I just got back from a weekend trip to Portland and I have some thoughts on that city that I’m looking forward to discussing with you guys. In the meantime, I thought I’d share this timelapse I recorded of the drive down there. This video was assembled by recording one image every two seconds. Most of the drive took place on I-5. The exposure got a bit wonky at the end, but I’m still pretty happy with the final result.
Things to do Before Your Twitter Account is Suspended or Banned
Two days ago, I was shocked to learn that, after 3-4 years in good standing, my Twitter account was suspended with no warning. Typically a suspension means you’ve violated one of Twitter’s rules, but it’s also possible that Twitter will suspend you if it detects that your account may have been hacked.
In my case, I was apparently accidentally caught in a dragnet for spam accounts. Twitter support got back to me and within 24 hours, my account had been rightfully restored. The whole incident did get me thinking, though. What if things had gone a different way and Twitter had accidentally deleted my account, or ruled incorrectly that my account WAS a spam account? What recourse would I have? Not much. More importantly, without access to my Twitter account, how would my life be worse?
There were so many things I wish I’d done! So many replies I could’ve made! So many direct messages I should have sent! But seriously, when I realized that I had no control over my account’s fate, I did wish I’d done the following things before I got suspended:
Back up the list of people who you are following – If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to “start over” on twitter again, the biggest loss is of course your followers. Over the past few years, I’ve been grateful to garner some pretty amazing people on my follower list, and it’s entirely possible that, even if I were to restart my account, those people might just never get around to following me again.
However, an almost equally big loss would have been the list of people who I follow. Over time, I’ve curated this list to be a group of users who I can depend on for interesting insights, opinions, ideas, and news. Re-creating this from scratch would have been a pain. I’d recommend you either copy-and-paste your list somewhere, or create a backup account from which you can also follow these people. This way, if your account is ever compromised, you can at least receive the same updates you’re always used to.
Back up your tweets – Twitter now allows you the option to download an excel spreadsheet of every single tweet you’ve ever made from your account (it’s right there under “Settings”). For some, reading through this spreadsheet might be a cringe-inducing exercise of self-examination. But regardless of your emotional reaction, it’s nice to have a record of everything you’ve ever said or done. If you live your life in public, this can make for a surprisingly useful reference document when you’re trying to remember major milestones.
Write more often on a personal blog/website at a domain name you own – Internet god Dave Winer has been issuing this rallying cry for years, and it can basically be summed up as follows: it is important to be the master of your own domain. In a recent post, Winer writes:
[M]aybe if more people stick to the open web, and resist the pull of the silos, it will force the silos to be a little nicer to the people who create their success. Think about that when Twitter does its IPO next month. How much of your creativity did you pour into their success, and how much do you get to participate in the windfall? Not very much? Then maybe you should learn from the experience.
Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely love Twitter and consider it an essential part of any online portfolio. On a personal note, the service has dramatically improved my life, my career, and the way I consume information. But if the newly-public Twitter makes decisions you don’t agree with or if your account is terminated by accident, all you’ll have left is the stuff online that you own. If that’s not a site/blog at a domain name with your name attached to it, then you may want to rethink where you are investing the bulk of your time.
12 Years a Slave and Ender’s Game Reviews
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with trailer-length video reviews for slashfilm.com. The objective is to deliver something that’s visually and aurally stimulating, but not so much work that I can’t sustain it on a weekly basis (with my full-time job and other podcast obligations). So far, the response to these short reviews has been really positive so I plan to keep them up, but I do hope one day that it will lead me to create videos that have more creative editing. Perhaps when I have more time…
The Engagement of Micah and Nicole
After acquiring my new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, I longed for an opportunity to try it out. So I asked my colleague, Nicole, if she’d be interested in shooting an “engagement video” with her fiancé, Micah. Neither of us had never done such a video before, but the possibility of a relatively novel way to announce an engagement to their friends was exciting to everyone involved.
This video was shot at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Belltown (a very competitive spot for family/wedding photos, as there were 2-3 other shoots going on in the area at the same time as ours). For this shoot, I used the following equipment in addition to the Blackmagic camera:
Alright, baby. Let’s do this thing! pic.twitter.com/FLgmetZXtR
— David Chen (@davechensky) October 16, 2013
Polaroid Video Chest Stabilizer – When I first started investigating DSLR video, I was pretty shocked at how expensive some of the accessories were. $470 for a Red Rock Micro DSLR rig? Surely there was a cheaper solution. In fact, this $55 Polaroid stabilizer is just what the doctor ordered for Blackmagic Pocket Cameras. While the rig itself is really flimsy and hard to tighten to a degree that I really felt satisfied with, it worked perfectly for such a small device. It would also work with a DSLR and maybe a pancake/prime lens, but any more than that and I’d seriously start to question the safety of my gear. Overall, I think it gives the final video a good “handheld” look, without being overly jittery. As a bonus, it’s super light and easy to carry around. I could see myself shooting a bunch of footage with just this camera and this rig (audio would need to be captured separately).
Tiffen ND Filter – Essential for shooting outdoors and achieving shallow depth of field.
As usual, I used FilmConvert for most of the color grading. For comparison, here’s an ungraded shot and a graded shot. You can see how flat the initial image is, as well as how much info and detail is contained in the ProRes HQ file that can be pulled out in post.
The only thing I wish I’d been able to do was shoot more b-roll of the couple doing other activities. But the scope of this project was very limited (only about an hour of shooting in one location). Next time!
The Wedding of Lucas and Heather
A colleague/friend of mine, Lucas (a talented photographer in his own right), recently approached me with an interesting proposition: he needed me to edit his wedding video. This was a bit odd to me, both because I hadn’t attended or shot his wedding, and because he had gotten married nearly a year ago. Turns out, a friend of his had shot a bunch of footage from the wedding and Lucas wanted to see if I could put something together to surprise his wife with on their one-year anniversary.
It’s a really weird feeling to edit footage from a wedding that you didn’t shoot or attend. When I shoot, I typically have some kind of vision for what I want the final product to be. “B-roll goes here. Speech goes here. This sequence goes here.” When you have nothing but raw footage, it’s like having all the pieces of a puzzle but without a picture to show you how it’s all supposed go together. Also — in this increasingly strained analogy — you have the option of dictating what the final puzzle picture looks like.
In this case, it was important to me to understand Lucas’ priorities for what events he needed to have shown, and what order he wanted to show them in. The video is also set to music that has emotional significance for the couple. But the most important part of this entire process was watching and studying all the footage, categorizing it into easily understandable and usable chunks, and then being able to assemble different sequences in compelling ways. “Need a clip of a toast? I know exactly where it is and what section of the toast to use in the final video.” And so on.
One of the pleasures of the experience was seeing a wedding through someone else’s eyes. I edited down 2.5 hours of footage into this 7-minute video. Thus, the vast majority of footage didn’t make it in. But I was able to find some “money shots” that I think worked wonderfully. That feeling of discovery, and of incorporating that discovery into a finished, beautiful product, is pretty unique to editing a project like this.
Also: loved the last sequence from the video. Still kind of gives me chills.
Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera – Initial Impressions and Footage
After two months of waiting, IT HAS FINALLY ARRIVED pic.twitter.com/NNjD9U0kDi
— David Chen (@davechensky) October 15, 2013
This camera takes any lens with a micro 4/3rds mount, which includes Panasonic’s wide range of Lumix glass. Never having used any MFT lenses before, I agonized over which one to buy and studiously perused a bunch of reviews (thanks to The Phoblographer for a lot of useful lens reviews). To be honest, I wasn’t sure how much work I was going to end up doing on the Pocket Camera, so I didn’t want to invest too much in glass quite yet. If I wanted to go all out, I probably would have ended up with the legendary Voigtlander Nokton 17.5mm. Maybe one day I still will.
Instead, I opted for the new Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 II. It’s a relatively new lens but I’d heard great things about it and more importantly, it was relatively cheap. I also recently ordered a Rokinon 7.5mm fisheye, which actually functions more like a wide-angle lens with the Pocket Camera’s nearly 3x crop factor.
Before I even bought the camera, here are a few things I’d already learned from watching/reading reviews about the Pocket Camera from the likes of Cheesycam, Philip Bloom and Dave Dugdale:
- The battery life is crap – I was able to get about 30-40 minutes of standby and recording time on a single battery. Buy extra batteries! Fortunately they are relatively cheap and easy to carry around.
- The camera is very selective about SD cards – Here’s a list of compatible cards. I picked up a Sandisk Extreme 128GB on sale a few weeks back, and that worked just fine after the most recent Pocket firmware update. You must format cards on your computer, as the camera firmware is incapable of formatting cards in the camera. Furthermore, you can’t delete media off the card in camera either, nor does the camera tell you how many hours/minutes of space you have left. Kind of a pain, but okay if you know how to deal with it.
- The microphone is terrible – Any sound recorded onto the camera, even when using an external microphone, was likely to be unusable. I actually went out and bought a Tascam DR-05 off of Craigslist for the express purpose of using it to capture sound for Pocket projects.
Taking all this into account, I shot the following video at Pike Place Market in Downtown Seattle. The audio was recorded using the Tascam DR-05, and the video was graded using Filmconvert. Everything was shot handheld.
Here are some further thoughts I had while shooting with this camera:
- Wow, these images are incredible! – Despite the smaller Super16 sensor size, this footage looks almost as good as the footage from the full-size cinema camera. The ProRes (and it is ProRes HQ only as of this writing – no CinemaDNG Raw yet) truly gives you a ton of flexibility in post and I look forward to experimenting more with the capabilities of the camera in the future.
- The screen is far worse than I could have imagined – I’m spoiled from using camera like the Canon 5D Mark III, with its gorgeous, crisp, glossy screen. But yeah, the matte screen on the Pocket Camera is really difficult to use and quite challenging to focus with. That being said, a double tap of the focus button reveals in-focus areas in bright green on the screen (Thanks to Andrew Gormley for pointing this out to me).
- Lack of meters makes life difficult – While recording, the screen has no meters of any kind except for a timer noting how long your current clip has recorded for. I did not realize how much I would miss the light meter until it was gone. When you’re using a crappy screen (with variable user-set brightness) and no light meter, you’re basically flying blind when it comes to shooting an image that will be properly exposed. Shooting in ProRes does allow you to correct a multitude of mistakes in post but that’s no substitute for a properly exposed image in-camera. Update: I should point out that zebras are available as overlays on the screen (which is okay, but in my opinion, no substitute for a proper light meter). In the heat of the moment, I neglected to use zebras for the above video, which may explain why many of the highlights are totally blown out. That, and also it was exceptionally bright inside the market. In retrospect, I should have exposed for highlights and tried to pull out shadow detail in post. Instead, I exposed for the subject.
- It is exceptionally difficult to manually focus using an auto-focus-only lens! – This is a basic observation but it’s new to me with this MFT glass. The lens gear just doesn’t feel very good turning in my fingers, and I always felt like I was damaging the lens in some way. I really missed having a manual/auto switch on the lens, as I do with all my EF glass. Also, my camera iris would sometimes spaz out, meaning that the aperture of my lens would occasionally change all of a sudden and unexpectedly. In addition, sometimes the iris button would not function (I’d press it and nothing would happen). Pretty sure these latter two phenomena are connected in some way – perhaps my camera was getting a delayed reaction from the iris button presses? Either way, I would strongly recommend you adjust aperture manually on this camera, whether through the up/down buttons on the back of the camera, or, if you have a fully manual lens, on the lens itself.
- ND filters are essential – Unlike a DSLR, the Pocket Camera doesn’t allow you to jack up the shutter speed in broad daylight until the image is properly exposed. That wouldn’t be advisable anyway, as high shutter speeds can affect the quality of the footage, but at least it was a possibility. The Pocket Camera only lets you control shutter angle, which I left at 180 degrees. Thus, ND filters are a must for any outdoor work.
I’m planning on doing more shooting with the camera this weekend, and hoping to combine it with a very simple Polaroid rig. I’ll post the results when I’m done.
The fine line between (soundtrack) homage and rip-off
[This post may contain SPOILERS for Captain Phillips, but only if you don’t know what Phillips’ fate was in real life. It also contains spoilers for Inception]
Captain Phillips was one of my favorite films of the year. I’m a huge fan of Greengrass’ hyper-real style, which ratcheted up the tension throughout, and Tom Hanks gives one of the best performances of his career. The score by Henry Jackman was also pretty solid, but one thing about it did catch my ear: the very last track.
I knew it sounded familiar, but as the track went on, its similarity to Hans Zimmer’s “Time” from his Inception score became impossible to ignore. Here’s the latter track:
The chord progression is obviously the same, but so is the instrumentation and the way both tracks play with dynamics (i.e. hear how the volume swells at the same point in the chord progression in both tracks). Furthermore, both tracks play at similar points within each film: right at the end as the credits begin, when some relative level of safety has been established for many of the main players.
Sure, certain chord progressions have been borrowed time and time again in different scores, songs, symphonies, concertos, etc. But their implementation is often so different that new iterations are either transformative or unrecognizable.
This, on the other hand, feels like almost a direct lift. If I had to guess, I’d surmise that “Time” was used as a temp score for Phillips, and it worked so well that Jackman had to create something incredibly similar, but different enough that his film couldn’t be sued. What do you guys think?
Update: Readers have pointed out that Zimmer received a “The director would like to thank…” shout out in the end credits of Captain Phillips.
Two Podcast Seasons In: Lessons Learned
This week sees the conclusion of The Ones Who Knock, the podcast I host with Joanna Robinson which covers both parts of the fifth season of Breaking Bad. This season of the podcast, and the most recent season of A Cast of Kings, were both made possible as a result of successful Kickstarters (both projects were funded within 48 hours of launch). I’ve already written my thoughts on how to launch a decent Kickstarter, but as this “season” of the podcast is about to come to an end, I thought I’d reflect on a few thoughts regarding the model of Kickstarting podcasts.
Podcasts are a strange beast. Their very format consigns most of them to niche status at best. The closest mainstream analogue I can find to podcasting is talk radio or shows on NPR. The producers of the latter understand that radio is no longer “appointment listening.” People are either leaving the radio on at work all day, or they listen to a 5 or 10-minute chunk in between conversations in the car. Information provided in relatively short bursts is the key. Thus, a 50-minute long conversation about last night’s episode of Breaking Bad is impossible to make into a mass-appeal product. This frequently leads to the following:
Result #1: The overwhelmingly vast majority of podcasts don’t attract enough listeners to attract any significant advertisement money.
Result #2: The overwhelmingly vast majority of podcasts are labors of love.
Result #3: The podcasts we know and love can easily end at any time, and without warning.
The fact that most podcasts are a result of sheer enthusiasm and will on the part of their producers does give them a special, intangible quality. But by accepting this as the norm, we’ve consigned ourselves to a world in which there’s no functioning business model to make podcasting into a solvent enterprise.
In my opinion, the Kickstarters we’ve launched show that if the quality of the product is acceptable, the audience exists, and the price is reasonable, people are willing to pay for something that will help them engage with their favorite forms of art on a deeper level.
From a producer’s perspective, I can say that getting paid for the podcast unequivocally motivated me to put out a better product. It’s one thing to futz around in Skype conversations without any idea of whether or not people are actually listening to you; it’s quite another to know that people are paying to listen and expecting a certain level of quality for each episode. I became considerably more motivated towards cranking out bonus content, like our interview with Dave Porter, to reward those that found our conversations and insight worth paying for.
Doing a podcast can introduce a number of stressors into one’s life: the burden of a weekly recording/production routine, the pressure to “perform” well, and, of course, the onslaught of commenters, e-mailers, and Twitterers saying nasty things about you. But it also confers a bunch of rewards. Many podcasters out there seek to find a balance that enables them to continue doing great work. I think the Kickstarter model and its attendant revenue help to tip things in favor of more quality content.