Software
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Dial it Down a Little: Disney Lets You Shape Actors’ Performances with New Face Director Software
The director Ruben Östlund shoots wide in 4K, composing the individual shots for films like Force Majeure by, in post-production, pushing in and moving from side to side. Now, Disney Research has developed a new tool, Face Director, that offers directors even greater possibilities; it crosses the final frontier in post-production manipulation: actors’ performances. Whereas, previously, directors would shape a performance by using multiple takes or, in post, skillful editing and music, with Face Director directors can alter performance by modulating them between two extremes. From Disney’s page: We present a method to continuously blend between multiple facial performances of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 13, 2015 -
Offload Review – Red Giant Securely Transfers Your Media
There’s a lot less to worry about when transferring footage off your camera than during the days of film (light leaks, scratches, unspooling, developing errors). But the copying of 1s and 0s from one form of media to another isn’t always flawless, and with the amount of files generated, organization is key. To help with the process, Red Giant has released Offload – a very basic piece of software that serves one purpose – get the footage off your media cards and onto hard drives quickly and securely. Now, this isn’t the first piece of software to do this. I’ve been […]
by Joey Daoud on Apr 12, 2015 -
Fractured Atlas’s Artful.ly Software to Streamline Outreach
Aiming to give independent artists and arts organizations the same marketing power as their bigwig counterparts, the non-profit Fractured Atlas recently unveiled Artful.ly, a web-based software system that streamlines audience interactions. Among the service’s offerings is a MailChimp integration that directly manages and catalogues email outreach, and a ticketing and fundraising apparatus that can be embedded onto websites. There are no sign-up fees or contracts, however, in the interest of an event, ticket buyers will be charged $2 per purchase in addition to credit card processing. Filmmaker spoke with Selena Juneau-Vogel, program director for Artful.ly, about how filmmakers can make […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 29, 2013 -
Review: Audio Scanning Tool Boris Soundbite
Boris Soundbite is a handy tool that scans the audio in your media files and lets you search for words or phrases. Useful for documentary filmmakers, supercut editors, and anyone needing to search an archive of media. Best of all – it actually works. This is an idea that’s been around for a while. I was skeptical at first as I’ve tried other solutions like this before with less than favorable results (like Premiere’s transcribe feature), but where Soundbite succeeds is it only returns hits for a search, not a verbatim transcription. It matches the audio based on words or […]
by Joey Daoud on Oct 10, 2013 -
Paper Co-Creator Andrew Allen about his Award-Winning iPad App of the Year
Back in April I published this interview with Andrew Allen, filmmaker and developer with the software company 53, about his newly launched Paper app. This week the app was named by Apple as its #1 app of the year for iPad. Our original conversation about Paper’s development, and Allen’s journey from filmmaker to developer, is detailed below. — SM Andrew Allen, one of Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces of 2011,” had a big premiere this month, but it’s not a film. Allen is part of FiftyThree, the company behind Paper, an iPad drawing app that made Apple’s App Store “App of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2012 -
Lightworks Revamp Just Around the Corner
Postproduction is in a state of flux. As is well known by now, Apple’s latest Final Cut Pro iteration left a lot to be desired for professional editors, and competitors Avid and Adobe were quick to step in and lure away Final Cut users. And now the newest competitor is also the oldest. Lightworks, one of the first viable nonlinear editing systems when it was first released in 1989, has been used by luminaries like Thelma Schoonmaker and has racked up a number of Oscars and other awards, including a technical Oscar and Emmy for the system itself. It couldn’t […]
by Randy Astle on Nov 29, 2011 -
Script Supervising Goes Digital
When I started out script supervising almost 20 years ago, the tools of the trade were a stopwatch, a pen or pencil, paper, a Polaroid camera and that all important bible, the script. Each script supervisor had his or her own idiosyncratic system for “maintaining continuity” of a film or a TV show, but walk on any set and the basic tools were all the same. Maybe you typed up your notes at the end of the night on, yes, a typewriter; maybe you didn’t. Well the tools have now gone digital, thanks in large part to script supervisor Anthony […]
by Shari Carpenter on Jan 20, 2010
