My niece, Alexis, had her baptism recently. I really wanted to surprise my sister-in-law Stef with a short baptism film of the day’s festivities. The day started off with Alexis putting on her dress and getting prepped by her personal servants (in this case, her parents! – Stef and Chris). Then they headed off to the church and the priest went through the whole ceremony. Pictures were taken, then papers were signed.
I’m glad we’ve had all this experience with wedding videography, because this baptism film was surprisingly similar to a real wedding! Anyhow, watch the video and see for yourself.
Special thanks to John and Louie for helping me with the filming.
ps. Alexis is my Little Tiger, because she was born in the Year of the Tiger. I hope she won’t mind me calling her that when she gets a bit older.
Lazy Sunday: A Perfect Shutter short film for Still Motion contest
Alright, I finally have a few minutes to write up about the short film contest. The goal was to create a short film that follows the guideline of stillmotion and adhere to the same time restriction that stillmotion staffs are allow to have. It seems like their staff is only allow to have 3 hours to work on this project.
My initial thought was that it would be somewhat difficult. But after shooting the film, I realized how bloody time consuming this really is. As you can see from the film, the concept is quite simple. I grab my wife to do a couple midshot, closeups and detail shots. Then add in music and finally do some color grading. However, my wishful thinking quickly went down the drain. The simple shots took roughly 1 hour. Then I have to convert my footage to Neoscene format since I’m editing in Adobe Primere. It took me another hour to find the song and license it through AudioJungle. After that I must scrub through all the footage to grab the key moments that I want and match it to the music. For some reason, the music have some techno sound mid way through so I have to use Adobe soundbooth to remove that. Finally, I had to color grade the whole thing to crush the blacks a little and bring the color back out. How long did the whole process take? Try 5 1/2 hours!
This took way too long for such a simple concept. The funny thing is, I can easily go over 8 hours if I wanted to make tweaks and enhance the result some more. Fortunately, I didn’t win so now I am going to get our team to try to come up with something more epic that can compete. We are really excited about doing this next piece. Stay tuned for our next contest. =)
