Looking for critiques on my urban wildlife cinematography

M

mrWr0ng

Well-known member
I took delivery of my HVX in May, my first camera, and I thought that the best way to really start teaching myself how to use it would be to film small flying animals (I did not realise this would be hard because I don't think about things in-depth before I do them).

My girlfriend and I are doing a documentary on urban wildlife, incuding pigeons, and I've been steadily filming them for a few months. I would love to get some or any feedback on how I've been capturing them in the "wild." So far it's been a lot of farther shots zoomed in as close as I can go due to the birds' natural skittishness when people get too close.

Everything's been hand-held, manual settings with a Varizoom rocker. I'm still learning a lot about the different colour and gamma settings, though mostly I've been using Scene File 1.

I'm mostly concerned about trying to get depth in my shots, trying to keep them from looking flat. Am I accomplishing this? Most of this was shot before I discovered Christopher Doyle and how to really change up my angles to put depth into a shot, but I'd love to get feedback on what I could do in a wildlife situation to bring depth and framing to a shot while still getting the content.

This is my video, 3.4 megs, minute and a half long:
http://www.jlboyce.com/video/20061004-pigeonflight.mov
 
I think its just personal preference. Alot of the shots were beautiful in my opinion. As the shots went on I liked them more. At about :27 on the shots were more smooth and were on target. Its probably going to mostly be in the editing, picking the right shots, and going with the mood of the piece.

I like from :36 to :39 ... has a nice documentary/ guerrilla filmaker style with the action like that.

Also :45 to :51 seconds.... nice tracking, and I like the building/treetops kinda of establishing where they are.

I think you'd just need a little more variation. It maybe very tricky to get, but would be nice to see them a little closer too to kind of help bring you into their world a little bit. Hard to get those types of shots.... trying asking disjecta on this board for pointers, I know he shoots wildlife and scenic type things. Maybe you can trick them a bit with some food to draw them in to get your shots.
 
Thanks you guys, I'm glad that it's looking pretty good.

I know the music needs work - I put it together in garageband in a couple of hours, nothing special - my girlfriend and I just moved in together and I'm putting my studio together and bought a book on ProTools so I can make some *real* music soon.

reflex, thanks for the tips on the framing. I've got a lot of closer stuff, but not of flight - they're just too quick. But when the weather gets nice again, I do plan on getting some closeups of flight in slo-mo. I've been following some albino pigeons released from chinatown, and they do some flying around as well, so I'll be following them around when it starts to warm up.
 
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