In Real Life – Number 4
I had something of a crisis trying to make this week’s video. I went out and shot a bunch of video around Tokyo, put together some clips from my work, but it just didn’t seem to tell the story of the week I experienced. The most important bits, the in real life meetings with people, […]
I had something of a crisis trying to make this week’s video. I went out and shot a bunch of video around Tokyo, put together some clips from my work, but it just didn’t seem to tell the story of the week I experienced. The most important bits, the in real life meetings with people, were missing.
This is the problem; I have an idea for these short films about living and working in Tokyo, it’s a dream of capturing the creative, inspiring side of this city. But, I also want to tell a story, a week to week story of the experiences I’m having and also the changes I’m making to become more free and expressive in everything I do.
Over the last few days it felt hard to bring those together. The solution I came up with was to scrap what was becoming a very dull, very serious little documentary and go straight to camera, injecting a little humour along the way.
Some Issues
Technically speaking I was frustrated by the iPhone footage this week. I set up with a different angle in the studio and the iPhone’s auto colour correction played games with almost every moment, making the colour grading of the clips a pain in the butt. I’m also not happy with he spoken audio. It sounded like I used a potato instead of a microphone! Going back into Logic Pro it seemed like I bounced the audio with some important plugins disabled. I’ve now created a Logic Pro template for these videos with all the plugins preloaded and busses for compression and reverb enabled (email me if you’d like the template).
UPDATE: I wasn’t convinced the low sound quality could be down to just a missing plugin or two. Why didn’t I notice the poor audio while editing the film! Turns out there was another problem. When exporting the video the Media Encoder window in Premiere Pro was set to 20Kbps for audio, whereas I normally encode at 320Kbps (like any sane human). This isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with what seem to be random settings in the Media Encoder settings. I’ve created a preset for YouTube settings but I’ll also need to add “text view video before uploading” to my YouTube checklist from now on!
Music
The background track for this week was a simple jazz chord progression. As fun as it was, especially using the EWI for the first time, I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be challenging myself a little more with the background music for the videos.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/307174195″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Still, I’m trying to look past all these complaints. The audio track had some things I liked and I had more fun with the video editing, which I feel is getting a little sharper with every video.
