the next step: the movie

TheNextStep: The Movie

When I was in Savannah, about a month ago, I took a lot of photographs. In four days I took somewhere over 3000 frames. Several people commented that I might as well have a video camera, the amount I shot. I think that dropped an idea in my head. From then on, I was thinking that I wanted to collect all the shots together into one sequence. I actually started shooting slightly differently, with continuity in mind. The video starts out very disjoint and jumpy but as I start to think about sequencing, there's a bit more stability to the camera point of view. My motivation with this is to show you everything. The good, the bad, the ugly (and there's a lot of bad and ugly). I found it an interesting way to take a look at how I approach subjects and composition. You can see where I dwell, angles that I favour and subjects I skip quickly over. Perhaps it'll give some insight in to how I take pictures. The sequence is about 5 minutes long. Every shot I took from landing in Savannah to arriving back in Austin. It is about a 17Mb download, which is why I haven't dropped it directly into this blog post. The format is quicktime. Feedback and comments are welcome on this as it is the first time I've tried anything along these lines. Technical issues: I put this together as a surprise for the various people I shared the workshop with. I've sent them all a much higher resolution DVD of this sequence (which should have arrived now, so I can share it here and not spoil the surprise). I tried a variety of video production programs, Adobe Premiere (Pro and Elements), Microsoft Movie Maker and a few others, until I eventually settled on Sony Vegas Video Studio. This had the features I needed and was actually friendly towards stop motion animation, which essentially this is. The price is okay - about $80 and it wasn't too painful to work with. It still isn't ideal, as there was no easy way to re-time a sequence of frames, that I could find. Other than that I was able to do this and two other sequences pretty quickly and painlessly.