(Page 2 of 5 pages for this article  <  1 2 3 4 >  Last »)

Filed under: Cameras •Editing •Lighting •Post Production •Production •Visual Effects •

It’s not the budget, it’s where you put the camera!

Before the shoot I went on a location scout with Jono and his producer, Laura Green. All the locations were in Santa Cruz: a bluff overlooking the beach, the city pier and the Boardwalk; the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Cruz; the roof of a friend’s house; the artist’s home; and Jono’s apartment. I took stills at all the locations except for Jono’s place and the roof, brought them into Final Cut Pro, and then played around with some looks using Magic Bullet Looks. I discovered that, while the presets in Looks are okay to start with, I preferred to use them as jumping off points to create my own looks. Each Look is created with modules (such as Curves, Diffusion, Vignette, Saturation, etc.), and it’s quite easy to turn an individual module on and off to see what it is doing. By selecting a preset Look that was close to what I envisioned, and then tweaking the component modules individually, I found it very easy to quickly achieve the image that was in my head.

Here’s what the Looks window looked like when I created my outdoor “minus blue” look:

Here’s detail of just the modules from the “post” section of the chain:

Looks has five “rooms”: Subject, Matte, Camera, Lens and Post. Each room allows you to add and tweak different modular effects, and the result can be seen in real time. The only drawback is that you can’t play the clip while in the Looks environment—you have to exit LooksBuilder and render the clip on the timeline in order to see what you’ve done in motion—but otherwise it’s a very powerful tool for amateur colorists like myself to take their shots to the next level.

This is the test video clip that I created from location stills shot with my Nikon D70:

Jono loved the green look at the pool so I did a lighter version of that for my final version. Originally I thought I was going to do an exaggerated warm/cool for the exterior shots at sunset but in the end I subtracted a lot of blue for a warm flesh/desaturated ocean look. The final interiors look nothing like this test as I opted to go with a color reversal look that I didn’t test here. (Jono is the guy with the beard; Laura is the woman in most of shots; and one shot shows the artist and her boyfriend having dinner while we blocked a VFX shot.)

I’m going to go through the video shot by shot and tell you a little bit about how each shot was executed:

(Page 2 of 5 pages for this article  <  1 2 3 4 >  Last »)

                   

 

The Best of Stunning Good Looks Art Adams | 08/30 A directory of my best articles, sorted by topic. This entry is a guide to my best articles, sorted by topic. Enjoy!

Full Compass Systems Appoints Jim Ripp as Assistant Sales Manager PVC News Staff | 02/06 Big News for the national leader in professional audio, video, lighting, A/V and musical instrument sales Full Compass Systems, a national leader in professional audio, video, lighting, A/V and musical instrument sales, has selected Jim Ripp as its new Assistant Sales Manager.  Ripp has a wide range…

Expression Shorts - Numerical Readout David Torno | 02/05 Create numerical readouts for use in HUD style graphics. With this Expression, I will show you how to feed numerical property information…

You must be registered to comment. This is an effort to reduce spam. Please REGISTER HERE.

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below: