The making of the Julian Garner Video

I think this was one of my most challenging videos to date, there were many new technical obstacles which I had to either work around or figure out.

(here is a link to the video if you haven't seen it yet)

One of the most challenging things though, was not technical at all. I have a lot of respect for Julian Garner as an artist, I've always found him to be a pretty insightful and creative person, so I felt a lot of pressure on myself to produce a video that not only accurately reflected him in a honest way, but also to create a video that was visually interesting that could fully give him the recognition he deserves. So many times I've seen videos where the subject matter is extremely interesting and but the video doesn't do it justice.

I found it funny listening to the things he talked about in his interview about being a creative person and never really knowing if what you are creating is something that other people will like. The curse of second guessing and over-thinking is apparent amoung all of us, especially those of us who create things for a living, this is something I definitely struggled with throughout this video. It was nice to hear that someone I held in such high regard had similiar thoughts.

All that aside, I thought I should elaborate on some of the technical obstacles and details about the production of this video.

 

Gear specs:
This video was shot entirely on DSLRs, the interview consisted of two cameras basically one of top of the other at different focal lengths. Audio was recorded externally using a boom with a shotgun mic and Roland Edirol audio recorder.

I used a several lenses for my b-roll footage in order to have a wide range to choose from. I quickly learned while shooting this, there is only so much you can watch of someone getting tattooed before it gets boring. Being able to shoot the same scene from several different perspectives helped me to get a lot more usable shots.

The lenses used:
(All nikon lenses)
60mm Macro (the entire intro was shot using this)
50mm f/1.4
14-24 f/2.8

24-70 f/2.8 (most used lens)
70-200 f/2.8 (This lens was only used once or twice for b-roll, but mainly was used during the interview.)


 

Audio Specs:

Probably the most challenging part of this video was the audio. It was the first time I recorded external audio for such a lengthy production. The interview was about an hour long and with two cameras that meant syncing audio for both and then syncing the two cameras together for editing. When shooting the interview I had someone to help start and stop the cameras each time there was a question. This made it easy to see what question/answer was where when cataloguing the footage, but it also made for a shit ton of clips. x2.

Syncing all of this up manually would of taken me weeks.

To do this automatically I used a two programs called Pluraleyes and Dualeyes by Singular software. I learned of these from a very talented video creator, Phil Bloom, he has a pretty great blog and creates a lot of “how to” tutorials. I definitely recommend checking him out.

These programs work astonishingly well, it was almost too simple. It was literally like: Select clips, select audio, press okay. The software then creates a new video file with the synced external audio, a file of just the audio trimmed to fit, and keeps the original. All the new files are nicely renamed and put where you want them.

It took all of about an hour, from downloading the software, doing a quick test to get the hang of it, to having it all in my new sequence. It was pretty amazing. I used the same software to match up the two camera angles on top of each other for editing.

This is the only place I ran into problems, as I quickly learned the second camera I used which I set to match the framerate of my other camera during the interview (24fps) was actually (23.98). This caused some of the video to be out of sync with one another, it was really apparent in the start of the video and less so near the end.

In all honesty, I'm not experienced with this kind of stuff to even tell you a solution should you run into this problem. If someone out there knows a way to fix this if it happens, a message in the comments below would be greatly appreciated.

The worst part is, I got some of it fixed, in a crude way I'm sure, but after I sent my clips to be colour treated they came back a little out of sync again. But since they were rendered already in colour, I couldn't slip/slide them back into place. Really frustrating.

In the end it all worked out, but it was definitely a new set of problems, one that is created from using the DSLRs to shoot video. The audio input and controls on these cameras are absolute shit, and you should never use the onboard mic ever. At the very least, plug a shotgun onto your camera, but have fun trying to monitor your audio while doing so.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the result, there is always somewhere to improve and learn from, and that's the whole point of doing these little personal projects, right? Make mistakes on my own time so when you're a paying client these little hiccups (hopefully) won't happen, and if they do, you aren't completely blind-sided by them. And I hope that maybe someone will be able to read this, and be able have an idea of some of the problems they could potentially run into.

If you have any input, comments, questions please leave them below. I would love to hear from you, whether it's advice or criticism, I'm happy to get it!