GERMAN ANGST is an anthology of three stories each directed by Buttgereit, Marschall and Kosakowski. Buttgereit’s episode is called FINAL GIRL. FINAL GIRL is about a girl who wakes up in the morning in her parents apartment and in the room next door is a man tied to a bed. Marschall’s episode is called ALRAUNE, ALRAUNE is about a young man who gets to know a woman in Berlin’s nightlife who introduces him to a secret sex group, where extracts from the Mandrake Root are consumed like a drug. In this Secret Sex group the protagonist experiences the best sex in his life. However, the incredibly great sex has horrible side effects. Kosakowski’s episode is called MAKE A WISH. MAKE A WISH is about a mute couple who are attacked by hooligans. In the mute girl’s possession is a Talisman that causes a soul exchange in which the offenders soul exchanges with the victim.

PYRO – When recession has closed the doors on the Fire and Rescue Dept.s in Turku, a dangerous Pyromaniac strikes the subsystem underneath the streets. Now the only hope is a group of volunteers, whom have to overcome their personal disputes to save Turku.

Starring Frans Isotalo, Tommy Johansson, Paula Kovanen, Katja Ryto, Dean Portnoj, Mark Sawalha and Erik Lindholm.

We cannot wait to see Niko’s latest work. Please like PYRO on Facebook to get the latest updates.

About The Festival

About The Conference

The conference will take place at the Art Center of Corpus Christi during the day at the festival. This is where topics from screenwriting, directing, acting, editing, music for filmmaking and more will be discussed with artists, anyone who wishes to attend and people in the industry.

Confirmed Workshops:

• “Screenwriting” lead by Michael Canales(Disney Fellow | Screenwriter | Poet)
• “Lighting for Digital Filmmaking” lead by Gilbert Aguirre(Dept. 13 Films | Academy of Art University Alum | Cinematographer – 16mm, 35mm, Digital). Gilbert will be bringing 1-Ton Editing and Lighting Rig.

Here are some pictures from STUFF 2012

Date: May 9th

Time: Doors open at 7. Screening starts at 8. Music starts at 10:30.

Bands: Cavegirl, T.W.O.E. and Flying Fish

Cover: $5

Join us and watch short films, trailers, works in progress, music videos, meet the filmmakers and ask them questions during the Q&A. Listen to and meet the musicians. $5 cover and all proceeds benefit the South Texas Underground Film Festival 2013 which will take place Oct 3-6 through out downtown Corpus Christi and including the Richardson Performance Hall at Del Mar College.

FilmSlam is run like an open mic for filmmakers. Filmmakers sign up either ahead of time through email or show up the night of. Filmmakers then show up the night of FilmSlam with either a DVD or data file and confirm their time slots and have 10 mins each. Once the list of filmmakers cycles through then if filmmakers have another project that they would like to show then that’s when another cycle of names continues. At the end of FilmSlam, we show a special presentation of a film/media or video that a filmmaker has asked us to show, over the 10min time limit, at the end of the screening.

Kamikaze Konfections will be selling
Yummo Cupcakes, Drunken Cupcakes,
Vegan Cupcakes. All kinds of cupcakes!

*South Texas Underground Film Festival is a 501(c)3 through the Art Center of Corpus Christi(Please go and like the Art Center’s page). All contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law. South Texas Underground Film Festival is also run by artists who volunteer their time to bring this cultural art event to Corpus Christi. By the Artists for the Artists!

What: 24hr Film Challenge

When: Kick off – March 9th 10am & Turn In – March 10th 10am

Where: Physical location at Emo’s Plaza, between Emo’s East and the Beauty Ballroom 2015 Riverside Drive, Austin, TX and Online:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/543687572331688/?context=create
Do 512: www.Do512.com/rxsm

Cost: $10
Pay entry fee here: https://app.etapestry.com/cart/ArtCenterofCorpusChristi/default/category.php?ref=364.0.116574219

Register your team here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ip44Y9fhertmXlfi_hm4QZZ2RL0USBJ0PZtg13CfJC4/viewform

About:
SELF MEDICATED 24HR FILM CHALLENGE HOSTED BY SOUTH TEXAS UNDERGROUND FILM AUSTIN, TX – RxSM Self Medicated Film Expo & South Texas Underground Film are pleased to announce the Self Medicated 24hr Film Challenge. Online Registration starts March 3rd. Kick-off starts at 10am, March 9th, 2013 online and at Emo’s Plaza, between Emo’s East and the Beauty Ballroom 2015 Riverside Drive in Austin, Tx. Turn-in will be online March 10 at 10am with the team uploading their film on Youtube and sending their link through email. Films will be collected and streamed on RxSM’s YouTube Channel. Online Screening and audience voting will begin March 10th – March 31st. Award winners will be announced at the Victoria TX Indie Film Festival in Victoria, Tx April 4th – 7th. Top 3 films and Audience Award Winners will receive badges to the Victoria TX Indie Film Festival(VTxIFF 2013) April 4th – 7th 2013(Victoria, Tx) and to the South Texas Underground Film Festival Oct. 3rd – 6th 2013(Corpus Christi, Tx). Films will be graded on time, elements and creativity. Filmmakers have 24 hours to write, film and edit a short film. Assigned elements will be drawn and emailed to the team leaders and posted online.

Online payment through the Art Center of Corpus Christi:

https://app.etapestry.com/cart/ArtCenterofCorpusChristi/default/category.php?ref=364.0.116574219

We were able to raise $350 that will go towards scholarships for our Youth Filmmaking Outreach Workshops. These scholarships are for kiddos who cannot afford to pay for the filmmaking workshops. Thank you everyone!

Here are the teams that were paired up:

• Robzilla / Roel Guevara
• Money Bosses Entertainment / Jace Cosby & Isaac Rodarte
• Red Giant / Norman Navarro
• Cavegirl / John Rosales
• Sun Salutation / Micah DeBenedetto
• Jared Pena / Stephanie Schumann & Melanie Granado
• One Dollar Bob / Criss Cisneros
• Koruptore / Chris Ambriz
• J. Tagle / Roel Guevara
• Steadfast / Jeremy Montalvo
• The Golden Meanies / Deborah Leal & Annette Gutierrez
• Bertha / Josh Deleon
• The Blind Owls / Micah DeBenedetto

Here are some pics from the MVC 2013:

JURY AWARDS (Celebrity Jury picks)

Best of Show
Viewfinder – Kristopher Cisneros (The Party Singularity)

Best Director
El Ping: From Right to Left – Will Diaz (361 Video)

Best Story
Stained Affection – Jacob Grim (Grim Productions)

Recently, I posted an article about the basics of removing audio problems, and the limitations that you face right out of the box when you go to fix some nasty audio. This time around, we are going to talk about removing a very specific type of audio problem: hiss.

What is Hiss?

Not to be confused with hum, hiss is a persistent noise on a recording that sounds like … well … hiss. Turn the sound up loud enough and you will almost always here some on your recording. A low levels, it isn’t much of a problem.

The problem is when you have hiss on a recording that is distracting – say from a bad microphone or from turning up low dialogue. You could also be trying to restore an old recording that has hiss on it. Wherever it comes from, however, it’s annoying and needs to be destroyed.

The Basic Method of Getting Rid of Hiss

Hiss removal involves a few similar steps no matter what software you are using. First of all, you need to find a sample of hiss just by itself. That way the audio program knows what the hiss actually sounds like isolated – before that, it could get hiss confused with other parts of your recording. After setting some parameters, your tool of choice will try to remove that hiss from the recording without damaging any other areas.

To illustrate, I am going to take a look at removing hiss from two programs: Audacity and iZotope RX.

Removing Hiss with Audacity

If you are not familiar, Audacity is a great (and free) audio tool for Mac and PC. You can get it here. To get started, open it up, and import a piece of audio.

After importing your track, look closely for a small chunk of audio where there is only noise. After you’ve found it, select that portion of audio.

Select Noise Removal… out of the drop down list of effects from the Effects menu. This will give you a little dialog box that presents a handy two step guide. The first, is to get a noise profile. Since we’ve selected our noise profile area, we can just click the “Get Noise Profile” button.

Once you have the noise profile, deselect the noise profile area, and get back to the two step panel. You can adjust the noise reduction amount, preview it, and hit okay. Play back your audio, and the hiss is now minimized or gone.

As we mention in our limitations section, your audio may be affected depending on the Noise Reduction level you’ve chosen. If you are getting audio that sounds like it was recorded underwater, it is time to go back and rethink your parameters.

Removing Hiss with iZotope RX

iZotope RX is a fantastic program that is well worth the fact that it is not free. You can get it at BHPhoto.com.

What does iZotope RX have that free solutions don’t have? Well first of all, it can do a lot more than take out hiss, but we are sticking to hiss in this article. One of my favorite features of iZotope RX is its Spectrogram information. It can be viewed right on top of the more conventional wave pattern:

This view allows you to see – in much greater detail – disturbances or irregularity in audio. For instance, hum can be observed as a single line shooting horizontally through a recording. Hiss appears as “noise” you can see in the background of the audio.

Removal works in a similar fashion to Audacity. Find a portion of the audio where just the hiss is present, click the Denoiser button and click Train. This will “train” the program in the audio noise profile of the recording.

As in Audacity, you have a Noise Reduction level and a Smoothing option. However, you also have a choice of several algorithms that might give different results. Some take longer to process, but it is worth it to see which one might fit your situation the best.

When using an advanced program like iZotope RX, it is a good idea to look through their documentation. In the case of iZotope RX, the documentation happens to be extremely helpful and thorough.

Limitations

Of course, there are limitations. Like we mentioned in our previous post, audio is like a bowl of soup. You are going to take out some things you want to leave in. Since every piece of audio is very different, you’ll need to do some experimenting with parameters to see what level of removal leaves your audio suitably in tact.

via Removing Audio Problems Part 2: Removing Hiss | DiY Filmmaking.

We’ve all been there before. You have a great shoot, and you get back to your editing system and discover that there was a problem with audio that you didn’t notice when you were filming. It sucks, because what are you going to do? Reshoot the whole thing? Of course not, and that means working with what you have.

It’s a common and difficult problem, so we are going to do a series of articles on how to deal with different types of audio problems and with what programs. But before we get fancy, we have do get down to some basics.

Enhance!

I like to sit down and enjoy an episode of a procedural crime drama like “CSI: Miami” or “CSI: Someplace” every once in a while, but I have to laugh when they deal with anything audio or visual. The common use of technology that doesn’t exist is the “enhance!” feature where a blurry security camera is somehow enhanced to allow us to read a license plate off the back of a car. It’s fun, but it’s stupid, because you can’t do that in real life. It’s just technically impossible to create data where there is none.

The same goes for their treatment of audio. Usually, a garbled piece of audio is brought into their A/V department and it comes out pristine, so they can get the one piece of evidence they need. Usually this can be done with Horatio standing over the technician’s shoulder.

Like the video part, the audio treatment is completely fabricated, but it plays into a common misconception about audio in general: that you can “remove” something from it or “enhance” a part of it easily.

Can you do those things? Yes, but it is much more difficult than TV has led everyone to believe.

Audio Soup

Think of your audio track like a big pot of soup. There are spices, carrots, peas, chicken, and a bunch of other stuff all mixed together. It’s delicious, but has a flavor problem. It would be much better if we took the carrots out. Okay, no big deal. You can see the carrots – they’re orange. You get a spoon and start picking them out.

So you start taking the carrots out, and you soon find out it’s not as easy as you thought. You keep removing parts of the soup you didn’t intend to, like some broth. But after a while, you manage to get them all out. You took some of the soup with it, but that’s going to be okay.

Now, for your next assignment, you have to take the oregano out.

What is “Fixable”?

Audio is like the soup – all mixed together and messy. You can’t just “remove” something easily and without consequences, but if you know exactly what you need to get, you can take it out with some work if you don’t mind losing a little bit of other audio in the process.

What makes something a carrot? It has to be something that is uniform throughout the audio, like a hum or a hiss. Something that can be easily identified and is always there. The carrots are still in the soup, they are just identifiable.

Obviously, it’s impossible to remove the oregano because it’s too much a part of the soup. If you really wanted to take it out, you’d damage the soup heavily, and you’d have a hard time figuring out what is oregano and what isn’t. There would probably be some left in there when you’re done too.

The oregano elements in audio are things like a cough or a car in the distance during dialogue. It’s too embedded in the sound to be completely removed.

Next: Removing the Carrots

Soon, we’ll be posting round 2 of talkin’ about audio, with a list of tools to remove carrot-like audio problems, and some methods. Stay tuned!

via Removing Audio Problems Part 1: The Basics | DiY Filmmaking.