Friday I got to break out our shiny new Steadicam Merlin and use it in an actual real life shoot. The video features our good friend Josh Riebock. We’ll post the whole video when it’s done. In the meantime, Lee did a little (very low res) side by side comparison of the Steadicam shot we pulled off and a handheld shot of us pulling off the Steadicam shot. The Steadicam shot is on the left and that’s me operating the Steadicam, backing away from Josh, on the right. Notice how smooth the Steadicam shot is compared to a walking handheld shot. Pretty cool.

There are a lot of good, high quality church videos to be had out there. But sometimes there is no substitute for telling the stories of what God is doing in your home congregation. Video testimonies/interviews can be a great way to tell those stories. Here are some tips and things to think about to help you get the best results shooting interviews.

1. Don’t Use the Camera Mic. The Camera Mic is terrible. Forget about it. You should never use the camera mic for interview audio. Your first choice should be to use a lavalier microphone, wired or wireless is fine, whatever you can get your hands on. Secure the transmitter on your subjects pants or belt and run the mic cable up under your subjects shirt to hide it. Then clip the lav on their shirt, test and adjust your audio levels and your ready to rock. If you don’t have access to a lav mic, use a shotgun mic. Aim the shotgun mic at your subject, get it as close to them as possible and test and adjust your levels. As a last resort, you could set up a mic on a stand and place it on a table or something like that to interview your subject. It might look a little odd, but I promise looking odd is better than getting poor quality audio. And please don’t tell me you’ll fix it in Post. Lastly, always use headphones to make sure you’re getting good audio. Just looking at the levels isn’t enough, because the levels don’t tell the whole story. That loud air conditioning unit or bug chirping isn’t going to peg your levels, but it is going to be annoying on your audio track.

2. Lighting is important. A technique called Three Point Lighting is the foundation of all film and video lighting. If you don’t know what it is, check out this brief tutorial at mediacollege.com. You won’t always need or have all three lights, but knowing what they are and how they work will give you the foundation you need to think about and talk about proper lighting. Here are some quick tips to help you in the trenches:

• Avoid placing your subjects in front of window or sliding doors. Unless you have a Hollywood lighting package, it’s really hard to compete with the sun.
• Use soft light. Soft light makes everything look better. Your subjects will thank you. If you’re using a film video lighting kit, try putting some diffusion in front of the lens. You can buy diffusion in the form of gels (hit this link if you have no idea what gels are) from most photo/video stores. Diffusion spreads out hard light and softens it. For a great low cost soft light, you can use Chinese Lanterns or Paper Lanterns. They use household bulbs and you can find them for a few bucks at places like IKEA or order them online. Some Hollywood cinematographers actually prefer and use these low cost lanterns to light their films. Alternately, you can bounce film/video lights off a white surface to spread and soften the light. Point your lights at a wall or ceiling or pick up some white foam core at an arts and crafts store.
• Place a house or practical light in the background. This looks nice, creates a sense of 3D space and provides a backlight to give some added definition to your subject.

3. Focus and Exposure. Don’t trust the flip screen for focus and exposure. If you do, you’ll get burned, especially when you’re shooting in a particularly bright environment where the sun obliterates the image on the flip screen. Use the flip screen for framing, shoot with it open, but don’t trust it for focus and exposure. For focus and exposure, you would ideally use a properly calibrated professional video monitor located in a light controlled environment (read a black tent) and operated by a professional engineer. But this is the real world and you work for a church. Unless that church is Willowcreek, you probably don’t have a professional field monitor. So… Use the viewfinder. Close the flipscreen, zoom all the way in on your subjects face, preferably eyes, focus, adjust exposure and then zoom back out and find your frame. Then, open your flip screen, get comfortable and you’re ready to rock and roll.

4. Check your footage after the first take or two. It is a good practice to shoot a little and then check and make sure you’re getting good audio and video. I was just shooting an interview the other day and, after the first question was answered, I rolled back and checked the video. Much to my dismay, the image was completely pixelated and the audio sounded like an alien signal in a Sci-Fi flick. Luckily, we hadn’t shot the entire half hour interview and returned to edit it only to find it entirely unuseable. We made some adjustments, replugged some connections and tested it again. It worked the second time and it was smooth sailing from there. Check it. But, if you check takes after shooting for a while, always remember to que the tape back up to the end. Otherwise, you’re going to be surprised and upset to find some shots missing in the editing room.

So, with a little bit of care and some basic equipment, you can shoot great interviews in house. If you have any questions about any of this or ideas or thoughts, feel free to comment. I’d love to keep this conversation going.

We’ve been shooting a lot of people outdoors and on the fly lately. So I thought it might be helpful to offer some tips and thoughts on what I do to get good quality photos and video when I’m shooting outside in uncontrolled circumstances.1. If possible, shoot either in the morning or in the evening when the sun is not directly overhead. The harsh overhead light from the sun in the middle of the day makes for hard top light and ugly pictures and video.

2. Position the sun behind your subjects and not in front of them. If it’s really early in the morning or late in the evening and the sun is low, you might get some unwanted lens flare from this. Lens flare can be very cool, but if it’s not what you want, you should be able to position the sun behind and to the side of your subject to eliminate this problem. Or, you can always hold something like a piece of cardboard up and in front of your lens to block out the unwanted light. Putting the sun behind your subject gives you a great backlight which helps pop your subject out from the background and aids in giving the image more sense of depth. You should still have plenty of light on your subjects face to get a great picture.

To get an even better looking image, you can use a reflector (or some white foamcore board that you can buy at any art supply store) to bounce sunlight back onto your subjects face. These techniques will give you much better results than putting the bright sun at your back and right in your subjects face. Besides getting a much more appealing image, your subjects will be able to look at you or the camera without squinting!

3. When the sun is up overhead and you have to shoot, place your subjects in the shade and try to make sure the background in also shaded or dark. By keeping everything in the shade, you’ll have plenty of soft diffused light to get good images and you won’t have that harsh overhead sun casting terrible shadows under your subjects eyes and causing all kinds of contrast issues.

4. Try and create depth in the frame. Film and video are 2D, two dimensional. Filmmakers and Photographers create the perception of 3D by drawing your eye into the frame. They accomplish this through the use of depth. A background that draws your eye deep into the frame gives the illusion of three dimensions. If you place your subject right up against a wall, it flattens the frame and highlights a 2D feel.

I pulled the following photo from my library. It’s a photo I snapped of my family a couple of years ago. It’s not a perfect picture by any stretch but the circumstances under which it was taken make for a good illustration here:
The photo was taken out in the open, in direct sunlight at about three o’clock in the afternoon. By placing the sun behind my subjects as best I could, I was able to accomplish a couple of things. Even though the light is somewhat top heavy because of the time of day, I was able to give them a nice backlight, which helps them look pretty and pops them out from the background. And, maybe more importantly, I was able to get my kids to have their eyes open in the picture. Move the sun in front of everyone and they’re squinting into the light and you don’t have anything but a harsh, flat front light on them and big ugly shadows cast from their eyes, their noses, etc. In a perfect world this would have been taken later in the day and I would have had an assistant there to position a reflector to bounce some nice, soft fill light into the subject’s faces. But it’s not a perfect world and we often don’t work under anything near perfect circumstances. When you’re running and gunning as we all so often are, you’ve got to work hard to do the best you can with what you’ve got.

Let me know if you find these tips useful or if you have any questions about them. I would be happy to answer any questions or debate people on the subject :).

Check out these shorts by Hallmark. The cinematography, acting, writing, direction. Man these are good. I want to be able to pull of shorts like this, to tell stories this well, to move people this much in our space. Man.

If you’re reading this on a feed, here are the links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRX7tdh1Ww4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-rMgkctHPo

These are two of my favorites, but you can find lots of these great Hallmark spots on YouTube.

Back to the old drawing board.

Up Early With The French New Wave

If you’re ever in our neck of the woods at 5AM on a Monday morning, you can join us for a movie screening at our office. Yes, I said 5AM. For years, Lee and I have been wanting to find more time to watch and study classic and influencial films. But with running the business and keeping up with our wives and children, it’s been really hard to find the time. Thus, “the 5AM” was born. If you’re willing to get up at 5 in the morning, you’ll find there are far fewer demands on your time.

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been checking out films from the French New Wave. Here’s a blurb from Wikipedia about the movement:

The New Wave (French: la Nouvelle Vague) was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced (in part) by Italian Neorealism. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style, and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.

So far we’ve taken in, Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Godard’s Band of Outsiders. Interestingly, Band of Outsiders in French is Band A Part, and that’s where Tarintino’s company that produced films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction got its name. If you watch Band of Outsiders and you know Tarintino’s films, you’ll definitely pick up on some of the influences there. I really liked both films, but Band of Outsiders was my favorite of the two. I just love the way these films feel real and alive and stripped down. The way that you can sense the filmmaker behind the camera. There is a joy in them. The joy of filmmaking and of storytelling and of trying to say something that matters.

If you have any suggestions for films we should definitely see, let us know what they are and we’ll add them to our list. I get to pick the next film and I think I’m going to switch us over to an Italian track and pick up a copy of Bertolluci’s The Conformist.

I’ve had some feedback that folks reading our blog would like some more information on editing. If you’re an editor or are interested in editing, I wanted to point you to a blog that Lee and I try to keep up with. It’s called The Editblog (click here to jump to it).

The Editblog keeps up with all the latest updates to programs like Final Cut Pro, Premiere and Avid (all the professional editing apps). It also points out good places to see film and video clips on the internet and handy little applications like the cool little widget posted about today:

VideoSpace is a dashboard widget from the good folks at Digital Heaven. According to the Digital Heaven Freeware section it is:

“a free widget for Mac OS X Tiger which calculates the disk space required for a given duration, codec, frame rate and audio setting. It works in both directions so you can calculate time to space or space to time as indicated by the direction of the arrow between the two input areas.”

And one of my favorite recent posts points you to where you can check out some of cinema’s most famous long takes:

If you are looking to kill some time this weekend the check out The Long Take post over at the Daily Film Dose. They’ve put together a huge collection (thanks to You Tube) of some of the “greatest long tracking shots in cinema.”

There may be some questionable content in these clips. I didn’t have a chance to watch them all. But you can definitely learn a lot by watching long takes done by some of cinema’s greatest storytellers. My personal favorite is the shot from Goodfellas. I know it’s a really violent film, but the shot they’ve chosen is one I’ve studied in film school and in a Steadicam workshop I attended in CA. It’s one of the most famous shots ever committed to film. Watch the shot and check out how much is conveyed about the character played by Ray Liotta by this single take. I’ve embedded the clip from Youtube below. Magic.

For those of you on the feedreader, here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=666F4QWgjpU

I’d love to hear what you think about the Editblog and let me know what your favorite long take is.

The Art of Cinematography

I was just writing my new bio for our about page (look for it there any day now), and it got me thinking about one of my favorite things: Cinematography.

Wikipedia says a cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera (the art and science of which is known as cinematography). The Cinematographer’s roles are many and varied and the job varies from picture to picture depending on the Director, the crew, etc. But at it’s heart, cinematography is writing with light. Writing and light are two of my biggest passions and so I love cinematography.

The late Conrad L. Hall is my favorite cinematographer. The shot he captured of the boy standing at the edge of the water in the beginning of Road to Perdition is one of the most beautiful and profound images I’ve ever seen. And one of my top five movies of all time is a little movie called, Searching for Bobby Fischer, beautifully rendered by Hall in a style he termed: magical realism. I love the movie and I love that term.

To me, magical realism means showing the transcendent, the supernatural, in the every day. That God is all around even in the mundane moments of life. I hope I can one day photograph a feature that can capture and communicate that style.

My monthly cinematography guide is a magazine called American Cinematography. If you want to learn more about how your favorite movies are captured and the people who capture them, pick up a copy. It gets into the details of the way a movie was shot, the cameras and film stocks used, the types of lighting the used, the special effects. I’ve been reading it for years. I love it. They have a couple of articles online here.

Here are some great links and resources on cinematography:

http://www.cinematography.com/
http://www.theasc.com/
Wikipedia List of All the Best Cinematography Award Winners
The Cinematography Mailing List (a great resource - this is a forum where you can go looking for answers on how to capture the look and feel you want for your next film or video)