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  • How To: Blend Mode Colour Correction in Premiere Pro (Lynda)

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to share a great little Adobe Premiere Pro tutorial by the ever resource-driven team at Lynda.

    If you make videos, then you ought to know that good videos have been treated in order to make the colour consistent. Just think – how many Hollywood blockbusters would you have avoided if the production companies hadn’t entrusted a colour-grading specialist to overlay the ubiquitous (and film critic nightmare) “orange and teal” colour system? More than a few I would wager!

    Case in Point…

    Despite Hollywood’s apparent reluctance to stray too far afield of their orange and teal ideal over the last 20 years or so (though to be fair, there have been other stereotyped colour visuals employed – for example, stark, or bleached white scenes depicting the future… warm orange scenes depicting the inside of a medieval inn… blues and/or greens employed to depict science fiction… you get the picture) – we shouldn’t throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Colour grading ought to be an indispensable element of the video-maker’s production schedule. But what if you don’t have the budget to hire a colour grader? What if, like me, you are more an indie-shooter that quite often produces the work from top-to-tail in a guerilla fashion? Are we to be left at the mercy of the raw footage? In short, no… there are tips and tricks that we can employ to help us smooth out our work too. And this video is one such tip.

    Adobe’s Premiere Pro can afford us with a unique – and visually-pleasing – result by employing some basic blending and adjustment layer functions. And as noted by the No Film School post on this same clip, author “Ashley Kennedy recently shared some extremely helpful tips for using blend modes to correct exposure and contrast issues, as well as some tips for using blend modes to create color casts.”

    Is it perfect? No. It may not even be ideal. But when you are on your own, or are in a seriously bad way with your footage – then this might be just the kind of trick that can help you to salvage something out of the situation. I hope you enjoy.

  • Video Essay: That’s Just Too Much Johnson Welles!

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to share a short video essay that interestingly brings to light the more humble beginnings of Orson Welles.

    74-years after crafting a picture that tells a simple, subtle story that works brilliantly in capturing our attention from the first frame onwards, Orson Welles still inspires. And for many cinephiles, the greatness of Citizen Kane is inextricably linked to the fact that the masterpiece was Welles’ debut work. Even so, whether it was his first or thirteenth film – there ought to be no disagreement that it stands as one of the most arresting films ever produced.

    Having said that, Welles did in fact have pre-Kane films.  The relatively recent 2014 surfacing of his 1938 work Too Much Johnson is an excellent case in point. Though somewhat rudimentary – we can see elements of the master technician practising his craft at least 3-years before Kane’s release. The work also does a lot to dispel the occasional assertion that Welles was a cinematic naif unschooled in the basic grammar of film. Oh, there is so much that may be discussed about this… but rather than bore you with my own verbage, let me rather introduce you to this little video essay by Kevin B. Lee on the whole matter.

    https://vimeo.com/103837463

    Note:  allow me to add this – I find it absolutely fascinating that the surviving film elements of Too Much Johnson somehow ended up in an Italian warehouse before being acquired by the USA’s National Film Preservation Foundation! It is almost as fascinating as the man himself!

  • How To: The Five Pillars of Exposure

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to share an excellent little tutorial on how to get the most out of exposure. Seriously. You have no idea how much I want you to see this video. This is one of those kind of clips… the potentially life altering ones!

    Okay, that was a bit OTT. Still – I love this clip.

    The team at Realm Pictures have taken what is often a long-winded subject (exposure and lighting), and they have cleverly condensed it into a nice neat package of just over 6 minutes. Whether you are just starting – or you just need a reference guide reminder on how to best use exposure in your videography – then this gem is definitely what you will want to come back to. Please enjoy responsibly. 🙂

  • Demo: Lily Camera Drone

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to share two different clips: the first is the promo video for a new drone camera that is getting set to hit the market soon (pre-order sales are already available) – the Lily. The second is little bit of a hands-on (as it were) demo of the machine.

    The tech specs on this little piece of kit are certainly interesting enough to warrant a further look. Even though the chances are that the first gen of Lily won’t be as great as it could potentially be (when are they ever?), there are always going to be subsequent releases with updated mods (amiright?). In fact I can already imagine version 2 will incorporate an object awareness sensor that is currently MIA from version 1. So, with its intuitive hands-off approach to shooting, I still think that it would still be fun to have one of these to play around with.

    Anyway, that is enough from me. Here is the hands on demo from the team at Resource Magazine for you to check out.

  • Video Essay: Rear Window (Michael McLennan)

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to share a short clip that was pieced together by one of my friends, Michael McLennan. Michael also happens to be a long-time cinephile who has worked as producer, director of photography, editor, sound designer, music editor, and has also taught across a variety of film disciplines at the Sydney Film School. Recently picked up by the Indiewire team, today’s clip is a simple video essay that demonstrates Hitchcock’s amazing capacity for structural story-telling. In this instance, we find the story engaging with the audience through a carefully constructed repetition of symmetry.

    I personally find that such examples really ought to reinforce the idea that while amateurs point and shoot and think something along the lines of, “I hope this will look good!” – professionals plan and plan and plan, thinking more along the lines of, “How do I want this to look?” If we want to up our game and get our work seen – then we can all continue to learn tricks from the masters of cinema like this. I hope you enjoy.

  • Video: Redneck Avengers

    Okay everyone today I want to continue with my Avengers theme – albeit with a fun little video. While the first series of videos were average YouTube fare – it was their late-2013 Game of Thrones clip that definitely propelled the team at Bad Lip Reading onto the viral video scene. Since then they have continued to bring out fun clips of various sorts.

    On Sunday, the team did it again with a fresh lip reading take on the Avengers! And in much the same way that I appreciate Weird Al Yankovic for his creative capacity to parody countless musical acts, I appreciate the hard work that goes into making this kind of video. So I hope you will enjoy the fun, stupidity, and bad lip reading antics with me!

  • Article: “Camera Choices for Avengers: Age of Ultron”

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to link out to a great little article that gives a concise breakdown of the camera choices that were made for the latest Marvel Universe blockbuster – Avengers: Age of Ultron – with insights by the DP himself, Ben Davis. You can read the full piece here.

    The fun fact for me was seeing that the diverse little beastie – the BlackMagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera – gets a shout out as a one of the tools used to make the film. Yeah that’s right – portions of the epic Avengers was shot on a BMDPCC! Very cool. So check out the article, and let me know what you think.

  • Audio Interview: Kay Cannon – Comedy Writer of Pitch Perfect 2

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I wanted share a piece that discusses the recently released movie, Pitch Perfect 2. For those who don’t know (or don’t care, I guess), this comedy sequel is about about a cappella singers (which, for what it’s worth, made more than US$70 million at the box office on its opening weekend . That is more than the first Pitch Perfect took in over its entire theatrical release in 2012 – as well as being the biggest debut ever for a movie musical).

    As the title suggests, today’s link is to an audio interview done with Kay Cannon: writer of Pitch Perfect 2. Well before Pitch Perfect came on the scene though, Cannon sunk her teeth into writing for comedy television – such as NBC’s hit 30 Rock (she won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedic Series for her work on 30 Rock on three separate occasions) as well as Fox’s New Girl.

    From NPR’s Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, this is a fascinating insight into the world of comedic writing for film and television in particular… and it is a great reminder that all of you writers out there are an indispensable part of the production process.

    https://soundcloud.com/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/kay-cannon

  • How To: Colouring Compliments in Photoshop

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to share an excellent tute that goes through some mid-level colour correction using Photoshop.

    Now why on earth would I want to share a Photoshop tutorial on a blog that has to do with videography and the like? The simple reason is that I like the presenter. That and the fact that understanding how to utilise complimentary colours is one of those fundamental techniques we all ought to be aware of, regardless of whether the images we work with are still or moving.

    Those who have learned their colour-jiu-jitsu are generally the ones that have been able to progress from a mobile phone kind of photographer/videographer that needs Instagram filters to help prop up their shots. Take it from me – tutes like this one are a great way of building up your skill set in this area. I hope you enjoy it.

  • How To: A Comprehensive Cheat Sheet for Adobe

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to share an excellent infographic. For those of us who are part of the Adobe Universe, you will know that short-cuts have a funny way of increasing productivity, right? If only there was a way to easily find and/or remember what some of the really important ones were! Oh wait – there is!

    Thanks to the team at Set Up A Blog Today, we now have access to a comprehensive cheat sheet that outlines a range of the important short-cuts to a host of our favourite Adobe products: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, FireWorks, Flash, Premiere Pro, and After Effects!

    Need some of that action? Get it right here. And as a bonus tid-bit – scroll down the the bottom of the post to get access to the PDF versions of the individual cheat sheets.