400 miles, 4 states, 182 photos:
The images in the video are all from my trip from Pennsylvania to Virginia to visit my brother, by way of Shenandoah National Park. With this in-car camera rig, I used a radio remote to trigger the shutter when there was an interesting scene. Post-production was done in Aperture, Quicktime, and iMovie HD.
Shooting lots of snowboarding and skiing action in Banff this year provided plenty of frames for this video (click the HD icon for full resolution):
Banff Snowboarding and Skiing from Matthew Botos on Vimeo.
Actually producing this gave me a lot of respect for the effort that goes into videos versus photography; the difficulty increases at least an order of magnitude. I really liked the pauses in Chase Jarvis’s Pray for Snow, and set out to imitate the effect with my own series of bash scripts that sequence still images and letterbox them. Titles and assembly were done in iMovie HD, with a Creative Commons soundtrack from Jamendo.
I wasn’t thrilled with the stills I got shooting the On the Bike series, so I took some inspiration from Chase Jarvis and threw all 128 frames into a video:
My video skills are pretty lacking, though I suppose I could just tell you the abrupt ending is a nod to the Sopranos. I exported the photos as 480px JPGs from Aperture, added a last frame with credits, and loaded the image sequence into QuickTime Pro.
Finding the music was an interesting exercise; I went looking for music licensed under Creative Commons and found Jamendo. A few songs by Convey had good strong openings; I settled on a 12-second clip from View from Above.
The recent announcements that Nikon’s D90 and Canon’s 5d Mark II DSLR cameras would also offer high-definition video seemed like a bit of gimmick, but Vincent Laforet’s Reverie proves it’s no joke (even at only 1/4 resolution). Proving why pro photographers are pros, he used his connections and skills to snag a pre-production model for a weekend, and cranked out a $5,000 movie showing what the camera can do in low light, on the hood of a car, and hanging out of a helicopter.
There’s also a behind the scenes movie, and he’s promised some full-resolution clips soon. In his original post describing the project, he said “It has the potential to change our industry.” A lofty statement, but backed by his reputation, and some pretty impressive proof. Given past statements from David Hobby (The Strobist) about the increase in photojournalism videos and commercial shooters like Jim Talkington and Chase Jarvis providing clients with both photo and video, and it looks like Nikon and Canon are making a serious move in the direction of the future.
