Archive for: March 11, 2008

Okay - here is a video clip that I did everything on - filmed, edited, recorded audio, photographed, special effects, compression, etc …

I had been working with my client earlier that day doing an audio meditation and had my camera in the car when Father Chip said, “Hey - lets go look at the church and I’ll show you some of the water damage we are working on” and so I gave him a mic with DAT recorder, grabbed the camera and voila - the resulting video.

I should also mention that I shot this during the summer of 2007 not knowing what I now know about setting up shots, using tripods, etc. (and it was the last time I would use a DAT recorder and went out and promptly replaced it with a new direct-to-smartcard portable disk recorder).

Thus it was really difficult in post to tell this story since a lot of the footage had camera shake from me walking around the grounds and in the church doing free-form shooting.

Thus my wife, Katie, created a little sign that hung on my desk during the editing process that said,

Wobbly = Still!!!

Which was my reminder to keep stripping out any shaky footage and replace with stills and then use keyframes with the pan-and-crop features to make the story move along.

Here is the lead copy on their site that sets up the clip -

“Take a tour of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral with Father Chip and Colleen … Filmed during the summer of 2007 and published in Feb 2008, this 13 minute clip takes you on a journey of the elusive source of the water damage that was being addressed during the recent renovations - enjoy!”

The video clip below is a project I participated with in early January 2008. I did the filming for the opening company (RAM) and the last company (RealTraps) but did not do the other companies inbetween (e.g., Painting, Fiberglass) but my camera was used for all the shooting.

Ethan Winer did the editing, music, narration, etc and he is the co-founder of RealTraps - the company featured here in this video.

Along the way, Mark Weiss provided some technical consulting and I learned several things from Mark including: a) don’t shoot interviews from low angle up (as I did with the RAM tour) as it creates an authority “top down” kind of interview energy; b) always use a tripod for shooting long form shots (e.g., when panning a 20,000 sq foot facility); c) keep tromboning to a minimum (this is the zooming in and out with the lens); d) when assembling clips in post, after a shot zooms in, then make a quick clean cut to another shot; plus several other tips on balancing audio, colors, and slides (stills) - enjoy!