Monday, May 21, 2012

Updates- How to FAIL in a Video Contest (My participation in the 48GFC contest)

No, No Hello World today I´m not in the mood....

There´s no need for false pride

I´m a bloody beginner in the world of filmmaking.

This weekend had prooven it to me.


I have a long journey to go...


But still I will continue it because one has to stand up after one falls!






On this weekend I participated in the 48 Guerilla Film competition.

The Goal of the competition ist to plan, shoot and edit a movie in 48 hours. You get a random genre and line of dialouge you need to include in your movie.

My Genre was Western and my line of Dialouge was  " I have a map for every mall from here to Tijuana".



The first issues I encountered was that my 2 partners blew of a day before the shooting and I had to find poeple to shoot. Most fortunately I found 4 poeple who were very eager to help me. Without their help the project couldn´t have been accomplished (VEEEEEERY BIG THANK YOU GUYS).


RULE NUMBER 1 FOR "FAST" JOBS:

Have a reliable crew


The second issue I had encountered was that it was nearly impossible to film outside because cars birds and wind disturbed the audio. In Post it was also very hard to level out the sounds. because I had used the In-cam-mic and an outside mic which had different recording levels.

RULE NUMBER 2 FOR "FAST" JOBS:

Be verry Verry VERRY carefull with your audio!!!


Probably the most severe issue I had is that the story didn´t really work out at the end. The storytelling is missing a red line and is confusing for viewers who don´t know the script

RULE NUMBER 3 FOR "FAST" JOBS:

 Don´t try to over complicate the script. Try to rather have a nice solid script that works just fine otherwise if you fail to deliver your message because the story is too complicated it doesn´t matters of how many twists or interesting features you thought the audience also needs to get them!


The last and most bitter issue I had that I underestimated the exporting time of Avid MC letting me be too late for the 48 hours...

RULE NUMBER 4 FOR " FAST" JOBS:

 Know your editing programm and it´s rendering times. You don´t want to be disquallified/canceled from the job because of your too  long export time.



Even tough I´m very dissapointed with my final movie. I still have to say that I greatly enjoyed it´s creation. One of the reasons I enjoyed it was the wonderful crew I had. We were only 4 people but we still managed to work as hard as 10 at least ^^.

Another positive thing about this expirience is that I now noticed a lot of mistakes I still make and can correct them the next time I shoot a movie.

I had a lot more issues then the listed by the way but these were the most severe ones.

I hope that you can learn out of my mistakes and had fun reading this Article

Giora

Friday, May 11, 2012

Updates - A Dark Cave to concquer (My Expirience shooting a Band Live

Hello World!

I couldn´t write for a long time because I had my final exams and a new Project.

The Project is/was to shoot a Band during a life performance.

Seems pretty easy, right?

NO!

The Situation is the following:

No Light.

EXTREMLY loud Audio

People Crashing against your stuff

No Time to pull Focus

Only two cams





Seems pretty lethal ain´t it?

Did i still managed to get  decent results?

Yes!

Why?

Because of planing, and backup two of the most important things to do if your doing a project similar to this.
 I had literaly 4 different Mics Recording in fear of bad audio, 2 Cams Crossshooting (absolute MINIMUM for a project like this),   2 X 16GB SD Cards 3 Batterys capable of recording 100 Minutes each. 3 glasses with different focal length. 2 People to keep the equipment safe and 2 Tripods (a small one and a big one for different situations).

Even with all this pßlanning and equipment i barely managed to get decent shots. So really think a project like this trough before you accept it!

One of the major problems I had was that nearly no light was accesable in the Club and i needed to shoot on high ISO setting (i hope i can denoise the images a little in post) another Problem I didn´t think of was that i had 2 cams in total: One mounted on a Tripod shooting the whole stage and my DSLR with which i shot Handheld from the crowd. Because I only have one lens with an image stabilzer which has a really small focal  length (little zommfactor)  i often entered the frame of my first cam while trying to shoot the band members. I will need to figure it out if this is a problem or i can live with this.

I also did a little timelapse with magic lantern of poeple entering the club (it renders as I write this Blogpost ^^)

In conclusion this project was exhausting beyond my imagination but a really good way of learning to shoot under extreme conditions. I´m really happy that I accepted the job :)

-Giora

PS: I filmed the Band The Mind Blowing Monkeys the videos on theire page aren´t mad by me (yet) but i think they make awesome music and need some support :)