The funny thing about taking a year to do a video of the 4 seasons is that no matter how hard you try, with all the rest of life going on, you don’t get all the shots you want. You run out when conditions seem right, shoot a shot, and then find out a half an hour after you left there was a dramatic sky with rainbows….that sort of thing. In the end, I used what I got, and in a few cases there, I actually got what I was looking for.
Chalabre, France
Hello.
I know. It’s been a while.
You’re looking at where I live when I’m not in England, home of the annual Chalabre en Sérénade music festival, now in its second year.
The founder, Vinx , lives two doors down, and we both live in the centre of the town where much of this takes place on our doorstep.
You may have seen videos I did of last year’s festival, mainly for promotional purposes to help increase sponsorship for this year’s festival and those to come.
This video tells the story of the festival in Vinx’s own words. It’s an interesting story because this festival has features not seen in any other festival in the world.
It’s my longest ever project (850 GB original material), 5 days to edit, 20 minutes final length.
I gave my Sony NX30 to a retired British local. I shot on my X70 and a bit on the Mavic Pro II drone.
And there were the usual run and gun challenges to overcome.
I’m not going to get into them all, but I do want to cover one of them: The lighting and shooting of Vinx’s interview. (that was a 45 minute interview)
I hadn’t planned to do that in the beginning. Actually, I didn’t have much of a plan at all–except to wait and see what I got and see what the footage might ‘tell me’ to do with it.
What you will see is what it told me to do.
Trouble was, I didn’t have any of my lighting kit with me, nor a tripod. That stuff was in England.
So I propped the camera up on a window sill and tilted it with a matchbook wedge.
I turned off his overhead lights to get light off the back wall and used a 50 watt halogen gooseneck reading lamp from my house to create a key on his face in the room that was otherwise lit by daylight from a small window behind me. That was enough to separate his face from the background both by light and by colour (mixing daylight and tungsten can be a good thing). Afterwards, in post, I used one of my favourite tools, the Slice X Vignette Shape Mask, to subtly vignette the background in a shape that wouldn’t be obvious. And voilà! I must say I was pleased with the result.
The other main challenge was, of course, music audio recording.
I pretty much knew at the outset that we wouldn’t be doing a ‘concert video’. For one, there were over 40 artists in multiple venues all around town. For two, I had no interest in even trying to do that.
I decided I’d do it the way I did last year: Establish one good track to tie together each of the single events into a montage.
That required at least getting some good recordings to which end I took a feed off the board at the main concert, and otherwise used the camera mic to record an act that sounded potentially good. When I was doing that, I kept still and let the other camera guy move around getting additional B roll. Ironically, the feed off the mix board I mentioned was faulty, and much of that sound had crackle and hiss on it. But I got by with the skin of my teeth despite even that.
I also didn’t hang around long at most events. Sometimes I regretted that–such as at the church sequence at the end, but I took my chances knowing I’d have to edit with the best of what I had even if I missed some really good stuff. Of course, if it was a paid gig, I’d dutifully stick around for everything, but charity shouldn’t have to kill me.
Sorry about any ads that might show up. Someone’s got a copyright claim on it and I’m trying to find out who it is so I can get permission on behalf of the festival, since we’re not trying to monetise it.
Finally, I think you might find that this 20 minutes goes by pretty quickly.
If it doesn’t, then for you, I have failed.
Drone over Belvoir Castle in the Fog
(whoops: when I first published, I forgot to add the video!)
It was only my second day flying the Phantom 3 Standard and my confidence was up enough to go for an early morning spooky fog shot over Belvoir Castle.
Fog turned out to be the least of my worries.
It didn’t occur to me that standing at the hulking base of that castle that the lead on the roofs would come between the controller and the drone and effectively cut transmission.
In fact, I wasn’t thinking about lead roofs at all.
But that’s what happened.
Yes, it crashed, but there’s a happy ending. Tough little bugger only suffered 3 broken props and lived to fly again.
So…if you fancy flying over old churches or buildings–keep line of sight with the drone. Those old buildings might have lead roofs.
The Video Whisperer 