Avebury, UK – Video

Avebury was another video made as a learning piece for me. We arrived at Avebury as the gates to the car parked opened for the day hoping to be able to film the stones without too many people around. The plan went fairly well though it was only an hour before the site started to get rather crowded. We decided to move to the less busy area of the West Kennet Avenue and then on to West Kennet Long Barrow to include some more of the historical area in to the video.

It was a lovely area to visit and I would advise anyone thinking of visiting the area to arrive early to experience the stones in a peaceful setting.

Bath, UK – Video

One of the first video projects I set myself was to create a short promo video of Bath. This was primarily a learning piece for me for both filming and editing.

We set out early in the morning to do our best to beat all the crowds and to give ourselves the best chance to film the quiet streets. I had a list of the main areas I wanted to cover but because we were not working to a strict schedule, I had the freedom to shoot anything else that took my eye during the day.

It was the first day I had taken out the Zacuto Z Finder Pro x2.5 and it is amazing, it makes filming so much easier especially on a sunny day. We also took out the slider for the first time, I am rather glad I didn’t have to carry it myself!! I’m only little and it weighs a ton when in the same bag as the tripod, I wouldn’t have got very far on my own!! Love the effect from using it, though in a busy city its really only usable when the street are quiet. It was a fun day and I am really happy with the final piece. I hope you like it too 🙂 

HLB Media

HLBMediaLogo

Exciting news! Today I have launched a new sub-section to my work base HLB Media. As you will have seen from previous blog posts and tweets I have started working more within the videography world. It’s something that’s developed from doing it in my day job over the last 6 months, I’ve learnt so much and have really enjoyed putting my new-found skills into action!

HLB Media is a developing area of work and I am looking forward to showing you what I have been doing. Keep checking back to the new site, videos will be posted soon!

I am currently working in collaboration with Obsidian Entertainment. If you are interested in working with us on a video project please get in touch via info@hlbmedia.co.uk

A Short Film – Test footage

A few weeks before our planned filming date, myself and the director spent an afternoon going over the D3s settings and filming some establishing shots at our chosen location. Although I have played with the video settings I had not yet been out to film anything seriously. By altering the saturation settings and manually adjusting the white balance we achieved the feel we are aiming for. We have however decided that the zoom shots didn’t really work. The zoom lens is not motor driven and didn’t hold focus through its zoom range. We want to do some further tests of zooming and focus pulling to see if we can manually achieve fluid turns of the zoom and focus rings without expensive rigs. We were both extremely impressed with the capabilities of the camera and the output looked awesome. The only major problem on the day was the lack of feeling in my frozen fingers! I can’t wait till I can show you what we are working on…

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A Short Film

In the last couple months, I have been learning Avid at my day job. It has been a steep learning curve with me having to edit together footage from an in-house event but it’s been a really interesting experience and I’ve learnt how to do everything from organising source material and preparing it for editing, defining my own workflow, techniques for editing sync and non sync video, customising project settings, enhance audio and levels for broadcast, using keyframes for image stabilisation and colour correction, and finally exporting for DVD creation! Unfortunately the finished product belongs to the company I work for and is not available online.

However, myself and the editor at work have become friends and in the first few months of this year we are aiming to make a short film. Over the holidays I headed out to do a location recce. Now, I’m unsure of all of the details of the film as the co-producer is also the writer but I was told to find a local graveyard!! Intriguing I know but I thought this one was quite nice as graveyards go!

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This is the first short film I have been involved in and have been thrown in at the deep end as co-producer and cameraman but I’m excited to be working on it! I’ll keep you updated on progress.