Underwater Filming: Part 3

A couple weeks ago I wrote a few blogs on underwater filming. I have keep up with researching this awesome topic. Here are a few more tips that will help you improve your underwater filming.

Hold Still

Avoid shaky movements. Sounds easy, right? After all, your camera is surrounded by water and should be nice and stable. While it's true that most underwater footage isn't prone to the kind of rapid shake that handheld cameras usually produce topside, any amount of wobble can be extremely distracting to your viewers. Hold the housing as close to your body as possible to help stabilize it, or use a tripod (see tip #3!).

Make sure you keep the camera steady on your subject for long enough to get a good, usable shot. Count to 10 in your head once you've got the subject in frame and don't re-adjust where you're pointing the camera or change the zoom during that time. A 60-second shot full of slight moves, shakes, or zooming isn't really a 60-second usable shot, and it's surprisingly easy to sabotage yourself by thinking you've been "on" something long enough when you never have more than a few steady seconds at once!

Move Around a Little

Videos are more interesting if they contain a variety of shots. So along with all your nice, steady, still clips, you probably want to have a few taken while moving.

Practice panning the camera by twisting at the waist to aim the camera all the way to one side, hitting record, and then slowly unraveling yourself back to the other side (don't try to turn your whole body using your fins as this will introduce more shaking).

Each kick of your fins makes the camera wobble for a moment, so try panning over or past your subject by frog-kicking. If you get a strong enough start, you can film a nice long, stable shot while coasting after each kick.

Use a Tripod

It's almost impossible to hold the camera completely steady, you can get rid of that last trace of shakiness by using an underwater tripod. Several manufactures make mounts for different housing, and tripod legs to suit your diving style and price range.

Using a tripod will kick your macro footage up to the next level. It's also surprisingly useful when shooting wide angle. Extend one of the legs out to one side and use it as a handle to give your housing a wider, more stable platform. Or, extend a leg toward your own body to use as a monopod that braces against your chest.

You can also leave your tripod set up on your subject and swim away - fish are much friendlier to cameras that don't have divers behind them.

Follow the Action

When shooting a moving subject, keep it in frame and with plenty of "headroom" - just like shooting stills, you want to make it look like your subject still has room to move.

You can't follow any critter forever, though, and if you try you wind up with a wobbly shot trying to "catch up" with it. After you've captured some amount of motion, hold the camera still and let the subject swim out of frame to "end" the shot gracefully.

Keep Rolling

Tape and memory cards are cheap - go ahead and take lots of footage! Some cameras take a moment to get rolling after you hit "record," and that usually turns out to be the moment with all the action. If something cool is hanging around in the area, I just leave the camera recording, but put my hand over the lens so I can easily see later that there's nothing "here".

Of course, the flip side of this is that you're going to have way, WAY more footage than anyone should ever be forced to watch. Keep in mind that the more footage you take, the more editing will be required. Some videographers truly enjoy the editing process, but those who don't often learn to be better "in-camera editors," only hitting the record button once they've got their shot all lined up and ready to go.

Get a Variety of Shots

When it's time to edit your video together later, you'll want to have a variety of shots to choose from. In particular, you want to try to get wide (establishing), medium, and close up shots of your subject whenever possible.

Try shooting your subjects from different angles, with different lighting. Take your time and give yourself lots of options for later.

Don't forget the shots that will help glue the story together: divers gearing up or entering and exiting the water, wide angle shots showing the overall appearance of the dive site, empty shots of blue water or diver bubbles that can be useful while running credits, etc.

White Balance

Get familiar with your camera's white balance functions. If you're shooting macro with lights, you can probably just leave it on 'auto.' But if you're using ambient light, even with a red filter, manual white balance is going to be your friend.

Manual white balance normally entails pointing the camera at something white (or close to white) and hitting a button, or an annoying series of buttons. Sand usually works, though in some locations the sand has too much red or yellow in it to make a good white card. Dive slates can work, but may need to be held at a bit of a distance and slanted so they aren't glaringly reflective. If all else fails, point straight up towards the sun (or make your buddy wear white fins).

It's often tempting to stop fiddling with white balance and just "fix it in post." But trust me: fixing it in the camera will look much better!

Ambient light and red filter; manual white balance.

Know When to Use Lights and Filters

Here are my rules of thumb - with the caveat that your mileage may vary based on your camera's performance in different lighting situations:

Wide-angle, 45' or shallower: Use a red filter and ambient light. Manual white balance whenever you change depth or the lighting changes.

Wide-angle, deeper than 45': if shooting something close, turn on your lights (extended above and to the sides of the housing to cut down on backscatter) and remove the red filter. If you're trying to shoot something larger than the area illuminated by your lights, you may just have to settle for having extremely blue footage. Putting the red filter on may help you white balance, but at depth it also cuts out way too much light and leads to grainy footage.

Macro: lights on, no red filter. Experiment with different light locations. I usually put one light right next to the lens aiming directly at the critter, and use the other light to backfill some of the shadows from the side or above.

Check Your Footage

Those tiny little screens on video cameras help you figure out where to aim, and hopefully tip you off if you're terribly out of focus or badly white-balanced. But to really get a good look at your footage, you need to look at it on a big screen.

Often I've taken what I thought was great footage - only to play it back on my HDTV at home and discover there's a bit of dust on the inside of the lens that mucked up the autofocus. If you're traveling and go days without really looking at your footage, you can miss things that ruin days of footage, so it's worth it to take the time and make sure you're getting the results you want at full resolution!

Shooting 4K films on your iPhone?

So we all know about the new beautifully clear 4K TVs and more importantly, 4K filming cameras. Now that they've been out for a couple months prices haven't started to calm down and they are a bit more affordable. Since it has come out though new technology around 4K filming has emerged. Other than the 8K TVs and whatever else they have now, they've developed a new way to film 4K film without buying a 4K camera. Recently an app has been developed for the iPhone that seeks to bring 4K filming, editing, and delivery for phones everywhere at a big price.

The app known as "Vizzywig" is estimated to cost an estimated $1,000. It will allow you to film at 24 high resolution frames per second at a data rate of 72MB/s. The creator Michael Zaletel made the app in such a way that it allows you to actually add transitions titles, music, ect. Currently the app is only available for IOS 7 and IOS 8 and requires at least 32GB or 64GB memory card.

This addition to the iPhone is revolutionary for filmmakers everywhere and even the common folk. Having this ability can greatly impact the average persons ability to make great films. It is definitely upping the popularity of film making. For more information view the link and watch the attached video to see what you can do.


http://nofilmschool.com/2014/09/you-can-now-shoot-glorious-4k-video-your-iphone-itll-cost-you

Filming Yay!

Our group started filming this weekend. We dragged ourselves out of bed Saturday and Sunday morning and were very productive. On Saturday we shot our interior scenes with our two main characters, Jordan (played by Erikas Chesonis) and Patrick (played by Nate Patterson. Jackie did a great thing for all of us and took some awesome pictures for continuity and to upload to Facebook and look cool with our cameras and gear.




Saturday we finished the beginning and ending scenes of the film. We ran into a few problems and I think we solved them very well. First off I didn't realize just how low the bed we were working with was. We wanted to do a shot from underneath the bed of Jordan searching for his Nerf guns and the camera would not fit. To overcome this problem we pulled the bed frame out from underneath the mattress and supported the mattress higher up off the ground. The end result worked well. A similar problem happened with fitting the camera inside a chest. Our solution was to take a black picture frame and have the actor lift it off the lens of a camera carefully to create the effect. Saturday went very smoothly and we all enjoyed a nice pizza from Ameritalia.

Sunday morning we were shooting outside with Jordan and his friends who are having a Nerf battle with Patrick's old Nerf guns.



We were worried about rain but we stayed dry and the sky remained overcast, which gave us nice even basic lighting. The Nerf guns we borrowed looked great and our actors did a great job. Dylan Van Arsdale and Peter Gargaro came down to be Jordan's friends. The only problems we had on Sunday was a dog coming out of no where and eating some of our Wegman's sandwiches. There are a ton of pictures of us with the dog, named Buddy, that I'll let someone else upload.

Contagion and Filming

This past Wednesday I saw the movie Contagion in theaters. So often we are consumed by fears of alien invasion or a tremendous cataclysm like 2012 with whole cities falling into the ground that we forget about the real threat of epidemic and I feel as though Contagion showcased this threat well. Whole montages of shots at door handle height with populations displayed in text at the bottom of the frame caused me to shiver as I thought about how quickly a deadly virus could be spread as our population continues to boom. Combine this with the fear mongering of news stations about Swine Flu and you have a psychological that deals with many real world things. One concept of the movie I found interesting was a blogger character who served as a fairly good villain. Alan Krumwiede played by Jude Law spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories on his blog "Truth Serum" as the disease spreads, and also urges his readers to not take a vaccine, a direct jab at Alex Jones and other anti-government bloggers.

Contagion also did a good job at showing very little but also getting the point across. Some examples I liked were a shot of monkeys in a lab immediately followed by hundreds of biohazard body bags being carted away. Later in the movie there is looting and violence as fear consumed the population and u see a shot from an upstairs window looking into another house. You see 2 masked men run in and then flashes of light that were obviously gun shots.

In other news my group filmed our scene in the campus center. It turned out pretty well and we were able to accomplish our scene in under an hour. All 8 of our actors had clothes very similar to the original subjects and followed direction very well. Because it is a wide shot the most difficult thing was timing while having multiple actors in the frame. It was very obvious if one person was on time and another was not so it took many takes to get everything down. The way we rehearsed was to train two actors at a time and build onto the scene in 4 parts. We also had 2 team members outside letting actors know when to go and also blocking off the doors which was another issue. As everyone knows those stairs have a good amount of traffic. I was happy with the way the scene turned out.

Flooding?

I hope that no one was actually effected by the flooding I read about in that Ithaca emergency email beyond having classes delayed today. I thought I'd share what I did yesterday towards our first project. Today the rain cancelled class, but yesterday the rain made filming annoying. Had it been a nice sunny day I would've gone to the Commons and shot something. Due to the weather, anywhere I went off campus would've been a place of business, which could have caused complications when trying to replicate the scene. So I grabbed my Canon T2i and trekked around campus stopping at various interesting indoor locations.

The next obstacle was creepiness. To try and capture people doing stuff from far away is not a challenge. To get a conversation or interaction between people in the foreground was interesting. The first shot I got was in the campus center by the Park side entrance. I stood on the second floor overlooking the entry way and filmed for thirty seconds. I had a stairway on my left and right with the doors directly in front of me. Because it was seven o'clock I didn't get a rush of people. But I got several small groups of people coming and going up and down the stairs having small conversations.

The second location I tried was the rec center. I just sat myself down in a corner and filmed the 6 or 7 people in there playing pool and ping pong. I also went to the music building's foyer that overlooks the hill center and sat in a comfy chair. At that location I captured in frame two people working and one girl talking on the cellphone. My final stop was the pub where I found a friend to place in the foreground. Calvin Healy sitting there ripping his hair out over calculus 3. In the background there were 3 girls arguing about a group project.

I didn't get the chance to try a moving camera shot. Maybe with this rain day I'll get the opportunity over the weekend to set something up before class. But I think I got a few nice selections for my group.