I woke up and watched “Sunday Morning” on CBS, it has one of my favorite segments on TV, the last 30 scones of the show, when host Charles Osgood says “We leave you this Sunday Morning…” and then they show nature clips from various parts of the country. There’s no commentary, no music, just basic shots of nature. It’s always been one of my favorite segments. That Sunday the segment reminded me of my shoot last week of the fall leaves
After the show I got in the shower and started to think of something to shoot for this week. I kept thinking of last weeks shoot of the leaves in my yard. It focused on the various colors. I started thinking since I focused on colors last week it would be cool to do something in Black and White this week.
I got dressed and was trying to come up with something to shoot, I was looking outside and figured, why not shoot in the same places as last week and do something completely different. It sounded like a good idea so I set the same limitations as the week before, 45 minutes to shoot something in my yard.
Shooting leaves in my yard again.
I could have easily shot it in color and made everything B&W in post, but I wanted to shoot B&W in the camera. I went to my cameras settings (Canon 7D) and went to “Picture Style” and selected “Monochrome”.
Monochrome settings on Canon 7D.
Monochromatic is basically using only one color, and it’s all of the shades, hues and tones of that color. Basically Black and White.
Knowing it was going to be in B&W, I wanted to play off of that feel and kind of exaggerate it and try and creat a stylistic mood with it. I like things out of focus, so I decided to shoot with the LensBaby Composer Pro lens.
LensBaby Composer Pro.
It gives you the ability to do a selective focus. I like how it distorts the borders of the images. I also have never shot with it in Black and White and wanted to see what it would look like.
I went to many of the same locations or spots in my yard that I shot the week before, I just used different angles, and a different lens.
You can shoot the same area in so many different ways. I remember an exercise in film school where everyone had to shoot the same stairwell. We had about 20 people in the class and we had 18 different shots, two of the people had the same shot. It’s a good exercise to make you look at things in different ways.
Many of the shots are handheld, and some are on a tripod. I like using my old photo tripod for video because I can tilt the head and shoot vertically.
My old photo tripod, shooting vertical.
I like the perspective it gives on the trees.
I like the perspective it provides against the tree.
It was pretty challenging to shoot the leaves falling with the LensBaby lens. Things were completely out of focus, but I liked the look of it. At one point I was laying on the ground waiting for leaves to fall.
Me laying down waiting for leaves to fall.
I got tired of waiting, so I grabbed my daughters soccer ball and threw it at the branches and then shot as the leaves fell down.
The most important gear of the shoot, my daughters soccer ball.
When I got the footage in Premiere, I was thinking of putting slow violin type music to it, but I couldn’t find anything that fit. Then I thought, I shot in the same location, why not try and use the same music, I put it on the timeline and I didn’t like the feel of it, so I thought about it for awhile. I like the sound of things in reverse, it’s kind of eerie sounding, and I thought that might fit the feel I was going for. So I tried reversing the song. It worked and I liked the sound of it, so I kept it.
I came up with the title “Absence” because like I said earlier I was trying to do the opposite of last weeks focus on color, and Black is the “Absence” of all color. I also thought the word fit the tree theme because the trees were becoming “absence” of leaves. That thought and theme made me add a shot at the end (branches with no leaves). The composition of that shot isn’t great, I had to increase the size of the clip to get a section of branches with no leaves. I wish I had thought of that while I was shooting, I would have gotten a better shot. The font was Al Bayan, simple clean, I liked it.
The only other thing I did in the edit was to add a Bleach Bypass effect to the shots. I just liked the look and feel of it.
Shooting the same thing, the same location and using the same music as last week, while trying to make a completely different video was a fun challenge, and a good exercise, try it sometime.
My assistant for the shoot, Roy Boy.
You can watch Week 40’s “Absence” here.
