SCOTTISH DIY - it's there!

After a lot of experimenting and a massive development file behind it (yeah, right), it is finally ready to go.

May I present the trailer for the Scottish DIY music documentary:




That's one down and two to go.

Fight the camera shake!

Some useful techniques on how combat the difficulties while shooting without any stabilizing gear.

This seems to be mostly useful for photographers but could always come handy with footage as well

Read here:

Research goes on - the movie trailer

How to make a movie trailer (from total film )

Forget the posters, the image releases and all the talent blathering on about how fun it was to make the damned thing.

The trailer for a new movie is the first time that we as audience members and dutiful film fans get to make an informed decision for ourselves on whether or not a new film will appeal to our sensibilities.

Would you have seen Star Wars if it hadn't been for that brilliantly foreboding first teaser? How about This Is England or, um, Titanic?

Here's our guide for how to replicate that all for yourself...

(read on in the hyperlink)

AnimatoInfographicoKineticoVector

Pardon the tittle, but there are so many ways to name it kinda does it justice.
Well this brings back memories of the first year when I made a kinetic typography sequence.


After watching this





I had an urge to go back to the animations, espiecially given how popular these sort of movies are nowadays.


Still being in the middle of editing, experimenting and watching ton of tutorials, I came up with this for now. Subject to a looot of editing.







Still a far cry from the one above but I believe I am getting somewhere.
Ideally I would like to strike some good balance between the first clip and this:







A long way to go.


Lessons Learnt: Why is design the only industry which imposes this sort of 'we are making you a favour' image? Any other branch offers their potential employees/interns some future possibilities, graduate schemes and locations all over the planet. We are offered invaluable experience (of actually losing money while working).

Hugo and the magic of the colours.

A pretty boring family cinema but unlike anything you have seen before.

Putting the plot aside (which really took a while to develop), the movie featured an amazing example of colour corrections with literally every frame featuring mesmerizing contrasting gradients.

Hard to describe as such but to compare with photography processing one can easily adjust the temperature of the image. This feature made it look like every shot had both hot and cold schemes adjusted to it in different positions.

Wow!

For this purpose alone the film is worth the time. 

I also liked the steam-punk feel to it as the whole film revolved around the clockwork machines. Warm gradients for this part are a perfect choice. It featured (not packed with, which is pretty rare these days) some amazing CGI.

Scorsese, who often devoted himself to analysing the most influental moviemakers this time takes it to a different level. The beauty of the 'film about filming' was the Hugo's nightmare sequence where a train has drove off the rail and wreaked havoc at the station. This obviously is a parallel to the first movie sequence ever made and how the audience was frightened at the idea of an advancing train  running them over. Apparently, people actually screamed and left their seats for a brief moment.

Martin Scorsese did a lot of justice for the film-making, but I still can't wait for the new Boardwalk Empire to come out.

Good watch though!

Lessons Learnt: Thou shalt not give discounts to your services. They won't appreciate it anyway.

Slow-motion test

My last project got some good feedback and landed me some more 'charity' assignments. Happy days!

In the mean-time I did research the topic and realised there is much more I could get out of it especially that the subject itself is interesting. By introducing appropriate effects and transitions in the post-production I could easily (well...) produce some amazing sequences. 

A friend of mine suggested to investigate the 'theory 11' youtube channel which features a variety of quality footage aimed to promote specialist cards and accessories

just a random example, there is plenty to choose from.

I must admit I was left speechless after browsing just several videos. I wasnt that happy with my footage anymore and decided to push it slightly further. Not only the quality of the footage is amazing but also this group has managed to accomplish everything in such short movie length (something which I struggle with).

Right now I am working with Radek on a script for the entire performance. I am considering several tools for making the footage really stand out, the most basic yet successful method is the time-remapping tools (e.g. Twixtor). Below is a quick example I did just to experiment how it works.

It does the job for now (especially that it was shot in 30fps only whereas the suggested framerate is at least 50p). 


I did surf the web a bit and found a lot of useful advice on how to best shoot the footage so that one could get the most out of it in the post. Philip Bloom has several interesting tips here.
Ok.this would be it for now.
Coming soon: advanced post-production inspired with Salomon's productions on the vimeo.com. Example below





 Be sure to check other productions from his channel, this is some finest post-production examples I've seen.
All these little graphic elements add so much to the overall production! This does bring back memories of my first experiments with the Photoshop brushes back in the days. It must be way more complex for dynamic media, but let's face it - everything was complex at the beginning. It did pay off in the long run.
Now I am officially excited for this project.


Lesson's learnt: The scariest thing in the world: the 0.01% germ. It is immune even to the strongest bleaches, it will take over the world one day. Brace yourselves.