Nicodemus

John 3:1-8

Another video from the misunderstood Bible passages series from February and March. This is the passage about being "born again." The status of "Born Again" is not just relegated to a particular political branch of Christianity; all followers of Christ are reborn in the Holy Spirit. This video doesn't address any of the misperceptions of the term, it just presents the relevant passage of scripture, setting up Will to dive right in.

This video was a lot of fun to shoot. We got to head downtown Austin to shoot footage of the town and shoot the conversation. The two actors are good friends, so they just sat there and talked while Alex and I pointed video cameras at them. We shot the conversation at the patio of the coffee shop located in the Frost Bank building on Congress Ave. It was during SXSW, so there was a lot of stuff going on, tons of people downtown, and just a great fun energy down there. It was great to get out of the suburbs for an afternoon. We shot everything handheld (obviously) with two cameras shooting the action. We spent maybe 10 or 15 minutes shooting the conversation, then walked around downtown shooting the sights for a while.

Post production turned out pretty easy. The music is my band, Amid the Crash. The edit was basically a throw together, off-the-cuff kind of thing. All the footage was handheld and rough, so I wanted to make the editing style match, and try not to over-think it.

The spot where I almost got stressed out and bogged down was with color correction. We did a poor job of matching the two cameras in the conversation shoot, so the shots were all over the place as far as exposure. It was going to take a lot of work, a lot of back-and-forth, and tons of time to get everything within a useable range. Then one of my volunteers (and great friend) Jenn suggested making it black and white. Voila! A potentially two day job became a one hour job. Desaturating everything took away all the color issues, and 90% of the exposure issues, and gave the video exactly the kind of look and feel I was hoping for.

I've generally avoided B&W for video in the past because B&W video usually looks kinda cheesy to me. But the HVX200 shoots such great footage that it came out relatively film-like once I was done with it in After Effects.

So all-in-all, it was a really fun project. I got to hang out downtown in my favorite city and shoot footage on a couple of different afternoons, and the final product served the weekend event well and drew the congregation into the topic of the weekend.

Excited!

I'm working on a show with Rachel Ray next Saturday! I'm gonna be the audio guy on the shoot. I don't know if it's for her cooking show or her talk show. Either way, it should be great fun. I'll be working with some former co-workers who I really respect, so I'm really looking forward to it.

2 Women

On the weekend of February 23 and 24, we showed a video without an official title that we just called "2 women" internally. It wa a very simple setup and shoot. 1 scene - 2 women meeting for lunch to talk about one's marriage counseling. The weekend was about Ephesians 5 - wives and submission. We're doing a series on miss-quoted bible verses and how they've been abused over the years. That passage of scripture is actually very convicting as a man who will probably (God willing, of course) get married some day. The passage places huge responsibility on the man in the marriage - I know I have a ways to go before I can be a proper husband.

Anyways... about the shoot. We shot at a restaurant nearby the church between lunch and dinner when they were closed, so we wouldn't distract any patrons (or have the distraction of patrons). I've been watching the 1st season of Friday Night Lights on the Universal HD network so I basically wanted to cop the look of that show for the shoot. For dialogue scenes they usually run 2 or 3 cameras simultaneously, and do a lot of handheld camera movement - zooms, refocuses, etc. The framing and the camera movement help add a lot of tension to the feel of the video, and since it's such a touchy subject, I thought that style would really compliment the video. We used one light and a bounce card on the shadowy side of the women to lighten them up a little bit, but our key light was the (cloudy) sun blasting through windows on two sides. I love being able to use natural light - it makes setups so much easier! We added just enough so their faces wouldn't bee too dark on the shadowed side.

We shot with two Panasonic HVX-200 DVCProHD cameras set to 720p24N, no lens adapters. We set the cameras as far away from the action as we could and zoomed in for closeups to shallowize the depth of field as much as we could. One camera was handheld with a spiderbrace support thingie, basically just PVC piping and a tripod mount that lets you handle the camera like a shoulder mount camera instead of a handycam. The other camera (which I operated) was on a monopod. The footage came out great, just like it normally does with the HVX. I think I got a little too enthusiastic with the camera movement on my angle, and some people said it was distracting, but I think it was overall a great shoot.

As for post production, we use Adobe Creative Suite 3. In the past, I've been a Final Cut Studio guy who uses After Effects a lot, but since we were setting up this new job, I recommended that we go with Adobe all the way, because of the interoperability between Premiere and After Effects (plus Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash). So I'm getting the hand of premiere pretty well. The hardest part is the different keyboard commands - I'm so used to "B" being the blade tool that it's hard for me to hit "C" to bring it up.

I did run into a pretty big snag in importing the Premiere project into AE, though. AE doesn't interpret multicam sequences properly. Since we shot the scene with two cameras simultaneously, editing it as a multicam sequence was perfect - the ability to switch angles during live playback added another level of rawness that I loved. But when I opened the sequence in AE, every clip was from the same angle. So I had to duplicate the nested sequence and go through and make cuts manually at all the same times I made them when creating the multicam sequence. I'm really glad it was a short scene with only two angles - I'd hate do have to do that for a 4+ angle hour-long concert!

So after getting through that hassle, I got the sequence into AE properly so I could do my color correction and grading. The two shots needed minimal correction between them to match, so my main job was to create the look. Here's a screencap from the original:
Highlights are pretty much blown way out, but for this shoot I didn't really mind. I probably would have blown them out in post if they weren't already.

Here's after I was done with it:
I knocked the saturation way down, bumped the contrast up quite a bit, and pulled the reds out and pushed blue up a bit. Initially I had it way too blue, but after a while of twiddling with settings, I got it just blue enough. Looking at it now, I think I could have worked a little harder at preserving the warmer skin tones of the original while still having the cold bleak look.

Audio was the biggest headache on this shoot. We had a Sennheiser ME66 shotgun mic on a stand not very far out of frame, and it picked up the dialogue wonderfully. But it also picked up the A/C, refrigerators, and other normal restaurant noisemakers. The ambient sound was awful. I scrubbed it up a bit with adobe soundbooth, which helped quite a bit, but it was still pretty bad, at least to my ears. I have a feeling it would have been a bit too much to ask for them to turn off the whole restaurant an hour before happy hour/dinner...

Audio aside, I'm extremely happy with how the video came out. I think we very successfully copied the look and feel of Friday Night Lights, down to the delay-heavy indie rock soundtrack (Appleseed Cast to the rescue!).

Neato

So I guess I have a real blog now, not just the one on myspace, which I don't really visit any more, and not the one from Varsity where I had to blog as part of my job. I think I'm going to be using this blog to talk about my work as a quasi-independent digital filmmaker, talk about whatever theological stuff is going on in my mind, do movie/tv show reviews, or write about whatever.

To a certain extent, I'm going to copy two of my favorite blogs, ProLost and PrepShootPost. Those are two very inspiring blogs for me as a digital filmmaker. I've learned a good deal from Stu and Eric, so I want to occasionally show my work as an homage to them, and also hopefully so I can inspire other DV Rebels. My work has improved by leaps and bounds since I started following those two, so I owe them a great deal of gratitude.

My main gig is as the Video Production Leader at my church. It's a full-time job, which is actually pretty nice to have after a little more than a year freelancing. Being my own boss was great, I was able to do a lot of stuff last year that I otherwise would not have been able to do, but I need a bit more structure in my life, I think.

Anyways, I'll be making a real 1st post some time relatively soon. I want to talk about a short we showed at church last weekend, post some stills, talk about the shoot and the post process, etc. It should be fun. I'm really happy with how the shoot came out, and I learned some stuff for future shoots.