I am drawn to cool short movies that are shot using “Stop Motion” techniques and/or by shooting with high-speed shutter option of still cameras. One of the coolest videos that has caught my eye is by a German photographer/producer, Roman Kuhn. He produced a five minute short that tells the tale of the new Mercedes Mclaren and a sneaking paparazzo. The entire video was produced using two Canon 1Ds shooting at 10fps.
A few weeks after viewing this cool short film I headed to Wyoming to visit my parents. As with most visits, we did the usual go out for breakfast, take walks, play with the dogs, eat lunch, take naps….repeat. One afternoon, as my dad and I were futzing around in the garage. We were both bored so I suggested we head down to the river to make a movie. He was in. My pop loves this stuff. He is the type of guy who is game for any new adventure, especially if he gets to play with cool new gear. Quickly, we decided to shoot a video featuring his cool new all terrain shoes. (I am not sure if that is the official name of these brogans, but for the purpose of this story they are.) We jumped into the truck headed to the river and looked for rocks, fences, dirt trails, sand and of course water, to start making our movie. We brainstormed some scenes and talked about all of the cool qualities of his shoes. We had to cover the vents, the velcro fasteners, the super cool slip-cord-tightner (another technical term) and of course, we had to shoot the super-duper-no-slip-rubber that keeps it all together.
Over the next two hours we shot 1,000 frames or so… the coolest part of this whole undertaking is shooting tons of images. I don’t know a single photographer who doesn’t like to fire off 10 frames a second. It is the machine gun of camera stuff. Clicking off frames as fast as they go. And, with digital, it doesn’t cost $12 a minute for film.
Since the end-use was web, I was able to shoot with low resolution jpeg image. This allowed each card to hold 2,000 or so images. I just shot away. One thing I forgot to keep in mind was, duh, keep the camera horizontal. That is actually a big change from shooting only stills. The format for video is completely horizontal. Any crazy tilts or going completely verticle renders the frame useless.
At the end of the day, my dad and I had spent some quality time together. Once again we were out in the wilds, tinkering with gadgets, toys and gear trying to produce something cool. True QT.
Take a look and let me know what you think. It is pretty bare bones and I still have to figure out the after effects. Drop me a line if you have any suggestions or questions.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/10208716[/vimeo]