21 September, 2010 11:08 pm
I have a bit more than a meter of film left (not counting the bit for the tail end) which converts to about 16 seconds (400 frames). I could still do a couple of lovely things with 16 seconds but it won’t stop being miserable outside on the days when I don’t have to work or play mommy. I want to try something with two lazy susans – the camera on one of them and some animated flowers on the other. Pleeeze. Sun. Friday.
Besides being frantic over the beginning of school and calming my son who is having trouble transitioning from a butterfly to a penguin, I’m jumping into The World of Colour Correction. And it’s not so bad. At some point it clicked with me that as I’m working with image files I don’t need an editing software for colour correction when I’ve got the fantastic assortment of Photoshop tools at my disposal. So I borrowed a book that took a lot of the mystique out of the issue: Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction, by Dan Margulis
I had asked a technician at school if it were possible to colour correct without scopes by tracking RGB values. He said Nope. Impossible Without Scopes. But it still felt like a reasonable possibility. So it was encouraging to find the book had a whole chapter on exactly that. It’s a hard core book but it took the mystery out of curves and introduced me to channel mixing and it gave me the courage to dive into it. I figured that as long as I didn’t crush any of the colour channels I wouldn’t do any great damage if ever I should get professional online editing help.
I find this a lot of fun. When I’m lucky to have a white flower or a fencepost at some point in a sequence I can correct the colour cast (always a bit blue) with the neutral white as a reference and make a batch action for the remaining images in the sequence.
When there is no neutral colour for reference it’s trickier but the excellent book gave some tips for balancing greens by the numbers of which I have plenty. It also helps that that my film is a bit impressionistic so colour accuracy is not all important.
I had fun figuring out how to get rid of a glare that got into a sequence. The glare shows up only in the blue channel so I just burned in the overly light part of that channel and the result looks fine. I might learn later that it isn’t but I’ll go with fine for now because I need encouragement.
13 September, 2010 12:38 pm
Of course I did not finish shooting by the end of last week. Access to the sun is dwindling. I did manage to shoot titles – or reshoot them since I had tried it last summer. I had built another contraption (shown above) for burning titles into an image. My film is called “Con Brio” and I animate the words jumping into the frame.
I made a thing out of black foam core that would fit onto the end of a bellows (a black flexible square boxy thing that extends from the camera lens to a position in front of it for the purposes of superimposing things like titles). I attached a piece of acetate at the end with the title printed inverted (clear on black). My foam core contraption is hinged so that I could expose a nice garden background and then flip the acetate in front and further expose (burn-in) the words. The foam core contraption also slid on a crude track so I could animate the word going up and down.
It didn’t turn out as well as I liked because:
1) I was sometimes careless in making sure that the foam core was completely in place when I closed the hinge
2) Because I could not be entirely sure of the framing of the garden (and I wanted to frame with nice space for titles) sometimes the words and the background did not click all that well.
3) not a problem last summer but a possible one when reshooting is that if the pinhole is not perfectly centered, it can be slightly offset from the framing of the bellows. i.e. you’ll see a part of the bellows in the shot.
So this time around I decided I needed more of a sure thing. I shot the backgrounds and the titles separately and statically. I will later animate the titles and composite them with the background digitally. This way I’ll have the pinhole look and the digital control.
By The Way.. my cheap substitute for kodalith for the titles was to photocopy the titles onto acetate using a colour printer. Even though the copy will be black and white a colour printer will give better blacks. But not good enough. I actually printed everything three times and stuck the copies together with double sided tape. It takes three acetates to make the blacks light proof.
7 September, 2010 4:38 pm
I haven’t posted in a while and it’s because there’s just too darned much going on and not a lot of it has anything to do with this project. The only reason I’m not panicking is because I’ve taken my husband’s example and stopped thinking of deadlines. He’s definitely more serene than I am so maybe there’s something to his attitude.
But back to the project…
My goal – and I sincerely hope to reach it – is to finish all shooting by the end of this week. I barely have any film left in any case to go on much longer.
Today I managed to get through a shot I like to call Zinnia Switcheroo. I absolutely need it. It’s the one shot for which I curse this low technology and wish I could see a preview before starting. I’m very good at blindly lining up the subject within the field of view but missed by a ridiculous amount for this one when I shot it last summer (as evident above – I think there’s a smidgen of zinnia visible in the top left corner). It’s because the camera is at a steep angle, and I’m using my two-hole aperture that has a longer focal length. It means that with the camera two feet away from the subject I have find about a six inch square that the camera is looking at (without a view finder) and place my subject in it. If I have time (and film left), I’ll try to shoot it again without the camera at a steep angle just so I can be sure that I have something even if it’s not exactly what I want.
My four year old son made a suggestion too. He said: I want make the flowers move but I don’t want them to hop. I want them to do this. – And he stood and showed me a gentle swaying motion. Why didn’t I think of that! I’ll have to get that in too.
The problem is I only have 23 feet of film left. That’s 38 seconds. And I need to shoot the film title. I might have to place all my hopes on the one Zinnia Switcheroo turning out OK. For sanity I should ignore the camera’s foot counter too – but really it can’t be helped.
Yesterday I felt like Super Woman.
After dropping off my boy & man to daycare and work, I…
- picked up the cat from the kennel
- dropped off the rental car
- shot intensely in the back yard (very productive shoot)
- prepared & served dinner
- went to son’s soccer game
- put him to bed
Of course, I forgot to eat lunch and I felt bad ignoring much of the cat’s desperate entreaties to play after four days in the kennel but I didn’t expect to be able to get in as much as I did.
Today was OK too. I finished shooting the segment I started in Toronto. It’s intended to be climax of the film – something I realized I was missing. I can’t be certain if it will work since I don’t have a Photoshop mock-up for it, and it’s something I hadn’t tried last year. It can only described as a rhythmic mix of blur, pan/turn, and random moves between the foreground and background – a mash of most of the motifs I had already used.
This is a bit of my mom’s garden. Smaller than mine in space but more mature and lush. We just got back tonight from an extended weekend visit to her place to pick up our son from his fab two week vacation with the grandparents. My son informed me that in Georgetown the parlours give out two scoops of ice-cream, not one like in Montreal. One day he’ll grow wise and learn to blame me for that.
The brilliant plan also involved me having two days to film in her garden and mangle her flowers. I had planned for and started an intense shot (I need something wild for the climax) but then modified it so that I could shoot in instalments in case I couldn’t finish. Good thing. It was very very dark on day two and started to rain. Desperate, I shot anyway – at least until the rain fell with intent. Each exposure was taking up to 10 seconds making the process ten times slower than usual.
One thing this project has taught me is to learn to let go of total control and try not to get frustrated or even angry when things don’t follow the ideal. I’m still trying because frustration and angst are my smothering friends. I’ve also managed to convince myself that there’s a benefit to each setback. And truthfully, there usually were benefits to each setback.
My crazy shot will probably work out better with a 10 second exposure because there’s not enough sun to cast shadows and the colours will be more intense. Also I’m not dying of heat exhaustion and the flowers look fresh for longer than 2 seconds. Perhaps I should have been shooting on overcast days all along. The rain, the sick, dying flowers, the opening up of the camera body thus destroying all film – none of these things have really upset me (that last one might have, just a little) and I’m grateful for the lesson. (But if I don’t finish this drat film within a year I’ll be hopping!!!)
Update on the Thing From The Composter: It’s not a zucchini but a squash! But my husband and I are wondering: when did we ever buy such a thing that it would end up growing from our bin? We’re quite loyal to butternut.
No shooting today: thunderstorms, or thunderstorm warnings, or sunshine but with very strong winds.
I took the opportunity to cleanup another scene and work on editing. And that got me thinking…
Originally I had an idea that I wanted to try. Looking through the seed catalogues, not knowing much about gardening, I was taken with the variations of cosmos flowers. The petals of Daydream had a pink center graduating to white at the ends. Picotée is white at the center and edged in pink. Sensation comes in all variations of solid white, solid dark & light pink, pink with darker pink centers… In short, the assortment is such that I thought it could be fun to animate. Specifically, I wanted the animated flower to look like it’s throwing off its pigment with the cetrifugal force from short spins.
Again, reality forced me to change my preset idea and go with the flow of nature. I gave up on the idea because Picotée bloomed early, Sensation bloomed late, and Daydream barely bloomed at all. I couldn’t get all the variations I needed at the same time.
It occured to me today that if I’m working digitally I could have just shot each bloom seperatedly and edited them together. A bit of a pain but possible. I could try it this year – if I get enough healthy flowers.
Shown above are the victims of my latest shot – a variation on the ‘spinny shot’ I posted yesterday. Below is the Photoshop video mock-up of the movement (but on film I change the background after each blur). The flower spins on a 17-frame cycle and the background on a 34-frame cycle. I shot this last summer and it worked well except that the flowers were too centred and so the background was not as obvious. Of course I can’t be entirely sure that I’ve got the position right this time either, but I’m fairly confident.
Here’s an ugly confession: I sometimes have to ‘enhance’ the flowers. Especially this year when most of them are misshapen or missing petals the only way I can get a usable flower is by taping petals together. The chrysanthemums in the dish are Frankensteins.
But in the case of this gazania, I’ve taped the petals just to hold the flower open. The flower tends to form a cup that makes even lighting very difficult. The flowers have such gorgeous colours that I couldn’t pass them up because of the shape.
I made some very sorry looking rudbeckia hop today. I’m not convinced it came out OK and would love to redo it. BUT I have no more rudbeckia for a few weeks. They’re sick, like everything else and I’m not getting many flowers.
I also made some flowers spin and my technique for doing this is not only lo-tech but also very silly. The below video is a mock-up of the movement. The above picture is the set-up for getting it done.
I have my flower stuck on the spinny contraption to make it spin into a blur, and the camera on a sachtler tripod head to allow the background to spin into a blur. Now before you think everything is spinning uncontrollably every which way I’d just like to point out that because my exposures are at least 1 second long it doesn’t take a fast movement to get a blur that looks like it’s going 100/kh.
A big problem with this set-up is that I need one hand to rotate the flower, one hand to rotate the tripod head, and one hand to release the shutter. Like everyone, I only have two hands but my feet can be dextrous enough. I found that by winding the string that rotates the flower around a toe, simply moving the tripod head away from the foot will make the flower spin. There’s still some difficulty in controlling the acceleration and deceleration but I’m getting better.
Now if only I could work the still camera with my other foot to get a picture of this in action…
One of the sequences I shot last summer was of three exuberant flowers hopping across the lawn in the distance. I was well prepared. I had a system of keeping track of each flower on each frame, and a great and patient friend, Sherron, helping with the camera. I couldn’t do this one alone because the distance between the camera and the flowers was a slight jog and it would have been physically exhausting to set up each flower and then run back to the camera to trigger the shutter.
Despite the preparation and the help, the sequence turned out pretty badly. The reality was that even with only having to run in and out to change flowers the heat was phenomenal and about halfway through I was seriously ready to pass out. But breaks had to be minimal because the day was advancing, the shadow of the house would creep in at some point and that would mean starting over another day. The flowers sometimes started sliding down while I ran off screen and I wouldn’t notice until it was too late. Aaak!!
AND on top of that, the light was highly variable and we were just getting used to a system of counting off the seconds.
As a result – the sequence was strobing from the uneven exposures and three of the hops were wildly erratic. The above image shows where the flowers should have been positioned in sequence and where they actually ended up. This was one shot I thought I would reshoot this year.
And then I thought about it. It was grueling work. Could I possibly save this sequence? Am I willing to give up a technical purist’s bragging rights to say: nooo – no digital manipulation was used in this baby! Yup. I couldn’t redo this even if I wanted – not enough flowers this year, or a nice background, or an available friend, or the time.
The fix was actually pretty easy. Although I like the idea of being a technical purist, I’m at the core a realist (pessimist, whatever) and the main thing is producing a strong film not a technically pure one. (This sounds like I’m still trying to justify it to myself).
So this is what I did yesterday. Along with shooting some more hopping from a single flower. Hopping flowers are the theme of the week. I would love to put up a video sequence of this but I can’t seem to post any film work that doesn’t look like colourful porridge without paying extra money to get extra bandwidth.
Things should get productive now. My son is off to Toronto for a couple of weeks to visit all the relatives. It is such a bizarre feeling to have the driving force of my existance take a holiday from me. It’s like moving out of the house for school all over again – I could do whatever whenever…but I also miss him already…
So I started by getting rid of as many infected plants from the garden as I could and spraying everything with soapy water – but trying to avoid all the nice critters.
I cleaned the dust from a half dozen more shots.
I started putting together the credits that I’ll need to get printed out on Kodalith or whatever is the modern equivalent.
And I animated some jumping flowers. A very bad day in terms of variability of light (I had to meter for every frame) but I can’t be picky at this point.
A pretty good start to two weeks of action.
