Hatch

Had a fun time today doing a film shoot with all the lovely people at Splinter . Managed to turn their meeting room into a small photography/ film studio. The idea for the shoot was to film the subject on a completely bleached out white background.

We did the shoot on a Sony EX3 XD Cam camera using the 1080 25p settings. Using a pure white Calumet backdrop, we used a couple of Ianaro redheads (with scrim) to bleach the white background to the effect we were after. We then used a couple of Bowens with Soft Light boxes on to act as a Key and Fill light on the subject. Then to round off, we used one of the redheads to back light the subject to create a bit of depth in the frame. We used Senheisser Radio mics for the audio.

Thanks to Claire from Splinter for looking after us with the brews.

I had a brilliant day at the Learning Lighthouse last Thursday where I ran a Digital Photography and Photoshop session for 7-11 yr olds with their parents/ grandfathers and guardians. Each session was only 2hrs long and the children/ adults got through quite a lot and more importantly had a lot of fun learning (then breaking) the rules of Photography. The first part of the session was a practical based learning as the young photographers used digital cameras and we followed the Digital Photography Tips & Tricks Presentation . The group then did an introduction to Photoshop and ‘played’ with making titles and adding filters to their photographs. Here is a gallery of all the final pieces. You don’t have to have Photoshop to edit your photographs, there are lots of free on-line photo-editing software . Well done to all the students now photographers who participated on the course and thanks to the lovely crew at The Learning Lighthouse.

Have been really busy with the BBC the last month working with Milky Tea on the production of a CBeebies’ pilot. We shot the pilot over two days in a converted barn down in Hemel Hempstead. It was a fab couple of days and I will post a bit later once we have got going on the project. In the meantime, here are a few shots from the shoot. It was a completely green screen shoot and was shot on DV Cam. Bit of a shame really as i was trying to convince the Beeb to shoot on HD progressive …. but the budget didn’t allow the extra cost for the pilot. Dave the camera man did a class job of filming and DOP’ing. Again, at a later date I will give a detailed breakdown of the shoot and how he lit the event.

Just doing a project with the BBC that involves some live action Greenscreen sequences. Here is a little bit of research;

2007 Compositing from scw1729 on Vimeo.

Great little film showing how much Greenscreen filming there is in everyday film that we watch.

Loved this video sent through from Matt Frodsham! A post from Videopia on his vimeo site about Framing and Composition….talks about the Rule of 1/3rds in Lay man terms with good Film references!

http://vimeo.com/1461280