November 2017 – Create SCI FI

Your Video Production Music On A Budget Can be Royalty Free And Not Suck

November 28, 2017November 20, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in BLOG

I want to share with you some simple scoring solutions I’ve come across and use a few myself. Music is often not dealt with as part of pre-production in tight budget scenarios. A lot of time and effort goes into location scouting, production design, casting and the monumental task of simply scheduling everything. Editing becomes a priority immediately after shooting simply because you want to see what you got. But the score is often ignored by most filmmakers and becomes an afterthought. Not because of ignorance or poor planning mostly because they are the last steps and often fall under the proverb “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it”!

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Often times scoring falls to the editor by default and he or she will score with temp music that you do not have the rights to but helps with pace and tempo. That becomes a slippery slope, you can become married to a tempo and energy and then never get the rights to that track. Also if your picture cuts are married to the music once you change it out recutting is inevitable and that’s going to be double the work. Worst case scenario is your cut was better with music you cannot obtain, that will haunt you. My hack is simple, create a music library of the vibe you want for your project. I Would recommend 3 to 1, three song options for each scene or a moment you will be scoring. Make it clear these are the only options. That way the editor can audition the tracks from that group of preselections that are in your budget or already cleared.

The good news is great news actually, getting the rights to a piece of music to score your production has become very affordable and there are many free options. Filmmakers can get cheap or free scores by creating them through software programs like GarageBand or an online service like Filmstro that allows you to score your video with their library. Websites like Pond5 and Audiojungle have tracks you can get the rights to for around $20. If you consider the time investment of the free options $20 is a bargain. Also with the low-cost sites like AudioJungle and Pond5 you can download any track before you actually buy it. This makes it easy to fill up your projects music library. It will have an audio watermark but that is fine for trying out tracks in your edit. You can also find some free options too. I’ve used Free Stock Music quite a few times. And for free sound effects an excellent resource is Freesound.

GARAGE BAND
Creating your own scores with GarageBand can be rewarding, it’s not too difficult to learn and with the newer version you can import your video. GARAGE BAND TUTORIAL

FILMSTRO
Is a customizable music library that always you to control several aspects of a music track to customise it to your image. It is subscription based. FILMSTRO TUTORIALS

AUDIO JUNGLE
Is part of Envato Market. At AudioJungle you can buy royalty-free music and sound effects inexpensively. The site is home to a bustling community of audio composers and producers. They offer ‘Music Kits” to customise and rearrange music tracks without using complex software. Basically, they give you the separate elements of a track.

POND 5
Similar to AudioJungle, Pond5 is a New York-based online marketplace for royalty-free media. The company licenses stock footage, stock music, stock photography sound effects, after effects, images and 3-D models.

Free Stock Music
There are many free tracks on this site. They offer a 100% royalty free license that allows you to use the music in all types of productions, for worldwide distribution, forever. There are never any licensing fees.
FREESOUND
Freesound is a collaborative database of creative-commons licensed sound for musicians and filmmakers. They have just about any sound effect you are looking for.

There should be an option on this list to fit your creative and budgetary needs. I hope you found this article useful. For more tips and shared experience visit my youtube channel Create Sci-Fi with plenty of informative videos on creating content.

Props & Costumes, Make Sci-Fi Props & Costumes Inexpensively: Step 5 How To Make A Sci-Fi Short Film

November 21, 2017November 21, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in VIDEOS

In this tutorial on Create Sci-Fi, I share my process of inexpensively putting together props & costumes. This is the fifth video of the How to make a Sci-Fi short film series. Make sure to subscribe to follow along.

Be sure to watch my video channel for more Sci-Fi filmmaking giddy-up.

How To Add A YouTube Channel Subscription Link To Gain Subscribers

November 21, 2017November 20, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in BLOG

I want to talk about a simple YouTube channel link hack to gain subscribers. First off I call this a hack because that just gives the procedure a little more pizzazz. To be clear this is not a nefarious hack. Some of you may already know this and I share it because I am surprised by how many do not. For me, it was a Hallelujah moment.

The most challenging and important step to building your series is getting people to subscribe. If you are like me whenever you post on social media or release content you make sure to include a call to action. You simply say, “please subscribe” or you get inventive, “please subscribe, just click that link down there”. For me, it felt like it was undermining my posts. I’d have all this fun or interesting information and lose a lot of people at the end with my “please subscribe”. But you have to do it.

With blogs and websites, the email pop up as soon as you navigate to the site is a great solution to this. Wouldn’t that be great if you could do that with your youtube channel? You can! Its very simple, here’s how. Full disclosure I am using my sites as examples.

• Go to the Home Page of your YouTube Channel. We are going to add some simple code to the URL to create a link.

•Yours will look something like this, either a bunch of random numbers and letters or your custom channel name.

My Create sci-fi youtube channel is random it looks like this:

a55292bae5d1786cadf130b4f68244b4887f7061

My Galactic Galaxy web series is a custom one it looks like this:

1d4abfe14b9a013c5dc432fc57690d06cbfc34f2

* If you have a custom URL that you made before Google plus was released it will still work yours will just say /user/ instead of /c/

•What we are going to do is copy the link from the browser and paste it into a text editing document, office, text edit, google docs, notepad… any text app will work.

•Copy the link from the browser, this is mine yours will be different :

5e2cdecb5f3691c71984b30aa7946a9ebb7fdc9e

•Add this text to the end :

9e63b1b30b0ce049228617bb94d5d0738c41d82b

It will look like this:

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Here is a before and after.

Before:
Please check out my channel Create SciFi

After:
Please check out my channel Create SciFi

That is it. Now when you tell people to click on the link for your channel you won’t have to add a “please hit the subscribe button”. I hope you found this simple hack useful. Please subscribe to my Video Channel for some more filmmaking giddy-up.

The Storyboard, Basic Storyboard Creation & Script Breakdown: Step 4 How To Make A Sci-Fi Short Film

November 15, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in VIDEOS

In this tutorial on Create Sci-Fi, I share my process of creating storyboards with an artist. This is the fourth video of the How to make a Sci-Fi short film series. Make sure to subscribe to follow along.

Be sure to watch my video channel for more Sci-Fi filmmaking giddy-up.

From Trash To Blast! How To Make A Sci-Fi Recycle Bin Laser Blaster Gun

November 15, 2017December 1, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in BLOG

Any good Sci-Fi project is going to need a Blaster, Laser Gun, Ray Gun, Photon Rifle, the list goes on. There are many ways to go about making these weapons for your sci-fi arsenal be it for a film, a cosplay or simply for display. In this article, I want to share with you an inexpensive and fun solution. I’ve come across a lot of craft builds with recycled plastic bottles lately and I thought hey, I have an overflowing recycle bin with a bunch of material for some Blaster building so I figured I’d give it a try. Here I’m going to share with you what I came up with.

First I dug into my recycle bin and found some bottles that were interesting and got out some tools.

I roughly arranged some silhouettes for my recycle bin blaster and this was the winner.

I start by cutting the bottom off of the water bottle.

I merge it with a ridged chip container.

I cut off the top of a cleaning bottle to make a hand grip. I saw that in some online video and it stuck in my head, it’s very clever and works nicely. I hot glue these parts together.

What I learn here is that the hot glue melts this plastic bottle that is my barrel which was not what I wanted. I had to cut off the damaged excess and I decided to take this opportunity to add some more dimensions. I added a hand soap bottle as a collar that I slid over the damaged area and that cleaned it up and looked good. A happy accident as they say.

Then I add the trigger. I simply repurposed the trigger from the cleaning bottle. To make it fit I rough out a hole in the handle with a Dremel tool to pressure fit this trigger in the handle. You could also cut a hole with an Exacto blade. It is not a practical trigger so I just secure it in place with glue.

Next up is a spent deodorant bottle added to the top as some sort of scope. Also, I add the ball from the deodorant model to the bottom of the handle and this interesting sports bottle cap finishes off the profile nicely.

Everything gets a light sanding so it will better accept the paint.I base coat it with a flat black primer and just dusted it a little bronze over that.

Painting is done with a dry brush technique. Using a metallic paint with a very light amount on the brush that is further lightened by brushing onto a paper towel. The paint is applied by just lightly brushing the surface and a brushed metallic look is achieved. To add some dimensionality I add some gold metallic by extra lightly brushing the high points and that gives it a nice glow. The final touch is introducing sparse green metallic highlights in places that might be buttons or decorative just to give it a little more life.

To make the Blaster look real and to give it some character a weathering pass is needed. That is simply some watered down brown and black paint that is washed over the entire piece. It is then quickly wiped off with a paper towel. The dark wash remains in the low points, cracks and crevices, this gives it the illusion of being an actual object.

Who knew space blaster hiding out right in my recycling bin! Now if I was doing a sci-fi project and I wanted to suspend your disbelief make you believe it was a real future or a parallel universe I probably wouldn’t use this prop Blaster. However, if I was doing a sci-fi fantasy like a Barbarella or a comedy this is exactly what I would use.

Be sure to subscribe and follow my video channel for more Sci-Fi filmmaking How To.

The Look: The Galactic Galaxy Production Diaries

November 7, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in BLOG

This week I want to talk about the look of my web series Galactic Galaxy. What really makes Galactic Galaxy unique and frankly me proud is the graphic novel treatment. Most often it is compared to The 80’s epic cartoon Heavy Metal. Which is a happy accident or maybe not I actually saw that movie in the theatres? I’m pretty sure we snuck out of The Great Muppet Caper and into another time and space… I digress. Many of my SciFi influences for the show are from The early 80’s Heavy Metal Comics or Metal Hurlant when it was first released and featured Mobius and my favorite Philippe Druillett, so though it was unintentional, it certainly makes sense.

I did lots of research on how to technically turn live action into illustration, the most obvious was Rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is an animation technique used by animators to trace over footage, frame by frame. The most influential for me was 1977 Wizards by Ralph Bakshi but that was very basic and more of a Broll filler. But like Heavy Metal an indispensable influence. I would not exist without those movies. More recently were the beautiful movies from Richard Linklater, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly which are beautiful. Bob Sabiston is the man responsible for that work and it is stunning. So much so that it is the other end of the spectrum, the time money and sheer artistry behind that method was well beyond my means

I used to say back to the drawing board but what is more accurate these days is, back down the google rabbit hole. I started looking into DIY desktop solutions from great resources like Red Giant and Video Co-Pilot. Shout out to Andrew Kramer, once you start to learn about SciFi DIY you can probably trace 80% of it to his tutorials. I was not able to find exactly what I needed so I started to cobble together bits and pieces from various resources until I came up with something that might work in theory. After some initial tests, I was able to come up with something that would work for my budget and not compromise my vision.

The basic process I came up with was a combination of online tutorials, some basic software and a year of trial and error. In essence, I Shoot on green screen and then key out the live action (remove the green). Then I apply a series of filters that turn the actors into an illustration. To add depth and movement a virtual film camera is introduced via Adobe After Effects to combine the 2D live action with a 3D background. To really sell this look I add very subtle camera moves and a few other subtle tweaks with film grain and lens flares.

In the end, it is a lot of work for a primarily DIY production. Many long hours were put into the creation of this show and I cannot wait to show you the end result. Be sure to subscribe and follow my video channel for more Sci-Fi filmmaking How To.

How To Make A Sci-Fi Short Film: Step 3 Casting, Creating A Casting Notice & Holding An Audition

November 7, 2017November 7, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in VIDEOS

In this tutorial on Create Sci-Fi, I share the basic steps of creating a casting notice and holding an audition. This is the third video of the How to make a Sci-Fi short film series. Make sure to subscribe to follow along.

Be sure to watch my video channel for more Sci-Fi filmmaking giddy-up.

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