Signal To Noise by Douglas Koke

Kessler University Interviews Douglas Koke

By Preston Kanak

We recently had a chance to chat with Douglas about his film, “Signal To Noise”. We have included part of the interview below.

Kessler University (KU):Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Douglas Koke (DK): Well, I’m 36, and I’m originally from Calgary, AB, Canada, but have lived in Denver, Colorado since I was a little kid.

Up until a month ago, I was the Creative Director at a Streaming Media company, but have since left to work for myself as a freelance designer, full-time. My company is called Site07, ingeniously named because it was the seventh site I ever built. So right off the bat, you can tell that I’m a wellspring of deep thought and creativity.

Filmmaking and animation were always something I wanted to get into, but it wasn’t until I was an adult that they weren’t entirely cost-prohibitive things for me to pursue.

To be entirely honest, I’ve only owned a DSLR since June of this year. Based on the advice of some friends who work at local editing/production houses and after seeing some of the work turned out by guys like Philip Bloom, and other proponents of HDSLR, I decided to give it a shot, and bought myself a little inexpensive Canon t3i.

And like most other noobs, I proceeded to go out and make a bunch of slightly cute, but mostly terrible videos featuring 10 minutes of unmotivated slider moves focusing on flowers, and other sedentary objects.

If you check out my first couple submissions to Vimeo, you’ll see that I’m not making that up. They’re truly awful. But they represented the best I could do at the time — I was just trying to figure out things like proper exposure, and depth of field, and how to move the camera around. All the painful first steps everybody has to take. And as dumb as they were, I was proud of them. As long as I can see some measurable growth in my videos, and I’m not getting lazy, I’ll be psyched.

KU: You did some pretty interesting things in your video — in editing, shooting, and compositing. Where did the idea come from?

DK: A while back, I had made a short video at a windfarm in Colorado that I had wanted to augment with some hand-drawn animation, but ultimately, I wussed out. I was still learning the very basics of shooting, editing and pacing, and I thought I should probably concentrate on just a few things at a time, so I put the idea on the shelf.

I love time-lapse, and I love working in After Effects, so I just thought it would be a fun challenge to incorporate some 3D components with live-action. It seemed like a great excuse to learn something new, and hopefully create something that was visually interesting, so I started
thinking about what would provide a compelling subject.

I think I was watching an episode of “Wonders Of The Universe” with Professor Brian Cox, or something, and all of a sudden, it popped into my head; “The Very Large Array!”

How fun would that be?!?

The VLA is something I’ve wanted to see since I was a little kid; It’s within reasonable driving distance of my house; it’s iconic; it’s visually arresting; and it MOVES.

It just seemed like a perfect fit. So, I threw all my gear in the car and headed to New Mexico.

KU: I love the approach you took with the film. It is very unique. I also noticed that you used Kessler Crane gear on the project. Tell me a little bit about your experiences with the gear.

DK: Well, thanks for saying so! I really appreciate that!

Yup. I used the travel version of the Pocket Dolly, and the elektraDrive with the Basic Controller. As someone new to all this, I had spent what’s probably an unhealthy amount of time on Vimeo and similar sites, just rabidly consuming every cool film and video I could fix my eyeballs on.

I was in absolute awe of how people were able to wring these remarkably elegant and cinematic images from such relatively cheap cameras. I watched these epic pieces by guys like Tom Lowe, and Randy Halverson and Philip Bloom, and apart from their undeniable talent, I was blown away by the fact that they were achieving these beautiful camera moves with something that could fit in the trunk of my car. That was INSANE to me. And incredibly encouraging.

I went out and bought a cheap little slider, and started playing around with that. It was fun, it fit in a backpack, and I was getting decent results, but not consistently. It would jitter sometimes in the middle of the shot, and I’d have to try again, and it just didn’t seem like it was gonna hold up if I kept dragging it out into the dirt all the time.

I’ll be honest– everything I had seen and read about Kessler Crane was enormously positive, but I was fairly skeptical, and had a little difficulty rationalizing buying one, simply because it’s a bit more expensive. But I kept hearing all these great things, so I took a risk.

It showed up in the mail, and after about two minutes, nearly all my reservations were dispelled. “Ohhhhh– Now, I get it.”

I could kick this thing down a flight of stairs, back over it with my car, and it would be fine. Like, NUTHIN’. It’s a little powder-coated Chuck Norris. Good luck breaking it. It’s just so beautifully machined.

And as much as I sound like a shill in a Slap-Chop infomerical, everything you read about Kessler is on the money. The dolly is completely smooth. The moves are flawless, and repeatable. You have to WORK to screw up a shot. I can do it, but the mistakes are always on me, and not the gear.

And I’m not ashamed to admit, I look at the webpage for the Oracle Controller and the Revolution head like they’re porn. I full-out covet them. It’s not pretty. You happy now? I said it!

KU: The post production on the piece was amazing. Would love to know a little bit about how you approached and executed it.

Thanks again!

Oddly enough, matching all the graphics to the time-lapse footage wasn’t as difficult, from a technical standpoint, as I thought it was going to be. But it did prove to be WAY more arduous and time-consuming than I had anticipated.

In addition to all the normal things we call contend with shooting timelapse — noise reduction, de-flickering, stabilizing motion from wind, color-correction, exposure jumps, etc., — I gave myself a whole new set of problems to grapple with.

I had to draw all these little fake “schematics” in Illustrator, and bring them into After Effects.

Then I had to match-move both camera movement, and the rotation of the dish antenna. I could let AE do some of the heavy lifting by motion-tracking the X & Y movement, but that’d do absolutely nothing to solve the dish rotation in Z-space.

And I learned that the dishes move shockingly often. In addition to broad, sweeping moves, the array makes small corrections almost constantly. So, I ended up having to animate frame-by-frame on the timeline quite a bit to match all those subtle changes.

Then, I wanted to make sure I nailed the obfuscation. I was shooting at angles where the dishes were often obscured by a foreground object, or each other, so I needed to do quite a bit of masking and rotoscope work, to make sure that my vector graphics would be hidden in the same places. So, if the antenna ducked behind a blade of grass, the graphics had to as well.

I got a little obsessed — the weather went bad on me, and it started to pour, so I had all these shots with rain hitting the camera. And in order to sell the effect that these schematics actually existed in 3D space, I went through and distorted all the graphics that passed behind water on the lens.

Little stuff like that.

As far as the glitchy editing, I was basically doing my best impression of Tony Scott, and Rob Chiu. Those two guys were ENORMOUS influences on this thing. If you haven’t seen Rob Chiu’s stuff, and you enjoyed my video, you NEED to check out that dude. He’s a MONSTER. I definitely stood on his shoulders to make my video, and if you watch, it’s pretty obvious.

If anyone’s interested in similar editing styles, I used a variety of things to get that spastic, hyper-kinetic look.

I had flash frames in a few spots, that you can achieve by simply dropping the picture every once in a while.

You can get the phony camera shake by using The Wiggler in AE.

You can get the color changes by just making really short adjustment layers with a tint effect.

And you can check out a plugin called “Twitch” made by Video Copilot. If anyone is interested in motion graphics, checking out Andrew Kramer and VideoCopilot.net is an absolute MUST. That guy is just obnoxiously talented, and SO generous with information. Best tutorial site for After
Effects, bar-none. And he’s HILARIOUS. Super fun stuff.

KU: What can we except to see next from you?

DK: Well, to be totally truthful, after spending 3 weeks banging my head against my desk to get all those graphics looking decent, I kind of wanted to shoot something nice and simple, just for fun.

But now, this thing has gotten some attention — which is just BANANAS to me, by the way — and I’m feeling a little pressure to up my game.

I just bought a 7D, a follow focus, and a shoulder rig, so I’d like to experiment with some similar live-action/graphic stuff, using hand-held footage. I’m also really interested in playing around with 3D camera projection, and maybe bringing some Cinema 4D elements into the mix, as well.

I dunno — I’m really torn between focusing on more traditional film-making, and this goofy, surreal thing where I’m mixing my design interests with timelapse and videography.

Hopefully I can find time to do both!

I’m sure I’ll probably make a few things that are just spectacularly awful before I stumble on to something cool again, but as long as I’m learning and growing, I’ll be a happy camper.

That’s all I really care about, to be honest– improving. If there’s progress, I’m stoked.