One of the applications I often lean on for any SFX, product or small scale camera work is Dragonframe. It has become the industry standard within the world of stop motion film production, but seems to be something of an enigma to many other professionals in production and post. But look a little closer at what this software can do and more importantly, how seamless the workflow and it should become pretty clear what an amazingly useful tool it can be, even for non animators.
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I’ve just put together a few of my favourite film effects from the Scratchtapes collection, into a mini pack of Final Cut Pro templates. Frame Damage Vol2, is a collection of 15 FCPX effects and a few flare and film clutter transitions.
The templates are made up of telecines from super 8 and 16mm film. The scans are over sized and in some cases, can be cropped in or windowed to reduce the sprocket holes, if need be. I used a few different cutting edge techniques to achieve the damaged effects, including bucket processing out of date film, hand scratching with a hot needle and coating removal with a pan scrubber.
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I’ve just created what I hope will be the first of a small series of shorts, monologues and mini docs, on the issues around greenwashing and the corporate takeover of environmentalism. The first of these “The Great Greenwash – The Great Reset”, is a monologue/op piece, which ties together two wildly separate subjects that I’ve been long interested in, the environment and conspiracy theory.
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It’s now 2 years since Codename Rendlesham was finalised and released. With the caveat that few productions and/or witnesses from the US have visited the UK in this time, the Rendlesham story, like many things has seemingly stood still….for now. As underlined in the documentary, the legend of Rendlesham has relied on a constantly evolving narrative, with emerging revelations and claims of new evidence surfacing every few months. Whether or not this evolutionary pause of the story represents the gradual onset of it’s ageing, or we’ll see a sudden revitalisation, remains to be seen. I’m hedging my bets towards the latter for now.
Continue readingConspiracy theory, that keyword that has somehow entered our everyday lexicon, is a term often used to compartmentalise any narrative that can’t be filed under consensus. From a lizard alien super race, to political and scientific discourse, why has this banner become a catch all garbage can for anything we find difficult to confront, explain, or investigate?
How do we really benefit from such one size fits all terminology and have we really got to a point, where reality and fact have become so entangled in fantasy and fiction?
“Tin Foiled” will be a short documentary in the Para/Dox strand, launching 2022….to stay up to date with announcements, please either subscribe to the blog, or you can follow Chill Factor Films on Instagram.
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