Category Archives: BEHIND THE SCENES

My Rode Rockumentary entry, part 2

 

This part will focus on post production, usual step for any kind of video work you would like to present to your audience.

The very first bit of the whole chain is to have all  your clips matched in terms of luminance. In the IRE scale the blackest point has to be set to 0, while the whitest to 100.
This way you know that anything below 0 will be totally black and anything above 100 will be pure white; both 0 and 100 are the threshold to get any detail in your picture. You have to do this work for all the cuts in your final editing, plus balancing out the RGB channels. It’s quite a tedious work, but once it’s done, you’ll know that the whole piece will be like one.
The next step would be to fix any issues, like under or over exposed areas of your footage… hopefully you will not have to deal with it, but chances are that it might happen if you are shooting solo or on a very small production. Especially doing exteriors, it’s difficult to control the action and the tech part as well. Never mind if you are shooting manual as well, we film-makers mostly do.

My Rode Rockumentary Entry, part 1

rode microphones rockumentary

 

The good news is that this video got the 3rd prize in this great competition engaged by respected worldwide manufacturer Rode.

I guess it cannot be called “news” anymore as it was awarded a month ago, but I have been shooting something else,  I had little time to write this behind the scenes (BTS) post.

I saw this opportunity on Philip Bloom’s website  http://www.philipbloom.net just a month before the actual competition deadline and the main idea behind it came to me pretty quickly, while I was driving along the motorway.
I tried very hard to have other people on board to help out, but for whatever reason they had, no one was able to make it.
In end I was on my own expect some little extra help I had in the final scene of the short movie, in which a baby is featured.

I thought I should have dropped it, at first. Too much to shoot, too little time and a one man band, tough I felt the idea was great, I really wanted to shoot this and what the hell I already shot something all by myself.
So I took the plunge, and went for it.

How I did “COSA RESTA” pt 2

 

This pt2 will concentrate more on the post production side of things. As usual there was bucket loads of it and it took a very long time to get things done.

Rendering times were bloody huge. This is due to the output resolution I chose and the processing power of my computer, a quad core 3ghz. When you’re rendering stuff out, unless you’re into 3D, all it matters at the end of the day it’s the engine running under the bonnet. I wish I had a 8 or 16 core Xeon based system but that was no option for now so I had to stick to my limited system.

How I did “COSA RESTA” pt1

Hi all, it’s been a while since I last wrote something. Fact is I’ve been dead busy with lots of projects lately and I did not have a proper chance to sit down and write on this blog.

Well, here I am at last! This post would have been too long to make it into one so I rather have it split in 2 sections, in the first one I will explain how I shot it and in the second part I will explain post production into details.

First you might enjoy having a look at the final version of the video

 

 

You might as well wonder why this version bears the “Director’s cut” label. In fact there was a first version of the video I edited strictly edited following the client’s directions but in the end he liked my version better.

All right, now let’s talk technical here. I shot this music video using both an anamorphic adapter and spherical lenses. I would have gone all the way anamorphic but in some instances we were in a real rush and we were mostly shooting exteriors so spherical is a lot faster. It would have been perfectly doable if I had the chance to grab some Hawks or Primos but I guess this was way out of the budget.. so the sought after anamorphic look it had to be all on an adapter: KOWA 16D.

SETTING UP A TV STUDIO ON A BUDGET

TV STUDIO canon 5dmkII

 

Working for TV it isn’t an easy task as It might seem at first sight if you are used to work in the movies industries, it simply won’t be like taking a remote and clicking on the power button.
As usual it requires hard work to make things look neat and polished.

Compared to filming there is a clear advantage though: once you have set up your lighting equipment and your cameras you are good to go for a long time. In filming you have to move lighting around as the scene changes so it’s kind of an ever changing situation.

The making of my NEXT MUSIC VIDEO

anamorphic gh2

 

Soon after doing the video entitled “L’ AQUILA”, the singer was very pleased with the result and he wanted a new video for the new song in the pipeline.

A totally different looking video. More filmic looking. More dramatic. More story telling. I though this was a great chance to go anamorphic, after all it’s the most cinematic thing I know.
What I usually do is to listen to the song many times and get my mind around the feelings I perceive. It will not necessarily link to the song, its words, its theme.. it’s actually more to do with the gut feeling I get out it.
It might have more to  do with the rhythm or with a particular instrument or the general vibe.

The making of KNIFED

 

I decided to shoot knifed for two reasons.

First of all I wanted to see how I could cope in “extreme” conditions, by that meaning I was completely alone and 100% exteriors. Different times of the day. Freezing cold.
Secondly in this part of Italy it does not rain that often and never you mind about snow. It was quite peculiar and I was eager to see how the woods would have looked like. Damn beautiful.

There is a third reason. I wanted to make up a simple story without too much hassle, no lines, no storyboarding, no actors, no audio recording.. no nothing. Straight and simple, just planned on the fly.
I shot it over two days because the first day I was literally freezing just by holding the metal legs of my tripod. Could not think straight so I had to come back one more time, also overnight I figured out I would have to make few more shots to have all the visual imagery I was after.