I'm currently starting to add video to my projects and I'm looking to work within the world of documentary films. I've been working on a project I'm calling "Trucker's Chapel" for the past three months and just finished editing an introduction piece for the project. I'm planning on adding more content and interviews to this so that's why I'm just referring to it as an introduction for now.
Since I'm now going from shooting stills to shooting video here's a small list of what I've learned so far entitled From Stills to Video or Matt is an IDIOT.
1. Patience is KEY. You're going to have to have your camera on a tripod and wait for the action to come to you. Which sounds like something you think you would be able to handle, but being so used to shooting stills the feeling of wanting to chase the action is hard to fight. The urge to just pick up the tripod and start running after shots seems like a such great idea at the time (IDIOT) trust me just like Axl Rose we all need some patience.
2. I'm not a fan of the term B-Roll. Recently I was given a lecture by my adviser about why we shouldn't refer to B-Roll as B-Roll. I waited fro him to drive his point and was hoping he would sign my extended equipment check out form which was the reason I stopped him in the hall in the first place. As I began to work on my first edit of the project the point my adviser made about the term B-Roll started to make sense to me. When I hear the word B-Roll I think of the footage the news shows when there's been an accident or arrest and there's that zoomed in shot of a police car or random shot of a building that makes no sense with the story. From now on B-Roll will be refereed to as "rocking awesome explosion footage that will drive your story the next level...of awesomeness!"
3. Whenever you think you have enough rocking awesome footage...you don't. After shooting five tapes of footage and grabbing an interesting interview I thought I was ready to wrap up this story, yeah not even close. There's no such thing as too much great footage, just keep shooting.
4. Working on a project for a few months is a roller coaster, wait maybe it's like the pitfall or maybe it's like the demon drop. I don't know just insert your favorite crazy amusement park ride here. At first I felt like there was a lot of potential with this story, half way through shooting I had no idea where this story was going and feared that I was going to be left with a dead end story. Then I showed a rough draft to my class and got a great critique in which my peers pointed out that their is a story there I just need to to keep digging. Keep showing your work to everyone you can, the more fresh eyes viewing your work the better.
So with that said comments or e-mails welcomed. themattadams@gmail.com
cool to see your work, Matt.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious to see how this turns out. The only thing that bugged me was the framing of the preacher @ :45 too much headroom.
ReplyDeleteI get what you mean about being a roller coaster or other amusement park ride. It gets hard to control a documentary and making it take shape, cause there's so many paths it can take.
This is a fascinating place, and a great topic to document. I am excited to see more.
@Wayne Thanks man. Hope all is well with your situation. My thoughts are with you.
ReplyDelete@Ryan Definitely too much head room for the first part of the interview. Will need to rework that for the final product. Thanks for the comment!
So I felt guilty enough to give it a view; totally worth the three minutes of my time. Which is probably how you should market your video, as an enriching 3 minutes rather than a time-filling 3 minutes. Great start, you found a great character. Also I'm impressed that gas was $2.87 however long ago you filmed that opener.
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