a little blog about my work and play in the fields of media, music and mission.
Well here it is, it’s been a while coming, I probably started thinking about this project about a year ago. I really wanted to work with OMF to create a video that is a little different from what we have traditionally produced. Take a broader, more open, more ambiguous look at a video that talks about mission and mission involvement.
My project continues and so does my venture into the plugin offerings of Red Giant and their Magic Bullet suite. I have continued to use their Denoiser II. As with any noise reduction software, stills or video, there is some softening of the image, this is not ideal as DSLR footage with all it’s joyful line skipping is not always as sharp as might be liked in the first place. 
Day 2 in the edit of my newest piece for OMF. Started getting to some of the night shots, whilst the low light capability of the Canon 550D is pretty good footage does start getting noise once you pass 640 ISO. I purchased Magic Bullet Looks and Denoiser just before shooting this project so this is my chance to test them both, so far so good.
A few mad weeks of being buried in the a design project for OMF UK’s short term mission program have come to an end and I find myself with some breathing room.
I really believe this time is important and like all rest it is important to make the most of. I think as creative people, musicians, designers, film makers, actors we can spend so much time stressing about what we are doing that we do not stop, have a break and ensure we will be able to keep it up.
Now we can’t just down tools very often and even with a series of big deadlines passed I still have various things to do including things pushed aside by this urgent work, however I think it is important to keep yourself going as a creative by taking time to enjoy the work of others, don’t just sitting and stressing about your own.
For me the blogs of people like Philip Bloom and Salomon Ligthelm are good places to be challenged and inspired. Websites such as designspiration.net and design-milk.com/ are also refreshing places too. Just taking time to see what others are up to really helps get me ready for my next big slog!
I am currently working through shooting scripts and concepts for a new video piece. I am hoping to use a bleach pass colour grade for the video and wanted to start working out how to achieve this look inside Adobe Premiere Pro. After a few searches I was unable to find anything particularly useful, a few used plugins others used After Effects but I could find anything just using Premiere. I knew how to achieve the effect fairly quickly in Photoshop using a couple of layers, blending modes and curves so I set about trying out similar ideas in Premiere. Here are my results and how I achieved them.
I finally got round to it. I shot my first astro-timelapse a few weeks ago.
For those who of you who have not come across the term before astro time-lapse is a time-lapse of the stars moving across the sky.
I went camping a few weeks ago and it seemed like the perfect opportunity, it was a brilliantly clear night, despite being only a few miles from my house there was hardly any light pollution, we had built a fire and could just leave my camera out of the way doing it’s thing.
Some shots from our first lunch time walk in Mucke, Germany.
The search for inspiration on a new video piece reminded me of this great movie.
Haven’t written a post for a while and was thinking what should I write about, that got me thinking about where ideas come from and I thought, that’s it, write some posts about inspiration.
For me inspiration comes from all over the place, reading books, playing computer games, watching movies and web content, natural and artificial environment, music, time just sitting thinking. Inspiration also comes in many forms, motivation to work, what work might look or sound like, story ideas, messages to convey, the tools to use. I think it is best to make this a series of posts covering some of these things but for now a few links of to things I’ve found inspiring recently.
http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/freebies/30-free-handwriting-fonts-every-designer-should-own
I am no After Effects expert, but I do dabble from time to time and have learnt much from friends like Stef Roberts and Priya Mistry, as well as online tutorials from the likes of Andrew Kramer at Video copilot. Recently however I have been interested in the abstract and organic style of animation present in videos like this
Geometrical Animation Tests from Clint Studio on Vimeo.
