October 11, 2005

Sequential Images: Diamond Knights Video

Sai (whom I worked with to do a composite image last week) and I created a video narrative, using sequential images taken with our digital cameras. The idea was inspired by Sia's music video for Breathe Me. You might recognize the song as the music that was played during the ending sequence of Six Feet Under's final episode.

We spent all day Thursday "filming." Basically, we put our cameras into continuous shooting mode and then biked around the city. I took 3rd person and external shots, and Sai had his camera velcro'd to his bike's handlebars for 1st-person biking footage. We set up a few special scenes, too, like the opening scene, which we filmed using a tripod in front of Sai's apartment as he brought out and assembled his bike and then rode out of the frame. There's a tiny glitch that you can see where Sai hesitates for a second as he is tightening his front wheel. This is because my camera's flash memory started to get full, which greatly slows down its ability to take pictures. I had to have him freeze and wait for my camera to catch up before we could continue shooting.

The other special scene was the crash sequence. We filmed this a number of different times to get the timing right, and there were a couple of sequences that didn't make it into the final production. The sequence with Sai going overhead is one that I'm pretty happy with.

The most difficult part about the whole process was probably the editing. We used iMovie to import sequences of images (from iPhoto) and then converted them into movie clips that we could arrange and cut as we liked. This was not such a problem (though iMovie has some idiosyncracies that we had to acclimate to), but it became really difficult to keep things moving at the right tempo when we started to attempt to use the musical cues for our scene changes. Ordering the clips and timing them right so that they work with the music changes was difficult. In the end, though, it is pretty clear that it was important that we did so. The piece is so much stronger when it plays right with the music.

Posted October 11, 2005 01:27 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 5 | Permalink