Sparkys

[Torrey Meeks]

Hi all, here's another short piece I just finished. This one is an ad for a local restaurant - a road food destination with all sorts of antiques and the greatest green chile cheeseburger in the world.

Discovery came in two days after I finished this and uploaded it, and filmed the restaurant for their Road Eats program! I was hoping a producer of the show would see it and call me up with a job, but no such luck : )

All thoughts and feedback welcome. I shot the whole thing on the T2i.

(Big shout out to the Magic Lantern firmware team with this video too. I used the intervalometer, zebra stripes, intermediate ISO ranges, manual gain control, and kelvin WB at different points throughout the day - all extended tools available with the firmware):

 

[Alex H.]

Looks like an interesting place.

I couldn't follow much of a story here. It was very jumbled, without giving an overall sense of the "start-to-finish" experience. And for that, it was a bit long.

And the camera work just didn't grab me. So many of the shots were from natural eye-level, which is a pretty common error since it's how we see the world every day. What makes a shot interesting is framing that's just outside of that normal place. Perrone Ford has a great writeup in the Cinematography forum about "Being Cinematic". Pay special attention to the sections on framing and camera height. Several of your shots could benefit from that.

A couple of the shots lead me to believe that you have a tripod. Use it. The shaky hand-held was a bit distracting.

 

[Torrey Meeks]

Looks like an interesting place.

I couldn't follow much of a story here. It was very jumbled, without giving an overall sense of the "start-to-finish" experience. And for that, it was a bit long.

And the camera work just didn't grab me. So many of the shots were from natural eye-level, which is a pretty common error since it's how we see the world every day. What makes a shot interesting is framing that's just outside of that normal place. Perrone Ford has a great writeup in the Cinematography forum about "Being Cinematic". Pay special attention to the sections on framing and camera height. Several of your shots could benefit from that.

A couple of the shots lead me to believe that you have a tripod. Use it. The shaky hand-held was a bit distracting.

Thanks for your great advice, C2V.

I'm reading through the basic cinematography thread right now, and I see what you're talking about. I'm always trying to make my work more filmic and cinematic. I'll break out the tripod a bit more, too. There are some pretty lurching shakes.

Regarding the lack of narrative coherency, the client and I worked out what they wanted as I was filming throughout the day. Originally all they asked for was someone to film a live performance and burn all the footage to a DVD. After they saw my portfolio they decided to go with an ad the day I was filming, so I scrambled for footage without pre-planning. The only directive was to make it look like a fun place to eat.

I appreciate the frank assessment of the jumbled feeling and lack of story. If they ask me to recut this for TV or another venue, I'll keep that in mind and take the opportunity to make it stronger and shorter.

(OH! Also, regarding your earlier comments on my video "The American Way," for the YouTube documentary project Life in a Day which I really appreciated too: they used footage from my submission in the final film that premiered at Sundance!)