I haven’t really posted much of what I have been doing. I’ve pretty much been shooting weddings for the past few months with little time to pursue other “things”. However, I did take a detour for a few days and put together a profile for my buddy Brody Dezember. It’s a short “about” film for Brody to play for his clients “in-studio” and possibly show at wedding shows.

We essentially shot this over the course of two afternoons. On day one, we did an interview session in a few locations around his studio. All of the lighting was available natural lighting as we had no time to set up anything. It was a great overcast day, so we had a nice blanket of diffusion over the outside shoot. I used my 7D and a kit lens (ef-s 18-135) on all of the interviews (not a lot of extra money right now for L-series stuff). As you can see, even the kit lenses are pretty impressive when shooting in video mode, though I noticed they are a little soft at times. For the indoor interviews, we went into the apartment building above Brody’s studio. The apartments used to be an old tire factory, so there is a lot of exposed brick and concrete. It’s very industrial and light pours through large windows in the ceiling.

In terms of audio, I threw a wireless Sennheiser on him connected to my Zoom H4N. We battled a large air conditioning unit and echoes for the entire interior interview. As a result, I had to Noise Print the background hum in Soundtrack, with some of the interviews coming out a little “basey.” Total acceptable though and not as noticeable with the music track playing. I admit there are a few “peaks” in the audio, which I haven’t had time to tweak. I ended up doubling the audio tracks in Final Cut to make them pop and as a result, got a few hot peaks in the audio. Nothing that can’t be fixed relatively quickly.

I did some very basic color correction for the interviews, crushing the blacks a bit, adding in some blues into the shadows and some yellow/orange into the highlights. Not any spectacular color grading to explain here, but the result is a very nice look. I of course used Denver’s “free” film burns you can download on this blog. They are very versatile when you adjust the colors and bring down the opacity. A few adjustments to color and clip speed and you basically have hundreds of film burn options from a few master clips.

For the wedding shoot, I tagged along with Brody on one of his LDS weddings. We shot at the Salt Lake Temple, with me using a glidecam 2000 for the moving shots. I opted for the older Glidecam 2000 versus the HD. It feels a little more solid, and I generally don’t do much modification to the weights once I have it balanced. Basic color corrections again. Nothing fancy. The colors out of these cameras are so impressive, that by very gently massaging them in Final Cut you can get some great looks for not much extra work.

For a few dolly shots I employed my Glidetrack. Quite honestly, if you want a slider, build your own with parts from Igus.com. I paid $350 for mine and it functions exactly the same as the one my buddy Kale built for about $150. His track is also a lot beefier than mine as well.

For the second photo in the shot, we dumped a layered photo into Motion and used the 3D camera function to make the sky move. Very, very simple movement, that can quite honestly be achieved with the motion tools in Final Cut. However, I needed to get back into Motion and fiddle around with the camera functions. We had planned to do some more complex 3D photo stuff, but for the sake of time, we just stuck to one photo.

For the signature at the end? I’m going to leave that one a secret. I will tell you that it was recorded with functionality built into Quicktime for Snow Leopard. We didn’t use any fancy software to make that happen. That was Brody’s touch. I want you to figure that one out on your own. Something to explore.

If you have any questions about anything, feel free to email me here.

Best,

Ryan Hinman

My website – www.ryanhinmanfilms.com

Brody’s website – www.dezemberphoto.com

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