I wanted to do something with the 5DMKII footage I shot in Hong Kong over New Years Eve and decided earlier to sit down and edit it. However, like all creative processes, the job always seems easier at first and then grows exponentially! Copyright free music was my problem. So I launched Logic and started composing a piece of music especially for this short video. But what genre of music? Which instruments would sound right? Luckily I had recently bought a few discs worth of samples so I spent the next few hours creating a soundtrack for my short film. Finally I could actually start editing. I knew already that I wanted to edit in a Music Video Clip style, so I began to cut the images to the beat of the music. The footage I had shot was all shot in one night – New Years Eve 2009/2010, in Central, Hong Kong. I didn’t actually know where the fireworks was going to take place and had taken a MTR to Causeway Bay. There I walked along the shoreline towards Central, where I chanced upon the perfect spot to film the event! There were easily half a million people around the Harbour, maybe even more as the fireworks exploded overhead. Although the fireworks display was quite short (around 15 minutes), the display was spectacular!

The 5D MKII’s strength is definitely it’s low light capabilities when shooting HD Video. It’s still recording in 30FPS which is annoying to me, however hopefully in February we may see a firmware update that will solve this. I also used my brand new 50mm f1.4 lens, which afforded me 2 more stops of light I wouldn’t have had otherwise! This lens is amazing. Very sharp and and at f1.4, produces the most perfect Bokeh. As well as shooting HD Video at 1920 x 1080, I shot quite a lot of stills in RAW mode. Later I combined these stills using QuickTime7 (on Mac OSX 10.6, it’s buried in the Utilities folder for some reason). I also shot several Time Lapse sequences using a Canon TC-80N3 controller. All the sequences including the 5D HD Video footage was converted to the XDCam (1920 x 1080, 30fps 35mb/sec VBR) codec. This made editing a lot more pleasant in Final Cut Pro. I didn’t spend any time on a Grade, so the final images you see in the video (minus the effects of re-compression) are as they were shot! In a perfect world, I would spend more time with my setups when shooting, but given I only had a few hours to film the event, I’m happy with the result. Enjoy! The video is uploaded to my Vimeo account. You can access it by clicking on the image above or navigating to http://vimeo.com/user735977

On boxing day 2009, I boarded a flight to Hong Kong, headed towards a new Television Commercial project. 2009 was one of those strange years for me that hummed along quietly & occasionly faulted! What I mean by that is work simply stopped! So my motivation to rip myself away from my family & go directly back to work so soon after Christmas was fuelled by my desire to start the new decade off with a bang! We actually shot the commercial two days later which is amazing! With two horses, a famous Hong Kong TV star & a day of pretending we were out on the badlands of the wild west, we filmed action sequences that looked pretty cool! More on that in a future blog entry!

Regional Group EP Shooting Gallery Asia - Freddy Kee

Because my Post Production started four days later in Singapore, I decide to stay in Hong Kong for New Years Eve rather then face 16 hours of flying to and from Australia! Having no idea where to go for New Years Eve in Hong Kong, I decided that the harbour area would surely have a fireworks display and a countdown?! Google didn’t really offer to many clues where and Hong Kong Harbour is pretty big! Any case, I ended up down at Causeway Bay and walked along the shoreline towards Central. Amazingly I arrived at the Exhibition Centre, just at the mouth of the bay at Central to find the perfect position. By 11pm, the place was so full of people that you couldn’t move around. Somehow I lucked it in and found the perfect position. There, I watched an amazing countdown and fireworks display to herald the new decade!

TV Producer for Shooting Gallery Asia - Leollyne Teng

I’m now in Singapore Post Producing the TVC. This will take about a week, departing Singapore on the 10th of January. A crazy schedule will follow a short stay in Melbourne though. I have just signed up for another massive road trip that will take a small crew round the globe! This will commence on February the 1st and end on the 1st of March!