A music video - from start to finish

May 15th. 2009 - A good version

It took quite a bit of work to manually crop many of tine 480 frames to remove the worst of the camera shake. Next time I will probably go with a tripod, or some stabilizing thingy. Another big time-consumer was to get a fairly good match between video segment switches and the different segments of the music. It meant selecting the right amount of original frames for each segment, and reordering them around and then watching most of the video over again. This is a pretty good version, some tuning might be needed and perhaps even a couple of segments will be switched. What do you think? Click the HQ (high quality) button in the lower right corner of the player for better quality.

Leave comments at the bottom of the page if you like. I would greatly appreciate it.

May 6th. 2009 - The shoot

Today I shot Monica for the music video. I had made sketches of all the segments that I wanted to shoot. We did a few retakes of some of them and ended up with around 40 segments, including the retakes. I have have made one test video using three segments. Some of the photographs need more processing. Especially it seems that my wobbly camera-holding-technique will require me to crop many of the frames manually, as opposed to just doing a batch-operation crop on all photos.

April 29th. 2009 - Planning

I now have a model (if all goes well). I have done a couple of shoots with her before: Monica.

Now I need to start sketching all the scenes before we start shooting. I will divide the song into segments for which each will require a certain number of photographs. Right now I don't really know how many photographs are needed for say a 3-4 second segment. So another important step is doing some trial and error before the main shoot begins. I guess my wife Ines and daughter Sara will have to endure some excessive shooting the next couple of days. Test shots and test videos will be posted here and in this flickr set.

Update
I have done a couple of test shots with Sara turning her head. The photos are shot at one per second or thereabouts. The below movies show different ways of combining the photos. The first one just shows each photo with 1 second intervals. In the second video, the transitions are made over 5 frames (in the 25 frames per sec movie). The third one uses transitions that go over 20 frames.

I think the last video works the best. However shooting the originals at one frame per second is to slow. I will try to shoot at 2 frames per second and see how that looks.

Any thoughts dear reader ? :)

One more update.
I did a quick test shoot with Ines aswell. This time with the Canon EOS 5D instead if the Canon EOS 1DsMk3. The 5D records less data and gives a more steady exposure rhythm. The 1DsMk3 records so much data, the buffer fills up and the rhythm gets irregular and. All photos are shot with the 85mm f/1.2 Mark I.

Anyway the first video shows the 21 frames that make up about 12 seconds. The second one uses a sinus weighted average of 20 stills per frame, and the last one a sinus weighted average of 50 stills per frame.

April 28th. 2009 - The Idea

The main idea I have for the video is that I will shoot lots of photographs and merge them together into a video with some software I've written. It enables me to take X photographs and calculate the averages over a given set of photographs and merge them into one frame. For example. It can do others things to, and I will try to explain when the example shots and videos start appearing.

As for content in the video, I'm thinking that I will use a female model, shot in black&white, short DOF (of course) and simplistic in terms of light and composition.