June 25, 2017

Watch: 8 Skills You’ll Need to Have Throughout Your Filmmaking Career

A nice camera and talent is great, but if you really want to take your filmmaking career to the next level you’ll need a few other things.

When you first start out in filmmaking, the skills that you decide to hone first are—what—the essentials: how to shoot a film, how to use different pieces of gear, how to edit, and hopefully how to write a decent story. The skills you’ll need beyond that point are things you typically don’t know about until you’ve experienced years and years of mistakes and failure. In hopes of helping you avoid countless missed opportunities and a lifetime of regret, Darious Britt of D4Darious lists eight essential skills you’ll want to develop if you want to have a successful filmmaking career. Check out his video below:

The world is a big, beautiful place that is full of opportunities to discover, grow, and completely crash and burn until you’re a heaping pile of ash and broken dreams. This is why it’s nice when those who have experienced the pang of failure, or at least narrowly escaped it, share with you want to expect and what to avoid while on your journey.

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Source: NoFilmSchool

June 25, 2017

Stanley Kubrick Explains How Chess Can Make You a Better Director

“With respect to films, chess is more useful preventing you from making mistakes than giving you ideas.”

Before he was a filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick was a chess hustler, spending days down in Washington Square Park earning money against the regulars who haunted it. And he never gave up his passion for the game, playing on the sets of his films and even using his prowess as a psychological tactic against actors (such as George C. Scott, with whom he clashed over certain elements of Dr. Strangelove).

Chess was one of Kubrick’s lifelong passions, and in this unearthed quote he equates the game with the craft of directing. In 1968, Kubrick told Playboy Magazine:

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Source: NoFilmSchool

June 24, 2017

Watch: 4 Ways You Can Reduce and Avoid Grainy Footage

Dealing with grainy footage can be extremely frustrating, but here are some ways to reduce or avoid it before and after you hit record on your camera.

Even though today’s cameras have high enough resolution and dynamic range to produce crystal clear images even in low light conditions, grain can still be a formidable foe for a lot of filmmakers. Thankfully there are a number of ways to either reduce the amount of grain in your footage or avoid it all together (or at least make it undetectable to the human eye), and Aidin Robbins of Digital Blast explains four of them in the video below.

According to Robbins, the most effective ways to reduce/avoid noise in your footage are:

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Source: NoFilmSchool

June 24, 2017

Humaneyes Vuze 360 VR Camera review

The Humaneyes Vuze camera is not without a few flaws, but you’re going to have to put up with them if you want 3D 360 content for less than $800.

The post Humaneyes Vuze 360 VR Camera review appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source: Digital Trends VR

June 24, 2017

A Guide on How to Use Light to Communicate Emotion for Film

Light is an excellent communicator. Here’s how to use it to speak to your audience more effectively.

How can light convey emotion? After all, it’s just a bunch of particles and waves that don’t seem to carry any emotional information whatsoever. However, humans have managed to infuse some of their goopy, drippy, delicious feelings into an otherwise neutral and indifferent phenomenon, giving meaning to different kinds of lighting that we can use in our filmmaking. In this video, Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens explains how you can use light to communicate different emotions to your audience. Check it out below:

It’s always a good idea to be constantly adding new words to your cinematic lexicon, especially when it comes to lighting, because, you know, it’s like one of the most important pillars of our medium.

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Source: NoFilmSchool

June 24, 2017

Watch: How to Turn Your Footage into Particles That React to Music in After Effects

Learn how to make your images come to live through music.

We’ve all seen that effect in music videos in which a subject seems to glitch slightly to the beat of the song. I love that effect! It’s kinetic and dynamic and a strange synesthetic experience that I’ve always wanted to use in my work, but figured it was much too complex and advanced for my limited expertise in VFX. However in this tutorial, editor Justin Odisho shows you just how simple (or at least, not super complicated) the effect is to create in Adobe After Effects, so you can be creating rhythmic particles in no time. Check it out below:

You don’t need much to get started with this effect. The first thing you’ll want to do is choose footage that has a dark background and clear subject, because the tool you’re going to use in After Effects, Card Dance, uses your clip’s light and dark areas to create the effect. From there, Odisho walks you through setting a few parameters, writing a simple expression, and then adjusting it all to your liking. He finishes up by showing you how to add an adjustment layer to add some color correction.

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Source: NoFilmSchool

June 23, 2017

These AR masks were designed using the same tech as the ‘Justice League’ movie

Become one of the five members of the Justice League using effects from the upcoming movie inside Facebook’s AR Studio. The new mask allows users to take a photo as Aquaman, Batman, Cyborg, The Flash or Wonder Woman.

The post These AR masks were designed using the same tech as the 'Justice League' movie appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source: Digital Trends VR

June 23, 2017

YouTube launches a new video format for virtual reality without the 360 view

YouTube is launching a new video format, designed to offer virtual reality effects without including the entire scene. The 3D, 180-degree videos are headset compatible and compatible cameras are already in the works.

The post YouTube launches a new video format for virtual reality without the 360 view appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source: Digital Trends VR

June 23, 2017

Weekly rewind: Graphene headphones, $1 cell service, baking bread like a pro

In the tech world, a lot happens in a week. So much news goes on that it’s almost impossible for mere mortals with real lives to keep track of it. That’s why we’ve compiled a quick and dirty list of the top 10 tech stories from this week.

The post Weekly rewind: Graphene headphones, $1 cell service, baking bread like a pro appeared first on Digital Trends.

Source: Digital Trends VR