The Guide comes with a DVD featuring The Last Birthday Card, a short film I directed in 1999.
Birthday Card is the first original Orphanage production, and the first public appearance of Magic Bullet.
The 20-minute short, which played at numerous festivals and on iFilm, is presented on the DVD along with a commentary track and visual effects breakdown. The many effects in the film are used as examples throughout the book.
Scott Kirsner (CinemaTech), who interviewed Jonathan Rothbart and I not long ago, has compiled our interview, several others, and his own insights on web video, viral media, and the economy emerging around them into a must-read ebook.
The Future of Web Video: Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers
I applaud Scott on three fronts for this: 1) Self publishing is cool. 2) Writing a book is hard. 3) There's some crazy shizzle going on right now, and it's a great time to be a filmmaker.
FlipFlop is a small, free Mac OS X application designed to assist filmmakers with on set monitoring/previewing using a laptop and a firewire connected camera. The features came mostly from reading many peoples requests on various forums such as DVXUser and Redrock Micro.
Wicked cool! I'm all excited about ScopeBox, but FlipFlop is free and available now, which are two of my favorite software features.
The importance of full-resolution monitoring and scopes is something I cover in The Guide.
I've updated the Rebel's Guide site a bit and added a page about the squib elements included on the book's DVD. You can download a free sample while you're there. Comp it into your next shootout scene!
Some amazing color correction examples on DVXuser.com.
I honestly would not have thought this was possible with the 3-way color corrector in Final Cut Pro HD.
This is another clear-cut case of less is more. We capture a wide dynamic range so that we can artfully throw it all away.