Long time…no post. Sorry about that, folks.
A while ago I heard about a collaborative video contest between Canon and Vimeo called “Beyond the Still,” where entrants were given a starting still image and then had to make a short movie from that initial visual point. Basically it’s like a collaborative game of telephone, except with videos moving the whole thing along. A neat concept to be sure. It also helps that it has some serious pull within the industry–the first entry was shot by director and cinematographer Vincent Laforet and one of the judges is the ubiquitous Phillip Bloom.
Well, I recently got access to a brand-spanking new Canon 7D HDSLR from my work, and I had some spare time over the past few weeks (shocking, I know), so I thought, hey, what the heck? I’ll enter!
I shot and edited my entry to the “Chapter 6” section of the contest this past weekend. Things came together very quickly–I had some wonderful friends who managed to pitch in at a seconds notice. I’ve never really shot anything with an HDSLR before, so I took the opportunity as a great learning experience to really figure out the workflow and shooting techniques. I know I made a ton of mistakes, but heck, that’s why you do little projects like this every once in a blue moon.
A ton of opinions have been posted about the HDSLR revolution, so I’m not really going to throw my hat into the already crowded fray. However, I will say this–the 7d takes beautiful images. Moire. Jello. Non-sync sound. Bad ergonomics. Yeah, they’re really annoying. But, at the end of the day, it’s hard to fight the purty pictures that tiny little still camera can produce.
For all the technical geeks out there, I used the 7d as my “A” cam and recorded sound and “B” cam footage with my Panasonic HMC-150 (I challenge you to pick the shots from my HMC-150–it’s a great camera that really holds up even when shooting against the bokeh heavy 7d).
Anywho, enough rambling. Check out the finished short below…