THE HELLO FUTURE COMPETITION: A SHARED DISSONANCE

I've been enjoying going through the other videos submitted to the Saatchi and Saatchi Hello Future video competition As of this posting there are over 200 videos posted. The deadline is today so I'm not sure how many more will be submitted but they do seem to be coming pretty fast and furiously.

It is utterly fascinating to me to see what different people do with the same inspiration. I've looked at most of the videos but of course I'm particularly interested in those that used After, the same song as I. That is still the least popular choice but it's interesting that those videos seem to be the ones now coming in right at deadline. Could be because it's such a damn long ass song. It is, in fact, the longest song by a good two minutes or so.

A few things came to mind as I watch all these videos. Firstly that for these skilled and dedicated amateur film makers, the overwhelmingly most popular weapon of choice is the digital SLR, primarily some version of a Canon SLR that records HD video.

I can see why these cameras are popular. The image quality is outstanding due to a combination of huge image sensors and superb optics. Using a DSLR gives you access to a large range of lenses and it gives you the advantages; focus control, depth of field, exposure, etc. It is also a relatively light piece of gear. Also most of the have the option to record video at 24 fps (frames per second) which mimics the "film look" so often sought

That film look is not something I actively seek. I love the look of video. For most of the projects I work on, I don't need them to look as though they've been shot on film. I am not a movie maker, I'm a video maker. Even if I make a fictional video expressing abstract ideas I like the look of video and it's possibilities

I still love the look I achieve with my Canon XL1. It is a standard def mini DV camera but it has a superior lens and 3 good sized image sensors. It is definitely old school, all the buttons I need to operate on it are within the reach of my fingers as I hold it, no annoying menu's to scroll through as I have on my Sony

Now, I am very impressed with my Sony. I bought it to replace my old Samsung standard def tape based handycam; its image quality was fairly low but it was small and portable and I liked to carry it in my pocket and mostly used it to take video of the girls and when Collette and I are out and about. These videos end up on this blog and I wasn't terribly concerned with the quality.

When I went looking at a replacement cam I would have been happy with another mini DV cam but those simply are no longer made. And I admit to the advantages of a cam that records on to a hard drive; you eliminate some of the physical issues you encounter with tape and if your hard drive is large enough, you can record a lot of footage. I liked the Sony because its small and I can record about 60 hrs of high quality footage on to its hard drive. The fact that it records in HD was not immediately important to me but I have to say, I'm very impressed with the quality of the footage. It doesn't record to 24 fps but the optics are pretty impressive.

Still, most of the videos for the Hello Future competition wanted that "film" look and most of them got that, with a deeper contrast ration than 30 fps and greater control over the colour temperature.

Let's leave the technical aside. I want to concentrate on the creative aspect. This competition featured video makers from all over the world, at all different quality levels. The film school kids were out in force and a lot of their work was quite impressive. The little film production companies are well represented and not surprisingly a lot of that work is of really high quality. And the artists ... the computer artists, the digital artists, the photographers even the musical artists all came to play and I really enjoyed watching their videos. They offered perspectives that never would have occurred to me.

What surprised me was how many common elements we chose to include in these videos. My submission features speed altered images of traffic, subway trains, the city at night. Turns out a lot of other people felt that same inspiration not just with my song but with the others as well.

I made a video that tried to portray emptiness and lonliness surrounded by millions of people. I knew that this was not the most original of concepts and a lot of others shared this idea.

The overall theme of the competition was Hello Future. Some folks tackled this in a very literal fashion: Robots, post apocalypse, cyborgs, plague, evolution .. all on display. I think my take was a bit less literal but fairly obvious and I'm in good company. Some approached the theme of the future on a very personal level, illustrating it through the degradation of personal relationships for instance.

Some chose to ignore the theme or perhaps tackled in a way that just escaped me. Power to them. My original concept for my video had nothing to do with Hello Future. When I reread the brief and understood that this theme needed to be an element in the video I at first thought "I don't really care, I'm making the video I want" But as I thought about it and began to figure out how I could introduce the future into my video it actually helped solidify my theme. And it gave me a clearly defined ending which had eluded me up to that point.

Vimeo is a website that is intended and designed to be a community for video makers. Mostly I use it as by far the best option to host videos, videos I generally create to show on The Hairy Edge but it is kind of nice to dog paddle in the shallow end of the movie making pool

My other blog is often about inspiration. This competition was all about inspiration, for myself and hundreds of others. As disparate as our videos may be, we all shared that same inspiration.

JIM MORRISON SINGS

This is the end my friends, the end ...

The video is done. Finished. Completed.

Not only is the deadline for the competition fast approaching but there really is no point farting around with this thing anymore. Sitting here with all these clips and my software I could edit and tinker forever.

But I started this with a particular idea in mind and I've achieved it. I've actually made the video I wanted and for a short time abandoned .. it's not very often that I can look at a personal piece of work and say "No matter what, that's what I set out to achieve"

I look at it and can envision more scenes but they were scenes that I did not shoot and did not think to shoot. That's why I need deadlines. I tend to rewrite and re edit personal projects and rarely finished.

I've submitted the video the Hello Future competition. I have no idea how it will fare. I've seen some of the other entries and they are incredibly diverse. Most of them were shot with DSLRs and look great but other than that they are all over the map.

I'm not worried about competition because honestly, I didn't embark on this to win. I started this because it inspired me. I would love to be a top 10 finalist, I put work in this and it's nice to be recognized but the judges have specific concerns and I respect that; but I didn't make this for them, I made it for me.

There have been a lot of entries for the contest, for all three of the Moby songs that were made available. Some of them are pretty amazing and you should check them out. Top ten finalists will be announced June 1 and the winner announced June 23

I did notice that the song I chose was the least popular choice of the three. Perhaps that had something to do with it being a goddamned long song, who knows

So, without any further ado, here's my official entry into the Saatchi and Saatchi Hello Future contest, After by Moby.

Normally I would embed the video here but it's a large HD file and seems to be playing havoc with Blogger's capacity so just follow this link to view it here.

ENTRY NUMBER THIRTEEN: THE LITTLE THINGS

The little things count, the details

The first offline was about assembling the clips to the tell the story, making certain I had the shots, making sure the story even makes sense, timing the clips to the music.

After I took my pick up shots I decided I had a good range of shots to use. Multiple angles of each shot, for instance, the correct length of the shot to time out to the song.

Although I'm working with a tight deadline I've left myself enough time to go over and over the footage, making adjustments. Once you're satisfied you have what you need, you have to pay attention to details. Details count.

I shot all the footage with Moniqea at Union Station on a drizzly overcast day. I shot the establishing shot of the train station on a relatively sunny day. You don't want that to jump out. But I shot the front of the building from several angles. One of them kept the facade in shadow and since I'm applying a diffusion filter to it anyway, it matches up

The in and outs of your clip are important. If you are matching cuts you want to make sure you don't have even a frame of errant camera movement at the end of a shot, trust me this is going to jump right out at the viewer; they may not know what they saw but they will know that something is awry

In parts of the song I want to cut right to the music, and I am doing this for a whole sequence of beats or musical cues. In the timeline, as I'm replacing shots, sometimes the in and out point of the clip will get moved but a frame or two; again, this will actually be noticed. So I routinely have to go through the timeline adjusting the clips to match up to the markers I placed early on

I'm also looking at things like exposure, colour saturation, things that I can tweak with the software. You always want to try to get the best shot possible during a shoot but in the run and gun style I shot this in, that always wasn't possible.

Then there is the creative aspect. Do the filters I'm applying make sense? Should I use a close up of Moniquea here or a mid shot? Even though this shot is timed to the beat does it go on too long?

I have a technical standard I want to meet but really, it's all about the story telling

ENTRY NUMBER TWELVE: EFFECTS AS PUNCTUATION

So I've gotten through the first rough cut. It's shown me a few things. For instance, I have a sequence where my character (let's call her The Girl) goes into Union Station. It is important that the viewer knows this, that they know she's entering a train station. I had lots of footage of the station but what I didn't have was a shot of a sign saying so, I was missing an establishing shot, which is Video 101.

While downtown I picked up a few more shots of busy crowds and traffic but I think that should be it. I'm happy with the footage I have but there you can fall into the habit of over shooting, of taking shots just for the sake of doing so. That's why deadlines are good, nothing like a Stop sign to slow me up.

Some of the shots I inserted into my timeline already affected; I'm using slo mo and fast speeds and it's important to put those in the sequence as such, for the timing. For anyone using Final Cut I put frame blending on when slowing, and frame blending off for speeding up.

I have a lot of effects at my disposable, hundreds and if you combine them, thousands and if I use programs such as Motion, or Colour or After Effects, thousands ... but why would I use effects and when.

My video is a story and each clip is a sentence. The effects are the punctuation in that sentence. It's all information, or expression. There is no actual dialogue in this story so effects help me convey emotion in the stead of words.

I'm doing a lot of contrasting here, a lot of juxtaposition. I have pastoral shots of country words cut next to fast moving highways. That juxtaposition is saying something right there, but I want emphasis. So the country shots are softened with a diffusion effect, then "aged" with just a touch of sepia and a soft black border which gives a vignette effect like a silent movie.

For the modern day, fast moving shots I want a jarring effect, especially when following that pastoral softness. So I use Color Corrector to oversaturate and exaggerate the colours and I put a little trail effect on the clip, to follow a kind of dreamy tone in the music.

For The Girl, I give her her very own effect. It is basically what I used for the pastoral shots but without the sepia tone; her shots are diffused, with a mild vignette. It's a way of referencing those country shots, contrasting here with the harsh colours and fast moving trails of the hurried shots of the city. She is as out of place in her environment as would be those idyllic country lanes.

Or at least that's the plan.

ENTRY NUMBER ELEVEN: THE ONLINE THE OFFLINE AND THE POWER OF THE PICK UP

OK, it's actually the power of the pick up shot but what the hell, I'm not above a little innuendo to get your attention.

I am now into the post production phase of the video, well mostly. But it's time to start putting this thing together. It's pretty obvious that what I want to do here, is to edit to music, in particular the song After by Moby.

So the first steps are to create a new project in Final Cut Pro and import my assests, that being the song and my footage. Naming your shots, or your clips, is a very important thing here. I have a lot of footage and once I load it into Final Cut's browser, it can be difficult to keep track of it.

The shots are coming off my Sony's internal hard drive where everything is named clip 1, clip 2 etc which would be a mess in my software so I rename every short during the import. In this case I used two naming priorities: All the location shots by the actual location and Monique's shots by her name. So all her shots were M and then by number, so M-1, M-2, etc in sequence as they were shots. Varsity Stadium shots were V-1, V-2 and Eaton Centre was EC-1, EC-2 etc. It makes finding everything that much easier.

Since this video is in actuality a music video, the video will follow the audio. FCP allows me to enter various elements, music, video, titles separately, on different tracks. So I lay in the audio track, the song first and lock it off. This allows me to lay my video clips into my timeline ... the editing interface ... to follow points in the music.

One of the things I liked about the song After was that it has tempo changes and even rhythm changes and I wanted to exploit them, I want to cut to them. So even before I even begin laying in clips I want to make notes of these musical cues so I can best exploit them. I do this by using Markers, little visual ticks I can insert into the timeline and use later to match my In and Out points to. There is a shortcut to insert markers in FCP, you just hit the "M" key. What I like to do is play the timeline, play the song as I come to these musical cues, hit that M key which places my marker. I just let the song play, hitting that key when I hear the point to which later, I will want to edit.

What I will do first is make a rough cut, which is sometimes called the "offline". Usually this is just a bare bones edit, placing shots that will tell the story, making sure they work, cutting to the time etc. You usually don't put in affects, adjust colour, create titles until later, in what is called the "online" edit. Some shots though I will need to affect right away. Slow motion shots or shots that are going to be time lapsed or sped up need to placed as such, to check out the timing (if I speed the shot up 5 X will there be enough viable footage to spread between two markers) and to make sure they work visually.

The offline is the best way to make sure that I actually have all the footage I need to make the edit work. The song is about 5 1/2 minutes long, that's like a freaking movie, trust me, expecially when cutting to the beat. I need to know pretty quickly if I need to grab any pick up shots, to either replace current ones that may not be working or to just help tell the story.

It really isn't going to be possible to redo any shots with Moniquea but I think I'm well covered in that regard. Time is fleeting so hopefully I won't have to do many pick ups. But the only way to do that is to get through the offline. What I'll do is try to edit the whole video with what I have, to make sure I have the footage to tell the story and to illustrate the music in the way that I wish. Then I can go back, shot by shot and examine each for how well they are working.

This is why, in movies, if they blow up the Great Pyramid, they take like 900 angles .. you only get to do that once