“Microsoft Tag” Mentions 5:13

Microsoft Tag’s Blog has mentioned our forthcoming horror film, 5:13.

5:13 a thriller movie slated to release in 2010 just implemented Microsoft Tag in their movie poster. Highlighted in yellow bellow, the Microsoft Tag can be snapped allowing the public at large to gain access to mobile content, including mobile trailers and downloads.

Using Microsoft Tag on printed materials creates the opportunity for indie and corporate movie companies to increase the ROI on their print marketing efforts. With Microsoft Tag print advertising can now serve as a real life portal to the online world. Keep an eye out for Microsoft Tag on other print material in your area and for the release of 5:13.

Read the whole article here.

You can read about our experience with using Microsoft Tag here.  We believe it’s going to be a fantastic way to deliver our mobile content to nearly all internet capable mobile phones.

And, whilst we have your attention, feel free to “give the tag a go” – just download the app from http://gettag.mobi and point your phone at our tag (above)!

5:13 Film Poster

It’s been a very busy few months here at Chaos Created.  Most of our work has been focussed on a couple of unannounced projects (more on that soon) and finishing up editing on horror thriller movie, 5:13, and the other movie, The Joshua Tapes.

Both films are slated for release early 2010, and Chaos Created has been responsible for post production (editing and sound design).

Yesterday, work was finished on the official film poster.  The film is slated for release in Malaysia first, but it’s also been submitted for London Fright Fest and will be submitted for London Film Festival soon, so we hope that you’ll get a chance to see it!

Here’s the official poster, designed by Luke Yerbury, with photography from Matthew Ong

The official web site will be launching soon.  We’re just waiting on approval of the trailer, and we’ll be good to go.

We’re also using Microsoft Tag to distribute out mobile content, including mobile trailers and downloads.  It’s a fantastic bit of technology that allows users to ‘snap’ the tag using their mobile phone (actually, on most devices, you don’t even need to snap, the moment the application sees a tag, it’ll send users on their way to the content), and automatically be redirected to our mobile content (dynamically).  Not only does it work on most phones (pretty much any phone that can accept applications and has a browser – i.e. nearly all new phones) but the responsiveness is amazing…  Out of focus, no problem…  Too close/too far? No problem.

Tags can tie into mapping services, video, web sites, or simply pop up a message.

We’re even now beginning to think of ways we could use tags…  Take a look at one of our past projects, Gridsearch.  This is an area in which Tags would be very useful.

Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/tag for more information on the technology.

The Beginning Of The End – Finishing The Joshua Tapes

Ok, the title of the post sounds a little daunting, but after a long slog of several months of late nights and work-filled-weekends, The Joshua Tapes is nearly done.

Last year, Perantauan Pictures, with Befour, filmed two feature-length movies back-to-back.  The first, 5:13, is a horror film and the second film, The Joshua Tapes is a drama/comedy/road trip film (I find it hard to describe it more concisely than that).

Due to the scheduling, The Joshua Tapes needed to be the first completed so, I ditched (for now) the editing on 5:13 in order to complete TJT.

The movie, shot in HD, was edited entirely in Sony Vegas Pro which has been a joy to work with.  I say that having had so many issues with other editing suites when I started on 5:13, also an HD film (Heck, Premiere lost me three weeks of work…).  Vegas has literally let me edit in HD, in full resolution or close to it, with real time previews.  It’s been great.  No rendering of clips in between previews, and no reduced-resolution clips on my timeline and output monitor.  I’m also running Windows 7 (beta, of course) which literally flies on this system (which has a nice 4GB of RAM), and a dual monitor set-up too.

The only draw back (with Vegas) has been that the film has had to be split down into four chunks (as it seems to become a little wobbly when you get past the 1GB memory usage) but, to be honest, it’s made the whole project more manageable as we’ve been able to concentrate tasks on a specific quarter per day/weekend, deepening on the task in hand.

The edit itself has been fairly smooth.  There were a few issues with missing clips during the shoot, but the assembly cut, otherwise, was fairly straight forward.

I prefer, when the audio is recorded separately, as was the case here (as opposed to recording to the camera) to do the picture edit first, and then do a second run through syncing all the sound.  So my assembly cut used the camera sound.

My second loop around, assembling the sound, was where things got a little trickier.  A huge amount of the film was set in a car.  The problem is that the car chosen (A Pajero) is the nosiest beast you could imagine – and I mean, the living room, two floors beneath my office, literally shakes when the volumes turned up, and it couldn't be towed for a couple of reasons, mainly due to the costs incurred in Malaysia where the movie was shot.  The sound, in itself, isn’t a huge deal as you play through one take, and one angle, but it became suddenly very jarring as we cut between the actors in the same scene, as gears change and engine noises altered.

Anyway, it became a point of altering the audio in each shot, and we got around it the best we could by merging the audio into one file the best I could, using cross fades in the sound, and picking opportune moments to switch between tracks.  Then in was a case of externally filtering the audio to produce three tracks.  One, just base, to give a constant engine rumbling, the original file altered if necessary, and a track with as much bass as possible removed.  Then, it’s back to Vegas to play with the levels some more.

Am I happy with it?  I think that it’s something I’m pedantic about and still a bit shaky on, but it’s not as noticeable when played out on a TV in 5.1, and maybe I’m only noticing it because I’m aware of what the problems are…  I think it would have been easier if The Joshua Tapes was about three guys on a bicycle ride, but I’ll learn to live with it.

Being HD, it’s taken 2 days to render the whole film out, and it’s off to the director, Arivind Abraham, tonight for him to pick through and highlight any glaring errors or omissions.  I’m pretty confident in the cut we have as Arivind’s been here most weekends, overseeing the process, which has been useful, obviously to get his take on the film, but also to stop me from going crazy with cabin fever.  Which happened anyway.

Then, if we’re happy, the render’s on it’s way, later this week, to Luke Yerbury for colour treatment.

And the verdict on the film itself.  After, I suppose, 5 months worth of work, I can still sit back and enjoy the movie.  Sure, there’s scenes I’ve seen a thousand times, and there’s lines I can’t possibly stand to hear again because they’ve given me so much bother, but at the end of the day, it’s a great film.  Sweet, smart and well paced.

I’m looking forward to everyone being able to see it soon.

But, yeah, bike movie next time guys!

I’ll blog a little more about some specifics of the process once I’ve had a couple of days to recover.

Geography Games

We went live last week with a whole bunch of new Geography games for i-board.  These activities are designed for use in Year 1, but are useful for Reception and Year 2 as well.

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Activity Pictogram
Follow up a survey by recording favourite leisure activities as a pictogram.

Activity Survey
Make a printable survey. Type a title and choose icons, or type a title, for each choice.

Fix Up The Park
Be kind to the environment...what changes can you make to improve this place? How can you stop your local place getting nasty!

Going To School, I See…
On your way to school, what do you see? Tell a simple tale of a journey by using the items in the menu at the bottom of the screen to make a rolling scene.

Shopkeepers
Who works near where you live? Dress the workers outside their place of work or shop.

What Is Nice
What do you think of this place? Drag the happy or sad faces to label the scene.

To check them out, take a look at http://www.iboard.co.uk and sign up.  Or, take a look at http://sample.iboard.co.uk/ for a sample selection of i-board resources.

Arivind Abraham (.com)

Another of our web projects went live over the weekend.

ArivindAbraham.com is the home to, funnily enough, Arivind Abraham – a writer and director, based in London.  He’s actually the writer/director for the two film projects I’m currently editing on though Chaos Created/Befour, 5:13 and The Joshua Tapes.

The web site, itself, was a bit of a challenge and we’ve incorporated Flash and Silverlight (tied together with a bit of JavaScript) to deliver trailers and film content in high definition.  And we’ve made the most of social networking, bringing together a blog, Twitter, Linked In, Flickr, Windows Live, Friendfeed and 12 Seconds to make the most of social networking. We’ll be adding to these in the coming months, to build a bit of a community, and we’ll pick up some traction as we go into marketing the forthcoming movies too.

Anyway, be sure to check it out.  There’s also a lot of content on there, particularly on the Blog, as to the work that’s progressing on both 5:13 and The Joshua Tapes.

Visit the site