videos

There are 168 posts filed in videos (this is page 15 of 21).

Megan and Alex’s Wedding

I had the opportunity to film my friend’s lovely wedding last weekend at Lakedale Resort in Friday Harbor, WA. It was an unconventional shoot; since I was recovering from a recent surgery, I wasn’t even sure I could attend the wedding until a few days before the event, let alone film it.

As a result, I didn’t have a chance to film any of the preparations, first look, or any of the other conventional stuff that a videographer capturing the day would usually get. Instead, I just stole whatever shots I could during the ceremony and afterwards at the reception. What really saved me is that I was able to hook up a wireless lavalier microphone onto the officiant (Jason, a local friend) to capture the ceremony. All the audio in the video is from that single microphone, and it really gave the video a solid backbone.

This video was filmed with a Panasonic GH4, mostly at 24fps and occasionally at 72fps conformed to 24fps. The ceremony was lovely, although the lighting conditions were punishing from a photography standpoint – because the ceremony was outside and in direct sunlight, a lot of the colors were washed out by default and saturation had to be added back in in post. The microphone was plugged into a Zoom H4N (my poor Zoom H4N is slowly dying after many years of good service – pretty sure i will need an H5 soon to replace it). I used my standard cheap-o Polaroid rig to stabilize the camera, plus used a stabilization filter in post.

Technical elements aside, it was an emotional, joyous day. I hope the video is able to capture that.

U2’s With or Without You – a Looping Cello cover version

I spent about 10 years of my childhood playing cello. But when I got to college, other responsibilities took over and I let the cello fall by the wayside. Now, about a decade later, I have picked up the cello again, but with a twist: I’m playing it using a looping pedal and an electric pickup.

Today, I’ve launched a new Youtube channel and plan to release one of these videos per month. My first video is below:


If you like these kinds of videos, feel free to Subscribe to my Youtube page or Like me on Facebook.

Space Needle Time Lapse

I was bored yesterday morning before work so I set up a time lapse video. This video compresses about 9 hours of time into 40 seconds. If it doesn’t look like the sun actually moves that much in 9 hours, that’s because it doesn’t. We are on the verge of Seattle summer, after all.

OK Go’s ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’

I’ve spent much of the day watching and re-watching OK Go’s newest music video. I actually really enjoy the song, but beyond that, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the mad genius it takes to CONCEIVE AND ATTEMPT such a thing. Like, these guys must have just sat around, thinking of how they could dazzle viewers with some camera reveals of these spectacular optical illusions? And do it all in one long continuous shot? MADNESS.

These guys have come a long, long way from dancing on treadmills filmed with a household camcorder (just 8 years ago!).

Equally brilliant: the way they chose to roll this out. They shot several exclusive behind-the-scenes videos and gave one each to outlets like Time and Mashable. This ensures coverage from those places while providing them each with unique, interesting content.

Another Year in the Life of David Chen



Last year, I wrote a whole series of essays about my attempts to chronicle my life one second at a time. You can watch last year’s video here.

I have finally completed this year’s video, which starts the day after my birthday in 2013. Round 2 of the 1SecondEveryday challenge was considerably more difficult this time around. Here are some thoughts on doing this project again this year:

Time is a flat circle – It’s true: the more things change, the more they stay the same. When you compare the two videos, there are a lot of similarities. A lot of riding the Microsoft Connector bus. A lot of sunsets and scenes from my apartment. A lot of shows at the Seattle Theatre Group (plus Sasquatch!). I’ve started to get into a routine here in Seattle, which is simultaneously comforting and terrifying – it means this place now fully feels like home, but I now fear becoming complacent.

Food – Again, I depended on food for a lot of the seconds. It’s very difficult not to. It’s also hard not to depend upon all the things one sees every day in one’s routine.

I lost the will to go on – About 2/3rds of the way into the year, I definitely lost the will to keep doing the project. It became exhausting to pull out the camera(s) and take some video whenever something interesting was happening. As a result, I didn’t think strategically about stories I could tell using this format. For instance, I could’ve done a whole sequence on the Kickstarter film I’m doing with Stephen Tobolowsky. Huge missed opportunity! Towards the end, as that Kickstarter project started to gain steam, I definitely got a little bit of my mojo back.

Nonetheless…

In the end, it was still incredibly rewarding – Not only do I now have a visual chronicle of my year, but the seconds help me remember a bunch of stuff that I would’ve otherwise forgotten. Plus, the process of revisiting all the seconds, choosing which one was my favorite etc. was as emotional as it was last year.

Moving to a one Month Release Cycle? – I’m thinking of releasing these 30-seconds at a time every month from now on, then perhaps doing a 1-year video every calendar year. The amount of work required for one of these videos just feels like it’d bear more returns spread out over time.

The Seattle Color Run 2014 – In Slow Motion


I learned a very valuable lesson yesterday: don’t shoot at a Color Run without camera protection!

The Seattle Color Run (as with many other Color Runs) is a photographer/videographer’s dream, an explosion of color and sound with tons of movement and a diverse array of human beings. But the colored cornstarch they spray gets EVERYWHERE. It gets on your hair, on your clothes, into your orifices (mucus from my nose was blue-colored all afternoon yesterday!). It also gets onto your camera.

I saw a bunch of photographers running around with plastic bags on their cameras yesterday but honestly I don’t even know if that would have been adequate. A few grains of this stuff isn’t a huge deal, but if any more than that gets into your camera, it messes with the sensor, the focusing motor, etc. What a nightmare. I’m happy with the footage but I’m not sure if I’d ever bring a camera to such an event again.

On that note, the footage was shot on a Panasonic GH4 at 96fps with my standard camcorder chest stabilizer, then graded with FilmConvert. The grade on this is pretty rough. Since you’re lowering your bitrate when you shoot in slow motion on the GH4, it doesn’t really hold up too well in post when you’re pushing the exposure and colors. Aside from that, I’m pretty happy with some of these shots, and also pleasantly surprised that the Polaroid rig I use is adequate stabilization when shooting slow motion.

My only regret is that I couldn’t have spent another hour at this event filming more shots and coverage. But I was already getting really concerned at how my camera was getting all this cornstarch caked on top of it and I felt like I had to leave. I think I made the right decision. Maybe next time I’ll pick up one of these.

Five Things I Miss: Switching to a Panasonic GH4 from a Canon 5D Mark III


When the Panasonic GH4 was first announced, I heard numerous reports that there were filmmakers who’d be selling their 5D Mark III’s and going with the GH4 exclusively. I was a bit stunned at all the positive buzz, just because I love my 5D Mark III and think the image quality is fantastic, even if the video codec is pretty terrible. Could anything possibly serve as a full replacement for the Mark III?

I recently purchased a Panasonic GH4, and while I’m kind of in love with this thing, I’ve already decided I won’t be selling my Canon 5D Mark III anytime soon.

The Panasonic GH4 has some really awesome selling points. It is the only camera that can shoot at 4K for under $2,000, and it does a pretty great job of it, with insane amounts of detail. It has video features that DSLR video users have been longing for for quite sometime, including zebras and focus peaking. And it does it all in a really small, light package, that’s extremely easy to handle.

That being said, as someone who’s shot exclusively with Canon for the past 5 years, there were a lot of thing I missed about my Mark III when I picked up the GH4 and started trying to use it. Here are the top five things I miss about my Canon:



1) The bokeh – It’s a scientific fact: it’s harder to get shallow depth of field on a smaller Micro 4/3rds sensor than it is on a full frame sensor. The shorter focal lengths mean that your aperture needs to be wider to achieve the same creamy bokeh you’re used to. That’s not to say you can’t still achieve great results with lenses like Voigtlander Noktons or the Nocticron. But it can still be a challenge. On that note…

2) The lenses – Canon now has a ridiculously large assortment of EF lenses to use from, a truly mature system that has pretty much every focal length and quality level one is looking for. Don’t get me wrong, there are some awesome Micro 4/3rds lenses out there, but they’re simply not as many to choose from (a difficulty which I ran into when I was first kitting out my Blackmagic Pocket). So you may not get the exact focal length you’re looking for, or it may not have the preferred build quality. Of course, for Canon, you can probably get the exact thing you’re looking for, but it’ll cost an arm and a leg, and the lens itself could be really, really heavy.

3) The buttons – One thing that’s annoying: On the Canon 5D Mark III, the aperture dial is in the back, and the shutter speed button is in the front. These crucial positions are switched on the GH4, and that is definitely going to take me some time to get used to. I also love that huge gigantic wheel on the Canon – nothing is really going to beat how easy that is to use, and the GH4’s equivalent wheel, which feels pretty flimsy, certainly doesn’t match up. UPDATE: Apparently, you CAN switch these buttons via the GH4 menus.

4) The viewfinder – I never thought I’d miss the viewfinder on my Canon, but it’s really hard to get used to a digital viewfinder/EVF on the GH4. I was fine doing it on my Fuji X100, because that was more of a “leisure camera,” but on the GH4, which I’m considering using for professional applications, I find the experience unsatisfying. There’s just no substitute for being able to look through a viewfinder and see, through a prism/mirror, the exact thing that you’re going to take a picture of. The software and screens on the GH4 are great, but software will take awhile to be perfect in this regard, and show us what we’re looking at with perfect fidelity.

5) The top display panel – I realize this is a gripe that is specific to people switching from a Mark III, but I really have grown to love the panel at the top of the camera, which the GH4 doesn’t have. It displays basic settings like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and drive mode, and if I’m in a situation where I need to be discreet, it makes it really easy to change my settings without putting the camera up to my face. Not a big deal, but just something I missed when I was shooting my first video on the GH4.

UPDATE: One more thing that really grinds my gears – there is very little third-party RAW support for the GH4’s .RW2 files, and it will likely be weeks/months until programs like Aperture and Lightroom release updates with GH4 RAW compatibility. I can’t believe we are still living in an age when one of the world’s most anticipated cameras can be released without an easy way to manipulate the files.

The Panasonic GH4 is essentially useless for professional photography jobs until RAW support arrives.

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Those are just a few of my thoughts on making the switch, but overall I’m a huge fan of the GH4 and plan to use it far into the future. Just sometimes, a few things bother me about it. But for the amazing video features, incredible lightweight, and hyper-competitive price, the GH4 is still a formidable camera and one that I’m really enjoying using.