These visual FX videos are always something special to watch, but they’re also a bit worrying too.
Obviously some of the shots in this Boardwalk Empire fx reel could only be created by a computer.
But there are other, more simpler, shots such as the car driving into the Atlantic City Armory, that I was surprised with, thinking that a location could’ve easily been found.
But maybe for tax purposes it’s not possible for production to leave the area it’s in and if suitable locations can’t be found, they’ll be improvised.
But still, at what stage will directors start saying ’screw it, let’s do it all in post’?
I’m loving this demonstration video for Canon’s new high end camera, the C300. These things can usually be very dry but informative all the same for those interested.
Thankfully though Canon gave this job to a guy named Jonathan Yi and the results are real funny.
…is the one you have with you. It’s an old saying but I find it’s very true.
I bought a Canon HDSLR with the idea of using it for video and photography but I’ve ended up concentrating on video because of the beautiful results. This means my go-to picture camera is the one I have with me, my iPhone 3gs.
Some of my favourite pictures recently have been the ones I’ve taken with my phone, like the ones below. The combination of a reasonable quality camera, that’s always in your pocket, with an easy and effective editing app, can’t be beat.
It’s the same for a lot people, most have a ‘good’ camera that sits in a drawer, battery half charged and only ever brought out for special occasions. But it’s our camera phones that are capturing those spontaneous moments, every day, that we weren’t expecting.
It’s shorts like this that make me appreciate how HDSLRs have changed how and who film things today.
This stunning video was shot off the coast of Co. Clare in Ireland, where I spent summers as a kid.
However this is a new view of it all for me as these guys got right into the water, the cliffs and the sea life thanks to the convenience and quality HDSLR video cameras.
Living in New York I’d grab my Canon 7D, or S95, and shoot footage of what was going on around me. It seemed like a never ending project and you could stay filming life in New York for a long time
Eventually I put the camera down and started to edit. Here’s the end result, it’s a bit rough and ready but that’s life in the Big Apple I guess.
Turn up the volume on this one for the beautiful song ‘We Don’t Eat’ by Irishman James Vincent McMorrow.
Having worked on-air in radio for a number of years, my brain is hard-wired for sound and in particular the voice. Words like gravitas, timbre and resonance are used to try sum up what a great radio voice is and the subliminal effect the voice has on the listener.
When it came to shooting my final year film for college I wanted to get a grasp on all this. But the more I got into it the more the documentary was becoming just as much about Irish society and its voices.
I mean, just what is the right way to announce a death notice?
How would you keep the bidding at a cattle auction interesting?
What’s the best approach to shifting 30 units of housing in 30 seconds of radio ad time?
And why shouldn’t you sound too excited as a sports commentator if your local team score a goal in the first 10 minutes?
I’m reworking the documentary at the moment and polishing it up, with grading yet to be done.
Here’s a clip from it with thanks to Suzana Zalokar for her camera work.
I worked for a number of months with the great crew in Apostle, the production company of Denis Leary and Jim Serpico.
I digitized the company’s previous shows and movies, reviewed and edited them into clips and posted them on Apostle’s social media pages via whosay.com. I also helped with their new website, gathering video and other media for it.
The biggest edit project I undertook there was reworking the narrative of its 5-episode Comedy Central show Contest Searchlight to suit a ‘webisode’ format.
It’s now ‘airing’ on the Comedy Central site Atom.com, click here for the Contest Searchlight channel and the webisodes.
Working for the terrific Modern Vintage Records, a small label based in New York’s East Village, I edited music videos of their acts from previously shot footage.
Working for Athena Media, the production company led by R.T.E.’s former Head of Radio, Helen Shaw, I was charged with researching and talent-finding for the young-persons’ program Is It Just Me? The program was commissioned and broadcast by the national broadcaster R.T.E.
As we moved into production I was given the role of Production Co-Ordinator where I was responsible for the organization of the talent, crew and location for the particular shoots. I also worked as a camerman on the episode below, capturing Emma as she ran in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
After completing a journalism course I worked as a broadcast journalist and presenter from 1998 to 2000 with Tipp FM Radio in Clonmel, Ireland. Here’s a quick sample of the work I did.
Here’s a wonderfully shot yet simple feature about Brock Mealer, who learned to walk again with help from the University of Michigan’s football conditioning staff after a tragic car crash.
Shot on the Canon 7D by Kevin Shaw of 23 Films, it uses the voices of those involved to tell the story instead of relying on a narrator, with Kevin making great use of the Canon’s low light and shallow depth of field capabilities.
Here’s a few stills from some footage I’ve been shooting on my wanders around New York with my Canon 7D and 2.8 lens. I’m editing them into some shape of a video to give a flavour of New York in the summer but as with all undefined projects, when are you finished? Especially when it’s a city that keeps throwing up some amazing sights.
The two things that stand out the most for me are the camera’s low light performance which means you can capture night scenes as you see them. I’ve written about this before but it’s great to have this performance in such an unassuming camera. Then there’s the crazy weather! Stifling humidity and frightening thunderstorms. Bring on September.
The season finale of House aired about two weeks ago but I only caught it last night in HD on iTunes. I was keen to watch this one because it was shot on the Canon 5D SLR using photographic lenses, the first time anything like this has been done for a major TV show.
I’m a big fan of shooting HD with these Canons, I use a 7D after changing over from a Sony HDV. There’re compromises, pros and cons between the two. However the convenience, ease and quality of output from Canon’s HD SLRs wins it for me.
So I settled down to watch House and see what a pro crew could get out of the 5D. I gave up after a few minutes. I’ve never watched House before and the story totally absorbed me. I just forgot about the camera aspect of it, it didn’t matter. Straight away that’s a good thing. Camera heads can discuss the colours and pixels and artifacts, but the story stood head and shoulders above all of this.
Ok, I’m a bit late to the game with this one but I’ve only come across these colour pictures of Ireland taken in 1913. Now we can see how miserable we all looked…in colour!
The stills are part of a collection of autochrome pictures taken worldwide at the time. I find them fascinating, partially because as a child I thought the world was literally black and white up until around the fifties (yeah yeah yeah, look the logistics of the presumed changeover to colour didn’t weigh heavy on my mind at the time), but also because true colour pictures from that part of the century are rare. We are just so used to seeing the past in black and white.
Alan Gilsenan is the acclaimed Irish documentary director whose work includes The Asylum, The Hospice and I See a Darkness. Last week in The Irish Times he listed the 10 most important rules he adheres to when making documentaries.
While it’s aimed at documentary makers and other media heads, it’s an appealing and humorous read with some good life lessons in there for everyone!
1. OPEN YOUR EYES AND EARS
Call me old-fashioned, but you don’t make documentaries sitting at your desk. You’ve really got to get out of the house or the office or the pub. But once you manage to finally shrug off your inherent apathy and venture out into the wild blue yonder, you need to look and listen.
Really look and really listen. Listen to people. To their stories. To what is said and what remains unsaid. Listen to the sounds of the wilderness and the hum of the city. See what is actually there before your eyes, not what you imagined was there or what you had hoped would be there. See the beauty in the ugliness and the ugliness in the beauty.
Then ask yourself what is all this really telling me? What is this not telling me? And when you realise that you don’t understand any of it, that none of this makes any sense at all, but yet you still instinctively feel that it may have some inherent importance, then record it.
Document it. Preserve it. You can sort it out later and maybe even begin to understand it (this is called editing and it is a dark and secret art).
Here’s a a short clip of some time-lapse photography I took in Kilkenny City last night. While time-lapses are fun to watch, they usually consist of life (humans, nature, engineering) sped up to show slow progress over a quick period.
However, instead of a time-lapse showing people scurrying about the place, I wanted to show the earth itself rotating, because when everyone is done moving for the day and stationary at home in bed, the world continues to spin.
Digital cameras make it easier to do these slow-shutter lapses, so I pointed my camera at the clock tower of the Kilkenny Design Centre and then directly across the road to the entrance gate of the castle itself. Photography like this is slow, it can take an hour to get enough pictures to make 5 seconds of video and that’s why the clip is so short.
To break it down, depending on the time-lapse picture you’re capturing, it can take up to 30 seconds to get one picture (you leave the shutter open for 30 seconds to let enough light in to capture the stars). In turn, it takes 25-30 pictures to make 1 second of video.
I was lucky last night. The redesign of the area outside Kilkenny Castle means the harsh orange street lights that usually populate urban areas, and drown out our view of the stars, have been removed in favour of more subtle lighting. While that helped, the subtle lighting then shut off shortly after midnight. Whether that was for energy saving reasons (which I applaud) or whether they went on the blink (which wouldn’t surprise me!) the area was left covered by moonlight which was unusual but perfect!
I like this picture of a French customs officer playing with his sniffer dog in a deserted Charles-De-Gualle airport as the ash from the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull-göes-bööm, continues to ground flights across northern Europe.
Meanwhile, staying with northern Europe and, of course, sniffer dogs, this four legged explosives expert joined his handler recently as they took part in a NATO exercise in Norway.
I watched an engaging and funny talk today given by Ken Robinson at TED 4 years ago.
In it he talks of how the inherent creativity in young people is curbed by education systems worldwide that put academic subjects like maths and science ahead of the arts and vocations. He describes how the school system we know today came about in the 19th century to provide useful, productive workers for the industrialism at the time (you can watch the talk here).
And things haven’t changed. I was out recently with a group of friends who are secondary school teachers. They talked about how important it was to enforce rules regarding the school uniform because it prepared the students for the office place uniform of the shirt and tie. Which is a worrying thought for 2 reasons.
If school is to prepare young people for the workplace, why is it that taxpayers fund schools and not the large employers that students are being prepared for?
What kind of workplaces are students being primed for that make the mindless, rote learning which dominates education, a good preparation?
Well perhaps the Young Explorer answers that. Boy oh boy you can start deflating your child’s optimism for a cheery future early with this toy. A cubicle bound desk-jockey my son, that’s what your schooling will train you for.
This blog post will change your life. Well the part of your life that you spend behind the wheel of a car. And it’s not a change for the better.
I present to you the four slowest driven cars on the road. If this pattern hasn’t stood out to you in the past, it’ll jump out at you now.
So much so that if you find yourself in the middle of a sluggish convoy, you can bet that it’s one of these cars in front. If you have a chance to overtake one of these cars, do it, DO IT! And avoid the inevitable frustration coming down the road.
Indicators? They’re optional for these drivers. An awareness of the traffic around them? Nope, not a chance. A constant 60 km/h in both 100 and 40 km/h zones. You bet!
Here’s a little glimpse into the minds of these drivers.
Here’s a few stills from some footage I’ve been shooting on my wanders around New York with my Canon 7D and 2.8 lens. I’m editing them into some shape of a video to give a flavour of New York in the summer but as with all undefined projects, when are you finished? Especially when it’s a city that keeps throwing up some amazing sights.
I like this picture of a French customs officer playing with his sniffer dog in a deserted Charles-De-Gualle airport as the ash from the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull-göes-bööm, continues to ground flights across northern Europe.
Man, cats seem really useless now…
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