So. I’ve been reaching out trying to get some workflows from well to do(s) that I can easily contact. Thus far I haven’t received to much info. Mainly because editing is a personal experience as is the organization therein. Almost like setting your apps the way you’d like on your nifty phone but on a grander scale. The way I attack a project is different than the way another goof would. I’m editing a multi camera shoot. It’s a short film. Im in the syncing phase and up until now I’ve had one camera films and only used multicam with pluraleyes when syncing weddings which is usually just a long sequence with all the clips. My brain started to fart out around the time this project fell in my lap due to syncing “the audio source” with multiple angles for loads of takes on the front end and then editing. I usually sync and separate the footage into bins labeled as each scene. Do I sync each clip with the audio? Create Multi clips? So far all avenues have led me to just syncing every take and every camera with the audio and going from there. That’s how my brain works. I’ll let you know how it goes. What are your workflows? What are your techniques? Love to hear them.

-s

Mark and I were invited up to Maryland to film a wedding for Zachary and Layla Foster after they watched our video for his brother Josh. It seems rather customary in the Wedding Videography field to get work via word of mouth. I like that aspect of marketing. Simple and effective if your work can speak for itself. Our work, I feel, is still at a whisper but alas a few have heard its little voice and been gracious enough to give us the opportunity to tell their story as well as learn a big heaping serving of experience. The wedding videography field is an excellent source of learning for documentary filmmaking and I highly suggest any filmmaker of any kind to not overlook this vast resource. Your only other option of this magnitude is funerals and I’ve yet to see someone looking for a funeral videographer. My point being, in every nook and cranny of this land, on any given day, there are more than a handful of weddings for any person with a little drive to park their brain and talents right into the middle of a ceremony.

We arrived in Maryland with 2 T2i’s, a few of lackluster lenses, one tripod, my trusty PB pocket dolly, a monopod, a Tascam DR-1oo, a lapel mic, 2 rode mics, and the other bells and whistles of cards and batteries etc. The drive was long from Nashville to Maryland and as we drove we learned the valuable lesson of why you make travel extra instead of included in the payment. Alas, these were friends of a friend and we cut them a deal for trade in more experience. (Always add on travel. It’s expensive.Fly, you gotta fly. I’m serious. Try it sometime. Saves time. Really, it does…or so I’m told.)

We first attended the rehearsal the night before to get an idea of the layout of the wedding and prepare our brains for the following day. THIS IS A MUST! Just to see where everyone is moving and shaking. Where audio situations will arise. Where to set up shop for dumping cards etc.. We ran into all sorts of technical problems that we needed to brainstorm about for quite a while at the rehearsal that if we hadn’t of been there we would have easily landing in the middle of a clusterpatch on the wedding day.

The wedding day began at 7am and ended around midnight. With every single shoot anyone is ever on, the day didn’t close without its fair pile of mishaps and wonderful troubleshooting opportunities. First problem we encountered was that the groom, the bride, the ceremony, and the reception(s) were all 30-45 miles apart from each other at many different times in the day. This would have been better known with a little more google map preplanning. We spent a blistering amount of money on gas, as well as sacrificed a few moments in order to get ourselves into position to capture certain other moments. Everything went fairly smooth until ceremony time when the pressure to nail it 100% of the time all the time is at it’s peak. I dropped my Canon 50mm lens while switching lenses and it broke in half while running to a different angle causing me to miss their kiss. (Never try and be Spielberg in the final moments of a ceremony. Just stay put if possible. Better to have a shot for certain rather than not getting a possible better shot. If that sentence makes sense.) After the ceremony the church audio guy was gracious enough to inform us he had unhooked our recording device from his system because he was afraid it might end up causing a problem during the ceremony. This blew my mind because we had set it up with the guy, the evening before at rehearsal and it was all fine. Before the wedding he even told us it was good to go and he would hit record for us. What happened to his brain from that point to the next we will never know. Case in point. Have a backup strategy and luckily we did. We had our own lapel mic running and recording and our 2 camera mics which helped us in the final edit even tho we didn’t have the church’s audio from their personal mics. Would it have sounded better with the other audio? Yes, but you make do with what happens. That’s part of the fun, creating the illusion that the day was a flawless masterpiece with zero stress.

Another mishap I feel I should warn people about was our monopod. We ordered the Manfrotto tripod bundle on amazon. The monopod that comes along with it should only be used as a cane or something to fill up your trash can with. First use it became lodged into one of our cameras. It took 30mins to dismantle and basically break it off. That’s what cheap is and does.

COLORING: The entire day was completely overcast and cloudy and left us with some dreary footage. Thanks to a little help from Magic Bullet Looks in post I was able to add some gradients and some color saturation to give the day a boost. Yes, I did get carried away with the gradients in the video, but it really added some color that it needed in a load of frames and that was something I just couldn’t visually do without. Overall there are a few scenes I wasn’t as happy with the coloring but with time crunching and rendering bars looming we had to settle a bit for a few of the “looks”. Coloring is something I enjoy but still can’t say im “Great” or even “good” at it yet. It’s always a trial and error sort of journey for me.

The evening was topped off with not one but 2 receptions. Something most videographers would charge extra for but we just churned it out as part of our package. Lighting became an issue with 2nd reception as we only had T2i’s and not very well off lenses to accomodate the low lighting. To some this becomes an eyesore in post. We decided to give it warmth and allow the grain to add to the feel of the evening. It seemed romantic enough and I was pleased with the shots I was able to use in the final edit.

Editing was a huge undertaking. Filming for 17 hours leaves you with a truck load of footage and a lot of filled harddrive space. I edited this wedding in FCP7 which added in the lovely feature of converting everything to ProRes before hand. By the time I was actually able to dive into the edit a couple days of computer churning had already taken place as well as hours of watching all footage and sorting into a workable folder situation. This was also the time I noticed we had different settings on our CineStyle color profiles. Cool!!!…. Anyways, all this isn’t news to anyone that works with “video”.( the quotations are their for the semantic “film” nerds who argue that we don’t shoot “video” or “film” so it shouldn’t be referred to as either. Sorry, I’ll call it wedding fileography from now on or Wedding Captureology. It’s a work in progess.) All projects utilize all these steps more or less and is part of the editors reality. I for one find a sort of bliss in the organization and tedious nature of it all. I’ve never seemed to mind it. At least until I arise out of the Computer Cave and see the light of a new day and realize that the pigment in my skin has receded and the sun now taunts my waking eyes. Editing a wedding is not only a challenge but a blast. Finding all the moments that resonate, and in some instances, creating new ones can give a perspective on the day that sometimes becomes overlooked.

Working with States has been a blast and kind of organically came from me forcing my brain into a viewable pile. The idea for Big News came from watching some of Philip Bloom‘s elegantly shot and edited videos. I wanted to shove into that some sort of comical action that seemed out of place. That idea grew into a little mini concept to tease an album release date.

First up my equipment was/is slightly bare and con/prosumer. I for one am a firm believer that its not the equipment its the story. When I say story I also lump in all aspects of the story telling for choice of shots to the editing to the sound and so forth. Sure having some magnificent shooting rig will up the visual factor but an audience is fairly forgiving these days with the advent of youtube and poor tiny streaming. I used a T2i w/ the Magic Lantern hack. I suggest anyone with a T2i to do so. It adds all sorts of neat features to the T2i i.e. audio meters, fine tuned ISO, etc. I only had a Canon 50mm and a Tamron Wide Angle lens that does have some bowing on the corners but not too bad considering the price. Sure I wish I had better lenses but I just can’t afford them at the moment. There is one shot in particular that drives me batty but its so meniscule that 99% of people DO NOT CARE but I have had someone call it out.(who are these people) It’s this shot right here.

What is going on?? I’ll let the bungalow film nerds be grossed out and everyone else live in complete ignorance for now.

I used the Philip Bloom Pocket Dolly (travel size) for the dolly shots. (if you can tell now you will, I have a very huge appreciation for Philip Bloom and all he does) His signature dolly tho seemingly pricey has been worth every penny for me. Its sturdy, well made, and fluid as all october. Tripodwise I had just purchased this Manfrotto package. Its a great little deal but might as well toss away the free monopod. Ours became near permanently attached to a T2i during a wedding shoot and was a bugger of boggart to seriously rip off. I also had a Rode mic that was my first outting with and forgot to switch to external mic within Magic Lantern.. so thats why the sound of voices and such is sooooo dangggg turdy. Oh that and the fleet of cicadas that were outside.

Story wise what ended up coming out was way different than what we had in our brains going in. Basically my mental script was this: Mindy walks into a coffeeshop. Orders a coffee. They make the coffee. Have stephen show up. Have Mindy spill coffee all over herself. Somehow it switched to having Stephen take the mega hit of coffee. I had just watched a video called “Street Level Royal Wedding” where they had shot at 60p and converted to 24 in Cinema Tools and it created a sultry smooth slow motion effect. The one turd hammer of a smack across a T2i users head is that you can only shoot 24 and 30 in 1080 and 30 and 60 in 720. Why? because they like it I guess. I have no idea why in the world I shot the entire thing in 1280X720 at 60p but I did. Thats why when the slow motion is not happening everything has that distinct to crisp and videoee feel. I use the term videoee very seriously… I was bummed I didn’t just uprez the 720 footage  using MPEG streamclip and shoot everything else in 1080 24p. Alas lesson learned on stupidity. I also only planned on slowing down the coffee making scene and by default slowed all of Mindy’s scenes down so it didn’t look just awful. It worked out well once the voiceover idea came in. We were shooting her standing in line and just said to ourselves we can record some voice over thoughts to help set up the spit gag. Not knowing what that was gonna be we just shot some different angles for about 10 mins then moved on to the coffee. Working at a coffeeshop that was open put a sort of rush on getting all the shots. Literally every shot I took of the coffee is what is seen in the video. I was inspired by this for the coffee scene. Of course I didn’t have some of the lenses or lighting to make certain shots come out the way I wanted but it turned out pretty neat considering. We then made our way outside quickly and shot the convo and then onto the spray. We did 3 angles of the spray. Plus 2 buckets of water dumping on him. Neither of which were needed but we had a heehaw of a time launching gallons of coffee at Stephen’s face.

Once voiceover started we ended up with a 3 min hilarious little script with all sorts of goofy gags. The one problem this dug up was A. We didn’t have any faces that sort of matched the dialogue and B. It was rather long. So we decided to do a pick up day and just get some more shots of Mindy in line with more reaction shots. This helped beyond reason but with any shoot like this many things go unnoticed till the editing room like when enter cutting with previous material her bag is switching shoulders all over the place. As well as adding and subtracting necklaces.

These things usually go unnoticed but to me they somewhat drive me up the wall. Mindy does a good job of acting with her face and moving the story along enough with the voiceover that nobody really gives a left foot. The first cut had about a 2.5min version of the “standing in line” scene which ended up being axed to barely a minute.

For the scene where the directed by seth evans is semi attached to the door and Mindy walks in front of it I just used Motion. I did this because at the time I was obsessed with Fringe and wanted to try and stick some text somewhere.  First I analyzed the motion of 2 separate points, and then match moved with the text to get it to hold. This took a little effort as it was my first time to do this while someone walks in front of one of the points. There also weren’t many good points to grab ahold of in the scene to make it very smooth but I did the best I knew how.

Now there are probably easier and better ways to go about  doing this next bit but I just did the only thing I could figure out on my own and thats by literally moving a mask point by point, frame by frame.

This was the same technique I used for the text at the start of the video. Only thing that I had to really fine tune a bit there was that half way through the shot the sun disappears behind a cloud and a shade is cast over everything. I just key framed a drop shadow in time with everything else and it seemed to look alright.

The next little effect and last one I’ll go into details is the shot when Mindy is in goo goo eyes over Nsync.

First I just tracked her eyeballs and match moved and key framed a bulge effect.

To put nsync in the window I did a Four Corner track on the corners of the window which wasn’t very stable and still has some jitter but its so quick in the video its not even noticed that they are even back there really. The four corner pin track is great because it can really hold something across time and compensate for size, rotation, etc. I also added some light filters and a few other effects to try and make it look like they were sort of glass. Doesn’t look that great ahaha.

The music was of course inspired by Wayne’s World. Once I knew I was gonna do the dream weaver gag the rest of the soundtrack just kinda fell into place. We did have a Paramore B-side “Decoy” over the opening scene at first, but as the entire video fell into place it just felt out of place and after searching for probably an hour I found the song I needed was where the rest were. Right on the Wayne’s World soundtrack. Another fun musical moment is the Superman Theme during the over dramatic coffee scene. If you notice it melds into a mashup with part of the Imperial March from Star Wars. Playing over each other it really sounds quite bad aspen creme pie.

All in all this shoot was a blast. I learned what not to do and what to do. I’m still smacking myself for the 60p and for the mic situation but what can you do. Make it work. Thats the editors job. Make it work. So I did my best with what we had. For $0 and about 2 hours total of shooting I’d say it turned out pretty fun.