February Radiance

My New Year’s Resolution this year was to BLOG MOAR. I have never been good with New Year’s Resolutions.

2011 has got off to a roaring start. January and February, as a film/video freelancer in England, is usually a wasteland of hungry ghosts, mournful spirits in desperate search for sustenance. This year has been a major exception, so I thought it would be nice for me to write up all of the excitement that has been happening at Entanglement Towers and the Sundog Industries Space Fortress.

The HDR project is still ongoing. We have had a number of difficulties finishing Delivery Boy, none of which were unexpected given that we are using highly experimental technology. We’ve made progress, however, and I’m confidently expecting to be able to make a full report soon, along with a premiere of the finished product. Enough of that for now.

Entanglement Productions have been working on another scientific project, this time for the SIDAM consortium. Chris Pinches and I love our SCIENCE! SIDAM is an EU-funded collaborative research project, involving three universities, two research institutes and a private company, in four different European nations. It is incredibly exciting to see how this kind of international cooperation can work. The SIDAM project has been massively successful, and will have huge benefits to European industry and technology. It’s also going to keep high-tech jobs in Europe, and give us a competitive advantage in the semiconductor industry. It’s a great use of taxpayers’ money. The semiconductor industry may well be the most important industry on the planet, these days. What’s that you say? Water, gasoline, food, textiles and healthcare are all more important? Shut up and try running the infrastructure of a complex, high-tech society without computers.

I’ll be announcing the completion of the SIDAM documentary here, towards the end of April. I am very much looking forward to showing it.

In other news, I have been working on a short film directed by Richard Jobson, who made New Town Killers and A Woman In Winter. Richard has had a number of careers over the years and has put an awful lot of interesting art into the world. He’s one hell of a director. It was a real pleasure working with him, and I am very happy I had a part in making a cracking short film. I edited and colour graded the film – although, of course, the colour grade was performed under the watchful and talented eyes of the DoP, James Stoneley. Stoneley’s a funny one. He’s a black-dyed bastard with a heart of purest granite, but he’s OK with a camera, I guess. The film premieres tomorrow at the National Film Theatre in the South Bank, and I will be there.

Richard is heavily involved in Converge and the Converge Film Festival, along with James Stoneley (DoP of Delivery Boy) and Rich Adams (producer of Delivery Boy) and Sol Rogers (VFX supervisor of Delivery Boy). At this rate, Mr Jobson will end up on my crew at some point. The poor bugger.

FINALLY, I am really happy to announce that Triple Hit has been selected for the Phoenix Film Festival. I am overjoyed about that, as I’m sure you can imagine. Arizona is a cool state – well, actually, a bloody hot state, but with cool people living in it. I worked on a movie out there many years ago and although the film was an absolute unmitigated disaster, I had a fantastic time and worked with an incredible crew. I’m really chuffed that I’ll get to show a movie I’m proud of out in AZ!

Sorry about the absence, again. I’ll try and do better. MUST BLOG MOAR!

HDR and EPSRC

As you may know, I have been working with the University of Warwick and GoHDR on new methods of HDR video. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, of course, and it is a technique by which greater extremes of light and darkness can be captured in the same image. HDR has been around in the CGI and stills photography world for about 20 years so far, but for moving video, the challenges are much greater.

The University of Warwick has acquired the world’s only HDR video camera, made by Spheron AG in Germany. It’s a fascinating beast. It’s very much a prototype – it’s a black box with a P+S lens mount on one end and a cable on the other. No viewfinder, no automatic controls, and you have to have it tethered to a 24 Terabyte RAID array just to record the ridiculous amount of data the sensor kicks out. It’s about as easy to use as you might expect. But, the dynamic range is pretty special: it gets about 20 f-stops of latitude. A regular video camera might get 7 stops. Higher-end video, such as RED, might get up to 12-14 stops. Film, a truly dynamic medium, gets at least 14 stops, normally. This is one of the reasons that film is considered superior to video in terms of image quality. So, the Spheron camera’s dynamic range is truly impressive – in fact, it is a similar level of sensitivity to the human eye.

Yesterday, as part of an EPSRC public engagement grant, the University hosted an evening to show off their natty HDR technology. The team at Warwick, headed by Professor Alan Chalmers (a former SIGGRAPH VP), has all kinds of clever tricks up their sleeves. They’re developing compression systems to actually make this type of data manageable. They’re also developing systems to allow HDR material to be displayed on normal, low dynamic range monitors (the type you are reading this blog on now) while preserving the detail in the data. They are Very Smart People.

The most interesting part of the evening, for me, was the Q&A panel session we had at the end. There is a huge amount of interest in HDR video at the moment. It’s currently very tricky, but that will change, probably rather quickly. I’m very interested in the work done by the Soviet Montage guys in San Francisco, who have developed their own HDR video system. (And who are, on a personal level, simply lovely people!) Also, RED‘s new camera will apparently be able to capture 18.5 f-stops of latitude, which is also pretty damn impressive. Never bet against Jim Jannard. (Also, don’t bet that they will hit any of their ship dates! But I commend them for taking the time to make their systems really work well.)

We had a lot of very interesting questions – how do we see the uptake of HDR video? Will it go to cinemas first? Will it compete with 3D? For my money, I massively prefer HDR video to stereo 3D. But that may be because I absolutely despise stereo 3D…

We surely live in interesting times for cinematography.

Time Lapse Redux

The excellent Nick Stragnell, fine friend and stout fellow, has put up my Slave One time lapse on his blog. He runs Time Lapse Photo, and there you will find all sorts of interesting stuff. I’ll be shooting a lot more time lapse for him over the next few weeks, so make sure you add him to your bookmarks!

Lego Time-lapse

For Christmas, my wonderful parents got me Boba Fett’s Slave One, recreated in Lego. Excellent! So of course, I made a timelapse of the build. I filmed with an EOS 400D with a ProMote for USB control. I used a 50mm f1.8 lens, wide open at 400 ISO. All in all, I was most pleased with the results!

And, why, yes, I do still get Lego for Christmas. I am 37 years old, that is correct.

Merry Christmas!

Hello my lovelies. It’s that time of year again, when I send out a happy, Lego-filled Christmas card.

And then the Ministry of Secrets, of course, has to send out their end of year message. I wish I knew how I got on their mailing list.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

StarFest Q&A

Well, I’ve been a little quiet lately, haven’t I? I should ameliorate this by posting a Q&A from StarFest 2010, a SF convention in Denver that I attended earlier this year. Triple Hit screened, and I did a rather-lengthy Q&A. I’ve edited it down to 15 minutes or so. I talk about filming, the film school experience, editing, my feelings on being happy with your own art and other things, while drinking a Manhattan and sporting a festive black eye. I hope you enjoy it!

http://player.vimeo.com/video/17343430

Huw Bowen Q&A at Starfest 2010 from Huw Bowen on Vimeo.

New Office

It’s been a busy few weeks for me. Behold! The new Base of Operations:

The Lab

The big news at the moment, of course is Delivery Boy. This is our latest short film, and it will be shooting at the end of September. We’ve got a real crackerjack team assembled. Richard Adams and Jen Preece are sorting out the nuts and bolts of production right now, while Chris and I try to figure out how we’re going to shoot this beast. We’ve got genuine explosions, provided by Mick Thorpe of SM Fireworks, which is awesome, but leads to extra complications… local authorities, oddly enough, tend to object to filmmakers blowing things up!

Status Report: August 2010

I do hope you’re all enjoying your summer and are well and happy!

It’s been quite eventful for me so far. I’m gearing up for a new short film, “Delivery Boy”, which will shoot in September. It’s going to be an unreasonably large and lavish production for a three minute short. We have 3D CGI, pyrotechnics, a cast that is shaping up to be incredible, and many other exciting things. Also, it’s in the Ministry of Secrets universe, which is always a guarantee of quality – see previous entries.

I’ve been working hard on other people’s projects as well. I did a few days work as VFX Supervisor for Phil and Phil of PJP Video, who are excellent guys and put together two very impressive productions simultaneously. One of the shoots had a Juno motion control camera, supplied by The VFX Company, and that was a joy to work with. The VFX Company are hardcore – definitely hire them if you need motion control. They’re on-point. The Phils assembled a really great team and got some very impressive footage. It was a lot of fun working with them, and I think they’re going to go a long way.

I’m doing some effects for a movie called “Whatever Happened To Pete Blaggit”, by Mark Jeavons, and that’s shaping up to be quite fun. Mark decided that there just wasn’t enough blood in one of the crucial scenes, and, well, carnage is my business. And business is good. YEAAAAHHH!

I’ve also done a little work for The Milkhaus in Denver, Colorado – an utterly fantastic crew. We’ve been able to collaborate entirely over the Internet, and it’s been amazing. I’ve known them for many years, and it’s just great that the technology has progressed to the point where we can work on big projects while separated by thousands of miles. The Milkhaus are picture scientists of the first order. They’ve even got Oscar noms under their belts to prove it. It’s a massive honour to work with them.

Finally, I’m working on a new screenplay, about freelance intelligence contractors and Cold War orbital weapons systems. It’s a blast.

Summary:

I’m Huw Bowen. I make films. I’m a writer, director, editor and VFX artist. I like science-fiction and things that explode. I write a bit of music every now and again. If you need any of these things doing, drop me a line at huw dot bowen at gmail dot com. I’m co-founder of a production company with the inestimable Chris Pinches, Entanglement Productions, so check that out too. All of my videos can be found at Sundog Industries on the old YouTubes.

Ready, Ready.

So, on Friday I found myself overwhelmed with tedium after a long and hectic week. After several seconds of soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that what was required was a MIGHTY DOSE OF DRUM AND BASS. Rather than reaching for iTunes, I decided to roll my own and reached for Logic instead.

Ready, Ready by Sundog

It’s been a long time since I wrote any DnB and longer still since I sat down on my own and wrote a piece of music and finished it. Since I became a filmmaker, my musical interests have been rather subsumed by film. I’ve written soundtracks and I’ve produced music for other people, and jammed with friends, but I haven’t really composed solo for years. I’m pretty happy with the result. I’m using Logic Pro 8, which can sometimes be a little dissatisfying, because it really does make everything incredibly easy. It has a unified, one window layout that makes everything very quickly accessible, completely depriving me of the joy of hunting through pages of obscure configuration settings. It has an embarrassment of excellent-sounding software synths, samplers and effects. This, of course, prevents me from learning the entirely incompatible operating systems of the mountain of external hardware that I have which is now gathering dust. So, although it’s fast and easy, it makes you feel like you haven’t really worked for it, not the way that chasing timing errors through a ten-unit MIDI rig used to.

Anyway, nearly every element in the tune came from (heavily tweaked) Logic instruments. The exception of course is the sample of the creepy number-chanting lady. She’s from a Numbers Station, and she’s unlikely to sue me because she is Very Top Sekrit.

The Benwahs – Come To Mine

A few weeks ago, the awesome Entanglement Productions crew (yours truly plus Chris Pinches, Amelia Tyler and Damien Hayes) entered the 2Weeks 2Make It music video competition in Birmingham. Essentially, you get given a band at random and two weeks to make their video. We lucked out, and got The Benwahs, who are a fantastic pop-punk band. They’re regular giggers and they’ve even been on Hollyoaks!

They like pandas, so we made them a video with a panda in it. It’s a love story. I hope you like it.