Random stuff

This is the third part of the BUGro making of. – Part I and Part II

The video in 720p can be found from here.

So after the first day we were able to shoot in physically smaller apertures and got the full manual control on things. That made it easier to get things right – even though it required constant adjusting of settings as the lighting conditions changed a lot. In any case this kind of material would not have been at least easier to shoot in full auto though. =) (Most making-of photos are taken by McLad)

Also one considerable problem was the shake that was there for second or two after the setup had been adjusted. You have to take you hands off completely and let it stabilize before the material is ok – example below.

Here’s also a shot of a setup where I’m shooting with my genitals and the metal-tripod (fence running between these elements) very close to an electric fence:

And some of the shots required the rig to be a bit more vulnerable. Notice the tripod ledge on the verge – luckily didn’t push it down.

When we were working in the edit on the third day in the making we took a break and went outside. Now that we were familiar with the shooting of the stuff we instantly found out loads of places and bugs to film and when we couldn’t stand it anymore we had to get the camera out. Although for example the ladybug didn’t really want to get shot on video at all covering herself under anything available.

So one of the tactics was just to find someone, setup, compose the shot and wait for something to happen. The last picture is from the closing shot with the small beetles in the sunset. It was hard to focus but when the composition was right I just stood there waiting. The clip was at least 5 minutes long to get the footage wanted. You can get some sense of the scale if you watch the closing shot and note that those beetles move on the small yellow flower closest to the lens.

So the learning period with the shooting of BUGro was over. As you may notice it was just a brief test – nothing like a planned production. That is what makes it interesting for us. We can now have a base knowledge on how and which kind of material can be done with the setup.

So why did we create the video out of it?
Because it helps us to understand the material and what works and what does not. After shooting the material we could not have said how well and what from the footage works so we had to use the footage to be familiar with it. After all we had probably 5 times more footage than we used in the end. Some footage was not good enough and some contained features that could not be shown in less than the 1080p resolution. A lot of surprises were seen when we went through the footage as we didn’t really notice everything that happened on the screen on the set.

So the first prototype is now done. I’m not sure if we still go with an another kind of prototype which might include something of a more non-traditional elements or should we go straight to the ideas we ultimately had and what for we got dozens of new ideas more from the prototype. But now is not the time for talking about that.

This was so far the last part of the BUGro making of. But it may be that we come up with some extra video material to show and most probably at some stage we release the 1080p version of the video. So stay tuned.

As you can notice from my latest posts – we did an entry for the Assembly 2009 shortfilm competition. It ended up to 4th place in the results. Likewise my fast graphics competition entry was also 4th.

The theme for the fast graphics compo was “Over the edge” and the timelimit to create the piece from scratch was 1,5 hours. Which includes packaging, creating thumbnail and filling a form and sending it in. So practically it’s something a bit over an hour.

1280×720 version of the fast graphics entry behind this link.

This is the second part of the BUGro making of. Part I – Part III

BUGro in Youtube (Watch it in HD if you can)

So after the first shooting day (actually an evening) we only had material shot with apertures somewhere around 2.8-5.0 and the focused part of the picture was around 1 mm by hunch. So it was actually quite hard to get anything on focus or keeping it in there. Especially without the focus rail. After all we got couple of good shots on that day well worth using. For example here’s a crop from a video of one of them (not full resolution):

We have no idea what it is but already the worm-kind of thing was so small that we didn’t notice it before we pointed the camera on the stump. I was actually trying to rig the camera to take a video of a nice mushroom when we spotted those from the camera screen.

After the first day we searched from the Internet about the 5D mark II manual settings problem. Solving it was simple and I’m quite sure I we were not the first ones struggling with the problem. A tutorial from the Canon digital learning center says: “This last point is vital: If your Screen Settings are anywhere but “Movie Display” you will not be able to manually adjust exposure.” Oh, ok. And that was it. Even though I suppose this was something that had to be there this way for some reason – it really wasn’t that obvious that you need to change that setting to get it working in the first place. Good that the tutorial was available and we found it though.

On the second day we got a bit more depth to the shots as we actually left only the ISO to auto and just checked that it wasn’t dropping down to 6400 for the shots. In theory we had a minimum limit of ISO3200 even though we do have some shots with 6400 but those didn’t leave any room for edit and was not perfect enough for us. We left the shutter time to 1/30 as we didn’t have any fast movement to stop and mainly just tweaked WB and aperture for the shoots. In the end of the second day the shooting started to go smoothly and after that we moved to the editing table.

Example from the second shooting-evening above. Even though the highly reflective bum of the fly reflects the camera and myself too – it was one of the most enjoyable shots we got from that day. One of my favorites from the day was a small fly that hid behind a grass straw and followed me long time from both sides of the straw. I suppose it was a shy case of a fly. The shot failed technically though but you can see it lurking right here:

We didn’t plan to shoot more material but on a break from the editing table we went outside and took camera with us and managed to grab one of the best shots I think we got in the whole process. I’ll write about it in the part III.

BUGro making of Part III

Having had enough of vacation time – I needed to get disconnected a bit and decided to film a short film with my friend Joona Poikonen. Lucky enough I got a possibility to work on it for couple of days and as most that we did was more of a learning based creative work I suppose I should write about it in here:

It all started from an idea to shoot some stuff with the 5D Mark 2 I currently use as it can shoot 1080p HD-video. Which is of course cool as there’s the magical two jargon-letters that can render everything better by just mentioning them. I had an idea of shooting some random macro-stuff and when we had an meeting with Joona we realized that the only macro objective we have is an EF-S objective. Which of course wouldn’t work with full-frame camera (and actually by searching from internet forums turns out to be one of those things that drags black holes towards them: “why would you even want to do that” – “There would be some much vignetting that there would be no point”). Yeah – if we would trust teh people of teh internets – the story would end here. With some searching we found out that there is a way to do it … by sawing off part attached to the connecting ring of the objective that I do not recommend for anyone and we didn’t do that either(!). We just bought some extension tubes that could connect both EF and EF-S objectives to it. As we were going to shoot macro footage the extension tubes were welcome anyway.

First impressions were that there was practically no added vignetting from the EF-S objective and that we needed a lot more light to get good takes with the macro lens. Also tripod is a must. One thing we never got that we should have had was a macro focusing rail. Focusing without it cumulated a lot of extra work in the shooting. Here is the first test with the setup:

(a Petanque ball rail)

The first shooting day we didn’t get the manual settings working in the 5D Mark 2 video mode despite the fact that I had the new firmware in it. The cure was simple and I will talk about it in the next part.

BUGro in Youtube (Watch it in HD if you can)
Making of Part II