Had a few minutes today and updated the Concrete Calculators software. Some usability enhancements and automatic calculation of common bag sizes needed for a job. It’s been a fun little pet project for me, one that I hope someone else out there gets some usefulness from.
Calculating a slab
This is for all the indie filmmakers out there experimenting with new outlets for marketing your creations. It used to be that you absolutely had to have a distributor to get your film out to markets that would otherwise have been impossible to reach. The Internet has changed a lot of that.
In this article I’m going to go over a few things that I did to create an interactive poster for my film The Cursed (when it was called Tenebrous). This could also be a new method of distributing the whole film, using freely-available tools online to create an interactive marketing package for one of my films. At the time, USB drives were not available in the storage sizes and prices that they are now, but I will cover any special steps with them also.
Please note that some familiarity with tech is required. To those of you out there that rely on the Internet for promotion and marketing, it shouldn’t be much more difficult that what you’re already used to, but some sleeve rolling and elbow grease is still required to assemble the necessary parts and tools.
The tools I used for this were all free. However, certain substitutions can be done depending on your comfort levels. I work with a $0 budget all of the time, and the tools that I used were more than adequate to do the job with no hassles or headaches.
So you’ve got your film made and you want to get it out there, but YouTube doesn’t cut the mustard. You’ve also got tons of behind-the-scenes photos, interviews, etc., and you’d like to put those together also in an easy-to-explore format. You also don’t want to put it out on DVD, or you’d like to have some special branding. Heck, you may want to put your whole movie on there like this little gem by David Baker for MISSION X.
Whether on CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-Ray, or USB drive, you can now create a fully interactive tour of your film that lets people view pictures, listen to music from the soundtrack, watch clips, or even read the screenplay or parts of it. All within its own browser that you can lock down and brand with your own settings.
Note: this approach uses some HTML, so having a good working knowledge of it is recommended. If you’re not quite sure if you can do this, you can use a WYSIWYG editor such as Nvu (free) or Dreamweaver (not so free).
Before making your interactive film app, plan a layout for how you want it to flow. What kind of graphics are you going to use? What kind of color scheme is there? How will people navigate around easily?
I use a whiteboard, but paper and pen work just as good for this step. The only limitation at this stage is your imagination and creativity. Trust me, jumping in without a design first will leave you spinning your wheels. This is not as difficult as, say, the pre-production on your film was.
Personally, I do not recommend having music or loud video kick in automatically on the default start page. This is a pet peeve. You want the viewer’s experience to be pleasant and want them to come back again. Also, if they bought your disc, you don’t want to make them regret having bought it.
Decide here what media you want to put your app on for distribution. This will make a difference in what you can include since storage sizes vary. If you decide to do multiple media types, which you can, then take into consideration all of their sizes and what you can put on them.
You should also look at your assets at this time and get a total filesize for them all. This includes pictures, videos, documents, music tracks, anything you want to put on the physical media. This in addition to Portable Firefox, which is itself about 38MB. Small, but if you’re using only 128MB USB drives, it could get expensive.
A full list of links to the tools in this article is at the end.
Start by making a folder that will contain the internal layout of your project. I usually label these things “Name_Of_Project_CD”, since CDs are the first media I test on.
For this type of project, I had to assume that someone may or may not have the web browser and version with plugins that I might want them to have. So, the first step is to get said browser. I use Portable Firefox, which is not only small and fast, but also allows me to re-brand the titling and lock things down the way I want my project to be presented.
Portable Firefox - The starting point (click to enlarge)
After I have Portable Firefox installed in the project folder, my next step is to install Adobe Flash player. Note that this method differs slightly from the way that you might be used to with the web browser on your computer, so follow the instructions carefully.
This instantly opens up Firefox as a richer multimedia platform, and, you don’t have to worry about whether or not it is installed on the viewer’s computer. You can also install other plugins that you might need or want, but for me this is more than enough to go forward.
Optional: Once you have this part done, make a copy of the folder. That way, you can start from this point on your other projects without having to go through this step in the process all over again.
Once you have everything installed, you can test it out by going to a site on the Internet. When you are testing, however, you should close all other copies of Firefox on your system, as well as any other web browsers. This will prevent Portable Firefox from trying to glom onto your other installs and use their settings.
One last step here before moving on: create another folder inside the project folder called “Site”. This will be where you will place all of the assets for your app. You can name it whatever you like, but I use Site in this article. Just remember what you called it in case you do deviate from this naming convention.
Warning: This is probably the most technically demanding part of this process.
Suppose you want to change the branding text in the titlebar on the browser window. With Portable Firefox, it’s easy. Go to your project folder. You will see an Apps folder in there. Click on it to bring it up. Now drill down to the firefox/chrome folder. The branding for the browser is located inside the file named en-US.jar. This is the language file for US English; if you are in another country, load up the language file of your choice. It should be located in this same folder.
Some of you may be scratching your heads about JAR files. JAR files are in reality plain old zip files that you can open up in WinZip or any other compression program, such as 7-zip (free). To open them inside of Windows directly, change the file extension from .jar to .zip, and double-click.
Inside the zip file you will find a folder named “locale”. Click on it, and open the folder named “branding”. Inside here is the file that you want: brand.dtd.
Using 7-Zip to extract brand.dtd from a JAR file (click to enlarge)
Extract this file to your desktop or wherever else you can get at it. For most compression software all you have to do is grab the file and drag it onto your desktop.
Next you’ll want to open it in Notepad or any other text editor. Do not open this in Word. A plain text editor will ensure that no extra junk gets saved with the file.
After opening it, you’ll notice that it’s not that big, only 3 lines. You can change the values for them accordingly, as shown below.
The brand.dtd file in Notepad++ (click to enlarge)
The one value you’ll be most interested in changing is brandFullName. This is the value that Firefox uses on the title bar. You can change the others as well, and Firefox will use them in their appropriate places inside the brower.
When you’re done editing, you’ll have to put this modified brand.dtd file back into the en-US.jar (or whatever language file you have) to make the changes show. In Windows or 7-Zip, just drag and drop the file back in. Start up Portable Firefox again, making sure no other copies are running, and you should see the change in the title bar.
Title bar branding change in Portable Firefox (click to enlarge)
If you want to change the icon on the top-left corner of the window, you can swap out the appicon.ico file in the App\AppInfo folder with one of your own. As long as you name it appicon.ico, you shouldn’t have any problems, provided it is a Windows Icon file.
Remember that Site folder? Well, that’s where you’re going to put all your app’s content. I usually test while writing by placing everything in there to begin with. It saves a tedious step of copying everything over and over to the folder it’s going to be in eventually.
Start first by creating an index.html file and placing it in the Site folder. This will be your landing page. From here, you can add in whatever you want: images, sounds, etc. Organize it however you wish. I use sub-folders called images, music, and video to keep everything separated.
Bear in mind that the browser will not have an associated web server on your media also. Although that is possible, it is beyond the scope of this article. For now, consider that you’ll have to work with everything that is on the drive, and that’s Portable Firefox and Flash. That is, under most conditions, enough to carry your content.
You will however have to work using static HTML pages. But you do have a modern browser at your fingertips, one that you can take advantage of. CSS, Javascript, Flash et. al., are at your disposal. I use the Lightwindow Javascript library for images, which gives the recipient a nice, easy-to-view and easy-to-navigate system for images, especially those which can be large or are driven by thumbnails.
For Flash-based playback of MP3s, I use the XSPF Web Music Player. It is extremely small and uses easily-created playlists. Flowplayer is useful for playing back video. Note that none of these assets (video, images, or music) need be on the system to use these Flash widgets, but it might be handy to keep them local to prevent lots of delays in streaming, or if you want to truly make your app portable.
Did I mention that Lightwindow, XSPF Player, and Flow Player are all free? I guess I just did.
The point here is that your creativity shouldn’t feel stifled because you can’t use PHP or any other high-end scripting language. In fact, you should stay away from those for the purposes of your app. I’ve found that there is more than enough with the Firefox/Flash platform to serve just about all of my needs.
How you tackle the construction of the pages is up to you. Make them as bare-bones or as intricate as you’d like. The only constraint is the size of the media you’re going to put it on.
When you have your app ready, it’s time to lock down everything. I like to do this in order to keep everything on rails, so that they are really only looking at the content of the disc or drive. However, if you want people to surf the Internet with this, you don’t have to do all of these things.
Turn off any toolbars you don’t want them to have access to, and install any special themes or extensions you may want it to have. I find that PF running as light as possible the best course because it results in faster load times and reduces any clutter, as you can see in the picture above. I also set the window size to something that seems to work for my project. Your mileage may vary; try out different window sizes by resizing it, exiting, then starting back up.
For proper functioning however, you should ensure that your installation of Portable Firefox is ready for your thumb drive or other portable media. To do so, you’ll have to edit the FirefoxPortable.ini file, located in the root of your project folder. Open it up and make sure the settings are similar to this:
FirefoxPortable.ini (click to enlarge)
Of special note is the RunLocally=false setting. This will essentially put PF in “read-only” mode, which means any changes you may make from here on out, including installation of additional themes, extensions, or plugins, may not work.
Also notice that the LocalHomepage setting is set to the Site\index.html page. PF will always start with this as the landing page. If you have a different landing page filename, change it here. However, I strongly recommend index.html for convention.
Autorun, while it may or may not be active on the viewer’s machine, is a nice extra touch. For those viewer’s machines that do have it turned on, it can launch your app automatically.
For CDs and DVDs, you can write a simple autorun.inf file and put it in the root of your project’s folder. An autorun.inf file is what Windows looks for on the media, and, if the feature is activated, will run the appropriate commands listed. You can also change the icon that appears for the drive from your custom autorun.inf file.
To write one, open up your plain text editor. Here is a sample:
Example Autorun.inf for CD/DVD media (click to enlarge)
This example will start up the program called TenebrousViewer.exe (I renamed the default PortableFirefox.exe file) and will use the appicon.ico file for the drive’s icon when placed into the drive. Simple and easy.
USB drives have a little more to them, as they can be scanned for files and pop up with an AutoPlay window. When this pops up, you can have your own custom message text appear, such as shown in the screenshot below:
USB Drive AutoPlay Example (courtesy of Daily Cup of Tech)
You could have it say anything you want really, such as “Open My Movie’s Viewer”. Here’s an example of what else you’ll need to add to handle both Autorun and AutoPlay with USB thumb drives:
action=Launch Tenebrous Movie Viewer
You can also add in your own special menu items if someone right-clicks on the drive. For instance, say you wanted to have a command that would say “Read the Screenplay” and have it launch the PDF of your shooting script, you could add the following lines to the autorun.inf file:
shell\readScript=Read the Screenplay
shell\readScript\command=\Site\script.pdf
shell=readScript
Provided you have a file named script.pdf inside of the Site folder on the thumb drive, it will launch the PDF viewer on their system and load the screenplay for them to read.
Once you’re ready, put the autorun.inf file on the root of the thumb drive. To test it, unplug the drive and plug it back in. If you have AutoPlay enabled, you should see your customized INF file working.
Here is a sample autorun.inf file that you can modify for your own use:
[autorun]
open=TenebrousViewer.exe
icon=\App\AppInfo\appicon.ico
label=Tenebrous Movie Viewer
action=Launch Tenebrous Movie Viewer
shell\readScript=Read the Screenplay
shell\readScript\command=\Site\script.pdf
shell=readScript
Make sure you name the file, regardless of which media you use, to autorun.inf
Now that you’ve finalized everything, it’s time to put it on the media of your choice. This part is easy. For USB drives, simply copy the contents of your project folder to the thumb drive. For CD and DVD media, burn the contents of the folder.
If you want to go one step further to make the burning process even easier, you can make an ISO snapshot of the folder’s contents to burn later. Most disc burning software made today can burn an ISO image to CD or DVD in one step, instead of doing it over and over.
Here’s some advanced things you could do:
Install a JSON library in with Portable Firefox. This will then make Web Services available from inside your app, such as having a remote guestbook, e-mail, PayPal API integration, Google Maps, etc. The sky’s the limit. The idea here is that you don’t have to put the entire app on the drive/disc and can allow even further interactivity with you, your site, and even other special content.
If you’re not sure what JSON or Web Services are, then you might want to skip this or talk to a local web developer geek who can explain the pros and cons of doing it.
If you’re burning to a DVD-4, DVD-9, Blu-Ray, or are using a super-large USB drive, your storage options allow you to also add in some other portable apps, such as Portable Apache Web Server, Portable PHP, and Portable MySQL. This will give you some heavyweight backend software to work with, but it might also be prohibitively expensive size-wise. You may want to ask yourself why you would need all of that extra software.
Here are links to all of the tools I used and mentioned in this article. Every single one of these is free.
GIMP: Graphics editing. I use this in place of Photoshop.
Nvu: WYSIWYG web page editor.
Notepad++: An awesome text editor.
Portable Firefox: You’ll need this to get started.
7-Zip: A great universal compression program. Handles JAR files natively, as well as zip, gzip, tar, and just about every other compression format on the planet.
Lightwindow JS Library: Useful for your app if you want some nicer image viewing capabilities.
Flowplayer: Flash video player with many options.
XSPF Web Music Player: Compact and highly configurable player for MP3s.
It’s entirely possible I glossed over something here. If I did, and you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I will respond back as soon as possible to it.
After a long wait, The Cursed is now being broadcast on the SyFy Channel. It will premiere on Saturday, February 6, at 9pm Eastern, 8pm Central. Be sure to tune in, and if you’re going to miss it, set your Tivos or other recording devices to catch it then!
It’s great to finally see it get out there for many to see, although it will most likely be neutered for network television. Still, it’s a fun ride nonetheless.
This Wednesday will be the last ScreenTalk of 2009. My co-host wanted to do a special devoted to horror and my book. While I don’t believe myself capable of talking for an hour straight, as many of you who listen into the show know, I’ll do my best to keep you entertained with as many verbal gaffes as possible.
So tune in on Wednesday, December 30th at 9pm Eastern Time, 6pm Pacific. To sweeten the deal, I’ll even throw in a dirty joke and some swearing too, but I won’t say where.
And now for a Christmas parable.
I want to talk about a guy I know. For lack of a better term, let’s call him the Christmas Asshole.
There were a few events in my life that I thought I would share with people reading this blog. This is one of those events that shaped my writing mind into what it is today.
The first one was where I lived. Most people know that I was born in Brunswick, Georgia, but you couldn’t tell now if you talked to me because the accent flattened out after moving north and living there for more than a few years. Anyway, we moved off the coast in 1987 about 30 miles to get away from the air pollution from the Hercules pulp mill in Brunswick that was contributing to my constant illnesses.
Some people joke that they live in the middle of nowhere. But where we moved truly was the middle of nowhere. Woods, woods, and more woods for, well, 30 miles until you hit town. We lived there for only a few years, but it was long enough to make an impression on my young mind.
It was at that time I found out that we had moved about 5 miles from a place that was immortalized by the Charlie Daniels Band years prior:
Yes, the place was as creepy as the song suggests. During the day, your biggest worry as a kid was running across a 10-foot-plus southern diamondback rattlesnake that had decided to get a suntan. At dusk, it was the owls the size of a Volkswagen. And night…well, there was all sorts of things in those thick woods that made sounds that would send chills up anybody’s spine. Sounds you never thought existed in nature but they were there and the things making them were hungry, pissed off, or both.
This is in addition to the strange lights you would occasionally see coming from the woods in places you knew nobody lived or could even possibly live due to quicksand.
To this day, I still have clear memories of that place out in the literal middle of nowhere. It was a fertile ground for a fertile imagination and sewed the seeds reaped years later.
A few weeks ago I was asked to do a photo shoot as well as take some footage for a commercial for the book. This was all an experiment by my publisher, Michael Wiese Productions. An experiment in terror, in fear, in…seeing how far and wide this new-fangled Internets thingy could take a trailer/commercial for a book.
And here is the end result. Read on afterward for why I think this is so cool. They say that the story of how it was made is more interesting than the end product, and I tend to agree.
This was cool for a few reasons. For one thing, the footage was shot in two places, using bare-bones crews and commodity equipment. Neither of the crews knew what the other was shooting except in a very general way.
Footage was shot in Tennessee and Michigan. The Tennessee footage (of the truck and myself) was edited together with Premiere CS3 and sent MOS to Seattle, as well as the raw footage from Michigan. It was assembled, mixed, timed, etc., and ready to go within 48 hours using iMovie. It was then sent off to London for final approval.
Now think about it. This was a no-budget deal. We threw it together in short order and had it ready (thanks to the Internet) traveling all over the world in a matter of 2 days. Timezones excepted, it really comes down to 36 hours or less. We never met face-to-face, only communicated using phone and e-mail.
There is something to this, and I do love it. It reminded why I got into making movies in the first place: because I love it.
I’d like to also thank Dustin Masters for coming down and helping with our part of the shoot.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone out there reading this. The end of this year draws near. Many of us take the time now to reflect on those things we are happy for. I do so as well, but also contemplate what those things are that I will take with me into the next year that will make it even better.
Have a safe, gut-bloating, happy Thanksgiving!
Our guests on ScreenTalk this week will be Marilyn Horowitz and Will Akers. Our topic is “The First Act”, and Marilyn will be going over the first act with a Screenwriter’s Utopia member’s script live on the air and what can be done to make it better.
Mr. Akers is the author of Your Screenplay Sucks!: 100 Ways to Make It Great, a great addition to any screenwriter’s library of information.
Tune in this Wednesday night at 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific time. And if you miss it, don’t fret; the archive of the show will be available about an hour after it airs on the same page.
This has been a long time coming, and I’m glad to finally announce it. Screeniq Screenwriter is now out!
Screeniq Screenwriter is a free, web-based screenwriting software package that we’ve been working on since June of last year. We felt it was now ready for a broader introduction into the world.
What is Screeniq Screenwriter? Think of it like Final Draft, only for the web. And yes, it is free. No, it will never go “for pay”. We debated a long time over whether or not to charge for it, and frankly I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
You can visit the FAQ for Screeniq Screenwriter to (hopefully) answer any other questions you may have.
Screenwriter is made by Screeniq Systems. This is a new venture that deals with both web and desktop software for all aspects of filmmaking. There is a desktop version of Screenwriter in the works as well, one that will interface with the online version for synchronization.
And now for the obligatory screenshot:
Screeniq Screenwriter (click to enlarge)
We hope it is useful to someone out there. We put a lot of work into it, and there’s still a few other things we’d like to incorporate into it, but it works great right now.
Give it a shot, try it out, kick the tires.
Horror Screenwriting: The Nature of Fear (click cover to pre-order)
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