Wedding video

As you may have noticed it has been some time since my last blog entire, this would be down to me having the time to get many of my ides in motion.

One thing which I’m in the middle of is a Wedding Video! As with many people out there we all have family and sometimes these members of family get married.

For this event I wanted to get every angle so I opted for 3 Mini DV cams for the main seramoni, one fixed at each side of the church pointing towards the front and one at the rear with myself on it getting the best shots for the main section of the filming. If I could pick exactly where I had the cameras I would have put one behind the preast point towards the back of the church but it was not possible. For the next part I used 2 cams and this was for the photos being taken, to be honest there is very little usable footage from the 3 hours but the footage that I can use is very very good. The next event in the day would have been getting to the evening venue, this is where the confetti was through along with the bouquet and some more photos, for this it only need the one cam to get the key footage for any wedding. Now on to another important section of any wedding day and that would be the speeches, for this I used one fixed cam getting the full main table in and another roaming can to get different angles giving the allusion that there were many cameras filing that day, with the roaming cam there is also some good footage of guest enjoying the speeches. And there was also a fixed cam for the dancing at the end of the night.

The main problem in editing all this footage would be getting the audio to sound correct, as there is some footage in there which is not needed so getting the audio to flow is going to be a problem. Running the 3 cams for the church section work well and I’m slowly getting to the end of that section and using Adobe Prem CS3 MultiCam mixer (just like a live vision mixer) works well.

I know this is not what I would plan to spend my time editing but you know it good fun and I’m still enjoying it even thought I’m getting fed up of not saving my work!

One thing which caused problems was the fact that one camera didnt pick up any audio and the other cam picked up audio but it very very poor and jumps all over the place so it’s done to just the one audio source but I still think I can do something with it.

Graduation and wedding

Ok slight update, got another 2 videos done for my girl friends graduation and a friend. Not the best plan and no where to put the camera but take a look as I think I did well. Next video is a wedding! Yes that would be right a wedding but it is for my girl friends brother (you see the link?) but I'm kind of looking forward to it, nice change to the pattern I normally soot videos. Gives me chance to try out a slower video and a version of my own. I'm going to try a 3 camera shot set up in different places to get all the angles, it will make a different editing experience. We will see.

For the last few months I have been taking footage of the IMAX at where I work. There are very few videos of this projector out there so I decided t put something together so the whole world could see the sheer size of this projector.

It’s not a very challenging project but it did in tale getting allot of shots of only one thing which did stretch the imagination a few times.

The video is a story board of how the Imax is laced but not in too much detail as I would like not to see Imax in court as they are not too happy with things like this. I did take allot of footage just to get the different shots and all this was don’t with the use of one camera over a long period of time.

test shots

I managed to get up to Heaton park last week after I finished work, wanted to take some test shots in a bright environment and seeing how it was such I nice day I thought why not. Got in my car, drove up there just to open the door as the sun goes behind a cloud not to return. Close but no cigar this week.

Current Projects

I have 2 projects that I want to spend some more time on at the moment,

Islands lost at sea – Are a Bolton based band and I know the singer/guitar player of the 3, there are starting to make some head way in getting their music out there. I have seen them play a few times in Manchester and we got talking about a video for one of their videos, the song they feel is making the most progress is ‘The way we played it yesterday’ which you can check out on their myspace here. All be honest there are a few ideas going round at the moment.

1. Take a shot of live night, try and get them to play a few time to get many different angles as I would plan to use 4/6 cameras with some close padding shots (eg mics –on vocal, Guitar – close shot down the head)
2. Plan the entire shot, get a venue which we can use for the day and take shot after shot to get the footage needed.

At the moment I thing option 1 is more do able and would look better with a good flow as it would be the same footage just different cameras but we will see, they are not playing for a few week and I would like to get some footage before I start to plan the shoot.

Untitled – I have no title for this one yet but I do have a concept. I want to use outdoor light to get a strong contrast. With the outdoor light I want to get some very close shots but some cut shots so no full on frame. I have the music I want to run with the clips and I have the location, all I need now is time and good, sunny weather.