On Monday 18th March I will be filming Houdini playing live. I really enjoy getting stuck in with live performance, moving around the throng of the crowd with the main camera to get nice close angles on the performers, with a camcorder set up on a tripod getting a good angle of the band and crowd to use as cover shots.
Sometimes I manage to convince someone to lend me a second camcorder so I can get two angles as cover which gives me a few more options when putting the final cut together. It's good to have more than you need when filming something live and unrepeatable.
Until the 18th I will continue to plug away at a new Astralis video. It was only yesterday that I finally got all the footage labelled, catalogued and inserted. So now I have my ball of clay, but I definitely don't have a sculpture just yet.
I'm still working with Final Cut Express as I haven't quite saved up enough for Final Cut Pro X yet. The difficult part will be the changeover, for simplicities sake I want to completely finalise all my projects with my current editing software before moving over. This means finishing Where's My Milk You Bastard and the Three Sided Football footage as well. The former is being polished up and added to on a weekly basis, the latter has been sadly sidelined while I wrestle other projects but should be receiving some attention soon.
Projects... so easy to start so hard to finish. Must be more disciplined.
Showing posts with label three sided football. Show all posts
Showing posts with label three sided football. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 March 2013
Sunday, 24 February 2013
NEW ASTRALIS VIDEO UNDERWAY
Last night Dan Dobson and I spent a few hours capturing gameplay footage from the latest build of Astralis. The game is looking better than ever and we managed to pull about an hour of footage into 55 files, more than enough to get me started. Dan will be on hand to do any extra videos I need and send them to me using Dropbox.
The files themselves are huge so I'm going to use a trick that Alec (Astralis art director) taught me, which is to have a highly compressed version of the video loaded into Final Cut for when I am editing and building the video. The compressed version will be much smaller and easier to manage, reducing CPU strain and render times. Once the video is finished I find the source file for the videos on the hard drive and overwrite the compressed videos with the uncompressed videos (importantly, using the same final name). Final Cut then assembles the video using the full quality files.
The final render will be the only one that takes a little time. The hundreds of renders I will be doing before that will all be many magnitudes quicker. A simple trick, but one I never learned until now.
But first I need to compress all the full-quality videos. Once this is done I'll be ready to go!
Let's squish those files!
The files themselves are huge so I'm going to use a trick that Alec (Astralis art director) taught me, which is to have a highly compressed version of the video loaded into Final Cut for when I am editing and building the video. The compressed version will be much smaller and easier to manage, reducing CPU strain and render times. Once the video is finished I find the source file for the videos on the hard drive and overwrite the compressed videos with the uncompressed videos (importantly, using the same final name). Final Cut then assembles the video using the full quality files.
The final render will be the only one that takes a little time. The hundreds of renders I will be doing before that will all be many magnitudes quicker. A simple trick, but one I never learned until now.
But first I need to compress all the full-quality videos. Once this is done I'll be ready to go!
Let's squish those files!
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
Sunday's Filming @Plumstead Common
Sunday was exhausting! We arrived at Plumstead Common at about 10:30am and met with Owen at the rugby club pavilion where we got some general taping (scenery, location) done. Transportation was taken care of by Lauren "wheels" Carnall who drove myself and the gear down, along with Dee and our dog, Louie, who bounded around the common like a mad thing while I discussed events with Owen. Here's how it all went:
The Tug Of War
Shortly after we arrived two fire engines (sorry, fire appliances) from Plumstead Fire Station pulled in, the occupants forming one of the main tug-of-war teams, facing off against members of the Greenwich Rugby Club. The rope was laid out, the markers were set, and several rounds of ferocious tugging were underway! Lauren "wheels" Carnall took a camcorder and I took the Canon XL1S and we filmed every round, while poor Dee had to do her best to relax Louie who was sent into a barking frenzy whenever columns of beefy men started roaring and pulling. As the afternoon chill began to set in, the firefighters reigned supreme and took a trophy home for their efforts and thanks to Owen's excellent supervisory skills no-one lost an arm.
The 3-Sided Football
With the tug of war settled the hexagonal pitch beckoned. Dee and Louie made their way to the train station for home (I'm a sap but I missed her immediately) and Lauren and I set up our cameras on tripods to film several rounds of 3-sided football. There were 5 teams, each wearing a different colour which made things much easier to follow. The teams would rotate after every ten minutes so that everyone had an even number of games. The pitch was set up with proper goals rather than cones and the games flowed beautifully. In between rotations I was able to do a few small interviews with some of the players that I hope I will be able to incorporate into the final video. Filming a football game from the sidelines is hard, any zooming in you do invariably ends up with you losing the ball in your viewfinder and anything zoomed too far out looks a little poor. Sadly this means the best footage is not usually the bits displaying the most skilled players, but rather the moments when the drama of the game coincided with moments when the camera was pointing the right way and wasn't shaking around.
By switching the f-number with the frame speed I was able to jump between differing depths of field, a deep DOF to capture everything smoothly and a shallower DOF to get better looking shots (at the risk of losing focus) but the change would take a few seconds during which nothing usable is being recorded. I did get better at adapting my settings on the fly and by the last rotation I was getting much better footage than the first. With Lauren filming on the camcorder as backup I should hopefully have more than enough coverage of the game.
Coming Home
Shit got real when I got home. Our persistent little computer errors over the past week have been identified as a failing hard-drive. I somehow doubt that I will have any joy uploading the five hours of footage I captured on Sunday.
Five hours is an excessive amount of footage for two short videos, even though it is across two cameras. The mistake was mine as I made assumptions about everything. Having never witnessed a tug of war, and knowing that there were two main teams, I had assumed it would have been all over in one tug (like so many things in life). I soon learned that there would be several runs with varying team members so I recorded everything for the sake of coverage only to find that by the end I had recorded a shedload of footage (of both the tug of war and the football) and I should have been a lot more selective. By recording too much footage I have made the task of sifting through it all more difficult than it needs to be. I have my notes to guide me, but they are largely hasty and non-specific owing to the bustling nature of the day and the fact that the two camera operators were on opposite sides of a football field.
It would have been good to get started on the footage capture straight away, while my memory is still fresh, but the hard drive failure is setting me back.
Lessons learned? Always make time for note making and write them obsessively. Find out exactly how everything is going to play out so you can record appropriately.
The footage should be pretty good so I look forward to getting it together. I'll put up some stills once the editing begins and put the videos up once they are done!
Thanks for reading!
Check out more of the Plumstead Make Merry and their excellent community events here:
http://plumsteadmakemerry.co.uk/
The Tug Of War
Shortly after we arrived two fire engines (sorry, fire appliances) from Plumstead Fire Station pulled in, the occupants forming one of the main tug-of-war teams, facing off against members of the Greenwich Rugby Club. The rope was laid out, the markers were set, and several rounds of ferocious tugging were underway! Lauren "wheels" Carnall took a camcorder and I took the Canon XL1S and we filmed every round, while poor Dee had to do her best to relax Louie who was sent into a barking frenzy whenever columns of beefy men started roaring and pulling. As the afternoon chill began to set in, the firefighters reigned supreme and took a trophy home for their efforts and thanks to Owen's excellent supervisory skills no-one lost an arm.
 |
| The champions in action: photo by Sarah Harper |
The 3-Sided Football
With the tug of war settled the hexagonal pitch beckoned. Dee and Louie made their way to the train station for home (I'm a sap but I missed her immediately) and Lauren and I set up our cameras on tripods to film several rounds of 3-sided football. There were 5 teams, each wearing a different colour which made things much easier to follow. The teams would rotate after every ten minutes so that everyone had an even number of games. The pitch was set up with proper goals rather than cones and the games flowed beautifully. In between rotations I was able to do a few small interviews with some of the players that I hope I will be able to incorporate into the final video. Filming a football game from the sidelines is hard, any zooming in you do invariably ends up with you losing the ball in your viewfinder and anything zoomed too far out looks a little poor. Sadly this means the best footage is not usually the bits displaying the most skilled players, but rather the moments when the drama of the game coincided with moments when the camera was pointing the right way and wasn't shaking around.
By switching the f-number with the frame speed I was able to jump between differing depths of field, a deep DOF to capture everything smoothly and a shallower DOF to get better looking shots (at the risk of losing focus) but the change would take a few seconds during which nothing usable is being recorded. I did get better at adapting my settings on the fly and by the last rotation I was getting much better footage than the first. With Lauren filming on the camcorder as backup I should hopefully have more than enough coverage of the game.
Coming Home
Shit got real when I got home. Our persistent little computer errors over the past week have been identified as a failing hard-drive. I somehow doubt that I will have any joy uploading the five hours of footage I captured on Sunday.
Five hours is an excessive amount of footage for two short videos, even though it is across two cameras. The mistake was mine as I made assumptions about everything. Having never witnessed a tug of war, and knowing that there were two main teams, I had assumed it would have been all over in one tug (like so many things in life). I soon learned that there would be several runs with varying team members so I recorded everything for the sake of coverage only to find that by the end I had recorded a shedload of footage (of both the tug of war and the football) and I should have been a lot more selective. By recording too much footage I have made the task of sifting through it all more difficult than it needs to be. I have my notes to guide me, but they are largely hasty and non-specific owing to the bustling nature of the day and the fact that the two camera operators were on opposite sides of a football field.
It would have been good to get started on the footage capture straight away, while my memory is still fresh, but the hard drive failure is setting me back.
Lessons learned? Always make time for note making and write them obsessively. Find out exactly how everything is going to play out so you can record appropriately.
The footage should be pretty good so I look forward to getting it together. I'll put up some stills once the editing begins and put the videos up once they are done!
Thanks for reading!
Check out more of the Plumstead Make Merry and their excellent community events here:
http://plumsteadmakemerry.co.uk/
Thursday, 11 October 2012
Three sided football this weekend.
I've managed to draft in a good friend who has volunteered to help and most importantly, drive! We'll head out in the morning for Plumstead Common with all the gear and film the guys setting up the hexagonal pitch. If you're reading this and thinking "what the fudge is three sided football" then check out this earlier post. We'll also film some talking heads and hopefully have enough material to put something half decent together!
I grew up around Plumstead Common although I have not been there in many years. I'm curious to see what has changed and what has stayed the same! I remember the view from Winns Common, which is just next to Plumstead Common and is at the peak of the uphill road I grew up on. I used to go up there every weekend in the late 80's and early 90's to climb on the tumulus - a well preserved bronze age burial mount, and to the Northern tip of the common where I would gaze out over the flat expanses of North East London all the way to Essex. You can clearly see the grounds of Belmarsh prison and I would always count the number of gas holders and towering chimneys on the horizon, sometimes with a pair of heavy, grown-up shiny new binoculars my grandfather gave me for my birthday. Within a year the binoculars were destroyed by water damage and condensation when I foolishly tried to use them to see underwater in a playground paddling pool on Winns Common, a source of stomach churning guilt for many years. I never threw them out, even though they were essentially useless and I never told my grandfather.
But back to modernity. Once we're filming on the common we have a rather sizeable problem in that we will be in an open space for many hours with no access to power points. I'm going to fully charge my batteries before we head out, and then I guess I'll need to need to take a break halfway through to take a short drive back to Owen's house to wait for the batteries to charge, which could take an hour or two. Not exactly ideal, but short of hiring out some sort of generator, we're stuck with it. We'll miss a chunk of the day but we should still end up with enough footage to make a nice little video. We're not there to document the whole match, just to assemble a short video about three sided football and about the Plumstead Make Merry, the people hosting the match.
Right now, the ever unreliable weather forecast for Sunday is bucketing rain all day long. As I look out my window, it's much the same right now. Fingers crossed for good weather on the day. We'll have no cover.
I grew up around Plumstead Common although I have not been there in many years. I'm curious to see what has changed and what has stayed the same! I remember the view from Winns Common, which is just next to Plumstead Common and is at the peak of the uphill road I grew up on. I used to go up there every weekend in the late 80's and early 90's to climb on the tumulus - a well preserved bronze age burial mount, and to the Northern tip of the common where I would gaze out over the flat expanses of North East London all the way to Essex. You can clearly see the grounds of Belmarsh prison and I would always count the number of gas holders and towering chimneys on the horizon, sometimes with a pair of heavy, grown-up shiny new binoculars my grandfather gave me for my birthday. Within a year the binoculars were destroyed by water damage and condensation when I foolishly tried to use them to see underwater in a playground paddling pool on Winns Common, a source of stomach churning guilt for many years. I never threw them out, even though they were essentially useless and I never told my grandfather.
 |
| The view from Winn's Common |
But back to modernity. Once we're filming on the common we have a rather sizeable problem in that we will be in an open space for many hours with no access to power points. I'm going to fully charge my batteries before we head out, and then I guess I'll need to need to take a break halfway through to take a short drive back to Owen's house to wait for the batteries to charge, which could take an hour or two. Not exactly ideal, but short of hiring out some sort of generator, we're stuck with it. We'll miss a chunk of the day but we should still end up with enough footage to make a nice little video. We're not there to document the whole match, just to assemble a short video about three sided football and about the Plumstead Make Merry, the people hosting the match.
Right now, the ever unreliable weather forecast for Sunday is bucketing rain all day long. As I look out my window, it's much the same right now. Fingers crossed for good weather on the day. We'll have no cover.
Sunday, 30 September 2012
Indie Game: The Meetup + Three Sided Football
This is a busy weekend! Right now I'm getting ready to take the camera to a park in New Cross to videotape a game of three-sided football as practice for the real event in a few weeks. There's no way I'm going to be able to get the kind of coverage you see on television, not with a single main camera and no elevation, but today will be a good chance to see what kind of footage I can get and a chance to see how a three sided football game flows so I can be better prepared for the big day.
I'm still a little sleepy today because last night I attended a convention for independent game developers in Central London called Indie Game: The Meetup, an opportunity to show your game, play others and network among like minded developers. I was there with Vince, Dan and Alec to show an alpha version of our game Astralis. We had a laptop set up and were inviting attendees and fellow developers to play the game. I brought the camera (and large tripod which didn't get used) and we videotaped our part of the event.
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| This made me feel very cool. |
The venue, a small basement bar in Brewer Street was heaving with people. From profit turning indie developers to one-man teams showing their games, it was a really positive atmosphere. The bar lighting was dim and ambient which made any kind of video work difficult (digital video needs a lot of light to look good) but I brought my LED lighting panel which I attached to the camera shoe. It gave me a little bit of portable floodlighting which certainly made filming easier. I switched between using the light and cranking the gain up on the camera when the light was too intrusive. The gain gives me a brighter but far grainier image so it is always a trade off between visibility and image quality.
The event was a huge success so the booths were cramped and crowded which lent the whole evening a wonderful sense of camaraderie and encouraged conversation, but it did mean I was filming from a very close range whenever gathering footage. If I had stepped back for a wider shot I would have been lost in a sea of people and probably knocking over someone else's laptop! You couldn't deny the enthusiasm and talent on show at the event, it was great to meet and talk with so many like-minded people and to get them to play our game and hear their feedback.
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| Vince discusses Astralis with a co-developer at the event |
A great night and I was glad that I could capture some of it. Now I just need to decide how I'm going to use this footage. But right now, I'm grabbing the camera and dashing out the door to meet Owen for some three sided football! Batteries charged... new tape ready... fingers crossed I haven't overlooked anything.
Thanks for reading!
Friday, 14 September 2012
Three sided football
Well, the showreel was assembled but sadly the opportunity that lurked on the horizon has darted off into the distance for now, but never mind! While the current project slowly bubbles away in the background a new video-making opportunity has come knocking at my door.
Owen - friend, librarian, beard owner and all-round good guy - is a member of the team behind the Plumstead Make Merry festival. They also have a hand in other events such as the upcoming Three Sided Football tournament and it seems that the tournament is a great opportunity to get some video up on the website. It's also a great opportunity to answer the question: What the hell is three sided football?!
For those not familiar, three sided football is a game in which the typical "us against them" confrontational nature of two-sided football is replaced by a strange mix of game theory and tactical play. It is played on a hexagonal pitch with three goals and three teams.
The winner is not the team that scores the most goals, but the team that concedes the least. As one team starts to gain a lead on the other two teams, it is in those team's interest to team-up against the current leader. Allies become enemies become allies, with allegiances constantly switching as each team tries to keep the ball out of their own net. It's a fascinating concept and I can't wait to see a game in action. As a video project I imagine it will be a lot of fun to create and I'll be working closely with Owen at every stage to bring it together. We're going to film the tournament and also some talking heads so that we can not only show you the game, but also put it in context and explain how it works!
For more about the philisophical roots of the game, check the wikipedia page.
For now, it's time to crack on with the short film for Mark and Frazer, I need to finish that first! Ah, projects, so easy to start, so hard to finish! It never quite feels perfect.
Owen - friend, librarian, beard owner and all-round good guy - is a member of the team behind the Plumstead Make Merry festival. They also have a hand in other events such as the upcoming Three Sided Football tournament and it seems that the tournament is a great opportunity to get some video up on the website. It's also a great opportunity to answer the question: What the hell is three sided football?!
For those not familiar, three sided football is a game in which the typical "us against them" confrontational nature of two-sided football is replaced by a strange mix of game theory and tactical play. It is played on a hexagonal pitch with three goals and three teams.
The winner is not the team that scores the most goals, but the team that concedes the least. As one team starts to gain a lead on the other two teams, it is in those team's interest to team-up against the current leader. Allies become enemies become allies, with allegiances constantly switching as each team tries to keep the ball out of their own net. It's a fascinating concept and I can't wait to see a game in action. As a video project I imagine it will be a lot of fun to create and I'll be working closely with Owen at every stage to bring it together. We're going to film the tournament and also some talking heads so that we can not only show you the game, but also put it in context and explain how it works!
For more about the philisophical roots of the game, check the wikipedia page.
For now, it's time to crack on with the short film for Mark and Frazer, I need to finish that first! Ah, projects, so easy to start, so hard to finish! It never quite feels perfect.
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