Harry is my dog. Samus is the Coghlan’s cat. I spent the day at their place hanging out, and didn’t want to leave Harry home alone so they graciously let me bring him with me. He was so excited to explore their apartment, that even though he saw Samus at the beginning, I guess he forgot about him or something. Anyway, he was just running around having a grand ol’ time. So, of course, I start filming. Sarah decides to torture him. Then we start doing stuff and leave Harry to his own business. The whole time, Samus is perched up on this little overhang thing watching Harry run around the downstairs area like an idiot. We’re hanging out upstairs and all of a sudden I hear Harry start to growl and whimper, and I’m like: “What’s going on?” I look over the side, and see him just sitting there staring at Samus. So I guess finally, after like an hour, he spotted Samus. Then they just stared at each other for forever. I got my camera and filmed a bit, and condensed it down to the video you see here. The end of the video sums their relationship really well. Samus yawns, Harry’s tail is wagging a mile a minute. BFF fo’ real.
I filmed it with my Jag35, no lighting at all (just what was coming through the windows). 35mm lens, f/2.0. I apologize for the shaky camera, still getting used to this filming upside-down thing.
Jabarie kept showing me these videos online of guys singing all the parts to a song snippet and then piecing it together acapella style on the ‘net. Like this:
Matt walkley sent me this video of a guy doing the same thing with the guitar. It’s pretty cool, sounds amazingly like a MIDI file… which in a way, if you think about it, operates on the same principal. Sampled sounds triggered at the correct moments. Must’ve taken a long time to do this!
So last week Martin and I worked pretty hard on shooting and editing this Holiday Hipsters video. For something with very, very little planning it turned out pretty well.
Basically, Friday, January 30th, we at the last minute decided to get together on Saturday to film a music video for Cupid’s Lament. Martin said he has some shots planned, so that’s how it went. Burgos, Martin and I convened at this house at about 12:30 on Saturday. Martin and Burgos had already started planning out some shots. They has basically decided that the video would be Cupid going around like, trying to shoot people with arrows and missing, basically showing that he sucked at his job. There was always supposed to be a girl, and Cupid would be fighting with the girl until eventually he makes an online dating service to replace his bow and arrow, and he and the girl live happily ever after.
Did a quick test with the Jag35 35 mm lens adapter. First thoughts:
I’m using a fast lens, but when I use a different lens with an f-stop of 2, there’s some serious vignette on the image. Only problem with using such a fast lens, is that the depth of field is ridiculously shallow. You can see in some of the shots of the scooping sorbet, that her hand is pretty in focus, but the bowl right next to it isn’t. That’s crazy.
Also, it flips the image, and it’s really hard to track footage when everything’s flipped upside down! So that’s why the camera wanders a bit.
Also, needs a lot of light still. Although it’s night time and my kitchen wasn’t very well lit, I did turn on one of my soft boxes that I already had set up in my living room. I dunno. It’ll require a lot more testing to really get the hang of it, but it looks pretty neat so far.
I slowed it down a little bit, shot at 30 fps, the footage is 24 fps.
No, I’m not implying that women who are single are musical geniuses. And actually, saying that Single Ladies by Beyonce is a work of musical genius is probably going a bit too far. But, I will explain why I dig the song… and no, it’s not because of the female empowerment lyrics.
Actually, for those of you who know me, you’ll know that I’m not much of a lyric listener at all. So that leaves us with the music.
This song is primarily an electronic beat with vocals on top. Since there is no chordal accompaniment to go along with the vocal melody, our brains assemble what we think must be the key in which the song is sung (See my post below about Microsoft Songsmith and Bach).