Chicago Blizzard on the Lakefront (GH2)

S

smith148

New member
I finally got comfortable enough with my first camera that I bought a couple months ago to try and put something together. I am a total newbie to filming and editing so any suggestions and advice would be appreciated. I had trouble with the white balance since all the cars/streetlights had different color lights AND because I'm a little bit colorblind. And forgot to set it for the indoor fluorescents. I tried to desaturate the footage and cool it down a bit but some of it was so green or orange it was hard to do much.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0kOlj1Ws5U

It's a collection of footage from the massive blizzard here in Chicago last week that I took after leaving work early (first time the gov. building I work at was closing down in 20+ years!).

Long story short we took a bus over to the lake to try and see the 25 foot waves and ended up wandering unknowingly onto Lake Shore drive which was completely snowed over and abandoned. We only realized we were on it when we stumbled onto a tow truck stuck trying to get away from the car it was trying to tow... and then a couple abandoned cars... and then more cars with people in them, and buses, and plows, all covered with waist deep snow drifts (and this was still fairly early in the night).

There's more about what happened at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...d_n_817771.html

My camera was all frozen over with ice but still seems to work fine! Again, I'd love to hear feedback.
 
Dear smith148, this is great work! Especially, as you write that it seems to be one of your first pieces!! Regarding the whitebalance, I normally set it at a fixed Kelvin temperature. Only if I go from indoors to outdoors I reset it. Also the grading looked good. Keep going!
 
Very nice... I am a huge fan of moving around, getting as many different angles as possible, and it seems like you did just that. Plus, I feel like a blizzard is black and white by nature, so the desaturation was a nice touch. Great work!
 
I am happy to see gh2 working outside in tough conditions.
That was my only concern with the GH2.
 
Title was in after effects stabilized with mocha. I ran into an odd problem doing it: things would look fine when rendered in aftereffects, but when the .aep was part of the premiere project the final render would be quite jittery (similar to if I had used the regular AE tracker, which i had tried first). I ended up having to render in aftereffects and then just include the rendered clip in the premiere project. Still haven't figured out why it did that.

I was very happy with the durability of the camera as well, considering it was coated with wet snow that had frozen into a nice icy covering in some places as it was just below freezing. I made sure only to use the EVF rather than the LCD. We briefly ran into a photographer out there with some serious canon gear and he mentioned BOTH of his cameras' LCDs had died, not sure if he just meant they weren't refreshing due to the cold or were actually kaput.

When we got off the drive we went to a bar where I just turned everything off, spread everything in my kit out and soaked up all the water with napkins - my flash's zoom motor was only making grinding noises and I though I had broke it but the next day even that worked fine.

Thanks for all the comments!
 
Nice job! really like the raw look of it, good work on your first outing with the GH2.

As a side note about durability, I had the GH1 before I got the GH2 and I was extremely surprised by it's ability to last in both very cold weather and also to not overheat in direct sunlight. They are great little cameras!
 
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