Metropia **review** #LFF

Metropia is the third film by Tarik Saleh, a wonderfully bleak vision of a united Europe joined by a stark underground Metro system. It echoes an Orwellian vision of a society watched over by a big brother surveillance system, whilst blending paranoid delusions of voices in your head with plots to take down the controlling forces. It’s a striking film that in some moments looks like it is live action and in the next rotoscoped animation. In fact the technique is surprisingly just the use of two dimensional images animated in After Effects. Faces are only ever seen face on or on profile and while the mouths move with a subtlety only seen in computer animations of a time now gone, it is the eyes that capture you with their expressive gleam and wide-eyed longing. Heads seem to teeter on miniature bodies. Skin tones are hyper real, like gorgeous macro photography might be. There is an air of authenticity to the acting and animation that breathes life into this bleak, grey vision of a future inspired by the Swedish suburbia that the director grew up in.

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After Tomorrow

Kicked off my London Film Festival this year with a real corker. It was a short film panorama featuring seven rather odd little delights from around the world. The highlight for me was After Tomorrow directed by Emma Sullivan and starring the excellent Joseph Mawle who I recently saw in the TV drama Freefall (about the credit crisis in the UK).

“Returning to the village of his estranged wife, James grows increasingly concerned when the sinister owner of the guest house refuses to let him leave. A psychological suspense with a surprising yet moving denouement.”

Without giving too much away this short is not what it seems and the twist actually elicited a few gasps from the audience and lots of chatter afterward. It’s a shame you can’t view these shorts online yet but I’m sure once the festival seasons are over it will be posted so look out for it. Who knows, it might even be up for an oscar this year.

Short from the London Film Festival

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Rana Rama & Bubble Bobble

You know when you suddenly get an echo of days past and something pops into your head. Well today, as I was cleaning the bathroom, that voice whispered in my ear “Rana Rama”. At first I had no idea what it was and thought it was a TV show in the same vein as The Adventure Game or some such. But a quick google and I found it. It is a game from the Atari from the 80s. Joy! The plinky plonky 8 bit track soon led my mind to another gem I used to play. So here are those two sound tracks in all their glory.

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Speechbreaker

Well I think it can be said that Speechbreaker was a resounding success. We put out the following video on Friday at about 5am having worked through the night chopping up David Cameron’s keynote speech.

It’s had over 3000 views so far. But the site itself has had over 24,000 uses with hundreds of videos being made. Check out the youtube channel to see the creations.

I’ve got to say it was an enormous buzz working on this project and seeing something go properly viral. The ability to watch people twitter and retweet the thing in real time added to the excitement. Just goes to show the power of tapping in to the general zeitgeist and catching the wave of a topical subject. Something can and will only go viral if the content is something that people actually like and want to share. You really can’t force people’s hand on this.

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Cameron Rant

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Boy’s loo at Lean Mean

If you saw my post about the girl’s loo at Lean Mean well you might be interested to learn that the girls have had their revenge. We now have these lovely pictures watching us as we wee.

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Chopping up a speech into word chunks using Adobe software

If you ever need to chop up a piece of spoken word video into chunks, with single words from the speech in each video clip, then I have a great automated solution for you.

First bring your video clip into Soundbooth. Double-click the file to display the video and show its sound wave. Open the ‘Metadata’ window and click Transcribe at the bottom of the panel. Select the language of the speaker. Adjust the quality if needed. Identify speakers should be checked if there are more than one speaker. Click OK.

You’ll then have a transcription of the speech. Select each word in turn and click play to check the accuracy of the word. Double click into a word to change the word or right-click to merge words into each other if there are inaccuracies. The transcription process works best with clear speech and no noise so spend a bit of time with these settings and any noise reduction you can apply to get the best results. You can export this data to XML by using File/Export/Speech Transcription. This might be all you’d need to do as this XML can be used directly in Flash to seek streamed video to specific parts based on the ‘Name’ node, ‘Time’ node and ‘Duration’ node.

However, you may wish to take this further as I did today and actually chop the video up in a fairly automated fashion. So from Soundbooth use the File/Save As functionality to save a new version of the video with embedded XMP metadata information. In the export settings, make sure you select your preferred audio and video export settings but before you click OK to render the file make sure that ‘Include Source XMP Metadata’ is checked from the drop down menu.

Switch over to After Effects and import the video file with XMP metadata. Go to After Effects/Preferences/Media & Disk Cache and check ‘Create Layer Markers from Footage XMP Metadata’.

Create a new composition from this video file and you should now see there are layer markers labeled with the text spoken for each word in the speech.

Now we need a couple of scripts to help things along so head over to Paul Tuersley’s site to get his ‘Split at Markers’ script and Jeff Almasol’s site to get his RD Pre-Compose script. These should be saved to Applications/Adobe After Effects CS4/Scripts. Restart After Effects having saved your changes.

Go to File/Scripts/SplitAtMarkers to split that layer into chunks on the timeline. Then select the words that you’d like to render by selecting the newly chopped up timeline layer and go to File/Scripts/Rd_Pre-Compose. It’s important to name the new composition with the same name as the word and to check the ‘Trim new composition to combined layers duration’.

Once you’ve done all of this you will have lots of named compositions that can be exported using the batch renderer at whatever settings your heart desires.

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Yin

Yin is an absolutely lovely animation that a friend of a friend created a few years back. The animator is Costa Avgoustinos and his friend provided the score. It was entered for the Australian short film festival Tropfest and went on to win 3rd Prize, People’s Choice and the Young Talent Award in 2004. It was later remixed into a dance track for Ministry of Sound. A rising star?

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The Betty Bottle

These lovely little Diet Coke bottles recently came into my possession. They are for an upcoming Ugly Betty promotion and have been designed by Patricia Field with what looks like a lippy leopard print in bold pink. Around the neck hangs a cute sticker book on the back of which is the ad for Ugly Betty on Channel 4. The Betty Bottle is a rather cute collectible all in all.

Diet Coke for Ugly Betty

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Ooglies

I spent a weekend with my lovely nieces recently and between a steady dose of imaginary tea parties, Nintendo DS, bedtime stories and street dance classes I was introduced to Ooglies. The basic premise is to put some googly eyes on inanimate objects that you might find around your house. These creatures come to life when no one is watching. The results are hilarious. It’s delicious stop-motion in the same vein as Morph and Wallace and Grommit. It’s the kind of thing that can easily get lost amongst the slew of dreadful kids programming (Disney channel most notably) – but CBBC have really pulled it off with this one. It’s really lovely stuff so try and catch it if you can. Something for all the family.

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