"What're these two pedals over here for?" he asked.
"Those are the brakes," replied my uncle.

Ok, this was going to be more interesting than I thought. I had assumed that every kid who grew up in this part of the state had driven a tractor at one time or other. Apparently not. Fortunately, Kevin proved his mechanical prowess despite never having driven such a machine in his life. He got the hang of the tricky clutch and unsynchronized gears, and we were off making movies.

All went splendidly, and we're very close to wrapping this scene. This coming weekend will be our final shoot out on the farm, and I know everyone will be glad to be out of the heat. After that, we can sit back in airconditioned comfort as we spend the next few months kicking our computers in frustration over the countless effects shots.

Anyway, our art designer, Marc Stowe, sketched out a marvelous design for one of the spacecraft in the movie, and I've been throwing together a model of it for screen tests. I'm also working on the storyboards for the final segment of the scene we're shooting. We hope to wrap in two more weeks, weather permitting.

Last weekend's shoot went fantastically despite the relentless heat. Stars Kevin Ledford and Chris Evans did an awesome job as usual, as did our DP Mark Duncan. Mark also showed up with a rough cut of the footage we had up to that point. He had done an amazing job of cutting together the live-action plates with some of the CGI storyboard. I was really knocked out by it. It helped quell any doubts I had about the overall sanity of my shot selection. Even without the effects, the scene really seems to be coming to life. Credit goes to Kevin and Chris for their great portrayal of the two lead characters, and to Mark for his expert photography and imaginative editing.

It was just the shot in the arm I needed to get through another day of sweltering heat.

In our experience, we've done it all. We've designed and built sets, dressed sets, even built our own production equipment. We take our time to light each setup, and we know about how much time it will take to shoot a given scene. By now we ought to be able to accurately determine the length of any production just by glancing at the script.

This time, though, I really screwed up.

We've never shot a full blown effects scene before. We haven't even done any serious CGI work before. Sure, we used a little CGI as far back as 1993 to fill in the holes in scenes here and there, but there was no real interaction between the actors and the computer imagery. Most importantly, the effects scenes were extremely short. This film is something altogether different.

Over the past two weekends, I've found that although it's easy to write a line in a script that goes something like "Ken Buddha fights the giant robot," it's a very different matter to shoot it. As soon as I started storyboarding, I came face-to-face with the magnitude of what we were really undertaking. Two days in this August heat wave have made it palpable. This is a very short scene that's taking longer to shoot than I figured.

Part of the slow-down is the inadequate size and portability of our greenscreens. We're wasting some time just getting the things set up in the right position. Our Master Carpenter has proposed a plan for a larger, rollable panel that could speed up production. We'll try to get that plan in action post-haste.

As I've said somewhere before, I like a challenge. We'll get those rednecks into space one way or another.

Needless to say, there have been debates. One of the most debated issues is the choice of visual formats. Once upon a time, the choices were film and video. Mark and I both love the look of film but it can be pricy. Video was video, and it sucked, but then along came DV. DV still looked like video, which sucked, but with the advent of desktop video you could do things with a PC that used to require millions of dollars of exotic equipment--and that sucked considerably less.

Then came high-definition video. It's as close to film as video can get, but it has some problems, the main one being bandwidth. HD requires a lot of storage space, and punched cards are not getting cheaper. Working in HD professionally still requires megabucks. Professional cameras start at around a hundred grand. Editing and compositing require vast amounts of storage and bandwidth. Obviously, we can't afford that (yet).

Over the past couple of years, high-definition cameras started entering the consumer market. This is were the debate began. You don't get something for nothing, so in order to make HD affordable to consumers, certain sacrifices had to be made in the technology. There's the rub. To get over the bandwidth/storage problem, manufacturers made use of "compression" technology. I'm very skeptical about the quality of this system. Old fashioned DV also uses compression, but it's much less severe.

What's wrong with compression? Well, if you want to stuff a Cadillac up your nose, for instance, you'll have to make some adjustments either to your nose or to the Caddy. You can try "compacting" the car, but even that is not likely to facilitate the operation. Eventually, you'll have to start removing parts of the car in order to get it to a manageable size. That is exactly what happens with HDV. The HDV "codec" selectively removes parts of the image which are deemed "unnecessary." This works out well for consumers who generally don't post-process their footage, but for those of us with giant robots in mind, it causes a lot of headaches.

There are other sacrifices in consumer cameras, too. The most notable is the lower quality of the optics. Most folks don't realize the importance of quality lenses in cameras, but it's not hard to see that if your camera uses plastic Cracker Jack lenses, it will probably create some interestingly distorted, achromatic and grainy images. All the pixels in the world won't do you any good if you're shooting through the bottom of a Coke bottle. Producing high quality optically-perfect glass is an expensive process. Often, the cost of a single lens will exceed the cost of the camera body.

Then there's the question of distribution. Currently, there aren't a lot of folks with HD TV's and HD disk players. That will change in the future, but for the time being there is little market for it.

So, for all these reasons and more, I was arguing that we should invest in some used professional SD equipment. Possibly a Betacam. We could work in uncompressed SD, and be in compositing heaven.

Mark saw things differently. He was concerned that we needed to "future-proof" our work. The future is HD, and I have no doubt of that. We talked some more of getting a film camera and shooting Super-16, which would give us HD performance without the compression problems.

Well, to keep this post from getting much longer than it already is, I'll cut to the chase.

While I was working on C4D, Mark took the HD plunge. He bought a Canon XHA1 and started doing some tests. In order to do the composite work in C4D, I needed to have each and every frame in uncompressed form, so Mark exported a sequence in TIFF format. What that means is that each frame-- twenty four per second-- came to occupy about six megabytes. One second of uncompressed HD took about 144MB. That's compared to about 30MB for uncompressed SD.

Mark lives about three hours from me by hybrid. I don't have broadband (it's hard for me to give up the trusty old teletype), so the only practical means of transferring such large files is by DVD through the US Postal Service.

We took a step back.

We decided to shoot HD, but produce the finished product in SD. We would still have the original footage in HD so we could always go back and re-render it that way. That would make post production tolerable.

So, when the first day of shooting was at last upon us, Mark bravely attached his expensive camera to the end of our cantankerous homemade jib, and we shot HD.

Later, as I sat watching the dailies on my PC in high definition 24p, I was enthralled. I think my jaw must have dropped onto the desk at some point, as I later noticed a pool of drool there. Rednecks never looked better. I thought to myself, "My gosh, it looks just like film!"

Ah, how quickly my cold, hard logic melts away when exposd to a pretty picture!

So now I'm trying to figure out how we're going to do this in HD all the way. There's no going back now. I'll just have to order some more vacuum tubes for my typewriter while I enjoy this lovely plate of crow that Mark has served up for me.

I'll begin with the script. Where did the story come from? I tend to write stream-of-consciousness, so I started with a premise, and in this case, a very silly premise. The problem with this process is that once you have the premise, you have to do something with it. You can go stream-of-consciousness for a while, but eventually you have to start thinking. That's when my scripts usually start breaking down. Fortunately for "Shiners," I managed to produce a complete outline of the story, which I still change from time-to-time--even while we're shooting it.

Usually, when writing a script for a no-budget film, I try to limit myself to things that we can do without megabucks. For this film, though, I decided to let my weird imagination run wild. We have a number of other scripts in the works, and Mark and I had been debating what we were going to shoot next. I've wanted to do an "effects" film, ever since I saw "Star Wars" back in 1977 (me and about a million other guys, apparently). Mark and I had played with some 3D animation software back in the early '90's, but the state-of-the-art at the time was not up to the task. A few years went by, and I took another look at the 3D scene. As anyone who's watched the Sci-Fi channel can attest, the technology is now available to the masses in a useful form. It was about that time that I was working on the script for "Shiners," and I thought that CGI had reached the point that we could do it ourselves.

Anyway, I wanted to see if we could really do it, so I busted open my piggy-bank and bought Cinema 4D. It's a very impressive piece of software that includes everything but an instruction manual. Apparently, you have to pay extra to learn how to do anything with it, so I spent a couple of months picking up the basics from strangers I met in dark corners of the internet.

Well, the upshot of all this was that Mark and I agreed to shoot a single scene from "Shiners." This would be the most difficult scene in the movie, featuring absurdly difficult effects, and it would make-or-break the production. Can we do it or not? Do we have the technology? Do we have the patience? We're gonna find out, so stayed tuned...