Thursday, May 5, 2011

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





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