first clip

so here is the first clip / short that i did a long while ago; perhaps february? i had the camera for maybe a few weeks and david and i were thinking that we needed a very small project to first cut our teeth on. carina was nice enough to invite us to a night of bowling so i wrote up like a short 1 page 'screenplay'. the original plan was for it to be a faux documentary absurdist/black humor piece with interviews clips that compared bowling, specifically, mindless destruction of pins, to genocide ... the actual result (after culling through a morass of bad footage and some basic editing) was more like a really dark (in many ways), elegiac intro to a ... i don't even know what:



several now obvious (but at the time i think, caught up in the enthusiasm, i decided to just plunge in there w/o much consideration) lessons were learned that night; lessons that encompass basically every fundmental facet of capturing video

(1) the bowling / bar was way too dark. the lens we used (the kit lens that came with the gh1) wasn't a very "fast" lens either (a fast lens will allow more light into the sensor, so it doesn't require as much lighting in the environment, ie, good for dim situations). the result was that every shot was extremely dark. although, in a moment of some ingenuity, we took the lamp shade off one of some random lamp to use as lighting.

(2) the place was fucking noisy, and all i had for sound was my zoom h2 sound recorder. the h2 is great for capturing environment sound, but that was exactly what i didn't want. instead of catching the voice of the person being interviewed, it recorded the sound of the entire bar. in hindsight, a good shotgun mic would have been better, although, really in a place that loud, you just record the ambient sound and then overdub the lines later.

(3) hand holding the camera provides for some headache inducing shaky shots. professionals usually have the camera shoulder mounted or even strapped to a steady cam full body suit to dampen the small vibrations. i promptly bought a stout tripod, and though i still get tempted by the ease of handholding sometimes, i find that i just regret it afterwards.

doing the editing was also pretty edifying --

(1) if you go into a shoot with no real plan and no control over it, then, be prepared to throw away 95% of your footage, because the chances of the random footage magically cohering into narrative of any kind is small.

(2) holy shit, music makes all the difference. without the soundtrack its just some shots of driving around and dark stuff! now at least the shots make sense in terms of a atmosphere setting context.

couple of things make this clip compelling for me; the shot of my friend twirling a pen that gets faded in the beginning, and the shots of the hockey game.