After being away all last week on shoots, I was behind on two things, yard work and family time. I combined them both in this weeks video.
My yard and the 10 million leaves I racked up.
I spent all day Saturday raking leaves, I was exhausted. Sunday I just wanted to relax and have some family time. The kids wanted to play in the leaf pile, so we took the dog out and started playing. I had my iPhone in my pocket so I started taking some pictures. I had always wanted to do some burst mode pictures, and then put them into a video, so I started shooting some bursts of the kids running and jumping into the pile. Then I figured, why not make this a challenge video so I started to shoot some slow motion stuff as well.
We ran around and played for about an hour. Seeing Roy Boy jump in the leaves was hilarious.
Shooting Roy Boy with the iPhone.
It was nice to do a simple no hassle video, I really didn’t put much effort into it, I just wanted to have some fun.
Monday came and I sill needed to finish the edit, I still wanted to relax though, so I edited it while I watched Monday Night Football, I did most of it at halftime and the rest during the commercials.
There’s always places to find time.
It was a simple edit except for the photo burst section. I had always envisioned a cool segment of a sequence of stills piled up that create motion. What I envisioned didn’t turn out. I spent a bunch of time (most of the halftime) trying to make the sequence work, but I couldn’t get it right. I finally decided to do it in a mechanical way, I’d place an image down and rotate it, then every other image I would rotate 2 more degrees. I didn’t like the outcome, but I didn’t want to spend more time on it. Although I shot a bunch of burst mode images, I didn’t use them. I decided to just go with the slow motion clips.
The way I did it made it to mechanical, I like a more natural look and feel.
There were a few issues getting the images and videos off of my iPhone. The first was that the slow motion video plays at regular speed when you put it on the timeline. There is no way of exporting it in slow motion. When you click on the clip properties you can see that it is recorded at 120 frames per second, but it plays at 30 fps. I simply changed the speed of the clips to 25% so they would play at 120fps (slow motion), 50% would give you 60fps.
With the burst mode pictures I had literally hundreds of pictures. They all needed to be resized, and I also wanted a white border on them so they had the feel of old polaroids. With so many images I decided it was best to do a batch resize/effect in photoshop, then import all the batched images into premiere. If you have a bunch of images that all need the same effect or resizing done to them, I highly recommend using the batch feature in photoshop.
To make a batch action (like resizing all images) go to the Actions Panel and select “New Action”, then name the action you are about to create (I named mine resize 800×600 stroke) because those were my actions. Then hit the Record Button, and do the actions or effects you want. When your finished click File/Save As, and pick a folder to put the images in (a separate from the original folder, also don’t change the name of your image). Then hit the “Stop” button. All of your actions were recorded. Then go to File/Automate/Batch and choose the action you created, and pick the folder with all of your images and hit OK. Photoshop will automatically resize and put the effects on all of your images and place them in the folder you indicated. It save a ton of time, trust me.
Since I started with a stroke(White border) on the photo burst images I thought it would be nice to put that same effect on the video. Premiere doesn’t have a stroke feature though. But I found a way to fake one. To get a stroke feature on a video in Premiere add the “Radial Shadow” effect to your clip. Change the color to white, the Opacity to 100%, then change the projection distance and light source to whatever you want to get the look you are after, for me the projection distance was 5 and the light source was 596.0 388.0 .
The Radial Shadow effect can work like the stroke effect for borders.
I added a rotation and a slight grow to the clips to make it more fun. I wanted a fall looking background, so I took a clip of a leaf I shot for Week 39. I retimed it to fit the length of the video, and then I added a Gaussian Blur to it so it wouldn’t distract from the video clips.
Week 39’s clip, blurred for the background.
I like creating my own backgrounds. Doing it this way, there was still subtle movement in my background, but it was blurred out enough not to distract from the main images. Backgrounds need to stay in the background. You can shoot almost anything for backgrounds. I once shot an Emmy Statue one of my coworkers won at Digital Juice, and it was used for a background in a makeup ad. Use your imagination, it’s fun.
The background on this clip is actually Bokeh from an Emmy Statue I shot about 5 or 6 years ago.
The only other things were the music and the font. I got the music from bensound.com and used it with a creative commons license.
I’ve used bensound a lot, he’s got some good stuff.
The font was a standard font, Brush Script MT.
It was nice to get the kids involved in the challenge, that was one of my original goals (to get family involved). It was also nice to do a family video. They are great to watch when the kids get older, and they preserve wonderful memories. I’ve shot a bunch of them and recommend you do too if you have kids, they grow up so fast. Just have fun with them and be creative. I post some of them in my “Just For Fun” video section. Here is one of my all-time favorites, my son eating popcorn, it’s called “The PopCorn Zone” I shot it about 12 years ago, and that’s him now jumping in the leaves.
The reason I’m not in the video is because I was growing my Movember Mustache and didn’t want to be seen.
One Day Only, my Movember Mustache.
You can watch Week 42’s “The Pile” here.
