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Showing posts from April, 2012

Introducing M dot Strange the fine artist ^_^

"Offering" 2011 M dot Strange Since I'm creating fine art at 24 muthafuckin frames per second I should probably get into the "art" game and sell stills of my work... like these choices from We Are The Strange and Heart String Marionette "Bridge to Reality" 2011 M dot Strange "Wind" 2011 M dot Strange "Don't leave me here" 2011 M dot Strange "Knocking on hell's door" 2011 M dot Strange "Samhaine Tsuke" 2011 M dot Strange "Thunder rumbles" 2007 M dot Strange "Like a clown" 2007 M dot Strange You might be saying uhhhh you just applied some filter to stills from your films and yes thats what I did but it looks fucking awesome ^ ^ I'm an artist that uses computers to create my art... BUT they are not making the art for me... its my color, my construction, my composition, my staging, my vision... I guess I realized like DUH I'm a filmmaker

Backup yer project files in the cloud for free

I've heard too many stories of people losing creative work because of hard drive/computer failure... if we're doing serious work we should have a solid backup scheme in place... backing up media files is tough because they take up so much space... I have all my source files... 3d renders, project files, final shot renders backed up to multiple hard drives... those are big files so they need dedicated physical drives for practical backup... BUT right now I'm working mostly in Adobe Premiere Pro so my Premiere Pro project files are the valuable thing right now... even if I lost the media on my computer I could restore it from the backup's... but without all the work I've done in the project files its not very useful... so these project files are valuable and not too big around 50- 150 megs... perfect for cloud storage! As of today there's a lot of free options... the three I'm using as online data backup are... Dropbox ... they don't give you mu

Selling downloads of your film on your own part 7

I've started doing encoding tests for the 1080p version... breaking the download of it up into two zip files allow a little leeway but I don't want to go crazy and make a 10gb file... The tests I had done up to this point were using the offline edit of the film... which is a 1920x802 24fps Quicktime movie using the PhotoJpeg codec at %100... perfectly fine for offline editing but it is a lossy format... So yesterday I did some tests using the online edit of the film which is a 1920x802 24fps Quicktime movie using the Sheer 10bit... so its a lossless file.... and the initial tests were pretty good! Much better than with the offline one understandably.... I was still testing at lower bitrates of 4000 and 4500kbps and it looked pretty nice at 1080p... those are the bitrates required to keep the 1080p under 4gb... there are a lot of advanced options in the x264 codec and I used some of them that made encoding pretty slow but the quality is great... But yeh so then I went lo

Selling downloads of your film on your own part 6

So now that I have figured out how and where the film is going to be sold as a download... now I need to figure out what formats I'll be able to offer the film in without it being too much trouble... So 4gb is the file size limit I have to work with... I know that I can encode a great quality 720p version of the film and keep the file under 4gb but I'm not so sure about the 1080p version... So last post I talked about how Apple is able to keep its 1080p files for 2 hour films under 4gb... now after digging a little deeper I found out that the low bitrates they are using will only allow good quality with sources have low noise... that is not much grain... not crazy gradients like fog and stuff 0_o HSM is full of fog and dust so it doesn't allow itself to compression very well... I did a few encoding tests after getting some advice from a d00d at doom10.org You'll get best results by having a clean, high quality source. Noise and grain reduce efficiency, but some a

Selling downloads of your film on your own part 5

Thanks for all the ideas and comments on the last couple posts... some really good ideas there! So I've decided to go with Dpd as they have everything I'm looking for and the man in charge there says that large files are no problem. I'll do some speed tests with it soon to see how fast a 100mb file downloads on average. 100mb is not 3.5gb I know but it should give me some ideas of the average speeds... if they are decent then its a go! Making sure there is a good customer experience is a big priority because it would suck for someone to buy the film then like the downloads are broken....or like take 4 days... slow or stalling downloads can drive a man insane! So lets say the biggest file which would be the film itself is 3.5gb... according to some quick research... So if you use this download time calculator for a 3.5gb file using a 10Mbps connection it comes out to about 50 minutes to download a file that big... NOW I know connection speeds and download speeds va

Selling downloads of your film on your own part 4

So as of now I've heard back from E-Junkie , DPD , and FetchApp .... I just received an email response from Fetchapp... they said this about large file downloads.. That's a large file for anybody to download.  Files of that size are best done over torrents (which make them shareable) or broken into smaller pieces. Torrents do work great for large files but has anyone figured out how to sell films through them? Not as far as I have seen... Vodo is set up to distribute films via torrent but it just uses public torrents... I mean you could run your own private tracker for you film but doesn't seem viable to me and I've never seen any filmmakers selling access to torrent files.... and not everyone knows how to use torrents so it's not a super easy purchase for all... but it is something to explore... sell a download of a torrent file on a private tracker maybe? Any ideas? When I asked Fetchapp about excessive bandwith usage which would happen if you sold a couple

Selling downloads of your film on your own part 3

So now that I've heard back from E-Junkie and Dpd it sounds like Dpd is the best choice right now... Here is what they had to say about my concerns in regard to large file sizes... DPD has no problems delivering files of any size (Amazon S3 does have a hard limit of 5GB per file, but we cache huge files like that locally). The real problem you're going to have is older computers opening zip files that are greater than 4GB in size. Windows XP, for example, can't open zip files that large- it will just lock them up  A better solution, since you will more than likely have to get a plan with more product slots than you need for the storage space, is create a bundled product that contains the standalone video (avi or mp4 or whatever) + a zip that contains the extras. Something like this would use 3 product slots- one for the video product, one for the extras product, and the bundled product, but would eliminate the issues with extremely large zip files. The benefit would

Selling downloads of your film on your own part 2

So after doing some more research it seems that E-Junkie has problems selling files that are over 2gb File   size s above 2GB or so have shown a consistent pattern of problems, so we recommend 2GB as a sensible "soft" maximum  file   size ;  file s slightly above that  size  may still do okay, but the more your  file  exceeds that guideline, the more likely you will have problems. Also consider whether most buyers would even have 3.4GB free on their hard drives to save the  file , and how long you'd be expecting your buyers to babysit a download of that size , considering that any download can only be as fast as the slowest link in the chain, which is usually the buyer's own ISP connection speed: http://www.numion.com/Calculators/Time.html For sellers of extremely large  file s, we usually recommend taking advantage of our pre-integrated support for SwiftCD, so you could have them automatically duplicate your  file (s) to a CD/DVD and mail that to buyers on-demand

Heart String Marionette will be released June 15th

I just got back from a meeting with Endika and we set that date...so come rain or shine or whatever... you will be able to get Heart String Marionette on June 15th by immediate download for $5 for the 720p version of the movie + the soundtrack... there will also be a deluxe edition with the 1080p + more that will be priced a bit higher... We decided that it is the best way to get the movie out to YOU... the people that have been waiting forever... we will release a DVD + digital versions in all the usual places at a later date... Right now I'm working on the making-of documentary that will be included with the deluxe edition... please let me know what you would like to be included in it... we're also going to be launching a little forum for discussion and collaboration to subtitle the film in different languages and maybe even dub it in different languages... and where musicians can collaborate on alternative soundtracks for the film... For the film's site where

Selling digital downloads of your film on your own

Sup yall I'm back from forty something days in Iceland wherein I wrote two feature scripts, played Basketball in the snow every day and saw Iron Sky in the cinema (visual fx were great but was pretty disappointed in the film as a whole) but yeh... I meet with Endika this week and I'll find out if he's done with the music or not... No matter what happens.... the film will be available this summer... So I'm looking at ways to get it out there and sell it... I can always do the normal thang with DVD/BLU-RAY/ITUNES/Xbox store/Playstation Store/VOD etc.... The thing about all those is that it takes time to prep/create all the deliverables and design stuff and the like... Since I've waited so long to be able to put HSM out I'm going to want to make it available as soon as possible without adding more months to the wait... You probably read about what comedian Louis C.K. did with his concert film recently ... I think its awesome because this approach is actuall

Awesome looking trailer for "CYCLE"

Found this posted on cgtalk... seems it's made by one guy and he used Cinema 4d for the 3d stuff... I think it looks awesome and has a suitE cyberpunk vibe too it... yall in London should check out the premiere I think we're gonna see more and more tite indie stuff like this as real artists get theY hands on the new affordable accessible tools out here.... I think its great... I need more unique films too watch ^_^

Stacking (8.5 x 11) Paper

So I now have three feature film scripts done and I should finish at least one more in the next two weeks... The one I'm starting now is a little horror film I hope to shoot here in Iceland this summer... I've been wanting to shoot a little no budget live action feature film ever since dem DSLR's got cheap so it seems I'll get my chance... Seems we got the location on lock and even a d00d on board as producer who will supply half naked humans to be slaughtered and more! I'll have HSM news for you in a few weeks when I get back to Nor CaL and see what that crazy Endika guy has been up to in his studio... I'm hoping its really done this time and I'm sure yall are too ^_^ I've been going through a bunch of Zbrush tutorials focusing on upping my skills for the next serious project... as well as testing lip sync techniques and trying to work out technical issues for future projects as well... the world of 3d animation gets more and more exciting every

Forever Alone Filmmaking Podcast #9 w/Victor Bonacore

Subscribe to the podcast on Itunes  (rate/comment/share if you don't hate it ^_^) or  download the mp3's directly here  on Jimmy Screamerclauz's site...  check out the tumblr page too  to post questions/comments for us to respond to on a future episode. The special guest on this episode is Victor Bonacore creator of the short film Ice Cream Sunday and the soon to come DIARY OF A DEADBEAT documentary. Check out the trailer here We talk about film festivals, both their pro's and con's and our own personal opinions as to what their use is for independent filmmakers. We also talked about some of our favorite films and a ton of other crap. Here is a link to the podcast about the film business I mentioned on the show mentioned on the show...check out episodes 20,21+