Wow, its been a few months since my last post. For starters, I hope all of you had a great Summer! I decided to take some time away from the blog and the website to work on some other projects, but also just to take some time and relax, the first half of this year was very busy and I needed the break. As I mentioned in my last post, I was going to start digging into The Getaway, which I have. I've also made some more progress on the "Ghost Hunt" project, and I hope to have something to share from that soon. Aside from that, I've been keeping busy at work - I recently wrote a blog post on their website about one of the bigger projects I was a part of over the Summer - you can check that out here. Over the summer is Clear Creek Community Theatre's summer program, as well as their annual production of a Shakespeare play. This year it was Macbeth, again directed by my brother Robert Meek. The show was fantastic, and I recorded a few key/popular scenes that I plan to edit soon and be able to share with everyone. I also made an awesome teaser trailer for that show - check it out below:
Meant to get this post out last week, but I was sick and work got really busy. So lets jump in - NAB is now long behind us, and as usual I jumped right into something new as soon as I was back in town. This year, it was the teaser trailer for Clear Creek Community Theatre's production of Beauty and the Beast. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out before we go any further: So I made this teaser entirely in Adobe After Effects using Video Copilot's Element 3D plugin (along with some other plug-ins), lets start by breaking down the pieces at play here:
One more project off the list! I've finally finished my edit of the Titus Andronicus production at Clear Creek Community Theatre from summer 2017.
It took a littler longer than expected, partially because it kept getting put on hold to work on other things, but I finished it the other day, and I'm glad to be moving on to the next project. Unfortunately I can't post the full show here, because of some rights issues with music. (The theatre has different rights/rules for stage than video), but they will be posting a few different scenes in the near future. However, I've got a sneak peak here for you all who follow the blog - check it out:
Along with the crazy couple weeks I've had at work, I've also had a few fun, but quick projects I did for Clear Creek Community Theatre that I thought I'd talk about a little bit:
First of all, there's the early publicity stills I shot for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised] last week, which is the next show on the CCCT stage. The director, Steve Sarp, had an idea for publicity to put the Groucho Marx glasses prop on Shakespeare, I then suggested actually photographing the image on the Shakespeare bust that sits on the piano in the lobby at CCCT. The pictures turned out better than I had hoped:
Okay - the teaser's out now, and since I promised we would, this week we're going to take a look behind the curtain at this one:
It turned out better than I expected. My mother, the director of CCCT's production of Black Coffee, came up with the concept and I shot this with only about half of a plan and no idea of how the pieces were going to come together. Not to say the concept was bad - but while I was shooting it I was having a little trouble seeing the final edit - unlike the Christmas Carol or the Titus teasers where Robert and I had some pretty detailed discussions far in advance (we even storyboarded Titus to the music track we ended up using) or even compared to the last Agatha Christie Trailer I shot, Towards Zero, which I also planned out and scripted in advance, this one was very much "shot from the hip".
Okay, so it’s been a little while - Christmas was crazy and I gave myself a bit of a break where I could, but now we’re into 2018 and it’s time to buckle down again. I've got a lot to cover, so let’s just jump in. My original plan for this post was to have a new vlog ready to accompany it and talk about some of the newer projects I've got in mind and the new progress on the old ones. However, between helping Robert on Christmas Carol and then helping my mother with her show, Black Coffee, I've had little time to work on my own projects. (Let alone get my office cleaned up enough to be "camera ready") That said, working promotional for both shows has given me some new little projects to work on - you’ve all seen the Christmas Carol teaser I shot, and now I’ve got a teaser for Black Coffee that I’m editing (and hope to have out in the next couple days) I'll probably go into more detail on the behind-the-scenes for that trailer next week.
A little over a month ago, I wrote a blog post about the simple, yet effective Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde teaser trailer that I threw together completely within After Effects. I needed some video and had nothing to work with - set wasn't ready, there was no footage of actors in costume, and of course, even though the original work is public domain, the version we were performing is not, and video rights are tightly held.
Earlier this week I took another "simple" approach to making a teaser, except this one we have the nearly completed set and costume, so we shot some real video for it - check out the teaser trailer for A Christmas Carol below:
Since Tuesday is Halloween, lets talk about this creepy trailer I shot for The Haunting of Hill House in 2015:
I really liked the way this one turned out - my brother, Robert, was directing this show and everything fell into place just so that he had the set finished when it was time to shoot the video content.
This being before I had my Ronin-M, I borrowed Jose's slider to shoot this piece. The thing that's really cool about this one is that everything in this video is an "in camera" practical effect. Everything from the rocking chair, to the slamming doors to the creepy reflection in the picture that doesn't show up anywhere else (did you catch it? Go ahead and rewatch - look around 6 or 7 seconds) is all done in the room on camera. There are no post/computer visual effects in this piece. The reasoning there was that while we could have added some spooky things in post, as an advert for a spooky show, it made sense to show the audience things that that they could or would see in the space, rather than just trying to scare them especially because the set was done enough in the time to shoot. Sometimes simple is better than complex or even "over-produced", in today's blog post I'm going to break down what went into teaser trailer I made for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So if you haven't seen it yet - check it out: Pretty cool right? Sure its not "amazing" by any means, but its eye catching, and it gets your attention. And I made the whole thing in Adobe After Effects in about an hour - it was pretty simple - let me show you:
Wow, where did this week go? I really am going to try to do this once a week (as long as I have new stuff to talk about) - but I guess I need to get into the habit of doing that first. Since my last post I have: 1) Made significant progress in editing the full recording of CCCT's performance of Titus Andronicus from this past summer - of course the full video won't be available publicly (music rights are different for live/vs recorded) but I do hope to pull some of the nicer scenes from it to post on Clear Creek Community Theatre's YouTube channel, and... 2) Gotten our 48 Hour Film Project Behind The Door posted to YouTube (click here to watch it) - I am really proud of how this turned out even though we didn't win any of the major awards. Its very impressive to see what we (and all the other teams) could pull off in just a weekend and it makes you think, "well why don't we take two weekends and make something bigger and better?" I've talked about this project so much in my vlog and in social media I've lost track of what I've said about it, I might give it its own blog post at some point when I've got more time to write (and think) At work, I finished some 3D work that's in a commercial currently airing for Pinkerton Law - I'll do a separate post about that a little later. (after they get the videos posted online somewhere) and we've been up to our eyeballs in liveshot support. This week we've got 2 other studios shoots already on the calendar so it looks like busy is the name of the game right now - which is great because I like money, but then I'm not working on my own projects either.
More on what I've been focusing on in my "personal project time": We shot a full recording of Titus Andronicus with three cameras: 2 cameras shooting mediums and close shots from the sides of the second row and one wide shot from the back of the house. Pretty much the same setup we used to shoot the recording of The Tempest back in 2014 (watch some of that here) with one main difference: We shot the tempest with 2 Canon 7D's and one Canon 70D - 3 generally nice looking DSLRs, but they have some shortcomings in an environment such as this and you really feel it in post. We shot Titus with a Sony EX3, a Sony F3 and my Sony a7s recording into my Atomos Shogun Flame - aside from the three cameras being a major jump in video quality period, the other big difference in how it edits is that those three cameras have timecode sync capability (though that forced us to shoot 30p instead of 24p, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make) What that means is from the word go all 3 cameras have been locked together and I've got matching audio and video to start with, rather than more steps/more time consuming workflow from Tempest in which I synced it all with pluraleyes, but then had to make single layer clips of the multiple clips from each camera (because the 7D's only record in 12 minute chunks) which I could then take into multicamera mode for "quick" editing. Its part of why I sat on Tempest for a couple years before finding the time to finish editing it, the idea of syncing the three cameras and the audio and then finding a way to edit it all was just a daunting task. And then when I did sit down to work on it I think I logged about 3 weeks of editing time in it when all was said and done. In comparison, I've been working on Titus for the equivalent of 3 or 4 days and I'm already fine tuning the edit - I hope to be done with it in the next few days so I can move onto my next project - a proof of concept for a different approach to the ghost hunting genre that I shot, hosted by Brian Treybig. To wrap up, I leave you all with a picture I took on my iPhone from The Pixel Forest an installation piece that just closed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston - it was a fascinating experience and executed beautifully. The hanging lights were synced to the video displays (4 nearly seamless projections) on the far walls and standing among them was a unique feeling. You can see more of the pictures (and video) I took at the exhibit on my Instagram account @tomameek Until next time - thanks for reading. Please follow me on Twitter and Instagram Subscribe to my YouTube channel Videos I mentioned in this blog post:
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AuthorThomas Meek is an independent filmmaker living and working in Houston, TX Archives
March 2021
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