Filming Tips:

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? I sure did. I am really grateful to God for all He has done and what he will still do. Let's get on with today's discuss.

Post Production: Remember what I posted some weeks ago about post production steps. Remember I mentioned that there is need for you to determine what format the production should be right from the preproduction stage. This will determine a lot of things.

What type of story are you about shooting? Your story can influence the type of camera to use. If the story is seen to be a blockbuster you may invest more into it by going for the best camera you can afford since you do not intend to make it a quicksell film. If you are shooting short film for YouTube viewing you may use your phone, if it is a quick sell film you may use 60d or better still Panasonic gh3, or Canon 5d mk 3, if it is a cinema film then you may use a celluloid or any of the professional digital cinema cameras like Arri Alexa cameras, Red, Sony f55, blackmagic, Canon C500 and so on.

The type of camera you use will determine the post production process. If you use celluloid you know you will spend money on laboratory development. If you use a phone you may finish your post production in 30 minutes. If you use any of the professional cameras for cinema and you shoot in raw, you will need a longer time for your job. You need to also be aware that you will spend lots of money on hard drives because of a whole loads of data to work with. My movie prime suspect occupies about 16 terabytes in hard drives. The money for the hard drives could have been sufficient to produce a quick sell film.

Are you aware that hard drive have a life span, a good hard drive will last for 5 years after which it can start misbehaving and any job you load into it at that time is at your own risk and that is why I always ask my clients to get there own drive newly. This is a major advantage film stock have over hard drives. Film can last over 100 years and your picture will remain intact, what people do nowadays is to load there masters into the cloud where hackers can easily hack it like they did to Sony cloud storage.

To edit some jobs that are shot in proress HQ or DNXHD format on a system that is not running on 32gig ram core i7 processor and 2 gig speed of graphic card may be difficult. The two formats are codecs that are in some cameras and they are best codec and are closest to raw format. If you have a system that is not as high as the one mentioned here then stay tuned till next week when we shall discuss the way forward. Have you ever asked the question: what is the difference between raw format and celluloid, which one is stronger and better?

Let's continue from here next week Monday and thank you for your time.

Feel free to share and ask your questions. If you have missed any of my past posts please go to Christian film Institute page and like our page or you go to my blogspot xtianmovie.blogspot.com

Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God given dreams alive and remain blessed.

Filming Tips:

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? I had a busy one actually, it was full of activities as I travelled to Ibadan in Oyo state, to bury my grandma who nursed me from birth. But today I am at Mount Zion Institute at Ife in osun state Nigeria, to be part of the refreshers course as usual, I told you about it last week. If you haven't been there before and you are in Nigeria, in Africa, you need to make it date next year May, it is an avenue through which you can be blessed by the Lord.

Post production: Last week I mentioned the duty of a sound editor, but this week I will like to talk about the challenges of post production based on the two movies I directed recently and the problem I caused for myself, I want to expose this for others not to make the same mistake.

I directed Missing The Mandate, a mount Zion institute alumni fellowship film though KSO directed the first phase of that same film but I did the second phase where we shot all the challenging scenes of crowd.

We used blackmagic camera but we needed multicam shoot for the crowd scenes. So we gathered different types of camera, we used 60d cameras, and my phone for the shoot. I want to believe that most of you must have seen the film but if you have not then you Need to grab your copy now.

I also directed another movie titled "Aba Idiwon" it is an egba dialect film fully subtitled in English. We have lots of crowd scenes, we also used blackmagic as our main camera. We used one 600d, Canon 60d, Canon 70d, and another Canon 60d.

If you are technically inclined you would have noticed the mistake already. Yes you are right, I used different cameras on a scene. But you are not absolutely right because you can actually shoot with different cameras on a scene but they must have something in common. I had some crowd scenes in prime suspect which was shot on 3 blackmagic cameras in raw format. But we couldn't afford such in the aforementioned movies.

The Avengers age of utron was shot by Seamus McGarvey, he used Alexa as the main camera, then he used 8 blackmagic pocket cameras for action sequences, then he used iPhone in addition, in order to catch all the shots they needed. You can see that they did lots of work on it. It came out great after serious colour grade, another one was that of Mad max fury road, it was shot also partly on blackmagic cinema camera for their action sequences.

Now, what was my mistake, in order to actually enjoy your shoot and post production, it is better to use same types of camera as your B cameras. This will help the colourist to correct the colour but if they are of different types like I did in those movies, it will be hard to score. If you have cameras that can shoot raw like Alexa, red, and blackmagic together and shoot in raw mode, this can be easily married well after a serious job from your colourist.

If you have seen Missing the Mandate, you might have noticed a little difference in some areas. Cameras that shoot raw can be easily married because you can control the exposure and the texture in post production through the camera raw setting in davinci resolve.

So when next you are going on a location to shoot, try to get same cameras but if not, try to limit the types you use to just two unlike what I did in the Egba movie which is titled Aba Idiwon. The movie is not out yet, but it will be premiered in Abeokuta, the date will be announced soon. Thanks for your time.

Remember, you can post and share, also feel free to ask your questions whether through the comment or you inbox me. If you have missed any of my past post you can visit my blog at xtianmovie.blogspot.com or you go to Christian film institute page and like our page.

Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God-given dreams alive and remain blessed.

Filming Tips:

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? Let me take this time to announce to the general public that mount zion institute is on. You can go for your training as a drama soldier, you can still join the rest at mokuro road, agbara nla village, ile ife, osun state Nigeria. I attended the institute 21 years ago and my life has never remained the same.

You may be wondering why did I change this to filming tips, it's because what I am about to be discussing henceforth has to do with filmmaking in general, moreover, my blog isxtianmovie.blogspot.com, so I see the title has tautology. Anyways, let's move on.

Talking about professions that exist in post production which is very wide, the first thing in mind is that of an editor. Whereas, the word editor is a general word. There is script editor which exist in pre production, there is news editor, print editor, sound editor, picture editor, video editor. These are called editors in there own rights. In video editing, we also have avid editor, Adobe editor, and final cut editor. By the grace of God I can operate all these softwares, I used avid media composer to edit some shows for MTN Nigeria, final cut for mount zion faith ministry's Sunset at Midday movie, and Adobe for Glo advert and so on. We have trained people in Horeb Digital Network Ltd, who can now handle projects and operate software to a very good level. They are into cinematography and post production works. You can contact them individually through their numbers:Odugbesan 'Olu' Tayo 08079177099,Adebayo Olushola 08054538787, Lane Stevie 08160019934, and Angel Alake who will be finishing her training by month end. You can also contact Horeb as a company on +2348029400724, that number will be available from next weekend. Sorry for the advert, let's move on.

You can be a sound editor. To be a good sound editor you need to have good knowledge of sound mixing and sound engineering. For a start you need a system that can handle heavy files and a very good sound card. This is my own system recommendations, get a very good sound card if it is desk top, 2 gig graphics card powered by nvidia, 16 gig ram, core i7 processor with a great gigabyte motherboard that has at least four slots space for memories. Get a good flat screen computer monitor and you are good to go. This configuration goes for photo editing and video editing as well. If it is macintosh, you may have to buy the configuration straight from their website. This is just for the computer aspect, you will need a very good microphone which can be connected to the sound card on the system, you need a good keyboard (sound) and a speaker that can project flat sound that is to produce a sound without any artificial additional tweets from the speaker. So that you can be able to ascertain what you hear and the original output. You need softwares like Avid Pro tools, Adobe audition, soundtrack pro, logic X, cubase, fl studio and so on. Do not be scared of the numbers of software to learn, because some of them serve same purpose.

The sound editors are the one responsible for the great sounds you hear in movie at cinemas. I won't be able to go further than this today. Thank you for your time.

Feel free to share and place your questions in the comment or inbox me. If you have missed any of our past posts please go to Christian Film Institute page and like our page. You can also visit xtianmovie.blogspot.com for more.

Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God given dreams alive and remain blessed.

Christian Film Production Tips :

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? I sure did. Let's continue with our discussion: Post production.

I told you last week that the 13 points mentioned is not detailed enough. Part of post production is animation, I mean CGI computer generated images, any job that requires the animator and the likes will require the service of a compositor. A compositor is not the same as a video editor. Composition in music is different from that video, I am sure many know this. But compositing has levels, if you have ever shot a chroma job before, you must have done composition to replace the background. A good editor should be able to handle this simple task but that doesn't make that editor a compositor.

Have you seen the latest advert of Sterling Bank or that of UBA? That must have been carried out by professional compositor. I was thrilled. It must have cost the bank a fortune. This aspect post production and some others were omitted in the 13 points of post production stages. For any serious production, you need to be sure of the post production procedure before you shoot.

There is an erroneous attitude and mindset of some filmmakers in Africa, they rush their editors a lot. They want the whole post production process to take only one week, this happens majorly among Christian filmmakers, thereby releasing lots of inferior films to the market and we take solace in the fact that lots of souls are waiting for the message. But I think we should also know that if Abel has taken an infant sheep to God for offering he wouldn't have been accepted. What I am saying is that you should do a thorough job on your film before sending it out. I am not saying you should waste years in post production but ensure you are giving out your at that time.

Post production has lots of areas of specialisation, I will like us to look into it next week Monday, I will also like these who desire to earn a living through post production to stay tuned, because we need to make the right choices right from the beginning of our carrier. I have made some mistakes in the past which I like to share with you, you can share yours in the comment either this week or next. I mean the wrong post production decisions you have made which you want people to learn from.

Feel free to share. If you have missed any of our past post, please go to the Christian film institute page and like our page, you can also visit my blog xtianmovie.blogspot.com

Till next week Monday when I shall be coming your way again, keep your God given dreams alive and remain blessed.