New blog for 3rd year…
i have been asked by the anti-academies alliance to film their conference tomorrow, at the congress centre, in london. their cameraman had to pull out so i got a last minute call asking if could do it. i’m on a train to london as i write this from my phone. i’ve got lots to sort out and very little time to do it in ie. clearing off memory cards, charging batteries, learning how to use the zoom h2 recorder etc.
i will be filming the first opening plenary (6 speakers – 1 hour) in the morning and the closing plenary (5 speakers – 1 hour) in the afternoon, as well as some of the workshops taking place in-between. pete jackson (the guy in charge) said he wants mid-shots of the speakers throughout and a very simple edit that they can easily upload to youtube. i managed to borrow a fluid head manfrotto tripod off a friend and will borrow a sound recorder off my brother tonight. i do not trust the quality of sound on my nikon plus i might be quite far from the speakers so having a seperate sound recorder could be vital.
i’m getting paid 100 pounds for this which is nice but its also great experience for me and if i do a good job, i may be offered more work in the future.
bright blue day – finished video
it is easier than i thought to create this effect. i created two ‘adjustment layers’ and then selected two ‘lens blur’ effects.
i left a gap in-between the two layers to leave a strip in focus and then added a mask to both of them which i feathered (by a few hundred pixels).
i then enabled time remapping to speed up the image – squashing 12 minutes of footage into 8 seconds. i also created an adjustment layer for the saturation and contrast levels. increasing both of these gives the image that toy, model like look and combined with the timeremapping it could be mistaken for a stop-motion animation.
mark will be adding the typography to footage after i’ve done all of the above to them. here’s an example of a finished edit (without the typo):
today we went to christchurch to shoot some timelapses from the church tower. i had managed to get special permission for us to be taken up the church tower. it was higher than i thought it would be and was also very windy. we had manfrotto pro tripod that seemed to do the trick but a sandbag or two would have been useful. most of the shots are fairly steady and we manged to get about 5 different shots.
two stills of the setup:
left – the may look unstable but it was actually ok. we did have to stay be careful where we walked while the camera was rolling as the planks wobbled when we stood on them.
right – we had difficulty viewing the screen on my camera because outdoors in midday sunlight it is highly reflective. i composed the shots using the viewfinder first, before changing over to morror lock-up / live view mode.
below are 5 unedited screenshots of the footage:
the constant movement of traffic between the georgian architecture made this a nice shot. its a shame about the ugly building behind the church but that will almost certainly be a blured out area of the image
we initially thought this would make a nice shot because of the constant movement of the people through the gate. however when we played it back we realised the gate was quite ugly and there wasn’t really enough people moving through the shot to make it usable. the shot actually looked better with the gate composed at the top of the image but that would mean the foreground of the image would be the graveyard which would not have really been appropriate.
there was plenty of people walking through the park as well as a few boats moving in the harbour for the 12 minute duration of this shot. there’s also a big open space in the middle where the typography will fit nicely. this one’s definitely winner.
i haven’t actually sped this one up in after effects yet so i don’t know exactly what it looks like but i think the boats gradually float towards the land and then back out. we were running out of time with this one so only had it the camera rolling for about 5 minutes. because the movement is so slow we really needed to leave it running for longer but i think this will still be a usable one. like the park shot it has a big open space where we can float some typography.
this final shot is probably one of the best – lots of traffic passing over the bridge – could probably put the text on the bridge or maybe on the front of the castle.
bright blue day – update
when i was away mark and cat did some timelapses of the poole quay area and went down by the studland ferry crossing and captured the ferry crossing the water. apparently they were both at sunset so these shots would probably work nicely at the end of the video. strating off with bright midday shots and gradually getting darker is now part of the plan. they also went down the christchurch, which apparently is very scenic but they said the shots they got won’t be usable. as i discovered from my test shots, you nearly always need elevation for the tiltshift affect to work. they mentioned there was a big church tower that would be good to shoot from. i phoned the priory earlier and have managed to get special permission for us to be taken up their on tuesday afternoon. we’re only going to have 20 minutes, maybe 30 max at the top, so we’ll have to be well prepared.
bright blue day – inspiration
there’s been lots of tiltshift style videos made in the last year or two. the coachella festival video is one where the effect has worked especially well. mark thought we could integrate the typography into the video, the same way it appears in the credits at the end of this:
to integrate it into the shot so that it looks like part of the scenery may prove to be quite tricky and will may require working in maya. so thats the plan. we going out tomorrow to scout potential locations and if the weather holds out, hopefully bag some shots. its important that its sunny and ideally clear blue skies for the shooting. from doing the tiltshift test shots a few weeks ago, i know we’ll need a good sturdy tripod, a telephoto lens and to shoot for a duration of at least 4 minutes.
bright blue day – meeting
bright blue day finally got back to us last week and we had a meeting with them yesterday in their offices, in poole quay. they liked our ideas and gave us a fairly clear idea of what kind of video they wanted. they recently updated their website and have slightly moved away from the seaside/beach theme. the website has a more contemporary feel to it so we’re going to do something along the lines of that. they liked the idea of using typography instead of showing examples of their work. they showed us the two fonts they use on their new website and requested that we only used them. one of them is ‘Georgia’ and the other is ‘Museo’ which is one they had designed especially for them. they also gave us a list of words and phrases that we could use:
- Everyday brilliance
- Energy
- Excellence
- Rigor
- Fun
- Ambition
- #3 UK integrated agency (they suggested this would go well at the end of vid)
- Everyday – doing what you do but a little bit better (this terrible – it doesn’t really make sense so i doubt we’ll use it)
so the plan now is to shoot some tilt-shift style timelapses of the area. (forgot to mention that they’re proud of where they’re located (poole quay) and wanted all the shots to be of the area as well as bournemouth / boscombe / christchurch area). so yeah tilt-shift style timlapses of the area with typography consisting of some of the words/phrases above. and in the style of either georgia or museo or even both.
pleased we finally met them and now looking forward to cracking on with this project!
we’re still awaiting a reply from bright blue day but we’ve continued to develop the idea. initially we intended to project examples of their work on beach objects (ie. beach huts) keeping in-line with their beach theme on their website. we thought if we could get some footage or a few more stills (like below) that this could work nicely. we probably would have done the projections in post, as opposed to using an actual projector.
we went down to the beach to get some shot of the huts and to work out where and how we’d project on to them. below is a screenshot of the unedited footage
during the shooting we realised it would be quite a difficult thing to do and couldn’t think of a variety of shots that would work for the idea. mark and cat made the suggestion that we should maybe use some sort of typography instead of examples of their work so we started taking shots that would work well with typography.
we were pleased with deck chairs because it they fit the beach theme of their website.
i found it difficult to envisage where the typography would go in these shots but mark and cat were fairly confident that it would work ok. after this shot we decided to call it day so that we could reflect on the new idea. we didn’t want to make the mistake of shooting loads of stuff for an idea that we not certain we were going to pursue.
