PC V Mock

This week Rob and I did a little bit of video work. Rob came up with an idea for parodying the "PC V Mac" adverts that Apple are running (an example one from YouTube below).

We did our filming at my house, in the lounge, using a home made green screen (made out of a 4m length of green fabric that I picked up at lunch time for £4).

We shot it on Rob's Sony FX1 and edited it using Premier Pro v2. Rob is currently finishing up the edit and when he has, I'll post up the end result.

All in all, it took 2-3 hours to set-up and shoot. We had initial problems with lighting. My lounge is pretty dark, lit by small spotlights that are in dire need of replacing. The lights we had were too powerful for the room and we couldnt find anything to reflect them off, so we ended up using a single desk light and having to do a fair amound of adjustment in post. I'll get Rob to post up some before and after shots and you can see how well Premier Pro 2 handles it.

We took turns behind and in-front of the camera. In the end result, we appear to be stood side by side and to be of equal height, when in fact we were filmed separately and I am about 6 inches taller.

It was good fun to do and hopefully the end result is fun too.

Playing around with lighting post effects in premiere pro 2

Some techy bits from me too!

I filmed some actors giving a short series of speeches, to compile a short promo vid for a play I'm working on. Very, very basic setup - natual room lighting + a 12 halogen to bring up a bit of detail. I decided to shoot against a white backdrop sheet ( deliberatley crumpled - I guess i wanted that look.... ) When i pulled up the shots on in edit they seemed a little flat, so i deceided to play around with the lighting effect present in premiere pro 2. I've used similar effects in p/shop and AE before, but decided to have a quick fiddle - I was actually very impressed with the results (also a little colouring applied to give it a bit more of a cold feel) :

Without effect With effect

The effect can be found under Video effects/adjust/lighting effects, and is pretty easily controlled by resizing the splash ovoid ( or whatever!), you can spin, widen and move the effect closer and further away. All in all a quick, easy solution for getting really interesting results out of such scenes. even if your lighting was wholly inadequate in the first place ;-)

Oh, and the final video can be found at www.redhottheatre.co.uk/video/lovepuke.wmv

"Introductions" and "Loss of virginity"

Hi, I'm Rob, and I'm a filmmaker.

Thought I'd introduce myself. This is my first ever post on a blog.

I've been "doing" video for about 6 or 7 years now - I'm quite heavily into power kite sports and theatre, and i bought a dv camera to play around with, and things just started to happen. I stopped doing "shaky cam", started thinking about my shots and spent hours fiddling with helmet cameras, fish eye lenses and wireless links.

I've produced quite a wide variety of stuff over time, including two DVDs on kiting which have gone on (limited) retail sale over the globe, backdrops for multimedia theatre, little corporate jobs, historical building profiles, training videos and a music vid or two. All whilst working away at my IT job during the day. I think my IT skills have done me well in the film arena - I shoot, edit, author and promote all my stuff, but it can get pretty manic at times.

I upgraded to HDV with a sony FX1 at the start of 2006 and have been getting amazing results from it lately, and just upgraded my edit suite to handle the memory hungry requirements for HDV output. I edit on Prem Pro 2, which I get on well with - i also dabble in AE and flash, but quite regularly forget how to do the basic stuff!!!

So, as you can see, we're moving at a good pace with the new short film idea - it's quite funny really, even though I've been so involved with theatre over the last decades, drama film is always something I have shied away from, i guess scared by it's potential complexity. Hopefully by starting out with this small project it will give both Richard and I a feel of things to come.
He's jam packed with crazy ideas and imaginative scripts, whenever I read them I can visualize the scenes in detail ( i think personally that it has come from too many years of reading 2000AD comics ) so I'm really looking forward to working this up.

Anyhoo, keep checking back on progress, and if you're in the maidenhead area and fancy getting involved at all, give us a shout!

Cheers, one and all.

Rob

www.treborsnave.com for some of my older works - new site coming soon!!!