@tedvid: I don't recall opening Photo Booth, which is probably why i jumped when I looked up at my screen from my phone to see me staring back at me.

Archive for March, 2010

Akira Kurosawa Film Cinematography

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Akira Kurosawa is a Japanese filmmaker who directed films in the 40s, 50s and 60s. The clips from above are from one of his more famous films, Rashomon. Kurosawa basically puts on a school for shot composition and texture throughout every scene I have watched of his so far. I love the way he uses the camera narratively and the overall look of his movies. His movie Seven Samurai is incredibly long, but definitely worth the watch if you are ever feeling like a black and white movie night.

As a random tidbit: George Lucas was influenced by Kurosawa. Something about Samurai swordsmen perhaps?

- Ted

Categories : Videography, film, movie, review
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Coloring Hawaii

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

I recently got to spend a week in Hawaii with seven of my friends and naturally I took my camera.

Although it was an absolute pain to separate my computer, camera and microphone into different containers to be screened before boarding the plane it turned out to be absolutely worth it. I ended up shooting about an hour and a half’s worth of footage which I then edited down to about fifteen minutes. Then I broke that down into a YouTube version which is what you see above.

I colored a lot of the clips you see above individually in post to give it a slight old-school feel. However, at one point I just started copying and pasting the same effect onto clips with similar subject matter because the difference was very minute and I have other stuff I have to work on.

Anyway, I found that with a gaussian soft edge border and some color correction into the blue/cyan area of the color wheel and a slight adjustment of the contrast with the proc amp tool (my favorite video correction tool in Final Cut) that you get a High Definition version of older film. Cool, huh?

- Ted

Categories : Videography, film, personal
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Latest Work

Friday, March 5th, 2010

I have just recently started doing some video and promotional work for iThemes.com and WebDesign.com and have been loving it!

It has mainly been motion graphics work so far, but there is some other video-related stuff that I’ve been working on for them as well. Hopefully this summer we will begin doing some really cool stuff merging Vlogs, Tutorials, and Community Building. They’re based out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and so since I’m in Waco, Texas it’s hard to help with any of their in-house videos and live shows for now, but it’s a great company that you should definitely take a look at! Anyway, I’m happy to be able to work with them and here are two of the promotional videos I have created so far for their Builder Theme (This is the Theme I have for my site) and Flexx Theme.

Categories : Videography, Web, WordPress, video
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Sounds are Important

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

No. Don’t read this yet. Watch the video above first.

Alright now that you’ve gotten that out of the way:

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I’ve noticed a recent trend in video/film in the emphasis of ordinary sounds – taking normal, minute sounds and making them the most audible parts of the clip.  Now I may be wrong, but I honestly think this is partly due to the way we currently like to participate in media. We expect response when we engage and so when we see visuals of earthy things, we expect an overly earthy response (such as the beginning of the video above) and we are able to attain this if the sound matches the engagement.

The film I noticed it in most recently was Shutter Island, which I saw over the weekend. Martin Scorsese used a very intricate interaction between imagery and sound in the direction of this film. Robert Richardson also did an absolutely incredible job with the cinematography as his images made the emphasized sound relative.

Anyway, I’m interested in trying this in the next short I make. What I’m going to make – don’t ask me yet.

Categories : Videography, film, movie, video
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