Behind the scenes with Joel Tjintjelaar

A few blog posts ago I wrote about the work of photographer Joel Tjintjelaar. This is a short impression that I shot of Joel at work, creating some long exposure images in Rotterdam. Since he is mostly known for his long exposure black & white photography, I wanted to create that same look & feel and capture some more long exposure video shots, similar to what I did in my previous video.

Unlike those previous shots however, I didn't shoot a RAW timelapse, but simply recorded some long video shots to make the process quicker. That, in combination with the fact that there wasn't too much contrast in the clouds, made the effect less dramatic in most of the shots, but a couple turned out somewhat usable.

You can find out more about Joel Tjintjelaar and his work on bwvision.com

Taking motion design to the next level

The opening titles of David Fincher's film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are one of the most impressive pieces of CGI/motion design I've seen in a while. Onur Senturk created these amazing visuals in cooperation with Blur Studio. They took vignettes from different parts of the film and transformed them into a mesmerizing, dark, oozing piece of visual art. If you're curious about the ideas and process behind it, you can read more here, or - if you're more technically inclined - here.

The long now

Recently I created this short experimental piece based on the idea of a long exposure timelapse. I was trying to come up with a way to create the effects and style often seen in long exposure photography, but in motion. A lot of timelapse videos seem to have something rushed about them, and I wanted to create a more Zen-like feel, as it were.

My first thought was to take a number of long exposure photos, and create a time lapse out of those in the usual manner. The problem with that is that, because of the long exposure, you can only create one or two frames per minute. If you were to create a timelapse sequence out of those images, any motion would seem incredibly fast, quite the opposite of what we set out to achieve.

Then I came across a Final Cut Pro plugin named Long Exposure, created by CHV Plugins, that blends together a number of frames before and after the current frame, thus creating a long exposure effect out of regular, short exposure frames.

An added benefit is that this helps a lot to reduce any flicker because of differences in exposure of individual frames in the original footage. This usually results from the lens not opening up to the exact same aperture for every shot, even though it’s set to manual. There are workarounds to avoid this, but we won’t go into too much technical detail here.

One drawback of this way of working is that you can’t do any slider moves or any other forms of camera motion during the shoot, since that will blur everything in the shot. Only the parts of the image that don’t move will end up not being blurred. Of course you could apply some zooming or panning in post, or do some compositing to simulate camera motion. In this case I decided to keep it very simple though. I’m planning to experiment some more with this techique in the future. Stay tuned...

Edited in Final Cut Pro X, graded with Magic Bullet Looks.

Soundtrack: Bane (Architect Remix) by Hecq. Get it on iTunes (and make sure to check out his other stuff)

A new take on time lapse

It's always interesting to see what happens when two creative minds collaborate. Motion & sound designer Woob and time lapse photographer Samuel Cockedey took the genre of the time lapse film to a whole new level. The edgy soundtrack, creative processing of the footage and the timing all work together to create something very unusual and intrigueing. When it comes to music I often find a remix of a track more interesting than the original, beceause there's this extra layer of depth that comes from the creative input of the remixer. The same thing goes for this video as well. Great work guys, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of this kind of collaboration on Vimeo.

A1

I've already posted some hints and teasers here before and today I finally finished my short film inspired by the Audi A1. I decided once again to go for a contrasty black & white look, with some red accents. The film burn effect that you see in some shots was actually created by overlaying some intentional camera movement photos of the rear light of the car. I thought it would be more interesting to experiment a little instead of using some ready-made effect.

The soundtrack is "Meanwhile Back in the Jungle" by Massiv in Mensch (available on iTunes).

Another little preview

Here's another little preview from the same project as last post. As you can tell I'm trying to merge two distinct looks: one contrasty black & white look, and another with some intense color accents. Stay tuned for more...

Michael Fletcher - Capturing the moving landscape

Instead of just rambling on about my own work on this blog I thought it might be interesting for a change to feature other people’s work that I find interesting or inspiring, and have a little chat about their background, motivation and way of working. This time I would like to introduce the work of Michael Fletcher.

I've been following Michael on Vimeo for quite some time. Based in Western Australia, he's involved in the photographic business of his equally talented brother Christian, and has managed to produce an impressive number of awe-inspiring short films focussing mainly on the Australian landscape. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, landscapes and video can be a challenging combination. It’s often difficult to make them look interesting because there’s not much movement going on.

Click to read more ...

A moment in time(lapse)

The above shot is one frame from a timelapse I shot last week. The idea was to test out shooting timelapse in RAW and aplying some color grading in Aperture. Normally I would shoot a timelapse in JPEG because of the excessive amount of storage required for large numbers of RAW images, but that severely limits my options in post production.

This location struck me as interesting because of the grungy old warehouse (soon to be renovated into shops and appartments) and the construction cranes behind it, working on what will become a large new highrise.

This is a typical example where a tilt-shift lens would have come in handy, to eliminate the distortion in the warehouse, and give the whole thing a more flat, geometric feel.

[ STRONGER ]

A little experiment using the camera's built-in picture styles. For this video I created a very contrasty black & white picture style, instead of converting to black & white in post. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, this keeps things kind of raw and spontaneous and very much affects the way you shoot.

Another experiment was the "rasterized" effect you see in certain shots. This was created by exporting some of the footage to my iPhone, and subsequently filming those clips playing back on the iPhone screen. However, instead of just filming the screen, I filmed though a second lens (a Nikon 50 f/1.4 in this case) that was sitting on top of the iPhone. This produced an interesting kind of macro image, where the individual pixels of the iPhone are visible. Below is a image of the setup.

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Unintentional abstracts

As I'm about to release my latest short experimental video, I grabbed a number of frames and saved them as stills to post on Flickr. The above image is one of them. It turned out there were a lot of interesting abstract compositions in there, which you don't notice as much when you're just watching it as a video. I posted some more framegrabs after the link.

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