Mabou2
 Second Officer
Flight distance : 811257 ft
United States
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Hi all, thanks for the comments.... a couple of answers...
1) The residents age ranges from about 70 to 102. Considering how much they shake in general, they did a great job. I had to use tricks throughout the shoot to minimize the talent shake and blinking. Then there are several times where I used a quick speedup, or post production zoom, or creative cuts to remove someone blinking or eyes on the camera. (Regardless of how much some of the people tried, bless their hearts, they couldn't remember what to do for long). But overall, I think they did a great job. The biggest problem with the location was that it was an active residence and there were a lot of people walking around in the background. There are many shots with people in motion in the background, but I edited the video at 720P, so I was able to crop/zoom etc from the original footage to cut people out.
2) The pouring beer and the spilling paint were all built ahead of time. For the beer it was basically tinted plastic wrap that hung from the bottle into the glass... same with the "spilled" paint being a flexible tube, covered with paint (I wish they had chosen a higher contrast color was my only criticism). In the bar I had the client find a still image of football being played and we got that on the TV screen so it was frozen too.
3) This was my first time using the OSMO outside of my house. I had only used it a few times just running circles around my living room. The most difficult part of the shoot (on the technical side) was exposure. I shot completely manually in terms of shutter and ISO. I locked the ISO to 800 (because the footage from this camera is way too grainy at higher ISO), and if needed, adjusted the shutter speed to get exposure. I was often able to get a good exposure by slowing down the ISO too. Except for saturation and sharpening (since I shot LOG) I didn't do ANY post production work on color and exposure because client didn't want the video to look too polished, they wanted it to look a bit home-made, like so many other mannequin challenges that have been posted. So you are basically seeing the exposure right from the camera.
4) The most difficult challenge I faced as far as a viewing experience goes was learning how to pan the camera without making the viewer feel nauseated. This is something I think is important for OSMO: Lets say you need to pan the camera 180 degrees during a shot. Rather than having you be the pivot point and spin your body with the camera at the end of your arm, envision the camera as the pivot point and walk yourself around the camera, keeping the camera in the same spot. To me, this makes the turns much more palatable and less likely to make the viewer vomit. Also seems to work better with the Gimbal itself.
5) The other thing I did (to try to help move the story along) was applying sporadic fast motion in post production, almost always starting or stopping the speed change directly on the beat of the music. The location was too large and there was too much setup in each room to shoot a continuous take. I REALLY wanted to do the whole thing in one take, but that wasn't going to happen. I did shoot through some of the longer halls, so I sped those up. The speed-ups also helped to cloak problems with the talent in the hallways or rooms.
6) The first thing I did after arriving to the shoot was try to figure out what to do with the beginning and end. The client had not considered this part at all. When I saw the piano, the idea came to me to have that be the start and end, with the only live action in the video being the kiss. I thought that ended up being really cute.
7) And the final thing that I considered in editing... again, in an effort to keep the viewer from feeling nauseated... I thought about ballet dancers... when they spin at high speed, they don't just keep their heads at the same speed as their bodies. If they did, they would get sick. Instead, as they spin they focus their face on a spot and through about 75% of their spin, they keep their face pointed at that spot while their bodies turn underneath.. then they snap their heads around and as quickly as possible get back to seeing that focal point. This way their heads only spin for a moment at a time. I tried to apply that same thought in post production, when I did have to do a spin or a long pan, I usually sped it up quite a bit so it didn't last long.
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