Up in flames

The Kendricks are burning up more stuff for their film FIREPROOF!

Go check it out!

DAD THE HERO

....and the WILD WILD WEST!!!

The Sampley's have really punched up the EXTREME IMAGINATION too!!

Watch the BTS videos here.

ENN Report

ENN is a kids reporting network hosted by Vision Forum. The reporter on this one caught my attention, apparently it is a re-run though.

Watch the news report.

Camping BTS #4

If you haven't seen the "Camping 2007" video yet....you might want to watch it first.

EDITING

CAPTURING
The first step to editing is to get the video on the hard drive. Instead of capturing a whole tape at a time Final Cut Pro allows you to go through a tape and make “in and out points” which are then created into a “temp clip” to be captured/digitized later.

I like to give my clips names that contain project and "take info. For example “Cmp07 – 01” – “Cmp07 – 02” it just helps me keep it organized. When I am done logging all the clips, I can select them and choose “Batch Capture” and the computer automatically goes back through the tape and creates the clips for me.

ORGANIZING
When editing I prefer the “View as List” option for my folders and bins. On every project I basically have 4 main folders – VIDEO – FILES – MUSIC – AUDIO. (sometimes I have Sound FX or Power Point folders too) You can see a picture of my Camping Folders below (click to view it larger).

Also, for just basic project files I create a folder on my external Hard drive for each project. Inside that folder my files are organized very similar to my FC folders. This project is a little less organized than normal due to the smallness of the project and lack of files.

Projects such as Joel’s Journey and Call of Courage have a very large number of folders.

DRAG AND DROP
Next, I go through the clips and pick the ones I like (I kind of did that when I captured the footage, but I still have multiple takes to choose from) I drag the ones I like into the timeline and arrange them by group “B-Roll” – “Narration.” Sometimes, depending on how much video I have to work with, I will even create a separate sequence just for the B-Roll. It simplifies my main timeline and keeps it less cluttered. ☺

SWAP IT AROUND
This is the part that is really hard to describe…. For the camping project, the next step was to start putting the B-Roll that went with each point together and interspersing the narration in a chronological format. In the following picture you can see the whole FC screen. In the Timeline I have my "faded black border" on the top layer, some special FX and b-roll in the next layers, and the bottom layer is my main narration and main b-roll.

FASTER, FASTER
The bane of videographers is that the video is too long or the shots are too long. (Now I am NOT advocating MTV style editing – got it?) It is best to get into the shot late and then leave early, especially for comedy. This is a good technique for movie outtakes too ☺ I tried to cut the shots rather quickly and to keep the pace moving. Some people have still told me that the video is too long in general, and yea…there are a few places that adding some more dialogue would have helped. We live and learn right? ;)

ADJUST THE CUT
Normally I stick to straight cuts and fades, the amateur star wipe or paper airplane are not in my typical set of transitions. :P However, different styles call for different transitions and I wanted the transitions to compliment the comedy effect I was going for. “Swish transitions” are often used in movie trailers for comedic impact, so I decided to try applying it to my short video. One thing to remember when applying Special Transitions (this applies to any transition really) is that you must use it sparingly and for a reason, meaning that if you place it correctly then the audience will expect it and associate with a specific element of your video. EXAMPLE: Camping ’07 – the “swish transition to the right” meant NEXT POINT and “swish transition down” meant THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE POINT JUST GIVEN. I added a few other fun and funky transitions to try and keep the pace moving. Note: SoundFX for the "swoosh" were from Digital Juice's SoundFX Volume 1.

SPIN YOUR WHEELS
After I have my video edit finished I take my color wheels for a spin! There is a lot of thought that goes into correcting the color on a shot and there is a lot of information out there on how to do it. One training video I found useful was by Digital Juice. You can view it here. (also, more on CC and special FX coming later)

MAKE THE MOVIE
Once the video is done, and the audio has been adjusted, I export the clip as a QuickTime Movie.

Some projects are now ready to be compressed using Compressor, such as Camping ’07 outtakes, while for other videos I still need to create some special titles and graphics. Camping 2007 called for some specialized titles, and since I don’t like Final Cut's title feature, I fired up Motion…but I am getting a little ahead of myself, that’s a subject is for next time….

[GRAPHICS AND TITLES] coming next….

Got it covered

I just finished some design work for Heartland Baptist Bible College, and I thought I would pass along some of the graphic design. These CD case packages consisted of a 2 sided insert (front and inside), the back of the tray card and the CD label. And NO, the watermark is not on the client's graphics :P

ALUMNI '07 CD

1st idea for the front (it was not quite what they were looking for)

2nd idea (FINISHED PRODUCT)

Front

Tray Card

FAVORITES CD

(FINISHED PRODUCT)

Front

Tray Card

CD

If anyone has tips for me to improve I am wide open and listening :)

Filming Fire

What would a movie about a firefighter be without a fire? The five FIREPROOF actors playing members of the Albany Fire Department battled the flames for the first time on camera on Wednesday. It was a day to remember for everyone on the set, including director and co-writer Alex Kendrick.

“It was very exciting, but it was also scary...." Alex says.

“This kind of stuff is very exciting,” says Bob Scott, the director of photography. “It gave me goose bumps.”

READ THE POST ON THE FIREPROOF BLOG!

Christmas Video

We did some shooting tonight :)

Camping BTS #3

This one is out of order, but I didn’t want to put two major posts right next to each other. So here it goes for audio….

NOTE: I use Apple Final Cut Studio to edit with, so key commands are from the Mac OS.
NOTE 2: You can click the pictures to view a larger version.

AUDIO

CUTTING THE FINAL AUDIO
-First of all I actually finish the edit before I mess with the audio (more on editing in a later post). Sometimes I don’t need to adjust the audio at all, other times it requires a lot of time and work (Joel’s Journey). Since I recorded on two audio channels, I have a high volume audio track and a low volume audio track, and I was able to capture the high volume track without any clipping. I duplicate the high volume track (option-click the track) and then drag it over the low volume track to replace it. I then adjust the volume as needed and sometimes that requires some manual keyframes of the audio level. I didn't end up needing to keyframe for this project though.

Once I am happy with the basic video edit I begin to apply the audio filters. Final Cut has lots of audio filters that I normally use for audio needs. However in this case I needed some extra tweaking control, so I used Soundtrack Pro. Next step is to turn off all other audio layers and export just my dialogue to a WAV file. Importing that file into Soundtrack Pro I am then able to take out background noise and add filters.

SOUNDTRACK PRO
-SP has a “background noise reduction” feature that I applied to this project and I also applied a Low Pass audio filter, which limits the amount of high frequency levels and allows more Low frequency levels. I didn’t apply this filter very much because I found that if I cut out too much of the “high” the dialogue became hard to understand.

When I was done with the audio fixes I exported it back out. Now the default SP audio export is AIFF and for some reason FC doesn’t really seem to like that format so I used iTunes to change it to a WAV format. After importing the WAV file back into FC I was ready to adjust the music.

MUSIC
-The music I used for this video is from the Digital Juice Stack Tracks library, specifically the HOLIDAY and SPOOKY stacks. I like DJ’s music because they allow you to take out any instruments you don’t want. Normally I would have had the Morris brothers compose some music for it, but I didn’t really have the time and they were busy too ☺ (they composed the music for Joel’s Journey)

I won’t go into all the monotonous details of adjusting all the music to fit and match correctly, but you can look at this picture of my timeline and see what I did.

Stay tuned for the next BTS article – [EDITING] coming next….

Joel's Journey DVD

NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD!!

For more information visit: www.joelsjourneymovie.com

Camping BTS #2

If you haven't seen the "Camping 2007" video yet....you might want to watch it first.

VIDEO AND ACTING

B-ROLL
-The hardest part was to make sure I got all the needed footage WHILE camping. I mean my family wasn’t real excited that I was always video taping them. ;) Also, because they didn’t know my whole plan, some of them thought that the stuff I was taping was kinda strange ☺ In the end I had about 45-55min of footage to edit from. (editing will come later)

NARRATION
-Location
first I had to find a location. Thus to find ‘just the right spot’ meant I had to spent quite a bit of time traveling around and around our yard. I settled on a spot in the front yard that would allow me to have trees with “fall” leaves for the background and it also gave me sunshine for a backlight (since I wasn’t using any lights.)
-Lighting
I did use a reflector though to bounce the sunlight and fill some of the shadows. I used the gold side of a 5-in-1 reflector that I have.
-Audio
Well, it wasn’t by choice, but I ended up just using the on camera mic. So I set one channel to be an expectable level and then set my second channel to be slightly lower, to accommodate for any “spike outs” from the audio. The biggest problem (which you can probably tell) is the outside “background” noise, and the passing cars/trucks ☹
-Assistants
I enlisted a couple of siblings to help me with the video shoot. Maggie held the reflector for me and Carinna held onto the script so it wouldn’t blow away. Thanks to the twins for their wonderful help!!
-Re-shoot
I shot the opening line for the video and then got reports from trusted sources (family) that audio wasn’t clear enough. Soooo, we reshot it and I moved the camera a little closer to the main talent (Benjamin). The “walk-up and put on the hat” was added the second time. In short, the 2nd time was MUCH better ☺
-Tapes
For what it is worth, when labeling tapes I like to include: The title of the project "Camp Trip 07," the tape number "01" - "02," and what is included on the tape, "Video footage" - "Narration." AND I also flip the save/rec tab to SAVE when I am done shooting.

CASTING
“Benjamin are you busy? – Let’s go shoot some stuff for the camping video.”

EXTRA VIDEO
-I wasn’t able to attend the grand water ski adventure due to the premiere showing of “The Call of Courage” and “Joel’s Journey.” Special thanks to my siblings who captured some priceless footage via the video function on their still cameras. ☺

[AUDIO EDITING] coming next...