too! If you were a pro the Media Composer would handle anything you threw at it. And it was cheap compared to cutting film in a rented editing suite. It has keyboard shortcuts for everything, which means that if you learn them you can cut as fast as you can type.

Anyway, that was thirty years ago. Apple and Premiere offered professional solutions at a tenth of the price, and now you can download a hobbled version of Media Composer for free. It only does 2k video so you can't really cut a movie on it, but I'm not doing movies am I?

Man what a tangent!

The thing I learned about the MC is somehow, they have the same chroma-key plugin that they were using in the nineties, and it's AWFUL. At first I was shooting on my iPhone, and compositing in iMovie because a monkey could use their green-screen system. It's really smart. You can green screen in the PHONE, man. 

But then I found that the free MC also offers free plugins and among them is a much better, more controllable chroma-key, so I started a couple of weeks ago with acceptable results. So what happened last week?

I rushed the shooting. Two mistakes: didn't light the background evenly (I liked a little shadow on my face and it turns out, can't do it) and the other one, and this it vitally important is I didn't lock the exposure on the iPhone.

Your phone probably does this: it corrects exposure on the fly. It's great for most situations but for green screen it means that if you move around the frame, or bring something light or dark into the frame, the exposure change and therefore, so will the background. And when that happens, whatever color you set to make transparent, the screen isn't that color any more. 

For the test above, I did it all right. Locked exposure, even lighting, and I made sure the screen fills the frame. I'm all set for Monday.

And most likely under ten people will watch, but one of them will be me.

Box Office News Aug 24

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Apologies for the terrible chromakey this week. Lock your exposure when you're acquiring images, is my advice!

Public Domain Friday: Latitude Zero

Here, got a movie for you.

I was completely unaware of this movie until last night, when it turned up in my Amazon Prime recommendations. What is this? I said. Joseph Cotton and Ceasar Romero in submarines? Directed by the guy responsible for all those Godzilla movies in the sixties? I'M IN!

If you didn't grow up watching it on Creature Features, it's probably for two reasons. One is that it's predictably awful. Joseph Cotton seems to be kicking off his late-career headlong dive into humiliation here. It's a few years before Lady Frankenstein and The Abominable Dr Phibes, and how he consented to wearing this costumes (and I swear, it must be a little lipstick and rouge also) can only be explained by a need for money or some really strong kink we never found out about. Romero fares better, if only because he'd been doing Batman for a couple years and was comfortable with camp.

The other reason appears to be the usual legal battles. The movie is an international co-production between Tojo studios and Four Star Productions, an American television production company. But early in the production, after flying Americans to Japan for shooting, Four Star went bankrupt and left the movie to soldier on with half the budget intact. Then once the initial TV rights expired they were held up in a legal battle which kept it out of sight for decades. It's only now that ALL rights have expired that you can see this. 

Box Office News

Box Office News August 10

A fun assortment this week!

Box Office News

The return of the major studios! *



*Return with an asterisk