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I went to Hawai’i, and in particular to the very photogenic Garden Island of Kaua’i, at the end of March and came back with a boatload of photos and video. I processed a lot of the data on my laptop while I was there, publishing the odd item on my Facebook page. So if you follow me there, the next few posts may be familiar. Still, I wanted to get it up here for the record, along with some additional information you might find interesting.

To begin with, here is a short video I put together from footage I took of myself snorkeling in Po’ipu using my GoPro camera in its water-proof housing.

I had finished my Post Production class at UCLA Extension just before we left for the trip, and one thing I learned is that most production sound is junk. Except for dialog, virtually none of the audio you hear in a typical show or movie was recorded on the set. Even some of the dialog will have been re-recorded after the fact using Automated Dialog Replacement (ADR, or looping), with the actor on a sound stage lip syncing to his or her own image on the screen. Certainly a car door, screeching tires, birds chirping, city sounds, whatever, would be added in post. Along, obviously, with music.

Anyway, when I recorded the snorkeling in the video above, the audio was a total loss. You would not expect much from the tiny little microphone on the GoPro, and then in a water tight housing, getting bumped around, and so on: all junk.

Not to fear. After locking the video, which is largely just a montage of shots I took while having fun in the water, nothing really planned, I located the stock sound effects that come standard on a Mac, looking for things like ocean sounds, beach sounds, scuba breathing, bubbles, and so on. I had fun mixing it all together in Final Cut (not exactly Pro Tools, but good enough for this little project), and the end result is not too bad I think, considering I did it in a couple of hours the same day I shot the footage while sitting in our rustic little cottage by the sea.

I was particularly proud of the last part, where the music stops abruptly as the camera exits the water, and then you hear a brief drop in the sound when the camera dips under for a moment. You might almost be fooled into believing that the sounds you are hearing are from the nearby beach, when in fact, there is zero production audio involved here. But there are also numerous other subtle sounds here and there that add to the texture of the video without rising to the level of consciousness, yet which add an important layer to the overall video, without which it is very flat.

The moral for today: audio, usually added in post, is extremely important. But you probably knew that.

The first few days I was in Glacier, while I was staying in Two Medicine, the weather was a bit windy, cold, and wet. Toward the tail end of this weather system, the clouds were rolling through fast and low over the mountains, coming in from the west. Unfortunately, I did not catch the really low clouds that were brushing the mountain tops, but a little later, when the periodic rain showers grew less frequent, I ventured out and planted the camera on the tripod at the foot of the lake, and captured a series of shots that I later stitched together into the time lapse video below.

If you view full screen, it should give you the option to view at up to 1080p, if you are so inclined.

Okay, unlike yesterday’s video link, here is one that I actually did myself a little over a month back, before this site was up and running. Actually, it was a collaboration with my kids. My son Ryan had a school project that involved inventing a breakfast cereal according to the theme of a book he read for a book report. His submission was Clue Crunch. As extra credit, he could present a commercial to the class. We decided this would be best done in video form, so we created the following:

This was shot on my D7000 over two different days without much planning, and pieced together with Final Cut Express in another day or so. The lighting is all ambient, and not the greatest, but it gets the basic point across. Apparently, it was a big hit in the 3rd grade.

Back in mid February, I posted about a commercial shoot that I was given the opportunity to assist on. It was for a high end furniture company that builds to order, and the premise of the commercial is that they put as much passion into their design process as goes into a Tango. You can see the finished product below.

Just to be clear, this is not my work. All I did was move a few lights, run some cables, and haul some furniture around, as directed. The director was Adam Forstadt over at The Monocular Group, with Tim Burton (no, not that Tim Burton) as director of photography, along with some others. Good group of folks.

Since I got my Nikon D7000, which has a built in feature for taking images at programmable intervals for a specified amount of time, I’ve been wanting to play with time lapse video. As we have some winter weather moving through right now, which in Southern California means a rain storm, the clouds this morning were puffy and moving rapidly enough to just see the movement with the naked eye, making them a good experimental subject.

So I pointed my widest angle lens (14mm) out the upstairs window toward the backyard, facing south by southwest at 9am, and captured some images, first at one per second, and then at one per 10 seconds. After some minimal processing, I then collected them in sequence into Final Cut and output as a movie. These two rates are concatenated in the video below, and nominally represent about a 25x speed up over real time, followed by a 250x speedup.

HTML5 version

Quicktime Verison

For those whose browsers do not support HTML5, please click here.

Comments:

• This is a more or less random shot out the window, just to see the clouds move. Nothing too fancy, so don’t focus on the composition too much.
• You can see compression artifacts. I was experimenting with HTML5 and MP4, so I could embed the file locally, just for the heck of it, and I have not fully mastered the compression options. I would have gotten better results out of the box and better browser interoperability if I had sent a hi res version to YouTube and let them process it, but it was interesting to experiment with HTML5.

Lessons:

• The brightness of the tree changes substantially as the sun goes in and out of cloud cover. Would have to watch for that type of thing in the future.
• A few frames have a bird flying through, resulting in a quick distraction. Would want to clean that up per frame, probably in Aperture before export.
• The sun began to introduce lens flare toward the end. Again goes to having to be aware of how the light will change over the course of the capture.
• The small movement of the leaves is annoying and distracts from the clouds. Need to watch for things in the frame which might “wiggle” over the course of the capture.
• During the first part at 1fps, the camera could not keep up once the buffer filled up, and some frames are dropped. This makes it a bit choppy toward the end of this segment. Would either need to run slower, or capture JPG and not raw, so that we are writing less data. In general, need to be sure of the max sustained frame rate for the given settings.

So a good experiment. I will have to find some more interesting subjects for another. And I also want to figure out a way to play with camera movement during the capture. I think it is really compelling when the camera angle drifts during the time lapse. But that will require carefully measured movements.

Follow up on my first shoot. Quick summary: had a blast!

The shoot was for a commercial for a furniture factory that hand-crafts high end custom pieces. It involved showing the process from customer order to completed product, with Tango dancers off in the background at critical points as a metaphor for the work going on in the factory, and romanticizing the final product. Throw in some artistic lighting and some good camera work, and it seemed to be working pretty well, at least from the raw footage I saw.

It was a modest crew, consisting of a director and his girlfriend/assistant, director of photography (DP), a gaffer (physically handling the lights), a steady-cam operator (with a second camera being handled by the DP), and two folks (including myself) with roles somewhere between key grip and best boy. Look it up. And of course the talent, which in this case was a couple of tango dancers and some furniture factory workers. There were also a few others floating around, including the factory owner (so, what I guess we might call the producer in this case, since he ultimately footed the bill).

I spent most of my time moving things around, wiring extension cords to where they needed to be for lights, and generally doing whatever physical work needed doing. Which was fine by me, because I also had the chance to look over the shoulders of the creative folks, getting to listen in on their thought processes, watch how the lighting was placed for various shots (sometimes physically doing the placing myself), how the camera was used, and how the actors were directed. And with digital film making, you can monitor and then watch everything right away, so I got to see how things were coming out as well.

On top of that, I met a bunch of really good folks, and exchanged contact info, so hopefully I’ll be able to get involved in more of these.

The final product will be on YouTube at some point. I’ll post a link when I get one.

Some good news today — I was invited to be an assistant on a commercial being shot up in LA on Sunday.  I’ve done some of what we will call uncommissioned videos on my own, but this will be my first chance to participate in a professional video production, being made for a paying customer, so it should be a real education.  I have no idea what my role will be — I may just be lugging equipment or holding a reflector or even just running for coffee — but it will be great to be on the set and watch how it’s done.