Pulled Prok Productions

Movie FX

A few weeks ago I worked on a friend’s filmset. He had the idea of doing a full feature film in a day. 310 shots with almost 60 actors. The movie is called The Dead and its about a series of friends and colleges visiting the coffin of a man who’s died.  The camera was set up in one spot, never moving, and each person (or persons) would come up, deliver their lines, then walk off.

One of the tricks to indicate time passage was to project the shadow of an off screen window onto the background, then move it throughout the day. The problem was that all of the characters visit the coffin two or more times, throughout the day.

The first problem to solve was the projection of the shadow, which proved harder that we thought, due to the size of the room we were using and the number of lights we had. That was solved by using a mirror instead, taping a window shape on it with duct tape, then projecting a light onto it, which reflects to the background.

We set it up on a c stand so we could rotate it to indicate time passage. However, we needed to be able to have the actors do all their scenes at once. Otherwise they would have to wait all day to do what amounted to a minute of being on camera.

Week 4 of House of Glass, our action/drama series, features one of my favorite scenes in the show, an interrogation between Wonder Russell’s character Jack and Sascha Streckel’s character Sylvia. On top of that, Sascha and Kevin Pitman (the villain Phobos) share a great scene in between. So it’s definitely the drama half of the action/drama.

Feedback has been positive so far, focused mainly on the acting and the “look”, which is fine by me. We lost a little of the story elements when we ran out of time, which is a blog post I should write up at some point.

Here’s the playlist link.

There has been much hoopla in the comic book circles revolving around a variant cover of Batgirl #41, all part of a DC promotion to feature the Joker on various variant covers. The image, which can be found online pretty easy, knock yourself out, is an homage to the graphic novel The Killing Joke, which came out twenty-seven years ago, in 1988. That's right, people that bought a 1st edition copy off the news shelf at cover price, you're fucking old.

The Background

The Killing Joke was written by comic legend Alan Moore and is considered one of the definitive Joker stories, winning the Eisner Award the year it came out. It has been reprinted numerous times and many of the elements presented in it have entered Batman mythology as canon, despite the graphic novel originally existing outside it. The interesting part of this is that not everything in the book became canon (for example, there is strong evidence that Batman kills the Joker in the last couple panels), just the most controversial element of it.

While The Killing Joke has had a fair amount of praise from comic readers, severe criticism rose around the treatment of Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, in the book. In the story Joker ambushes Barbara, shoots her in the spine, then strips her naked and photographs her, all in an effort to drive Commissioner Gordon (her father), insane. This was an early example of what comics writer Gail Simone dubbed "Women in Refrigerators", a trope in which a powerful woman character is killed, mutilated or depowered, to further a male character's story arc (so called from an infamous issue of Green Lantern where he finds his girlfriend murdered, mutilated, and stuffed in a refrigerator.)

Barbara Gordon became paralyzed in the story (though eventually rescued by Batman) and that element was carried into DC Comic continuity. Critics hold this up as a prime example of inherent misogyny of a male-dominated comic industry and it's a hard charge to refute. Alan Moore himself has found fault in the decision, saying in an interview that he had asked Len Wein, the editor, whether he could cripple Barbara Gordon and Wein replied "Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch." Moore goes on to say it was an area they should have "reined me in, but they didn't."

Gordon went on to become the hero Oracle, the Batgirl mantle was taken up by several other women over the course of the next 20 years, then she was retooled back into a fully functioning Batgirl for DC's new 52; which, of course, DC got flak for robbing the comics world of a handicapped hero. Can't win for losing sometimes.

So, now we're back to the present.

The Hoopla

Twenty seven years later artist Rafael Albuquerque creates the above mentioned variant cover in an homage to The Killing Joke and all hell breaks out. Several websites catering to women comic readers, run mostly by women comic readers, complain that the cover is misogynistic, triggering, and in poor taste in context of the modern Batgirl book, an extremely important point which I'm going to spend time on in a moment.

The movement spawns a twitter hashtag #changethecover and gained momentum quickly. Supporters of the cover stepped up to say it was a homage, it was an important part of Batgirl's legacy, etc.

Albuquerque then requested that DC pull the cover, and DC, in support of its artist, complied.

Then some supporters of the cover lost their fucking minds.

Censorship

Okay people, neutral history lesson over, here's where the opinion starts. An artist requesting a piece of art of his be pulled, is not fucking censorship. DC Comics does not publish political cartoons or satire aimed at exposing the larger forces of evil in our society or whatnot. They publish super-hero comics and they are in business to make money. Let me repeat that, because it is the single most important point of all of this:

DC Comics is in business to make money.

No government is telling them what to print, no radical forces are threatening to kill them (more on that, later), there is no pressure on DC Comics to do anything else but make. Money.

Which, ironically, is the argument some of you are making.

"Let the market sort it out!"

The market already has, you knucklehead, and we'll talk about that in a sec, too.

So drop that whole censorship bullshit. It's an insult to people that have died defending censorship, it's an insult to media in countries being threatened for death if they publish a picture or write an article.

Fucking Stupid Red Pillers

The only people being threatened with death are the fucking people criticizing the cover. Yes, read that again. The people complaining about the cover, are being threatened with death over it. Not DC, not the artist, the people criticizing the cover.

There's your censorship example, Captain Irony.

Context

I know it's hard for some people to understand context in internet arguments. Context is the thing that puts a small issue in comparison to a larger issue that it's a part of. For example, if I told you a man died because he ate a chicken, you might think the chicken was poisoned or he choked on it. It would be hard to fault the man or make any decisions at all involving the chicken.

However, if I had told you a few days ago that I knew a guy that was 600 pounds, with a weak heart, that loved fried chicken, and loved eating it all day, and after each piece of chicken he did 5 jumping jacks, because he called it "his exercise", so it would be the excuse in his mind for eating more fried chicken... that's context.

A normal conversation would go like this:

"Remember that guy I told you about, the dude that eats all that fried chicken?"

"Oh, yeah, the big fat guy with the weak heart."

"Yeah, dude was eating a piece of chicken and he dropped dead."

"Heart attack?"

"Oh yeah, that dude was fat."

See how that works?

In context, DC has a long history of being tone-deaf with regards to  growing their audience past mid-teen to 20s white males. They have been  fucking horrible at it.

The  rebooted Starfire in the New 52 is the prime example. They had an  audience of *millions* of pre-teen and teen girls who's only exposure to  Starfire was the Teen Titan cartoons. Instead of tailoring the  character to that model, they catered, again, to the thousands (not millions)  of horny young males that read comics. They had an opportunity to bring a boat-load of new readers to that comic and flushed it away. Because DC brand managers are bad at their jobs.

Well, slowly, somehow, like a heroin junkie on his 4th rehab, DC Comics is trying to come around. The current Batgirl comic is designed for younger readers and female readers. It features clean art, inspired by the current Anime craze sweeping through that demographic, and Batgirl is a hip, modern chick in her early 20s, struggling to have a life and fight crime.

Those readers have not only never read The Killing Joke, but they have no  interest in reading stories like The Killing Joke. Otherwise, DC would  have millions of girls reading The Killing Joke and this controversy wouldn't have  happened. Surprisingly, I say facetiously, most young women don't want to see images, no matter what the context, no matter how good the homage, most young women don't want to see images that remind them what it might be like to be assaulted or raped.

The writer of the current Batgirl book, Cameron Stewert, has gone on record that the creative team was uncomfortable with the cover because it's not the right fit for the book they are producing.

In that context, the market has spoken. And DC ignored it with this cover.

Maybe  that cover was a good idea on another book, or as a special give away,  or, even better, as added content on a special addition of The Killing  Joke.

HOUSE OF GLASS IS LIVE! THAT'S WHY I'M SHOUTING! Two years of work finally finished! Go check it out, support us if you can, comment, like, all that modern social media stuff! And thank you!

I realized I haven't posted here in a while and Super Bowl season is rolling around again. I want to share a post I did on sports last year, that was posted elsewhere. Yes, it's long, and, yes, some of you've been trained by modern media to have microscopic attention spans. I broke it up into little paragraphs for you. Sports:

I've been writing about this over and over the last couple days, so it's time to put it all in one place. A buddy of mine had a more personal post, regarding not shitting on things your friends like. Mine is more general.

Sports are not evil. Sports are good.

Listen, I'm sorry if you had a shitty sports experience. Seriously. I was hit in the balls with a soccer ball when I was in Junior High because my parents didn't know enough to get me a cup. It was the last time I played soccer and probably still colors my view of it.

I've watched the same degenerate news stories as you have, regarding sports figures. Rape, murder, dog fighting, drugs, etc. Those are indefensible actions take by criminals. I can't even say the riches they got through sports weren't a factor, because they may have been. I do, know, however, that you all know Michael Vick's name, but you probably don't know who Rodell Vereen is. Rodell buggered a horse in South Carolina. He was arrested for it, served jail time, then was released on parole. First thing he did? Found his way back to the same farm, same horse, to bugger it again.

Now, of course, we don't hear about Rodell because the media doesn't care about homeless schizophrenics as much as they do multi-million dollar quarterbacks. That's the media's fault and our fault, for paying attention to them.

My point is, though, for every Rodell, there are many, many schizophrenics (and people from South Carolina), who don't fuck horses. And for every Vick, there are many, many quarterbacks (nee football players) that didn't hold 6-8 dogs underwater until they drowned, just for not fighting well enough.

But we all know that.

Let me give you some personal background. I was not encouraged to participate in sports as a kid. I was free to, but I didn't have the parent over my shoulder pushing me into it. I ran a little track, ran cross country, but mostly tried to draw comics and play Dungeons and Dragons.

Sometime between 17 and 19, I grew to love football. I'm not sure how or why, I just started watching it occasionally, and playing pick-up tackle with friends on Sundays. I decided, in my early 20s, that I was going to play semi-pro football, my first brush at organized ball.

Semi-pro leagues are made up of basically two types of players. Ex-pros or ex-college athletes that still feel the burn to compete; and people too stupid to get college scholarships (yes, it's possible). I played with both.

We had a guy that literally couldn't figure out how to line up to the right and go in motion left before the snap. Don't worry about the lingo, just imagine not being able to figure out you have to put the car in reverse to go backwards when you're learning to drive.

This guy was an idiot.

He was an idiot with about 5% body fat. Even at the beginning level of experience I had, my brain in his body would have made me millions.

But, I also played against ex-NFL players, guys who were at one time, the elite. Because even a guy that gets cut from the NFL after a year, even the guys on their practice squads, are elite athletes that worked really, really hard to get where they are.

Anyway, I played for about three years, but I never lost the love. I still play contact flag football on the weekends and I am way past the age some guys even toss a ball around with their kid. I never really thought I was in good shape, but that's because I go to a gym on a regular basis. Looking around at people near my age, even some people younger than me, and I guess I am.

During this whole time, I also never stopped doing what I'd been doing since I was nine. Which was draw, write, and play games. I actually quit playing semi-pro to go to the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning.

I guess what I'm trying to say is while most of you are breaking up into camps of gamers or jocks, you can do both. In fact, you should do both.

But we all know that, too.

So, you hear stories about football players raping underage girls. Football is bad. You think the US is the place where "neanderthals" play football. Football players are stupid. That sports team is extorting money out of your city for a new stadium. Pro football teams are evil. The NCAA is ruining colleges. It's evil, too.

I'm going to tell you a story about a kid named Peter. Peter was on the second team of the three teams I coached in Little League Baseball. I had the losers of the losers. The league I was in had try-outs and then the "major" teams drafted the kids they wanted. Any other kids that signed up were put into the "minors".

Those teams had trouble coming up with coaches, so they usually had too many kids. Fifteen to seventeen a team, which, in a six inning game where everyone has to play, makes for only a bat or two a kid a game.

I had a "minor" team, made up of the kids other "minor" coaches didn't want. They basically gave me their three worst kids, out of a team made up of the worst kids.

The basic idea was good, to give the kids more playing time, but, man, some of those kids were painful. But they all wanted to play.

Peter was a tall, gangly kid who couldn't hit a baseball to save his life. He could barely catch, though he threw alright. Peter played in every game that season (as required) and, aside from a couple of walks, either stuck out or hit into an out every single at bat. We worked on his hitting during practice and he kept a positive attitude.

Wait, did I say every? I meant all but one. On his very last at bat in the very last game of the season, Peter hit his one and only, no shit legit, single. It was a story you couldn't sell Disney for a movie about a kid getting his first hit at baseball.

Now, Peter would probably not go on to play baseball much longer and I have no idea where he ended up. What I do know, though, without a doubt, is that that one moment, like a bad movie cliche, he will remember his entire life.That kid was lit. up. running down to first base. We treated it like a game winning home run.

For perhaps the first time, but definitely not the last, Peter learned that working hard at something and keeping a positive attitude really does pay off. Peter learned one of the most important life lessons a person can learn and fuck you in your cynicism if you think otherwise.

Why does this matter? Because what happened with Peter happens every. fucking. day. somewhere in this country and the world. Probably hundreds of times. Because every day we've taken energy that was originally spent on warfare and struggles for food, by those very neanderthals you think they are, and turned it into something positive.

Poor and want your kid to get to college? Your options are sports and military. Choose. Want your daughter to have a statistically significant lesser chance to be raped, a much smaller chance for an unwanted pregnancy, and a much higher chance for a positive body image, no matter what that image is? Put her in sports and thank Title IX.

What to teach your children good eating habits, good exercise habits, how to work as a group to achieve a goal, how to handle failure and setbacks?

Sports.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You've heard or seen or experienced those crazy ass competitive parents, yelling at their kids or his coach or her umpire. Well, fuck those people. That's not sports' fault. It's bad parenting. Like those parents that give their kids beer or teach them to smoke.

Football didn't rape that underage girl. Football didn't drown those dogs or murder that guy. Football doesn't set a car on fire after a Super Bowl win or punch a guy for wearing the wrong colors at a stadium. 

People that do stupid criminal shit, are criminals.

If you want to have a discussion about why we spend so much more in military than schools, let's do that, I'm with you. If you wish some parents weren't assholes to their kids, I've got your back. Hell, I've umpired Little League games, I've seen it personally.

You want to rant about the NFL being a non-profit, rant on, it's a fucking stupid loophole.

But sports. Sports! Goddamn, what a glorious thing.

Full of math and physics and human behavior and how we treat success and deal with failure and every fucking thing that makes up our fabric as beings.

Little secret, when you put on a football helmet and run down the field, you can't hear shit. All you hear is wind blowing through the ear holes and you feel like you're running a million miles an hour. You aren't a leaf on the wind, you're a spear, flying through at the speed of sound. 

I am so, so, sorry if you don't get it. I really, really am. Because to be able to share my love of a thing with you would make me as happy as... well, anyone that derives love from sharing something with someone.

Remember when I said I coached Little League? I coached Little League even though I didn't have kids. I did it because I knew sometimes losers get lost in the shuffle and I wanted to show them, perhaps ironically, that skill does not determine how much we love doing something.

Remember when I said I game? I take equal delight in scoring touchdowns as I do confirming a critical hit in Dungeons and Dragons, beating a map on X-Com, or finishing the first draft of a script. 

One just makes me eat better and take care of myself.

So, again, if you've had a bad sports experience, I'm very sorry.

We live in a decisive time and if you want to get into fights with people over something they love, then I guess that's your right. But, again, sorry for those assholes. If they didn't have a big game, they'd find a different excuse, trust me. Try to remember the happiness of your friends and loved ones that are into it and take joy they're happy.

And play more.

The trailer for my webseries House of Glass is finally out! Check it out on youtube and please share to help us get the word out.

We are currently in post-production with our webseries House of Glass. Post-production has two main components, sound design/mixing and color correction.

A lot of webseries simply post what they shoot, allowing the camera to choose how to correct the footage. This is the equivalent of using a preset on your phone to make your cat picture looks like 30s sepia tone. That can be fine for someone with limited resources, time, or interest.

I'm using this series to better my skill set and that involves learning a very complicated piece of software called Davinci Resolve. Resolve is for professional color correction and they have a free version that has nearly all the tools as the professional version.

When color correcting, the intent is two-fold. One, adjust the footage to match the rest of the footage shot.Two, change or adjust the color to create a mood, feeling, or look.

Professional digital shooters use the flattest setting possible on the camera, meaning you capture the most color information, at the cost of the footage looking washed out until color corrected. We use a Canon 7D camera and the superflat setting. Here is what a basic clip looks like, set up in Resolve:

As you can see, the footage looks pretty lackluster. To the far right is a waveform scope. Scope help you correct color without having to rely on your monitor. Since everyone's monitor is different, this is usually a bad practice. The waves of color you see match up with the image from left to right. Meaning that cloudy reddish bit near the left is Anya, while the bit to the far right is the wall and hanging.

The line at the bottom, the 0 line, is where blacks live. The line at the top is the max amount of light. The round dials on the lower left of the interface control the shadows (Lift), the highlights (Gain) and the midtones, where fleshtones live (Gamma). The scope to the lower right, with the light blob that looks like someone flashing a peace sign, is for fleshtones.

The important bit to refer back to are all the little boxes in the upper middle, with the red Xs through them. Davinci uses what's called a Node based system, which is kind of like layers in photoshop. You can make each correction on a separate node, from left to right, allowing you to change very specific things.

In fact, Davinci is so powerful, it will track specific colors or areas as people move. In this clip, Anya walks up a set of stairs, so all my corrections had to be track to her movement.

The first little box was used to make basic light corrections. Get the bottom of that wave to hit 0 and the top to hit higher. That adds more contrast, which is always good when using flat footage.

Here was the basic image again:

And after basic adjustments:

As you can see, the darks are darker, the lights lighter and everything in general looks better. I could have exported this and it would have looked fine, though pretty standard, unexciting overall. It says nothing about the scene or its location. Now I went to work doing more detailed adjustments

First, I was able to use an eyedropper tool to pick out just the lavender of her dress. It looked okay, but I know it could be brighter and I knew what I planned for the overall look. I adjusted it and Davinci would track the changes as she moved. It came out like this:

A subtle change, but needed. Another subtle change was to change the skin tones slightly. The camera had shifted everything slightly yellow and I knew it would need some correction before I hit it with the main changes. That came out like this:

That was the end of the correction part of things. Now came the grading, or coloring things to reflect a look. The artistic changes. These could be whatever I wanted. I would make the world pink or blue or anything, really. What I wanted, though, was sun. The character is ascending to talk to this world's version of Apollo, the Sun god. I wanted a yellow and orange warmth, exaggerated.

First, I created a mask around Anya, as I didn't want the changes to be as severe on her. Plus, by making the background around her darker, I could focus even more attention on her.

The initial mask looked like this:

Though it's hard to tell, purposefully so, I am also able to blur or sharpen the background and I blurred it very, very slightly. This, too, helps draw the eye to her and keep it there. But, she couldn't remain normal colored, as it draws attention to the changes. It makes it look like she has a spotlight on her.

Davinci has an option to allow you to make a node off a node you just created. In other words, I was able to copy this change, but have the inverse of the mask I created be active. So, while the first node oranged up the background, this one would do whatever changes I wanted to the foreground, or Anya. I could orange her up, but make it slightly less and lighter than the surrounding background. That can out like this:

I wanted to do one last thing, something movies have done forever, that, in a perfect world, you never notice. That is, add a vignette. Originally vignettes created by using a lens or a mask on the lens, that made the corners of the image darker, more out of focus, or both. At the extreme, it's like looking through a tube at something.

What I wanted was just a slight darkening of the corners, which, by contrast, would make Anya look more lit up. That went something like this:

For final reference, the before and after look like this:

Quite a difference. Now, for those that may think it looks really obvious in this still, it is completely unnoticeable in motion, unless you look really, really hard and know what to look for. You can see it every day in movies.

We have a trailer up, as well as a short prolog episode, for House of Glass. We really need help to do a first season. The series features a largely female cast playing characters inspired from Greek Myth. Take five minutes and check it out.

I’ve talked about the first writer meeting for House of Glass. At that meeting we roughed out basic concepts and outlines for the series. There was still a lot of work to do.

A couple more weeks passed. I did more research. Both Andy, my co-writer, and Bix, my Assistant Director, pitched characters they wanted to see. From their list and mine, I distilled things down to the six episodes we wanted to do. Some of their ideas were integrated, some were rejected, or adapted to what I wanted to do. I am the creator, it is my show, and ultimately I get what I want. But, luckily for them, you, and the show, I do not believe I am smarter than everyone in the room.

A lot of good ideas came out of their notes and the final episode list was stronger than if I had sat in my dark room. 

Once that was done, Andy and I had a Skype session (he works in California, I'm in Seattle) to develop the outline further. Email works fine for some things, but in the writing process, the back and forth conversation is the best.

There are plenty of tips on how to write online and in print. Different people have different methods. When I'm doing something by myself I can usually think about characters in my head, then work out plot and dialog details as I write. I end up going through several rewrites, but I like that process. The work is always better on the other end.

With House of Glass, though, we had several unusual things to deal with (for me, anyway): a large cast of characters; some deeper subtext; a short episode length; and making sure Andy had what he needed to turn in a good first draft.

I’ve talked a little about collaboration before. Let me be direct. Collaborate. Don’t go through life being the isolated, weird artist, feeling sorry for yourself and sitting in your dark room trying to imagine the perfect project to introduce the world to your awesomeness.

This isn’t to say you should let someone else dictate your vision. Successful artists definitely have a vision that’s uniquely their own. But, and we’re talking about film and tv stuff here, they have had a lot of help along the way.

I had the original idea for House of Glass. I am the creator. But, the first thing I did was talk to my co-writer for Clark and Lex, Greg. Greg and I had abstract discussions about things we liked, shows and ideas that we didn’t see enough of, that would be fun to do. That lead to thinking about House of Glass seriously and getting the mood, structure, and world in my head.

As the development process went on, Greg stepped away. He wasn’t interested in the direction I was pulling the show and he was smart enough to see that up front, instead of spending months working on it. However, during our discussions, we came up with an idea for a movie. Completely unrelated to the series, but borne from the same discussions. Something neither of us would have come up with on our own. So, while he left this project, he is now working on that screenplay. Right after House wraps, I expect to be working on that, under his guidance.

From a group of people I knew that wrote, I sent inquires to around ten of them, seeing if they were interested in working on House of Glass. This is a herding cat process. I set up a Facebook group and let them know what was going on. Of the ten, only one followed up and responded. But that’s the way it goes a lot of time.

One of the only things that separate successful artists from unsuccessful ones, is the ability to finish things. People live busy lives and a lot of the time, artists are working on things. Their own things. Sometimes you get lucky and find someone that want to work on your thing.

As things ramped up in late November and early December, House of Glass grew in complexity. Instead of just focusing on one or two things, I now needed to be juggling rough ideas on story, casting, locations, even costumes. I had to sell the Director of Photography on the idea and start getting an idea of the budget, so we know how much to ask for the Kickstarter (which starts in March).

One of the main characters is called the Host. He is the one that owns the House and sends his agents out on missions. Yes, we made the same Charlie’s Angel jokes, but aside from the idea of a male benefactor sending women agents on missions, we’ll have very little in common.

Our Host is an omnipresent force in the House. He dwells upstairs and uses his second in command, Ariadne, to do the dirty work. I wanted to use my friend Dave, who not only had the look we wanted, but owned the house we wanted to use as the House. Dave is not a professional actor, so one of the now many balls I was juggling, was finding out if he could act.

We took a trip out to his house in early December. Since it’s better to multitask whenever possible, I took my Assistant Director and my Director of Photography. The AD was tasked with talking to Dave and seeing if he could act. The DP and I would, at the same time, walk around Dave’s house and explore camera angles. We needed to know what kinds of shots we could get for both the series and, more specifically, the Kickstarter video.

My AD put Dave through a series of basic exercises. Acting, even mildly good acting, requires more than memorizing your lines and hitting your marks. Dave needed to prove he could move with purpose and use his presence to own a room. Basically, could be be the alpha dog just with body language.

We found out, that even though he’s a very nice guy, he can, indeed, make his presence felt if he needs to. It helped a lot. We don’t know if he can memorize lines yet, but that’s just a matter of working at it. We also don’t know if he’ll freeze up in front of a camera, but you can never know that until you’re faced with it for real.