The Saturday contra dance held during the Cape Breton Fiddle Fest in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in October 2009. Anna Rain calls a dance by Dean Snipes. Wendy MacIsaac from Nova Scotia plays the piano.
Here's the latest personal video, from Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The contra dance was held during their Cape Breton Fiddle Fest, so the music was stunning.
I edited the music track first, then found the most interesting bits to illustrate the dance. I had 8 and a half minutes of footage to work with; the final piece comes in at 1:43. One trick I use is to tap out the beat on the "M" key, which puts in markers on the clip and on the timeline, depending on which is selected. The tempo was solidly even throughout the medley.When I lined up the beats on the timeline the music overlapped perfectly.
A house on our street puts on an elaborate Halloween skit every year for the trick and treaters. It's always gross and spectacularly creative.
The house down the street every year puts on an elaborate and truly gross Halloween skit that's a hit with the trick & treaters and, especially, their parents. Here's the video.
Two years ago, when I was exploring the hot format of the era, audio slideshows, I composed this piece on the event.
My next door neighbor Sue regularly hosts a Quebec music session with some of Seattle's finest musicians, and invites me to listen. Here is the video.
The making: this was my first video with the new Zacuto finder, which snaps onto the LCD screen and magnifies it. It allows me to actually focus the 5D. It This almost makes the 5D into a real video camera.
I shot with a plan to do cutaways. The great thing about when musicians play in a session is that they repeat the tune again and again. I put markers on the beat and layered them in the timeline. It was fairly easy to align the markers so that in any track I picked the playing was in sync with the master audio track.
Having things like this happen on my street makes me feel spectacularly lucky to live where I do.
Seattle's Thursday contra dance at the Lake City Community Center. Jennifer Youngman calls, music by Ryan McKasson, Marni Rachmiel, Dave Bartley and Russell Smumsky.
I've been trying to figure out what to do with this footage for some time. It's from a contra dance last June where I tried using my HV-30 on a homemade steadicam. That part didn't work so well, and I also shot in aperture priority, which means my shutter speed frequently dropped below the frame rate. Fine if you want that effect, but it looks funky no matter what. Nonetheless, I decided to try the full Blair Witch treatment with this sequence.
At the outset I intended a very different piece. I have some great, steady shots done on a tripod, which turned out to have little feeling and no place in this sequence. Where I thought I was going and where I ended up turned out to be very different places. Kind of like my whole career path, come to think of it.
A video documentary of Caryn & Rhetick and their wedding in British Columbia's Pemberton Valley.This was fun to do. As with every video project, I learned to make do with what I had, and mourned what I wish I had done but didn't. Most of this I shot on the Canon 5D, though I had a second camera (a Canon HV-30) that rolled through the ceremony. It was also my first field test of the Beachtek audio splitter for the 5D, which worked like a charm, but made the camera that much more unwieldy. With control of audio it means I now have to monitor audio--one more thing to keep on top of. Someday it will become fluid and unconscious.
If you're having bandwidth issues, the YouTube version seems to be easier to view.
Dream Tea's entry in the 48 Hour Film Project, Superhero Genre. A strangler (using the mandatory prop) finds victims using the search engine Bing. Our superhero's power reside in her bluetooth device. She attracts the strangler using Google, and vanquishes the villain.
Oh my. I get it now. This is why people make movies.
To be with other people watching the movie you made.
Last night was the night TechWoman vs The Necktie Strangler hit the bit screen. It looked really, really good. At least next to the competition. The 48 Hour Film Project is decidedly an amateur affair, and some of the “finished” films (which is stretching it) have various, shall we say, problems. Not that ours doesn't. It's a grainy, available light production of a very thin story. But our pacing, editing and camerawork were, I thought, the best of the evening.
And people laughed. They responded. They got our jokes. And when our team leader, Hina, stood up at the end we got the loudest ovation of the evening. At least I thought so.
Here is the latest video, a paid gig for a local dance studio. About 7 hours on site (and about 50 minutes of tape) and 14 hours editing (I kept a spreadsheet). Run time is just over 2 minutes.
Yikes, sorry about that. I just got word from our team leader that we're not allowed to post our films until they're shown at the 48 Hour Film event. Stay tuned, TechWoman vs The Necktie Slayer will be back Friday.
Ages ago, I registered at the Seattle website of the 48 Hour Film project. The idea is, you make a film, 4 to 7 minutes long, in 48 hours. Write the script, get the props, rehearse, film, edit, deliver. It attracts a lot of pro film-type people. I was hoping to join an experienced team so that I could learn something.
The day before the weekend started, I got an email from a Meetup group of “International Women,” wondering if I wanted to join their team. They signed up on a lark, realized they hadn't a clue, and, found my name at the bottom of the resource barrel.
I offered an ambivalent “maybe”, went off to the Fremont Solstice Parade like I planned, and kept in touch by phone as they worked out a story. Their assigned genre (given at the beginning of the 48 hour period, on Friday night) was “Superhero.” At 4pm on Saturday, I was in a condo in Bellevue, with five women, working out a storyline that I thought I might be able to produce.
We started filming two hours later, and finished at midnight, at a Lake Washington park, with our villain tied to a tree with neckties.
That we were a diverse crew is an understatement. Brazilian, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and me. The film is not likely to win any awards (except, perhaps, entry by most naïve crew), but I had a total blast making it. I loved the collaboration, the challenge (how do I convert my pajama clad character into a superhero?), the command of a story and a process of telling it.
I wish I knew how to handle sound in Soundtrack Pro. I've seen Larry Jorden's Lynda.com training about 5 times now, and it hasn't helped much. I wish I knew how to color correct. Heck, I wish I knew how to properly expose video with my Canon XH A1. I hit many of my limits with this project. It shows.
But boy, was it fun. I logged video until 1am, and was too hyped up to get to sleep for another hour. I was up at 7 labeling clips. By 9 I had a rough cut (funny how much faster it is to edit when you've shot with a sequence already in mind). By 5 I had the rough edges in the sound and color sanded as smooth as I knew how.
The theatrical premiere is this Thursday (6/25), 9pm, at the Harvard Exit, in Seattle.
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