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.
So just when I thought I was being clever by shooting in slow motion to get that motion strobe effect (and also getting discouraged and ready to trash the idea), I was reading in forums about how to manipulate the Sony SR11 to do whatever you want it to despite its limitations. This bigwig in the forums named Steve Mullen apparently wrote a book on how to utilize your camera to its utmost potential… but he makes you pay for it. He wrote an ebook and charges $35 for it, but it’s a 230 page beast of a manual. Needless to say, I bought it and within 15 minutes of reading discovered how to manipulate my camera to get the effect I desired. I still need to play around with it more, but this is good news.
Basically he tells you how to manipulate the exposure, combined with the preset camera settings (portrait mode, night mode, etc) to acheive your desired shutter speed and aperture. Pretty niiice.
You might not be sure what you’re looking at in the video, but notice that you can clearly see the pen at all times. There’s no motion blur or anything. That’s motion strobe. Might also get lost a little bit in the youtube encoding… but it looks good as a raw file for truth.
So Rob is out of town this week (more so than usual) so Lumer and I conducted a couple video tests in preparation for our music video. I wanted to see how drumming would look at 24 frames / sec in a couple of different ways.
The first test, we sped up the music to 125% of its original speed and had Lumer play drums to it. My camera films at 30 frames per second. So in the computer, I loaded it in telling the computer to think it was 24 frames per second, and then it played back at the correct speed. You’ll see the differences in the video. I’m frankly amazed that it doesn’t look like he’s going in slow motion at all… if anything, the end of the video looks sped up. It gives a nice fluid motion I guess.
The second test was all shot using the motion strobe technique, but this time with better lighting. I think it looks pretty cool, but the picture quality is noticeably worse. Maybe not on this site with the low-quality youtube embed, but definitely in the HD view if you click through to the youtube page…
So, the question is, which to do for our video… which will look best in the long run. I also learned that I need a lot of work in framing shots. Blarg.
