A Tree Film
I recently bought myself the Canon 5d MkII. The reason I sucked it up and spent the cash on the camera was because I actually needed to shoot some HD footage for a project I’m working on. Instead of renting and hiring a camera guy for basically the same price for a few seconds of footage, I bought the camera and shot and directed myself. So there was a legitimate business purpose and not just a “i want it” kind of reasoning.
Now the project shoot with the camera went fine. I had a great production team, lighting was amazing, footage looked great, camera did it’s job, i’m happy and the client is happy. But in the month that i’ve had the 5d I really hadn’t had any time to shoot much else (other than a bunch of footage of my kids sitting in front of the t.v., wondering why i was shooting them doing nothing.). Anyway, yesterday was a pretty nice day out and I had just wrapped a meeting with my client downtown, so on the way back home I stopped and decided to try out some “nature” shooting. It’s not the most incredibly compelling footage you’ll ever see, but it was just a reason to see what the camera could get me without any lighting or real thought to set up of any kind. I think the stuff looks pretty good for trees, weeds and some more trees.
Anyway… here is the epic “film”, “Tottenham Forest” with music by Thomas Newman.
As for a workflow… I imported the H.264 QT files > Batch converted them to ProRes 422 via MPEG Streamclip > Edited them in FCP (i have FCP2 with a MatroxMini MXO) > Colour graded with Magic Bullet Looks> Rendered > Went to bed, got up > Exported a movie straight out of FCP > Converted for upload to YouTube and Vimeo with Compressor. I conformed the 30fps to 24fps with Cinema Tools as a test to see what it looks like… and it looked cool. But for laziness sake, I didn’t bother with a full conform because of… laziness, as previously stated at the beginning of the sentence. I just didn’t want to re-edit, Cinema Tools simply slows down the footage, and I didn’t want to wait for the Compressor to render a conform. Lazy.
This workflow is taken from Phillip Bloom. And he explains it much better on his site and the Canon site. His “films” are actually that… films, and they look amazing.
I’m off to have a tuna sandwich.
Wow