Friday 19 November 2010

Filming my Project

In order to give me something to apply my learnt techniques & ideas to Dheeraj is encouraging me to think of some idea of a project. What material have I got to work with? What idea do I want to work with? Crap I don’t know. What with sorting out the enforced moving house I hadn’t spent anytime thinking about such things. It’s kind of obvious now and I want to kick myself for not bringing any material with me I can work with. Dheeraj shows me some basic animation in Photoshop, which I never knew existed and we talk about production logos. We have some ideas and by the end of this course I’ll have a reasonably good if only first version of a logo for Moonrise Media/Moonrise Media Productions/Moonrise Productions, whichever I decide to go with. Currently I’ve been referring to my “media arm” as Moonrise Media, but it may very well end up as Moonrise Productions, we’ll see.


Following on from this throwing around creative ideas, my mind slowly starts to click into gear and soon filming ideas start to roll into place and before I know it I’ve formulated a storyboard and a list of shots I need. This took up most of my first day of training and when I get back with the 4 O’Clock cab I go grab my camera & tripod and start grabbing some material.

Again I lose light very quickly but get enough stuff shot to at least have something to work with. The quality of the filming is dire but that isn’t important. As long as I have something to edit and do stuff with that’s all I need. The failing light and the lack of decent light in my room at least gives me footage I can apply colour correction to when we get to that part of After Effects! I enjoyed setting up the camera, filming, moving the tripod, using my 7D for some shots and basically just finally getting to play.

I’ve only recently bought the two tripods I brought with me. The big video tripod (which cost more than many people spend on their car) is an absolute joy. It’ll go to nearly 2.5m by the time the camera is sitting on the head down to .5m and the head is nicely smooth. The smaller one is a Joby Gorillapod which has flexible bendy legs that can wrap around things and form into shapes to help you get into awkward positions. I still have doubts about it as although it is the slightly heavier duty one (SLR-Zoom) it does seem to sink when my 7D with normal 24-70 lens is on it and you try to use it as a table top type tripod. However it did seem to hang upside down off my curtain rail quite well and vertically flipping the footage I shot will work out.

In filming this project footage I also got to use some Adobe software that Dheeraj told me about on that first day that I’d never paid any attention to. On Location is for video capture… well, on location! With my laptop connected to my camcorder via the firewire cable I can record directly to the hard disk, with the advantage that I get to see a near real-time video screen (there is an approx. 1/10th second delay), whichis handy as I dumped my 7”LCD monitor just before I left for Heathrow to try to reduce my weight a little. I do however regret taking my LED light as it would have made my life a lot easier grabbing this project footage and I’d have been able to use it with some of the creatures in the dark I’m encountering! C’est la vie.

In the following two days (Thursday and now today Friday) I’ve been working through the Classroom In A Book exercises and then working on my project footage. Mostly editing to get the “story” but being at least being able to apply some of the Ripple, Rolling, Slide & Slip editing features I now know better.

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