film

back-to-school-paper-colored-paper-stationery-159519

A Simple Way to Organize Your Media Project Files

Whether you’re an illustrator, video editor or motion designer, it’s important to keep your files organized. Especially with video editing, it’s easy for your projects to quickly spin out of control. You often have video footage, audio, still images, graphics and animation files that you need to keep track of.

As both a video editor and animator, I’ve tried various schemes to keep my files organized. For many years, I used the following (or something close to it):

This is obviously better than files scattered across your desktop, but it’s a very flat file structure and specific to the type of videos that I create. What happens when you’ve designed something in Adobe Illustrator that is referenced in your motion graphics project? How do you keep those files organized in this scheme? Or what if you are just doing a simple design project? Is there a way to keep those files organized that would be immediately obvious to anyone who picks up the project?

The answer to these obviously rhetorical questions is, yes! Recently, I had an file organization epiphany (oft had in the shower) that makes organizing a whole lot simpler and consistent across projects. It’s applicable to any kind of project where the finished product is rendered out. For example, a video, animation, photo or illustration.

In a nutshell, the structure looks like this:

If you are doing a simple design project in Adobe Illustrator, your files and folders might look like this:

If you’re doing something more complex, you can repeat this structure all the way down through you entire project. This way everything stays organized from top to bottom.

Here’s what a more complicated animated video might look like:

The important thing here is that this way of organizing files is SCALABLE. It can be used on any project, from small to large, keeping your files grouped logically, readily accessible and easy to find.

In a future installment, I’ll take a look at the the bigger picture of how I set up my drives to store these files and folders, and back them up incrementally so that important work is not lost.

I hope you found this useful. If you do something different and you think it’s better than my system I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Digging around inside nature’s giants

Sperm-Whale-Inside-Nature-007 — Credit: Windfall/Richard Taylor/Jones

A sperm whale’s penis has no bones. This allows its flexible member to penetrate a female sperm whale from any number of directions; a necessity when two multi-ton animals are trying to line up tab A with slot B in an unsteady ocean environment.

This and other interesting facts about sperm whales are the subject of the first episode of the documentary series Inside Nature’s Giants, which premiers in the U.S. on January 18th. Each of the series’ four episodes centers around the dissection of a large animal, which is used as a starting point to explore the animal’s biology. (A clever device, which I also used in this Scientific American video about jumbo squid.)

Should broadcasters pay to protect the ‘stars’ of wildlife films?

lion-cub — A lion cub in Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Discovery Channel’s reluctance to air the climate change episode of the Frozen Planet series–an episode they helped fund. I asked that we label this act ‘unsustainable nature filmmaking’ because Discovery had failed to use its bully pulpit to protect the species that feature heavily in its films. An opinion piece in the journal Science this week, penned by Oxford geography professor Paul Jepson and colleagues, takes this argument one step further and asks that broadcasters like Discovery make direct monetary contributions to protect the ‘stars’ of wildlife films:

We ask whether it is time..[for] media corporations
producing and commissioning nature-based
programming…[to] adopt PES [payment for ecosystem services] principles.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of ‘payment for ecosystem services’, this is basically the idea that the many benefits provided to us by nature have a monetary value and that corporations profiting off of those services should give a percentage of profits back to conservation efforts.

Discovery Channel and unsustainable nature filmmaking

On Tuesday the Daily Mail reported that the Discovery Channel will not broadcast the final episode of the popular Frozen Planet series in the U.S. Why? Because the show deals with climate change, an emerging threat to animals living in the subzero regions of our planet. Apparently, Discovery thinks this topic will offend the political sensibilities of some portion of its U.S. audience. How ridiculous. Climate change is a matter for science, not politics (or at least it should be). And even more ridiculous is that Discovery helped pay for the production of the very episode that they now refuse to air.

This got me thinking about the genre of so-called ‘blue-chip’ nature documentaries like Frozen Planet. These docs are built around charismatic megafauna engaged in life or death struggles. And honestly, some of these films are my favorites. I mean, who can resist the pull of a full-grown male lion chasing down a hyena in a battle to the death? Who can say they don’t like Discovery’s ‘Shark Week’–just a little bit?

Video editing in the ‘vertical’ dimension

In the last chapter of his book In the Blink of an Eye (Viking, 2001) film editor Walter Murch explores the possibilities inherent in the digital future of film editing. He predicts film editors will be able to manipulate moving images in much the same way sound editors manipulate many layers of sound:

Up until now…[motion]picture editors have thought almost exclusively in the horizontal direction. The question to be answered was simply, “What’s next?”…that’s complicated enough–there are a tremendous number of options in the construction of a film. In the future, that number is going to become even more cosmic because film editors will have to start thinking vertically as well, which is to say: “What can I edit within the frame?”

Last week Adobe previewed a new technology called a video mesh that looks an awful lot like Murch’s “vertical” dimension. It allows the film editor to extract 3D elements from live 2D video and ‘re-shoot’ certain aspects of the scene (e.g. depth of field). It is even possible to reposition characters and objects within the scene once the 3D landscape has been defined.

In the future, video meshes and other technologies like light field photography may completely change the way we think about 2D images and how best to capture them. Will these new possibilities lead to innovative filmmaking or will too many options lead to a kind of self-conscious paralysis? As Walter Murch says, we already have a “tremendous number of options” at our disposal.