Two documentaries I shot for my college

G

gunstarhero

Member
I recently shot this documentary for the college that I work at. The school wanted four documentaries that showed their involvement in the community. I was given two of the film to make and the others were made by professional companies. The films were recently shown at a campus event for the faculty and staff where we had the video playing simultaneously on 3 14 foot screens. I only have one of the documentaries posted now. I will post the other one soon. This first one was shot in the Florida Everglades. It was a great experience going out on into the national park. It really is an amazing place that very few people ever get to see how beautiful it really is. I shot everything in 1080p 24p with a hacked GH1. The shots of the sharks are HVX200 and a couple of GF1 shots are also mixed in. All audio was recorded with an H4N with the on board mics. I had a redhead windscreen on it but that wasn't enough sometimes. Every day we filmed was extremely windy.



Here is the second documentary I shot for the same event.

 
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That looks so great! Nice smooth camera movements and crisp codec achievment. The editing kept me involved.

Which wide lenses did you use? Did you use any zooms for flexibility while shooting in a boat (close ups of tagging vs looking straight ahead)?
 
That was captivating. I watched the entire thing...and learned something too. :) How long did it take you to put this together?
 
DanDOF said:
That looks so great! Nice smooth camera movements and crisp codec achievment. The editing kept me involved.

Which wide lenses did you use? Did you use any zooms for flexibility while shooting in a boat (close ups of tagging vs looking straight ahead)?
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Thanks for the comment. I wish everyone couple see this footage in its uncompressed form. My 6gb export of the Everglades film is insanely detailed. Every leaf and piece of grass is razor sharp. Vimeo muddies everything up. Anyway, I shot most of this with the kit lens. Yes the zoom was used often. And my second most used lens was the 9-18mm Olympus lens. Both of these were great for capturing shots quickly. I had so many more shots that I loved but I just couldn't use them in the films. Many shots that I actually think were better than the ones I ended up using.
 
HHL said:
That was captivating. I watched the entire thing...and learned something too. :) How long did it take you to put this together?
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It was pretty time consuming. I think we had about 12 different days of shooting in all and many days were not full days. One of the most difficult things was scheduled the shoots and getting these people to let us come along and film them or do interviews. We had about 4 hours of interviews for each film. It was amazing how little of those interviews were actually usable. Scientists have this amazing ability to give the most complicated answer to the simplest question. We asked one researcher "tell us where we are right now" and he gave us about a 15 min. long answer and never actually answered the question. So I had many long days of editing down the interviews with the script writer. I worked on it on and off for about three months while working on other projects at the same time.
 
It is good, it has idea and good execution.
In most docs you normally cut amazing amount of footage. :-)

But I sugges you to buy two courses by Barry and others, for lighting and sound.
Because sometimes sound is slightly lacking and sometimes lighting is also not ideal (either character placement or lack of reflector).
I think that amazing thing in video that you constantly learn and still realize how much you don't know :-)
 
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It was pretty time consuming. I think we had about 12 different days of shooting in all and many days were not full days. One of the most difficult things was scheduled the shoots and getting these people to let us come along and film them or do interviews. We had about 4 hours of interviews for each film. It was amazing how little of those interviews were actually usable. Scientists have this amazing ability to give the most complicated answer to the simplest question. We asked one researcher "tell us where we are right now" and he gave us about a 15 min. long answer and never actually answered the question. So I had many long days of editing down the interviews with the script writer. I worked on it on and off for about three months while working on other projects at the same time.
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Thanks. That's what I figured....that it was a BEAST, as far as time goes. That said, you did a GREAT job. There wasn't any rambling on the video....so you cut out the garbage. Good for you. Vitaliy is right about the light/reflector. There's one of your setups there that was distracting. It actually stood out from ALL OTHER SHOTS it was so bad. I'm sure you know which one....I'm also sure you kept it because the information that he gave was particularly important. No biggie...just one of those things. Congrats again!
 
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