Standoff: Editing Exercise

For the final project in Nonlinear Post Production, the class had to collectively edit an entire episode of the cancelled FOX show, Standoff, starring Ron Livingston. The show is about FBI hostage negotiators, and has a few familiar TV faces on it besides Livingston. (I was happy to see Firefly's Gina Torres having a small part as well.) It only aired 6 episodes, and we got allllllll the footage they shot for the episode entitled "Heroine". After this project, I got to say "Look Ma! I edited a whole TV show!"

The class was divided in teams of two, for each team to edit one of the four acts. One team volunteered to also tackle the trailer for extra credit. I was appointed Supervising Editor (a decision made based on the quality of my previous work in the class, such as the shoe commercials and an edited scene from the TV series Angel.

This was the first time I have edited with a partner or collaborated with anyone really. My partner, Andrew Darling was also appointed Supervising Audio Engineer for displaying his own proficiencies at soundscaping and audio selections on other projects. He is a skilled and easy-going partner who also wanted a professional end result. Sometimes we edited together, getting and giving input on editing decisions, and other times we worked alone. Both methods worked out fine, and the end result speaks for itself.

After our act was finished I also had to edit the others for continuity, content, and time. The final cut had to be 44 minutes, and ours was 49 all together. As Supervising Editor, I had to cut scenes that were not necessary, trim dialogue, and cut long segments (instead of a continuous shot of someone walking to get a door - I just showed the door opening). I had to color correct certain segments, and seek footage that was not included for our project. I searched for HD footage of Los Angeles to use for scene transitions, and grabbed some footage off of the Hulu video of the same episode (such as opening/closing credits). It was an intense project that required many hours of work, but was a blast and I'm very proud of the show and the work my fellow classmates put in.

The clip below is the climax of the show, and the act Andrew and I edited together. Sorry it isn't in YouTube format, they claimed I violated come copyright stuff, and some morons didn't understand the refute I sent them.

*Update: Here's the embedded video courtesy of Vimeo!

Nirvana Desktop Wallpaper

Due to the popularity of the White Stripes wallpaper, I thought I'd upload the Nirvana Wallpaper I made a few years ago (2007). It was one of the first projects I did with Photoshop on my first-ever Mac, so I was just gettin the hang of it, and using layer effects for the first time. There are plenty of GLARING errors (at least to me) and things I'd like to improve upon one day. I'd also like to resize it a bit better. But for now, I'm just gonna upload it. Obviously focused primarily on Kurt Cobain, but Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl are there too...

A-Phlatt's Mixtape

While working at 747 Productions for my internship, Andre "A-Phlatt" Russel asked if I would be willing to design him an album cover for his upcoming mixtape - Mr. Feature Vol. I, The Double Disc Edition. I said sure, and came up with three variations before settling on this one. The design process was completed within 3 days.

The original image of A-Phlatt himself was not the best quality photo - colors were bland and the image was pretty blurry. After isolating him from the background, I converted it to a black and white image. I applied a light "Dark Strokes" filter in Photoshop to him, which provides a nice high-contrast smoothness without making it any blurrier. I used a gradient overlay to get that blue-pinkish purple color for A-Phlatt, and created a different gradient for the blues in the background. After looking at Lil Wayne's Carter IV album, we decided to use a fancier font (Snell Roundhand) for A-Phlatt's name to contrast with the grungy and bold type everywhere else (Impact font with some grunge brushes overlaid on top).

The city was created with merging several shapes of city skylines together, and is no city in particular as far as I know. I then added the splatter shapes below and merged the two and added a yellow stroke around everything to really make it pop. Using a few other brushes, I added the greens and yellow-red flourishes all around for a more soulful touch, like it is surrounding A-Phlatt (who looks pretty imposing over the city skyline). Overall I think it encompasses classiness and boldness at the same time. That QMG logo is semi-transparent, and is positioned to be kinda at the heart of the city, without interfering with it. I also created matching promotional flyers for the release - which is coming up on December 17th! Check out "She Betty Boopin'" below. (My flyer is at the beginning and end of the slideshow!) The song is pretty damn catchy...

White Stripes Wallpaper

To commemorate the return of Conan O'Brien and the appearance of Jack White on the new TBS show, I decided to get artsy-fartsy and make a desktop wallpaper. (By the way, if you havent seen the rockabilly performance that Conan and Jack did, look it up - it's pretty cool).

The main idea for the poster came from a poem I've been working on - it's still in the works, but the title is "Jack and Meg". The poem is a descriptive journey through the world that the White Stripes have created and their roles as children wandering and battling with Meg's wooden sticks and Jack's plastic guitar. (It definitely sounds better in the poem). I decided to focus on the ideals of the White Stripes, from the earlier days of Elephant and White Blood Cells, and kind of ignored the more experimental styles of Get Behind Me Satan. The duo themselves went back to their older style for tours promoting Icky Thump, so a few images are from that era as well.

I hunted around for some rolling grassy hills and found a great one with a beaten grass path right in the middle. I colorized it red, and then duplicated the hills with a different layer effect to create some of the highlights in the grass. For the white path, I just cut out that part, made it black and white, and messed with contrast/brightness. I took out some trees I didn't like, and removed the sky - since I would be creating my own. I messed with the Render Clouds filter and placed it over a pure red background and a very light vector starburst shape. I placed a peppermint candy "sun" right in the middle of the starburst, and added some inside and outside glow effects.

The skyline features a few larger than life images of Jack and Meg, and I messed with a few layer effects to get them to look how I wanted. Found a cool picture of an African elephant since they have bigger ears and are overall cooler than Indian elephants (no offense). I messed with positioning and gaussian blur to create a sense of perspective, and had a little Jack White leading the elephants with guitar in hand, like a Pachedermal Pied Piper. I wanted more images of the group, so I took the cover of Elephant, and had them sitting in the tall grass, with Jack looking straight up at the peppermint sun. The lightning effects were added to give it a little more "color" (white isnt a color, but I just wanted more white).

After creating the initial wallpaper, I realized the aspect ratio and sizing was a little off, so I also made a more horizontally-friendly version using the clone tool to "stretch" out the landscape, and added more lightning (below). It was a lot of fun to do, but it makes me miss the White Stripes...obviously love all of Jack's other endeavors, but there's something really special about Jack and Meg together.

Rack Room Shoes :30 Ad (2)

This is another commercial for Rack Room Shoes, and the assignment was the same: create a 30 second commercial using hours of footage by the same guy who directed the other one. This one is pretty self explanatory, I color-corrected the whole video with a little more yellow to give it a south-western flavor. The rotating shoes at the end was done with some chroma keying effects (green screen) and was the first time I ever used that effect. (I just watched some tutorials online to figure out the basics). The music is "Hello Operator" by the White Stripes, and it's only a coincidence that there is currently a Converse commercial using it nowadays. Or maybe they got the idea from me...

747 Productions Logo

It was a bit of a daunting task: I had only been working at my internship for a few weeks when they asked if I could redesign the logo. I admit, I knew that it needed some serious work the first time I saw it, but I never really thought I was gonna do anything with it. Here's the original stacked up against mine:

The most glaring problem of the original logo was that the design couldn't exist anywhere but a white background. If you wanted to slap it on a poster or something, it would have to include an ugly white rectangle behind it to make it stand out. The easiest way to fix this was to put the contents into a shape so that it at least has some kind of unique form.

I wanted to keep the same basic color scheme, since it had to fit with the same website. I messed with the spacing in "747" to make it fit better in the circle, and wanted it to have that cool shiny web 2.0 button look. So I messed with these layer effects: Gradient Fill, Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, and Bevel/Emboss. I left the main text pretty much as is for it's simple elegance (the font is Monotype Corsiva). I gave the whole shape a slight gray to light-gray gradient, and a light blue outline to tie the colors together.

Rack Room Shoes :30 Ad

In my non-linear post production class, all are assignments are given to us with all the footage, and it is up to us to turn it into something useful. These projects are "tests" that are given to prospective editors to assess their skill level and creativity.

For this project we had to create a 30 second ad (which of course means 29 seconds and 29 frames - that last frame is used to signal the next commercial). The add could not be any longer or we would lose points (makes sense to me). We were only told to use 3 computer graphics: "Smart Shoes" "Dumb Boyfriend" and "Rack Room Shoes" (The shoe company for which the commercial was made for in the mid 90's)

The premise: a daughter invites her new boyfriend out to lunch with her parents at a diner. The father is skeptical of the new guy, and the mom is trying to play peace keeper and just have a nice family outing. Meanwhile, the new boyfriend (Judd) engages the girl in some good ol' fashioned footsie. She gets up and leaves (probably cause she was getting too excited...) and Judd realizes that he was just feeling up Dad.

The difficult part came from culling together the right "scenes" of the commercial from literally hundreds of takes. The project was headed by a first-time director, and he didn't quite know what he wanted. So there were no less than 20 takes of the boyfriend walking into frame. It's kinda nice not having to go out and shoot once in a while...but at the same time, it was super frustrating knowing that these shots could have very easily been gotten without all this hassle. There were also entire sequences and lines that would have been impossible to include in the 30 seconds.

I chose the Black Keys' tune "Howlin' For You" (off of their latest album, Brothers) because the commercial was intended for girls in the south. The southern-blues song has the right mix of sexy and playful moods and has a fun sing-songy chorus. I made the graphics in Photoshop because I thought it would be a good idea to manipulate a single image of text and the arrow instead of using Avid's title tool and then creating another arrow. I also grabbed the Rack Room logo (thanks Google) and threw a light glow around the .png. I thought it turned out pretty good.

Keep in mind...this was shot in the mid 90's...so don't go blaming me for non-HD and whatnot.