The Twelve Films Project

The May Documentary

I start shooting my May film this Sunday.  It's a documentary about a food truck in Austin (Odd Duck) and how it's adopted the Farm To Table philosophy.  Farm to Table is about locality, seasonality and sustainability and it's something that many restaurants have started incorporating into their menus.  Eating locally and seasonally is good for the environment, but it's also a good way to ensure that you're getting fresh food that's better for you.  Incorporating something like this into a restaurant's menu might be moderately easy, but doing something like this on a small scale in a food trailer is much more difficult.

The Farm to Table movement is something that I've really become more and more interested in.  Austin has some amazing local farms and a great Farmer's Market scene that we try and go to every weekend.

I'm really excited to be interviewing some really amazing people for this documentary, including Bryce Gilmore who owns the Odd Duck trailer as well as a brick-and-mortar restaurant called Barley Swine.  Bryce was named Food & Wine Magazine's Best New Chef for 2011 and Barley Swine is one of the best restaurants in Austin.

I'll keep you posted on how it's going...

360 notes

A few people have asked about some of the techniques from the 360 film that I posted up yesterday, so I thought I'd put up a quick blog post about it.  Most of the questions were about the time-lapse stuff and getting movement within the shot.

To shoot the time-lapse, I hooked an intervalometer up to my Canon 7D and put the camera in Aperture Priority mode which was the only way of getting the first shot which goes from total dark to full daylight.  If you're shooting in constant light (full daylight for the whole shot, for example) you can just put it in Manual mode, expose correctly and let it go.  But if the light is changing drastically (day to night or vice-versa) then you have to let the camera judge how much light it lets in to the sensor.

Once the time-lapse shots were done, I brought the files into Adobe After Effects as JPEG sequences.  I shot full-size 18MP stills for the time-lapses, so the files were very large.  This allowed me to animate the scale of the shot over time without losing any resolution.  Scaling the shots up or down gives the illusion of a camera move over the length of the time-lapse shot which is very difficult to do otherwise.

A couple other questions were about the camera slider shots, asking if they were difficult to pull of by myself.  To be honest, the hardest part of the entire shoot was hiking up to the top of the 360 Overlook with my camera gear, 2 tripods and a 6.5-foot camera slider...and I did it twice.  The path leading up to the Overlook isn't lit, and I was going up there at 4:30am to get the sunrise shots.  The path is cut out of slippery limestone and I was balancing a lot of awkward gear...but it really was worth it as the shots up on the cliff are some of my favorites from the piece.

Operating the slider, once it's all set up, is very easy to do on your own, but it's the set up that's a pain.  Getting two tripods set up, getting it level and steady (especially on a rocky surface) is hard when it's just you.  I'm sure having a shorter rail would make it a lot easier as you only need to center mount it on one tripod, and I'm still thinking of getting a shorter rail for the Glidetrack Hybrid carriage that I have.

I really am happy with how the piece turned out.  To be honest, I had so little time to work on it this month that I thought it was going to be a throw-away video, but it's been getting some really good feedback.

The April Film - 360

 

Here's the April film, 360.  I decided against the text and graphics and focus on shooting for this month.  I've always been fascinated by time-lapse shots, so I wanted to incorporate that into the piece.  I also wanted to get better at shooting with my Glidetrack Hybrid Slider, so I spent a lot of time on those shots.

For a project that felt rushed, I'm very happy with how it came out.  I wish I had a couple more days to work on it, but it's done and I think it's very much in the spirit of what I'm trying to accomplish with this project.  I hope you enjoy it.

April Update

Not to sound like a broken record, but this month has been crazy.  Work ramped up and I've been struggling to find time to work on the April film.  Fortunately, a little window opened up this weekend that allowed me to go out and shoot.  I'm hoping for another one tomorrow and maybe Wednesday and then I'll be done.

The film will be online by Thursday morning as I'll be out of town at a film festival starting Thursday afternoon.  A short film I made last year, Sketch, is screening at the Hill Country Film Festival this weekend and it's nominated for Best Texas Film and Best Actress for Natalie Monsanto's work in the film.  I'm really excited about the screening and it should be a fun time hanging out at the festival.

So check back on the Twelve Films Project site at the end of the week and you'll get to see the April film.  It's going to be my first mood piece about a very cool structure here in Austin.  The footage is looking cool and I'm really excited to see how it comes out.

Sorry...

I know I haven't been posting much this month.  Work has been running me ragged and it's going to be tough to get a film out this month.  That's not to say I'm not going to get one out, just that it's going to be down to the wire...just like last month...heh.

Anyway, here's a quick little video I did while I was driving from Dallas to Austin after doing some re-shoots on a directing job I had a couple weeks ago.  It was shot on my 7D with an 8mm fisheye and an intervelometer.  Enjoy.

 

A little update

As my life gets busier, the time I have to commit to this project dwindles.  April has really become that month, but I'm still very committed to putting something out by the 30th.  Might not be the best film I do this year, but there will be something up before the end of the month and I have an interesting idea for what it's going to be.  

Something that I do a lot in my professional life is motion tracking, taking a shot and tracking the camera motion to create a virtual camera that can then be used to seamlessly insert text, images, 3D models, etc.  Here's an example of a tracked shot that I did a few years ago (shot on an HVX-200, animated in Cinema 4D and composited in After Effects).

I'm thinking about doing something similar this month, though it would probably be something longer, with a little more of a story.  I have a subject, just need to figure it out...

Revise

Well, I may have spoken too soon.  The documentary idea may need to be pushed back to May so that the subject can make time for the shoot which is actually kind of a blessing for me.  My April has really exploded and work is keeping me crazy busy right now, so doing something smaller might be the right thing to do.

This documentary idea is really exciting to me, and I'm not going to let it go, I just think I may have overestimated how much time I and my subject were going to have this month...so look for a smaller mood piece this month (probably close to the end of the month) and hopefully, the short documentary next month.

The April Movie

Views for the Twelve Films Project website and for this blog have shot up recently.  Since I posted up the music video for Stars Fall yesterday on Vimeo, the site got over 200 hits in 12 hours which is amazing for a small site to which no one seemed to be paying any attention.  A lot of that traffic jumped over to this blog and spent some time looking around which is nice.  I'm hoping that those viewers keep coming back to look at the rest of the films that I'll be putting up this year.  Speaking of which, there's not going to be a lot of down-time for me this month, as it's already April 1st and I need to get started on this month's film.  

A few weeks ago, my friend and D.P. Ben Wolf came down to Austin for the SXSW film festival and ended up crashing in our guest room.  He was in town because a short documentary he shot, TUGS, got into the festival and I went with him to the short documentaries screening.  Some of them were good and some were pretty average, but it really opened my eyes to what could be done in a small amount of screen time.  I've always been a HUGE fan of documentaries but for some reason, I'd never thought about making one.

So that's my goal for the April film...a documentary.  I have an idea for the subject, but since it's not all locked down yet, I'm going to wait to talk about it.  Keep checking back for more info and a big HELLO! to all you new viewers!