‘The Captain’s Daughter’ (working title, desperately need to come up with a real one) took a brief hiatus while I spent some time working on ‘Bloodstain’, my EFP project. Gonna polish it up a bit then have a viewing at my place in a week or two. Well received in class, fun little thing, but back to business.
Ungraded still, Cano T2i, 50mm 1.8
On another note, something that absolutely kills me with the recent advent of DSLR filmmaking is poor focus pulling. I can understand that it’s difficult to manage with that tiny little depth of field, and lord knows I could use some work at it, but it seems to be the trend that people are just getting plain lazy. I see these videos (mostly music videos) where the shots are pretty, the talent is good, but the focus is hunting all over the place and they don’t care because they think it looks cool.
An interesting commentary on the trend, putting it in the category it should be in: right next to the star wipes.
“If you’ve been around long enough in the event videography business you know that trends arise mostly because the technology makes them possible. Back when digital synchronizers became available to tape-to-tape editors dissolving between a freeze frame of the end of the last shot to the incoming shot was the rage. The synchronizers also allowed strobe, posterizing and paint effects and wipes and pattern transitions that were just a button-push away. We could do effects now! And we did. Then non-linear editing became affordable and we could do dissolves between moving shots that didn’t involve an A/B controller. We could do slow motion even if we didn’t have a variable tracking deck! And man, did we do dissolves and slow motion. Diffusion, glows, movie effects, vignette - all simply because we could and until we got tired of their uniqueness.
Now in the course of 2 years we’ve gone from ungainly lens adapters to DSLR’s which make narrow DoF shots possible for anyone. In the same way as the other trends you’ll be able to date many event productions by the prevalence of focus hunting and focus pulls. The overuse of sliders will also fall into the bin of dated effects as quickly as reveals did 5 years ago. Because they become dated doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable. All you have to do is look at the productions that win awards. Each year the winners are the ones that have capitalized on trends. By the time the trend becomes cliche’ the innovators have moved on to use tools that new technology has made affordable to producers other than those with hollywood-sized budgets.” Source
In summary, I’d love all of this, amongst other things, Santa.
