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My First Short Film
This past week I had my first critique session in my grad school program. Typically the format is that three students sign up each week and get to show their work. By the end of the semester we should have each gotten a chance to show work three times. In each session, each student gets about an hour to show their work and have it discussed at length by both the rest of the class and the program director and visiting artists.
It can be a very interesting experience!
This early in the game nobody really had much to show and so only two of us signed up. I went first and showed a number for still frames I had shot over the past couple of months. They were pretty random and sort of what I like to call my “visual notebook.” But I discussed some of the project ideas I had and some of the concepts I wanted to pursue.
Flipbook from Micah Walter on Vimeo.
Afterwards I showed a short film I had made in sort of a “flip-book” style. The film was made up of over 1200 still frames that I shot all in sequence over a few days worth of working in Israel. Here is how I created the film.
I went through my Aperture library looking at some old photos. I was in Quick Preview mode so I could quickly scan through the library. At some point I noticed that a sort of animation effect was beginning to happen. Not only that, but there was a pretty cohesive story taking place right in front of my eyes.
I decided to try and create a film from these images, and so I made sure they were all correctly rotated and decided upon a starting point and ending point. I then created an export preset in Aperture so that each image would fit the bounds of a 720p HD movie. I also created a file naming preset that would make sure they each got a sequential index number in the filename. I started to export all of the images to a folder and had a cup of coffee while I waited.
When Aperture was done I opened Final Cut Pro. There is an export plugin that goes direct from Aperture to FCP, but for this task I really needed to be able to control some things on my own. In FCP I first set up my working environment. I created a 720p project and set the still frame time interval to 1/10th of a second. This meant that any images I imported would be played for 1/10th of a second by default.
I imported the folder of images and dragged them all at once to the timeline. Once I did this I imported the music you hear in the background. This was a topic of much debate in the class. Some really liked the music choice, others thought silence or ambient sounds would have been better. I wanted to put something in there for the class, but now that I think about it, the music isn’t really right. It is by Moby and used with permission a-la his Moby Gratis program.
Once I had the music imported I made a few tweaks to the end transitions, but other than that each frame is played for the same amount of time. I am using EVERY frame I shot over that time period and so you will even see frames where my camera was accidentally pointed at the ground. The end result is far from a finished product, but I think it sort of represents a different way in which we can tell a story thanks to the Internet and digital photography.
I am planning to incorporate a lot more audio and video in my projects in the future. So be sure to stay tuned!
Really interesting project. The decision to include the outtakes increases the realism. I think I would have had a seizure if I'd sat through the whole thing on a big screen (I skipped through the web version here); perhaps dissolves or longer individual durations would have helped.
What didn't your viewers like about the music? To me, it seemed heavy and out of sync with the rhythm of the transitions (not to mention the overall flow of the story), but I'm not sure any off-the-shelf song would have worked.
I think they mostly thought it was distracting from the images... I sort of agreed. It was pretty heavy, and if you sit and watch the whole thing through it sort of "over-motivates" the movie.
This week I am in Brooklyn recording ambient audio with a Tascam HD-P2 for a new project of mine. It's sort of my first foray into capturing audio. I decided to go out and record the audio first, and come back again to do stills and then a third time for some video I need to shoot. I think the separation of capturing each component should make for an interesting experience.
The recording setup is a little bulky and I am just learning about microphones, so it will be interesting to see how this goes... It's really amazing what you can creating with a MacBook Pro, Aperture and Final Cut Studio!
I'm pretty mixed on the music. It works for the end of the sequence, but not for the start. On the other hand I think silence could easily be a bit, well, boring for a sequence that long. The semi-animated effect from the collected shots of the same scene are very effective, however.
Moving away from the technical side to the actual content of the slide show, that is quite a collection you have there. I'm curious about the shots you took during the memorial/funeral. You have some powerful shots in there, and I wonder what was going through your mind when you took them. What drove you to pick up your camera and take the photographs you did? I'm currently at Virginia Tech, and was, of course, here last year for the shootings. There were many memorials, vigils, etc at the time, and I don't have a photograph (taken by me) from a single one. I don't know if I was too close, not close enough or just affected by the shear quantity of media folks crawling around the campus documenting everything. Even when I was asked to, I couldn't bring myself to photograph the events. I'm sure I could have taken some powerful photographs, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was exploitive (not much of a photo journalist, me). What kind of perspective do you have that allows you to pick up a camera at that moment? Not perhaps the place for this conversation, but I genuinely would like to know...
@Black - Thanks for the comment. You've raised a very interesting point and I am happy to discuss it here. It's a pretty typical moral battle that any type of journalist has. I suppose print journalists ( writers ) have a somewhat more passive approach as they don't have to feel like they are "taking" something at a moment like that, but then they still have to write it up later, and ask people questions and be at least a little invasive..
As photojournalists we constantly have to decide when we have crossed a line, and when its more appropriate to put down the cameras... What usually goes through your mind is that this really really sucks, but I still have a responsibility to do my job, and to document this event...
In terms of the frames in this video, a LOT of stuff went through my mind throughout the few days of events. The funerals were hard to photograph for sure, and of all of those images I shot I probably only submitted a small handful. I am pretty happy that I have them though, as they as a whole seem to be able to tell the actual story of what was going on, albeit from a sort of birds eye perspective...
Anyway, I'm glad you liked it.. please remember that I have presented in this film EVERY frame I shot without editing.. these are all right out of the camera and sort of show the stream of conscious thought that I was having at the time... I still to this day have no idea what prompted me to shoot the sunset at the end of the funeral.. It has nothing to do with the story, and certainly wouldn't be used to illustrate it in a magazine... but in this context it seemed to work...
-m
Powerful storytelling approach. And fwiw, the music actually worked for me.
-Dan
I was amazed at the effect this style of displaying photos has. I think it captures the feeling of the content well. I found myself thinking about some of the images later that had not initially registered with me and wanting to go back and view them again.
Dudley Warner
Micah,
I really respect you and what you do. I just wanted you to know I was really moved by this piece. I loved the music. It both carried this with the driving beat, while at the same time painting a drama to it, which gave it a strong emotional connection and pulse.
If I could change anything, it would have that every so often, I would froze the frames, and maybe did a slow zoom or pan( Ken Burns style)and then picked right back up, so as to break it up a bit and increase the dramatic presentation.
Thank you for this. It was beautiful, inspiring and I really appreciate the work that you have done.