Night of '10 Jan 11 - JJ Abrams

It's been a while since I've had a weird dream. I've had trouble remembering them. But I remembered this one for some reason.

Recently I got the Adobe CS4 Production Premium, complete with Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, and many others. This has thrown me into a filmmaking frenzy. I haven't made any real full length feature films yet (I'll let you know when I do) but I'm beginning to get all of these great ideas for them. It's as if having the tools to create has inspired creation.

Anyway, last night I had this dream...

I had a dream that I came up with some genius idea for a movie, and that some famous producer was considering funding it. Naturally, I was flattered that any big name producer would even consider producing a film by an inexperienced director like myself.

It turns out that this producer was the one and only J.J. Abrams. Abrams is my favorite filmmaker of all time. I contacted him, even though every part of me believed he wouldn't want to deal with me. I thought I would do it just so I could say I did. You can imagine my shock when I got a phone call saying he was coming over to my house to talk with me about my idea!

So he shows up at my house, and as I open the door, I see Mr. Thompson, a teacher of mine, staring right back at me.

MR. THOMPSON WAS J.J. ABRAMS! I asked him why he never told me this secret, and he said it was because he never thought it was relevant. This made things even better because he knows me and would undoubtedly want to produce my film.

Then I woke up.

Film Leaders FTW!

I love leaders. I've made a number of them in After Effects and add them to all my projects whenever I can. They're both useful and awesome. You can cram a ton of information in them, like producer, aspect ratio, title, director, actors names, legal stuff. It's like the fine print. The circle around the numbers also helps make sure the aspect ratio is correct, and the tone should be a perfect 1kHz tone on the 2 (this one is .88kHz) to help make sure frame rate and audio sync are correct.

I don't care much for standardizing leaders, especially with the way video is in today's world. If there is to be any standardization, it should be on what information should be contained within a leader. I think that 4 seconds of assurance that the film is being displayed properly is good, and that it's always good to hide some secret proof that it's your movie.