For the last couple of months, I have been working hard on a new project, tentatively called “State of Electronics”. It’s basically concerned with the history, development and future of the Australian Electronics Design and Manufacturing Industry. Partly fuelled by my own interests in Electronics, the documentary hopes to investigate the life cycle of an industry – how an industry is born, how it develops and then how it goes into decline. It’s a subject that can apply to many forms of industries including my own industry – the film industry.

Filming has begun and over the last couple of weeks and I have interviewed many people who helped create the Electronics Design & Manufacturing industry in Australia as well as those who are very active within it still today. The documentary will highlight many of the individuals who tinker in their back sheds designing and building innovative electronic devices, large & small scale manufacturers, Repairers, Component Suppliers, Design houses, Technicians, Businessmen and Woman, futurists, Hackers and Organisations with the sole purpose of showing a worldwide audience the state of the Australian Electronics Industry.

The format is driven by interviews that are mostly like “Discussions”. The topics vary from how people became involved with electronics as a child, how they developed their careers and then how they changed the world around them with innovation, good business sense etc. However, as with any good story, there is a darker side also. The Documentary is investigating the decline of the industry also. Through both economic and political change, the Electronics Industry is constantly undergoing change. World economic problems as well as technological advancements have meant the end of an era in certain sectors of the Industry, leaving jobs at risk or making them extinct! However, not everything is of doom and gloom. The documentary will also highlight individuals and companies that have been able to break through the difficulties and find their feet on a worldwide platform, delivering state of the art products and innovation.

As the project progresses I will update this blog with further information. For now, I can tantalise you with just a few images already shot on the 5DMKII. Perhaps this is an appropriate moment to describe the shooting process. The entire documentary is being filmed on Canon’s 5DMKII using L series glass. Audio is recorded using a Zoom H4N digital recorder and the video and audio are combined in Post Production, using Final Cut Pro. Because this is such a small gear package, I am largely able to handle most of the production needs by myself. When it’s all said and done, I will write up my feelings on going solo on such a big project, however for now I can say that it is incredibly liberating, somewhat demanding but very efficient! I’m also using my iPad as my “questions note pad” and also to carry out research on the fly (even while asking questions). I’ve had the opportunity to include “others” very quickly into the Documentary by being quick to research and write new questions for them. The iPad has made this possible. It’s an amazing tool used in this manner! The last thing I should mention is the overall size of the gear package i’m using, is so small that I can  (using a Defence Force term)  ”deploy” very quickly by air or road to carry out interviews. On the 19th of July, I flew to Sydney for two days of interviews with just two pieces of luggage!

More to come!

I don’t normally like to blog about technical stuff but on this occasion I felt I needed to record some of my findings, where I could get at them quickly and easily in the future. It might be useful to you also?! I recently bought an iPad and wanted to encode some of my own videos to the platform. Dragging a stack of material from iTunes onto my iPad, I realised I got several warnings from iTunes about video files it couldn’t upload to the iPad because they could not be played by the device! Frustrated I had a look at the files that wouldn’t play and surprisingly some had the same file sizes, frame size and encoding type as files that could be played on the iPad?! So I started to investigate further. This is what I found.

The iPad reports to support video formats up to 720P which in layman’s terms means 1280 x 720 pixels in dimension using a frame rate that is Progressive. However I wasn’t able to successfully get video encoded to this size to play properly on the iPad. The actual frame size of the iPad is 1024 x 768 and while 720P content is supported, the iPad has to down scale the video to 1024×576 to present it to the screen. So what’s going on? Frustrated, I used iTunes to convert a video to an AppleTV profile, which I then openned in QuickTime and “got info on” (press Command I). I discovered that iTunes uses a default setting of 960 x 540 pixels and not 1280 x 720! Now I was even more confused?! Jumping on the net, I found a large number of similarly confused people discussing the right size and data rate for best quality video on the iPad. However a link to an Apple Tech Note is very useful and can be found here. Basically it’s more concerned with streaming video to the iPad, iPod & iPhone and not playing back of files from disc as I am. However I used this as a guide to Encode my video using Mpeg Streamclip by Squared 5. You could use other Encoders such as Apples Compressor and simply translate my settings here.

Below is a Video of my family having some fun at a Go Kart track.

The video is action packed and shot with a Canon 5DMKII and a Go Pro HD Hero in 16×9 aspect ratio. Because the Go Pro has some fairly significant rolling shutter issues, I thought this video might be quite challenging for any encoder to get right and might reveal nasty jagged edges and other encoding artefacts in an obvious way. So firstly, I exported my 1920 x 1080 25FPS video from Final Cut Pro as a Vimeo friendly 1280 x 720 H.264 movie. I tried that in iTunes and it failed to upload to the iPad. So I then took this same video and threw it into Mpreg Streamclip and played with the settings as follows. All were encode using the H.264 format with the audio set to AAC 256kbps.

1) Firstly below is the version created by iTunes that works no problems on the iPad. If you click on this file it will probably download it to your computer as it is a .m4v file. It’s video size is 960 x 540 and used the H.264 encoder with a bit rate of around 5 MBS. The total file size is 56.5MB

2) In Mpeg Streamclip I simply wanted to recreate the same settings so I could create a Preset for it, and that was totally successful. However reading the Apple Tech note indicated that this size may not be the ultimate setting for the video if a lower files size was needed. What’s probably more important then frame size is the data rate considerations. So I began to encode the same video, using many different data rate amounts. Below is a video encoded at 960 x 540 with a cap at 4MB/sec

3) This video below is encoded to 1024 x 576 which is the resolution that the iPad uses to display your video on it’s screen. My thinking here is if the iPad doesn’t need to “on the fly down scale your video” then surely this would play better and look nicer. It plays well and looks great but the file size remained quite large at a hefty 73MB. Admittedly the data rate is capped quite high as well being set at about 6MB/sec but I was trying to get very good quality video. At 5MB/sec this video is about 56.7MB and still looks fantastic.

4)  From the Apple Tech notes again, I learned that the iPad has very good upscaling abilities. So I tried to encode the same video at 640 x 360, again using the H.264 encoder, stereo AAC Audio compression set at 256kbps. Here I tried with a capped data rate of around 4MB/sec. This video uploaded to the iPad no Problem and plays very nicely. In fact, I was quite surprised that although the video is much smaller in size the iPad rendered it to the screen in a perfectly acceptable manner. If you look closely you may be able to spot some aliasing and compression artefacts but overall it looked great. The file is 47.9MB!

5) Dropping the data rate even more but keeping the same size settings (640 x 360, again using the H.264 encoder, stereo AAC Audio compression set at 256kbps) again I was surprised that it looked great on the iPad. The data rate on this video is set to cap at around 2MB/sec and has a file size of 25.7MB! Yes if you compare this video with the version set at 4MB/sec, there is some degradation but it’s not horrendous. Certainly if you need to keep file sizes down, I think this setting is quite acceptable.

Conclusion:

I should quickly say that viewing these samples on a Computer Monitor will lead you to different opinions on acceptability. For my purposes I was more interested in comparing these settings on the iPad and I highly recommend that you do the same. Because the iPad does some magic during the upscaling, the final out come of how your video looks is different to that of a computer display. So for my recommendations on compression settings, I would suggest you need to keep in mind what devices need to see your video. For best possible display quality on both a Computer and the iPad then these are my suggested settings (although this is way higher then the iPad really needs):

The above compression settings will not play on most other devices. Lowering the data rate, like the example below, might be better for longer video programs and will allow other devices to play this video:

However, for iPhone’s and iPod’s as well as other manufacturers devices, the following profile might be better, while still playing on the iPad. So my ultimate suggestion for compression settings that works on a range of devices including iPad, iPod, iPhone and as a small file for download to a Computer, try this:

Importantly the video needs to be set to a data rate no greater then 1500kbps or 1.5MB/sec to be safe. Apple supports H.264 data rates of up to 2.5MB/sec and this probably explains why my iPhone was able to play a file at 640×360 2MB/sec no problem while on the iPod, a file of 640×360 4MB/Sec played perfectly also!? The important part about iPod and iPhone is keep them with a size of 640 x 360 for 16×9 content and 640 x 480 for a 4×3 aspect and a reasonably low data rate of around 1500kbps if you are using the Baseline encoding profile. Using a different encoding profile like MP4 or H.264 the iPod and iPhone support a data rate of up to 2.5MB/sec.

Hope this helps. Please don’t hesitate to comment if you feel I have made an error. Cheers!

Part of being a good filmmaker, I believe, is to constantly try new things. For me that includes equipment, new technology, different Crew members, new Clients & new Ideas etc. Recently I had the pleasure of working on a new Campaign that forced me to think about my own “filmmaking process” in a different way. That project was a Television Commercial (TVC) for Ponds, a beauty product.

For me this particular project was different because it was a beauty Ad! It was different because the process of making this TVC was different to other work I have been involved with. I suppose on a filmmaking level, the nuts and bolts is the same, just the interaction with the Agency & Client was quite different. As you may be aware, many of my Commercials involve the heavy integration of 3D. This Commercial was no different. The balance here was to create a “Beauty Spot” which involved a “high concept idea” of pages from a magazine flipping helping us to tell a story, but remained soft, feminine and playful.

It all started back in January, when Kemistry Films in Jakarta Indonesia contacted me to have a look at a concept for a TVC involving pages flipping. I had previously created a TVC for Canon that involved a “Flip book” style and I guess once you have done one, you get calls for more (hopefully?). Any case there was enough of a difference for me to be interested in the project. The opportunity to extend my repertoire to include beauty products was enough of a lure.

On the 1st of March, I flew to Jakarta from Singapore, having just completed a Canon Commercial for China. In fact, we were still finalising the Online that Sunday for Canon and by Monday afternoon I was attending preproduction meetings for Ponds in Jakarta! The TVC was written by Ad Agency Ogilvy & Mather in Jakarta by creatives Dinah Sumantri and Dewi Putri. Both are young, very considered, super thoughtful and I’m not just saying that because I was working for them! They were incredibly cool to work with. Both had produced many beauty spots in the past for Ponds but had not had a huge amount of 3D integration experience. Nor had the Client. So finally, after months of preproduction work, I finally met with everyone in Jakarta to discuss how we were going to make this TVC. Creative Director Dewantarie Hadikoesoemo helped walk the Client through the process and if there is one thing I could stress the most is the importance of “Managing peoples expectations”. It’s absolutely critical on these types of of jobs. It’s also fantastic when the Agency is so supportive in this regard and Ogilvy & Mather rose to the occasion.

This Ponds TVC is built around a competition involving three winners. I spent several days putting most of the winners through, not only make-up and wardrobe tests, but also a photo shoot. I used this opportunity to break them into the weird world of advertising. I always like to rehearse whenever I can to eliminate much of the initial folly that can take place. That way we can concentrate on making the best possible TVC with the most fluid, tightly integrated 3D and post production effects etc. Importantly though, it gives me the confidence to mould their performances in the best way I can.

On the 7th of March, Goh spent the day pre-lighting the sets for the shoot. He is a true gentleman to work with. A quiet achiever with a real flare for lighting which I really appreciated. Actually my entire crew was fantastic. Rini had recommended a brilliant Production Designer from Malaysia called Malek Prada. He came up with some pretty awesome designs and Set pieces which was great. Fendi, the make-up artist, was another very creative individual who sculpted our girls “looks” and really brought out their best. Wardrobe stylist Imelda Untoro was yet another vital ingredient to the overall success of the “look” of the TVC and her gracious and understanding manner made her a pleasure to interact with. Others I had worked with before included 1st AD Eugenea Agnes, who was not only an absolute pleasure to work with but conscientious and diligent while always being fun spirited. What more could anyone ask for! Rini had assembled quite an amazing international crew as well as provided a very solid and capable local Indonesian crew, which as awesome!

On that day we tested for as many scenarios as we could before finalising for the shoot. I place a lot of value in rehearsing Actors before any shoot. Keep in mind all our Girls were “civilians” not actors! None of them had any experience at all on screen. They all had a speaking roll to play as well as look glamorous on screen and to their credit, performed magnificently.

On the 8th of March we started filming. The two day shoot was actually quite involved, requiring everyone to imagine a 3D world around them. Quite a number of elements were required to be filmed including a huge list of high resolution images to be used as textures for 3D. Having Damien there on set was absolutely fantastic. He’s a very creative person and it’s great bouncing ideas off him while actually still on set – a process that I really enjoy. Finally with the 2 day shoot behind us, it was time for Post. The guys from BMD flew back to Singapore while I continued on at VHQ Jakarta to oversee the Telecine with Goh Meng. Rushes looked great and I finally met my Offline editor, Zaki Marican. He is a freelance editor who edits on his Macbook Pro and an external monitor. It’s an ever growing trend for editors to be completely independent from Post Houses. Zaki was great. On the 11th of March, he cut the TVC in a small amount of time using the rough 3D animations created on set by Chachoon and Damien Yang. The TVC was actually quite polished even at this stage. Later that afternoon, Rini and her assistant Producer Elle brought in a Composer to receive a brief from me. We talked about musical styles and I handed him a few references. At the end of the day, I felt like a lot had been achieved and good work had taken place!

The 12th of March, we presented first to the Agency and then later to Client. They loved it! On the 13th, I finally flew back to Singapore to handover the Rushes, Edit Decision List etc to Damian at BMD. With that, I left Singapore for home – something I hadn’t done for almost 3 months due to all these back to back projects! The next two weeks, Damien and the gang at BMD spent enormous amounts of time creating and rendering amazing 3D content. They were sending me mpegs to approve along the way. Derri NG (BMD Producer) and I sent each other quite a few emails back and forth, fine tuning things.

On the 30th of March, it was time to fly back to Singapore for the last leg. Over the next week, we rendered out each of the scenes. The Client and Agency arrived in Singapore on the 4th of April and we presented for them a work in progress. The purpose of these final Client/Agency meetings is to make sure that we are all on the same page and are moving forward in the right direction. It affords some minor changes at this point, if the Client wants something corrected by giving the 3D team some time to effect the change. The last couple of days are fixed in stone though. It’s merely a process from then on to finish the TVC. That’s exactly what we did. Hours before I was due to fly back to Australia, I was still overseeing the last renders in the timeline. Lead animator at BMD, Vincent Yoe, spent a few days glued to his seat, continuously! He is one of the most gifted animators I know with a style that I really enjoy. Off course there are others working with him who are equally talented and I thank them all for their help on this project. Damien weaved an incredible amount of compositing magic, blending the 3D with the live action shots and once again proved that he is an exceptionally talented compositor! The Girls all look fantastic and the 3D is very fluid and beautiful to watch in my opinion. Damien is incredible person and a very trusted and dear friend of mine. I always enjoy catching up.

Just as a side note, many of the images you see on this blog entry were shot for the Commercial also. They were used as part of the content of the flipping magazine, although much of that was reduced by me in the final version. I took hundreds of shots of all our cast & crew, including the Agency to be able to fill a magazine full of images etc. This in itself was a big task. As usual, this type of job is a huge collaborative effort. From the resourceful crew at Kemistry Films, to the clever gang at Ogilvy & Mather to the persistent & talented tribe at Blackmagic-Design, I think we created a nice spot for Ponds. The three winning Girls all look great and have a light and feminine touch to their personalities. I would like to thank the patient crew of the shoot for helping me to create this TVC. Hope you enjoy it also. Cheers!

]]> http://www.karlvonmoller.com/blog/2010/05/06/ponds/feed/ 1 http://www.karlvonmoller.com/blog/2010/04/20/singapore-awakens-a-time-lapse-experiment/ http://www.karlvonmoller.com/blog/2010/04/20/singapore-awakens-a-time-lapse-experiment/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:58:42 +0000 Karl von Moller http://www.karlvonmoller.com/blog/?p=3093

Much of my work is away from home. Often I travel to places like Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong to Shoot & Post my television commercial projects.However, I sometimes like to fill my spare time with an experimental project. As an owner of a Canon 5DMKII, I have been shooting time lapse for some time. I even recently posted a short film on Vimeo called the “The World in Motion“, which was shot all over the place using the 5DMKII and time lapse photography. On a recent trip to Singapore, I wanted to capture a sunrise and try and tell a visual story of a new “Dawn” in Singapore. I wanted to showcase the “Awakening” of Singapore as a visually spectacular and technological megapolis. My only problem, it rains in Singapore a lot! So I think I spent nearly 12 very early mornings, shooting the sun rising from various vantage points in the city. I even caught a taxi to “Marina Barrage” to try and film the Singapore flyer (Giant Ferris Wheel) and city scape at dawn. During editing, I could have used even more scenes if I had shot them! With only one camera, it’s difficult to maintain continuity, while still describing the sun rising all over the city. Nearly every single shot has differences from levels of clouds, rainy weather, sun, no sun etc. Still, I don’t think it matters now. Singapore looks amazing at night with it’s city lights. What’s actually more difficult to film, is the day time. I wanted to try and have a certain amount of blur in the motion of objects. That’s not easy, even at 100ASA with the iris stopped right down. So I started to look around for something to help me.

I had heard about a 10 Stop ND (Neutral Density) being released by Lee Filters, which I was pretty keen to hunt down and try out. using a 10 stop ND in daylight hours would allow me to expose a single frame for about one second, blurring the motion of any moving subject. I found one at Cathay Photo and picked it up. While the system isn’t cheap, it’s flexible enough to work with all my lenses, using the appropriate adapter rings. The large square (4×4) glass filter easily covers my largest element lens (82mm).

Using a square filter system is a lot easier to use then the circular types, especially if you stack them. I also purchased the sunshade system to protect the filter from sun flares. This is essentially a paper bellows which can be extended or retracted with relative ease. I did find occasionally that this would creep into frame at times or if I accidentally rotated the front filter holder system on a 45º angle, using a wide angle lens. So my suggestion is to always check your edges before committing to the final position of the filter & shade system.

Another reason to use a 10 stop ND filter was because I was shooting with my new 24mm Shift & Tilt lens. For the most effective focus effects, you really need to shoot wise open or close to. Again in daylight, this would be impossible without a heavy ND filter. However, with the Lee 10 stop, I was shooting in the middle of the day, in full sun, at about f2, with the shutter set to about 1/4 of a second. That’s remarkable! While I didn’t do extensive tests, it is my opinion that there is very little colour shift when using the Lee 10 stop filter. Certainly, not enough for me to care. I graded the images you see in the film in Final Cut Pro. I had more difficulty in matching sunrise levels from shot to shot then any colour shift caused by the 10 stop filter!

Next tip is frame your shot first then put the 10 stop filter on. Otherwise you will see jack through the viewfinder! Luckily, the Lee Filter Holder has a very good quick release mechanism. Because I was working at heights, I was particularly careful with this release mechanism and the way the filter was installed in the Holder at all times. However, it’s well built and easy to use and I trust it now.

My last tip has to do with motion blur and shallow depth of field. The two don’t like each other much. I say this because I was trying to shoot wide open at night and also create some streaking light sources. Trouble is, the image can all look blurry or out of focus quite quickly! So my suggestion is to shoot night scenes, time lapse, with some Stops on the lens to increase your depth of field a little, especially if you are using longer lenses. I typically was shooting f4 at nighttime with a longer exposure time for blur length. If you are after less blur length, then it maybe OK to open the lens up a bit to say f2 but it does depend on your lens size.

Finally, “Singapore Awakens” was filmed using a variety of lenses including the 24mm TS lens, 100-400mm Canon Zoom, 24-105mm Canon Zoom and a Canon 50mm f1.4. I used my Canon Intervelometer again which is very useful and a very lightweight Carbon fibre tripod made by Manfrotto. I do love this tripod but with the heavy click of the shutter, this tripod is not ideal for time lapse. Using Mirror lockup isn’t an option either so my suggestion would be to use a heavier gauged tripod.

As mentioned earlier, I edited the footage in Final Cut Pro. The images were again converted into Apple ProRes (HQ) using Mpeg Streamclip and I scored the soundtrack in Garageband. Actually this was my first experience using Garageband only and it is definitely a very capable soundtrack editor. I normally will use Logic or Soundtrack Pro but I thought I would give Garageband a go.

That’s it for now. Enjoy “Singapore Awakens”.

On the 22nd of February I jumped ship from another project to resume work on a Canon TVC. This commercial was shot in Hong Kong right on New Years Eve December 2009. After production had concluded, I remained in Hong Kong for the New Years Eve celebrations and then traveled to Singapore for the Offline. Over the next few days, VHQ Singapore looked after the Offline edit through editor Corrine Yong, and One-Light/ Final Grade with Corey Spykerman. The Offline was then presented to Client via ECD Hiroshi Yoda (Dentsu Beijing)  back in Beijing.

A break in works commenced as I began work on a documentary project and for the next month, VHQ began to slowly Online the TVC in my absence.

On the 22nd of Feb, we re-grouped in Singapore to finnish the TVC. Swee Aik  Khor was my Online Compositor, who slowly replaced the Hong Kong skyline with mountains and a more appropriate vista! The 3D team headed by Eric Gambini, created a 3D EOS 5DMKII Camera and a Canon Legria HM31 Camcorder plus hundreds of photo frames that represent the high quality image sequence that the camcorder can produce using the same technology that’s found inside it’s professional EOS stills cameras. Over that week, VHQ worked pretty hard to meet our deadline, which meant delivering a Master by Sunday the 28th of Feb. On the 27th of February, we stepped into AMX Studios, off Bukit Paso Rd Singapore. and David Ong mixed and Engineered Jonathan Lim’s Score.

Shooting Gallery Producers Freddie Kee & Leollyne Teng put together the shoot in Hong Kong in record time. Daniel Wu was only available for a certain amount of time before he began production of a major motion picture film in China with Kevin Spacey. That meant that the shoot had to occur with very little preproduction lead up. Amazingly, directly after Christmas, we shot the commercial. Daniel was fantatsic to work with again. I had previously worked with him on another Canon TVC shot almost a year earlier. That time I had suspended Daniel from wires, using a Hong Kong Wire stunt team. This time, we were asking him to ride a horse at high speed! Luckily for me, he’s a great guy and doesn’t mind mucking it out! Because the weather was a constant threat and it was the height of winter, the shoot had to be quick. That meant fast setups, lots of fast rigging and plenty of large scale movement across a large disused land fill site. We quickly changed from dolly shots, to hand held (using an easy rig) on a tracking vehicle chasing Daniel riding his horse. Then back to static camera shooting Green Screen shots. The day was action packed and we had to complete everything before the light fell or it started to rain! Adding to the complication were all the special effect requirements. The sequence of images that form on one particular shot involved a complicated locked off camera shot. Daniel and the Horse would then ride through at high speed. The Camera was then released from the lock-off and traveled on an arc through the line of imaginary images left behind Daniel. The ground was so rough here that it was almost impossible to get a smooth track with what we had and the given time. Still the idea is strong and I think it works.

The Hong Kong production team were really excellent again. Mostly they were the same team I had worked with a year a go, so I felt very comfortable working with them again. The combination of the locals and the small Shooting Gallery Team from Singapore were very efficient. In addition to the film crew, we also had horse wranglers, two horses, tracking vehicle department, and a large Agency team. Actually one of them, John, took it upon himself to act as the rain guardian and spent quite a bit of time directing the clouds with his arms! Luckily we completed the shoot and made it safely back to Singapore.

Back in Singapore, the filming continued. In the Shooting Gallery Studio, we completed the product shots on a purpose built S board. Raman is an in house set constructor and all round “fix it” guy who is just amazing to work with. His brain is wired to think logically and cleverly solve production problems, using anything available to him. On this job, his task was relatively easy but he did it with incredible speed and flare!

After a long day on the 28th, we “Mastered” the TVC and it was done! All in all, I’m happy with the outcome. There were many limitations placed on us while making this TVC. Firstly we had to film everything in Hong Kong – there aren’t too many places you can recreate the wild west in Hong Kong! Secondly, the weather was not in our favour! All things aside, I think we managed to produce an interesting spot for Canon.

The TVC can be viewed here. A making of video can be seen on Vimeo here . Enjoy!

While driving around country Victoria Australia, in early 2009, I stopped by an old Sawmill near Jubilee Lake in the township of Daylesford. Daylesford has an amazing history including playing a large role during the 1850′s – 1950′s Gold Rush era. Today it’s Melbourne’s weekend escape with many Spa & Massage Centres, thanks to the naturally occurring mineral springs, Restaurants and Art Galleries. However Daylesford has many hidden gems, including the subject of my mini documentary.

My family has a long history with the township of Daylesford, including my Grandmother who taught at the local High School. So I remember traveling to various peoples homes to get things like eggs, milk, bread and honey. For some reason, there are several families that make honey in the district. However I remembered one particular place that looked more like an industrial sawmill then a place to get honey. Having recently fallen in love with my Canon 5DMKII’s ability to record HD video, I thought to myself, why not go back to the mill and ask if I could walk around, take some videos and stills. So on a slightly wet and dreary day, I rocked up with nothing more then my camera.

Barry is the Beekeeper. He’s been working the property for ever, having built the place by hand from scrap. It’s difficult to find words that describe what exactly Barry has built other then I would like to describe it as a “Terry Gilliam” inspired work of art! In all fairness, Barry has built everything he needs to make Honey, including growing the Timber to make the Bee Boxes! Hence the Sawmill’s purpose. After logging the forrest, his small team then turn the raw timber into planks that make Bee Boxes. He makes the Wax inserts that will eventually house the honey, as well as obviously taking the Boxes out into the fields where the Bees do all their work. After the Bee Boxes are recovered, he produces Honey & Wax and sells it all over the world. There are people who travel from as far away as India to buy from him.

So I didn’t really arrive at his door step with a great plan. I just wanted to record some of the visuals before time took it all away and have some fun with my camera. Barry is a very kind and generous man. Not only did he allow me to film him and ask questions, he took me on a detailed and frank journey about his life’s work. With my handheld 5DMKII camera with no external microphone or any lighting, I followed him around the property as he explained a few things to me. In my haste, I forgot to switch off the Image Stabiliser on the 24-105mm lens I was using and the sound has a nasty rattle running through everything I shot. I don’t think it matters because the industrial setting does allow for such mechanical noises but I did also reduce it in Post Production. I used Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro to edit “The Beekeeper”. Using the noise removal tools in Soundtrack Pro greatly helped the audibility of the dialogue.

At the time of filming, I was using the 1.0.4 firmware so everything was 30fps only. I converted all the footage to Sony’s XDCAM 35mb/sec format because mostly I was cutting on a laptop and I didn’t want the files size to bog me down. It’s actually a really great codec that looks nice without getting silly on the file sizes. Because Canon hadn’t released it’s FCP plugin, the conversion was done in Mpeg Streamclip. Back in Final Cut Pro I did add some colour adjustments here and there but not on everything. I loved mostly how it looked as it came off the camera. Because the day was quite gloomy and dark, I was shooting wide open and the resulting depth of field is very pleasing. The tones in the scene were largely monotone browns and blacks, which helped give the images an amazing look. So not much was needed to enhance the overall look and feel.

In less then two hours, I had shot an interview, a good amount of cutaways that I could add as overlay and said goodbye to Barry. I can tell you as practicing filmmaker, that is very fast. To add to it, I was completely by myself. In the professional world I can’t do that! So the power of my 5DMKII is not lost on my at all. Some would argue, “Well hang on, I could do that before with my camcorder!” That’s true, but we could never do the job with such film style and aesthetics. At best we could approach Television style news gathering quality but not a rich Cinema experience. Armed with my laptop, I was also able to do most things on battery power and in the field with no other resources such as tape decks, edit suit, or sound studio! Does that change the ability to tell a great story? – I certainly think it helps.

Several months later I went back to see Barry but this time I took along good friend Tibor Hegedis, who lives in Daylesford as well. He’s an experienced filmmaker in his own right and he was gracious enough to come along and help me re-shoot the doco but this time with more gear, more time etc. We shot for most of the day and I used a Dolly, Lights and Pro level Sound Gear to record interviews etc. However, a really strange thing occurred later. As I was cutting the new footage, I felt it looked manufactured and fake. It looked setup! I actually felt crestfallen by it because I had worked so hard to make better the situation. So for the next few months I kind of left it and moved on to other work. Recently I looked at the original raw edit and was surprised that it was actually quite watchable. The rawness of the interview and the unplanned nature of the questions even seemed to be more honest and believable then the revised version. So after much indecision I decided to post it on Vimeo.com so the world at least could pass comment. Barry’s story is worth watching and he really is an engaging individual. Hopefully, with so many DSLR’s now out in the world shooting video, the lives of individuals, Societies and their hard work can be better recorded for the future. It’s exciting to see technology advance but when it has such a profound impact on our own lives and the lives of the next generation, I can truly appreciate the importance of such a technological change.

Feel free to comment yourself. Enjoy!

After finally making it back home for a couple of weeks, back in Melbourne, I have been able to catchup with family and friends but also process many of the images I have captured around the world.

When ever I get the time, I try to do some time lapse photography. I’m not entirely sure why, I just felt that it would be a good idea to do a little here and there to form a collection of sequences that could be used on commercial projects etc. Lately I have been thinking that it’s a shame these images aren’t out in the open for people to see. So I started to collate them onto a timeline in Final Cut Pro. With no real theme or purpose, I started to formulate an edit based on a music video style approach and realised that a theme did exist – The World in Motion. For what it’s worth, here is my short film, made entirely out of time lapse I shot on my 5DMKII, using a 24mm Shift & Tilt Lens, 50mm f1.4 Canon Lens, 24-105mm Canon zoom & a 15mm Canon wide angle lens. I used a Canon TC-80N3 Intervalometer to control the camera. The camera was nearly always mounted to my Manfrotto Tripod. I say nearly always because rarely I did do some time lapse with the camera sitting on a box or chair etc.

I use MPEG Streamclip by Squared 5 to assemble the images into a Quicktime movie. Generally I use Apple Prores 422(HQ) as the codec. I then edit the footage inside Apples Final Cut Pro. I will make a note though, when ever possible, I try to shoot with a ND8 filter on so that I can set my exposure time to something close to half a second. It depends what the subject is but generally I try to shoot some where between 1/8th – 3/4′s of a second. This is because I generally don’t like the crisp, sharp time lapse that creates a very rigid staccato movement. This video unfortunately has quite a lot of this which works OK but generally I prefer the softer look of the blurred movement. Knowing what level of blur is acceptable is really the key to doing great Time Lapse work.

This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the footage I’ve shot, however in the future I might consider editing the rest into another short. Incidentally, the music is composed in Garageband by yours truly. Mostly loops with a smattering of Midi instruments. Finally, all the images you see in this edit were shot in 2010 from January through to March. Hope you enjoy it.

To watch the movie see it on Vimeo.com here or click any of the above images.

After Machete Maidens concluded in Singapore, I stayed on while the rest of the crew headed back to Melbourne. While I can’t divulge what exactly I was working on, other then that it was for Canon, there wasn’t any spare time between the two jobs. The next morning was spent re-familiarising myself with the footage and approving work created by VHQ in Singapore. The process of working on television commercials is just so different to long form projects, it’s always a bit of a culture shock to me when I swap between the two styles of filmmaking! A week of intense Post Production activities past and at the end of it, I think we produced a pretty amazing commercial. I will certainly blog about the experience when the time is right.

In true fashion, the TVC was completed on a Sunday night, after the last official day of the Chinese New Year Celebrations ended! Actually, I went down to Chinatown to witness the fireworks display and street theatre that took place in Singapore. Quite a cool experience. However, on Monday the 1st of March, I flew to Jakarta to start my next job. As it turned out, again there was no break between the projects! After landing I went straight into preproduction meetings at the office before finally crashing in my hotel room!

I’m now deeply intrenched into the preproduction stage of that job, with filming to start on the 8th of March and conclude on the 9th!

On the 15th of February, the Machete Maiden’s Team flew from London’s Heathrow Airport to Manila via Singapore. The massively long and boring flight was also apparently our day off according to the schedule! That’s a whole other issue, our days off have been far too few considering the time zone changes etc but I wont linger on this. Otherwise, the production has been going very well.

Back in London, after our whirlwind tour of Paris, the Team moved from our hotel in Acton North, to Ealing Studios. Talk about amazing. The historically important film studios of Ealing are legendary. Unfortunately, the place is falling apart by the seems and rotting to pieces! We were based at the back of the Studios in a former ADR studio. This had been guttered and while usable for what we were doing, the studio was in bad repair. On the walls were photographs of past productions which certainly reminded us of the importance of this place in film history! Rushing to setup, we interviewed three filmmakers before rushing to pack our gear up for a massive travel!

At the last minute, an interview with John Landis was made possible! Unfortunately for us, he was shooting his new movie in Kent that day, so we drove for an hour and a half through traffic. John is shooting a period film at a historic manner which was dressed with hundreds of extras, horses and a courtyard filled with period furnishings that just looked amazing! We were rushed past the enormous unit base, through the grounds of the historic building to an upstairs room the size of shoe box! In fact, considering where we were filming, our interview took place in a bland and boring environment which was a shame! The interview it self was amazing! John is a very knowledgeable and incredibly articulate man.

Arriving back at our hotel very late, we just made it to dinner at the pub across the road (The Castle) before returning to our rooms to pack up! At around midnight, I finished packing down all my gear ready for the flight to Manila. The flight required us to leave the hotel at 6AM which was hard. Finally we took off from 0ºC that morning in London to +30ºC in Manila! Only 2 days ago we had been in -3ºC in Paris so not only are we dealing with the time zone differences but the massive shift in climatic conditions. Arriving at the hotel in Manila at around 5PM local time, we checked in and had only a 20 minute walk around before collapsing at a Chinese restaurant for a feed. Then back to our rooms where I barely remember hitting the pillow!