Chris Watts

Flycam Nano - my thoughts

I am a big fan of camera movement in video projects. I have had great fun with sliders/dollies and small jibs/cranes. The projects I have used them on have been met with comments about how interesting an dynamic the finished production was due to the camera movement.

So when I learned that there were affordable “steadicam” style products available that would allow we turn walk and run with camera and have usable footage I was intrigued.

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Vimeo videos I love

Thought it was about time I put together a list of videos I have seen on Vimeo and loved and maybe a snippet about why. This is in no particular order, I will try and keep this up to date.

First up Skywalker Ranch, this was the first DSLR video I knowingly saw, the first Philip Bloom video I saw and potentially the first video on Vimeo I saw. It’s brilliant, beautiful mesmerising and shows just how good these video capable DSLRs are in the right hands with the right eyes!

Second on my list, this is the first piece I saw by the wonderfully talented Christian film maker Salomon Lighthelm. Stunning images, lovely colour grading, brilliant use of Twixtor super slow motion and great sound design. Maybe a bit to abstract to carry the message well first time but still brilliant, I have watched loads of times and see or hear something new everytime.

I love Stef and Dan Roberts, Stef was a great friend at uni, one of those people who is brilliantly talented and great fun to hang out with always doing something creative or funny. This short piece just makes me laugh, simple.

To many this piece was all about the news the day the Canon C300 became reality, whilst that is how I came across it I don’t think it has any bearing on why I like it. The shots are good and the locations look great on screen, the story is clever enough and it was lovely to see a film piece on Vimeo not just I’m trying out some stuff!

Lens wacking is slightly crazy but very cool, James Miller is the lens wacking master and claims he finds it hard to shoot normally now! This video is a fantastic example of the visual aesthetic this shooting technique produces. Enjoy.

Found this under staff picks on Vimeo, love the colours, the energy and the fun of this well executed piece. The video postcard idea is cool, the music was brilliantly picked, the multiscreen provides a great way of conveying the way you remember events like holidays as snap shots all merged together.

Just fantastic stop motion animation in this piece, wonderful playfulness mixed with bold technical shapes and colours set to good music.

Thailand Trip: What I learnt

At the end of November I went off on my first trip to East Asia with OMF to take part in my first documentary shoot.

I went as part of a two man team to shoot the story of a Dutch family who work for OMF in North Thailand. The other half of the team was Nigel, full time videographer for OMF, in the past months he had been looking into the DSLR video trend and whilst he loved the aesthetic he was unsure about the pitfalls of video on a DSLR. After so many years using Prosumer camcorders such as the V1, NX5 and most recently the XF300 he wasn’t sure he had the time to learn the skills, tips, tricks and work arounds to be proficient with a DSLR in the field, also with the next generation of DSLRs being rumoured for 2012 it was hard to justify the cost of buying another camera on top of the XF300. I’ve had a 550D since March 2011 and had been sharing what I had filmed with Nigel over the time so he approached me to come as his assistant and second camera man bring all the DSLR tricks to the table.

So on 16 November we flew to Thailand.

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Back from Asia

On Monday 28th November 06:30 our plane touched down at Heathrow airport, we were home after 12 days filming in Thailand and Hong Kong.

I will share in more depth what I learned at a later date once I have a few more things in order but I just wanted to quickly post something as my blog has been a little lacking in fresh content recently.

On the kit side of things I learned that my 550D is a great piece of kit. As I looked over what I had shot each day as I made back ups I was really pleased. It looked great and was helping to tell the story we were there to shoot. However when shooting all day it really does eat batteries! And swapping lenses is sometimes very inconvenient, is there a lens out there which is image stabilized 18-200 that’s f1.4 all the way through?!

Magic lantern was also very usefully, mostly for the crop marks which allowed me to check what I was shooting was going to look ok once in our super letterbox aspect ratio we hope to use in the final edit. It also never dropped a recording!

My new Lowepro 250AW back pack was also brilliant. In fact it so easily held so much stuff that my main problem was lugging around all the weight each day! However all the pockets and pouches and tripod holder made everything quick and easy to get to and made ensuring everything was with me at the beginning and end of the day very easy.

As I say I will share more and hopefully some BTS stuff soon. Also I plan to review my bag and a few other bits and pieces once I take some annual leave in December.

Thanks for reading.

Aspect ratios: Premiere Pro CS5.5

Figuring out how to get an aspect ratio that isn’t a preset option in premier was tricky.

I was used to After Effects where I can simple give any composition any settings and then move and scale footage to get a good result

I didn’t find Premiere intuitive and I couldn’t find any decent online help, so here is my whistle stop tutorial after figuring something out.

Set up your sequence and project as defaut 720p PAL or whatever your footage is out of the camera. Do any editing or grading etc, the crop seems to only be possible when you come to export.

Go to file, export, media

In Source tab:

use the crop handles to drag in the crop frame to the dimension you want your crop, use an aspect ratio calculator to work out your dimension. Then position your frame in wherever you want it.

In output tab:

ensure crop setting is set to “scale to fit” then under the video tab bottom right of the window ensure frame width and height match your crop settings on source.

Interactive Display

Over the summer we have been using a touch screen monitor to allow people visiting our exhibition stand to interact with a prezi.

It has work well but definitely had it’s restrictions. The main problem being that prezi was designed as a presentation tool, for one user to use in conjunction with a talk. As a result you can’t build a “real” user interface, you can’t build buttons or menus, so people have to have a lot of instruction to get the most out of the material in the prezi.

I wanted to take the touch screen information browsing to the next level, seeking inspiration from movies I wanted to see if it was possible to design and build a slightly over the top graphical user interface.

I took you tube to track down scenes from James Bond and Iron Man for inspiration.

Then opened photoshop to throw together a screen layout. After speaking to a few friends I realised my coding probably wasn’t up to the standard needed to build something like this in Flash or Adobe AIR. So I stuck with my strengths and opened up After Effects.

I then pulled the elements together in Encore DVD and now have one loading screen running through to a map menu, from here you can click the country of interest, at the moment only if its Japan! this then runs a loading sequence for that information and after viewing the information you are returned to the map. So we have a proof of concept, now just need to build a holding screen and all the information screens for each of the countries in East Asia we work in.

Actual photos

So a week or two ago I posted about buying a 35mm film Voigtlander, well the prints came back a week ago and I have finally got round to scanning a couple so I though I’d post an update. (yes the wonderful irony of buying a film camera in a digital age to then scan in the prints to share them with people is not lost on me either)

My thoughts on the camera are it was fun to shot on, small and compact, nice to not keep checking a screen after each shot to see if it was perfect. I shot on auto most of the time, the aperture ring is a little fiddly, the shots look nice, a decent depth of field in most of them. The colour is nice, I especially like the look of the matt prints I got. There are some cool looking flares, this may be due to the fact I opened the camera before winding back the film completely but who knows. It’s also lovely having prints to put up even if they just go on the fridge.

Here a selection of my favourites.

Music and your Video

So you’ve shot your footage, you know which shots work and which don’t, you have your story in mind and maybe even a rough edit but before you can finalise things you need a sound track.

Music is so important in the video world, bad music can ruin an otherwise brilliant piece. But I also think you can spend hours deciding between a couple of tracks when really it wouldn’t matter which you chose.

For example in my most recent piece for Fair Oak Farm, my client was very clear he loved the music I had used for my Min Yr Afon piece, he even said I could use it for his piece too if I liked, however ever as I had composed that piece in between filming shots of the house in Wales I really wanted it to stay as only for that film. So I set about composing something similar, it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t exactly how I imagined it would come out but it sounded similar to Min Yr Afon and it worked so I used it.

My advice for choosing music would be just choose something, if you think it works and don’t hate it, it will probably be great. As Philip Bloom said in his cinema 5D podcast Q&A “if the film is good I probably won’t even notice the music” (paraphrased). I think this is true. Unless people get bored or your music choice is just wrong for the piece most people won’t even notice it. You could spend all day thinking if only there were more strings here or a stronger beat there or more bass, unless you are or have an amazing composer you will never have the perfect score so don’t spend a week or two looking for one, you’ll just end up giving up and never editing the footage, I know I did this recently.