Video Diary #5: Shedding Light On The Matter

We solved our lighting issues with a trip to B&Q & Argos and surpisingly few pounds! The 150 watt halogen lamp cost about £12 and the tripod (which we already had) cost about £15. To light a set, you generally need 3 lights, two at the front and one at the back. More on that later. First though, here's a little video diary that shows the difference a single light can make!



So, back to the lighting set-up. You should generally set up a main light - a 'Key', to onme side of the camera, providing your main illumination and setting the 'feel' for the image you want. A second, not so bright 'fill' light, on the other side of the camera highlights the 'dark side' of your subject so it's not in complete shadow and provides more detail. Front lights generally make the image look flat and kind've blend into the background, so a light from the back, a 'back key' makes it feel more 3 dimensional!


These guys explain it far better than I can!

Video Diary #4: Clamp It!

A clamp turned up in the post today. I made good use of it!

The clamp was purchased from the excellent people at B. Hague & Co Ltd who got it to me in record time!

Video Diary #2: Life Through A Lens

So the camera's arrived and it comes with a couple of exciting lens attachments! We have a wide angle and a telephoto one.

The wide angle lens increases the camera's field of vision by effectively using a mild fish-eye effect (you know, like the little peep hole in your front door). This makes filming landscapes a bit better as you can effectively fit more on the screen and should be handy when filming in relatively close proximity to the subject - particularly if you have a couple of people on screen.

The telephoto lens simply multiplies the zoom by 2.

You can see the difference these lenses actually make in the video below. Oh, and I've thrown a bit of Strauss in!


Hosting the file on Youtube doesn't really do the fantastic camera image any favours. You'll just have to take my word for the excellentness of it all!

Customs

Argh! That camera's taking forever to arrive! First there was a problem with the case that was due to be shipped with it - the batch had been dented and cracked - and now the UPS site tells me that it's sitting in Customs. Gah. At least it's in the country - we may even be lucky enough to get it by the weekend!

Once it arrives, it's gonna be a steep learning curve in getting to know it. To date, I've only ever used an old analogue Sony with no useful settings on it at all!

The plan is to put together a couple of music videos for The Torr to get used to the functions before launching into the filming proper!

Steady, now...

Steadicams provide an awful lot of versaitility in your camerawork when you're filming. It means you can get in up close and personal, move around your subject and create a dynamic look to your movie without all that wobbling around that you get when you just hold the camera in your sweaty little hands. Problem is... they're really expensive. Hundreds of pounds expensive.

Or are they? A very quick search around the net uncovered The Poor Man's Steadicam, a site run by a chap called Johnny Chung Lee, who gives detailed instructions on how to build your own Steadicam from plumbing materials which comes to a grand total of $14. Yes, that's right, $14. That's £7 in real money. He also sells 'em here if, like us, you can't be bothered to build it yourself!

I've had a play with it, using the 'old' camera and it seems to be pretty effective - you're never going to get the same sort of quality that you'd get from a £1500 steadicam rig, but it's pretty damn good, for almost no money at all!

Choosing a Camera

Video cameras are pretty expensive things and it turns out that if you want to make your own movie, you have to get hold of one.

Now my mother lent me her old Sony camcorder to play around with a few months ago. It was rubbish on account of being at least a baker's dozen years old. Not even close to suitable for a job like this!

Stead and I spent quite some time deliberating on what sort of camcorder to get hold of for this project. Do we splash out on a High Definition (HD) camera? Do we buy one with a hard disk, one with DVD or stick with tape?* Eventually, we decided on a standard definition MiniDV (tape) based Panasonic DVC20. And here's why.

First up, HD is still pretty new when it comes to camcorders. That means that not only is it expensive, but the manufacturers haven't had the chance to iron out any bugs. At the time of writing this, it seems that there are quite major problems (in our budget range) with using HD recording equipment in low light levels - in fact, anecdotally, the guys that made Torchwood for the BBC invested rather a lot of money in HD cameras only to find that the quality was awful at low light. hence many scenes that should have been quite creepy and dark had to be filmed on a bright, shiny set. The Cyberwoman episode is an example of why this wasn't their best laid plan!

On that basis, we've decided that we'll stick with the tried and true Standard Definition, which is still going strong, works in the dark and, most importantly, we can afford!

So... how do you store your recordings? Tape? Disk? Hard drive? You can even get flash based cameras. Yay. The one thing we found in relation to all but one of the storage media, however was compression. Even on the 60gb hard disk models, the image was compressed into a MPEG2, which meant loss of quality. Our primary goal with the camera is to get the recording 'clean to tape' in the best quality we can manage. And if we're having to compress it before we even get the stuff off the camera, then we're in trouble!

Tape it is then. Of course tape comes with it's own inherent problems. Moving parts for one. As we all know, moving parts are prone to wearing out and breaking down. Something to keep an eye on then. Playing back your footage relies on rewinding and fast forwarding on tape, as opposed to simple scene selection on the other media. And transferring it to the computer for editing has to be done in real time. All small prices to pay for better quality recording, in our view.

Plus, when we looked on ebay, we discovered we could get all of this gubbins for just over £800:



(*Get it? Stick. With Tape! Aha ha ha ha ha!)