Plug-in Review: qp Grade Assistant 2

So we gave in....... and decided to review the occasional software, gear, and training package. This will not be turning into a "camera and software" review blog however.

While the internet is full of reviews for video gear, software, and training, we will be reviewing different, often unheard of products that will hopefully grab your interest and deserve your support. I occasionally feel a product deserves special mention on our blog if it changes the way we approach a certain aspect of storytelling, if it's use in our work substantially improves our workflow, or if it simply an outstanding product (officially awarded "Cinetic Awesomeness").

As I've been testing out a new After Effects plug-in on our newest video, I discovered it offered some really great tools that were unavailable with an built-in After Effects plug-ins or features. qp Grade Assistant 2 , available at AEScripts, offers you every type of scope you could ever want right inside After Effects: Lumascope, Vectorscopes, RGB scopes, and few more useful features that can really help you grade or composite your images with more accuracy besides "that looks better".

All Scopes and RGB Channels

Now, why would you want scopes in After Effects? We have them in our editor & color grading applications, so why add another? Plenty of reasons! After Effects has some extremely powerful controls for color correction and grading (even better than Premiere Pro CC and Final Cut X\Pro), it can be used as for finishing due to its powerful text and design tools, and we can't forget about the massive collection of third-part plug-in available which add untold levels of functionality. Add in the tracking potential from Mocha and 3D Camera Trackers and After Effects is easily the be most useful post production application around with scopes. OKAY, even without scopes, After Effects earns that title, but adding scopes really gives it a set of legs with ANY use involving color manipulation.

RGB Scopes

Besides the basic addition of a variety of scopes, this plug-in adds two neat features called Comp Assist and Grade Assist.

Comp Assist aids in the compositing (or combining multiple images into one) by displays the red, green and blue channels individually so you can the correct the colors to match (see my sample below). This makes compositing, say for example, a green screen key to a background much easier, as its essentially the act of matching 3 different black and white images using a basic levels of curves effects in After Effects on each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels. It's all messing around with each color channel until it looks just about right, or hitting reset on the effect and trying again, but eventually I'm betting you'll nail it, especially if you have some help like this plug-in.

Comp Assist of the Right

Comp Assist of Green Screen

Grade Assist aids by giving you live, responsive scopes while you grade with a huge number of effects loaded up (within reason and depending on your system configuration). That simple, but extremely useful, as its completely missing from After Effects and unavailable outside of Color Finesse, which is still a paid third party plug-in. Whether you like to use levels, curves, or third party plug-ins like FilmConvert to work with color, I found qb Grade Assistant 2 to be an extremely useful addition to After Effects if you need to manipulate color accurately in Adobe After Effects.

Final Decision: I found the qb Grade Assistant 2 quite useful and would definitely recommend it, especially if you do a lot of color correcting\grading or chroma keying in After Effects. It's not an absolute necessity at $79.99, but it really did make the process easier especially with the scopes and two useful 'assist' features. Be sure to check out the plug-in at http://aescripts.com/qp-grade-assistant/where you can try it or purchase it, if it sounds interesting. 

Disclaimer: I am a beta tester for this plug-in and was provided a license for testing and evaluation purposes. This fact does not factor into my review or opinion whatsoever. I won't support software or gear simply because a company offers to pay or provide free product in exchange for a positive review. Period.

Slow and Wells Wins the Race

I have the patience of a 2 year old and when it comes to learning new things and I can get frustrated when I cannot accomplish a new task instantly. Well, after I am over my fit and ready to put the project aside I remember what my prior boss once told me, “It is always better to learn something slow and well rather than fast and poor.”  This golden nugget has stuck with me since and has been the key to what we are doing here at Cinetic Studios.

Most of our shorts now are shot on multiple cameras and have significant post production work.  If you asked us to do that a year ago, our team would laugh and think you were crazy. A year has gone by and we have all been learning “slow and well” so that we can develop good and successful habits.  Practicing our solid, trained skills will eventually lead us to be faster at what we do.  So when we are sitting in our office cursing out the computer, we like to remind ourselves that “slow and well” always wins over “fast and bad”.

-Posted by Jessica

My Good Friend, The Glidecam (Part I)

In the last decade, the ticket of entry into the world of independent filmmaking was demolished as high quality cameras and equipment became available to any high school student with an imagination, a story to tell, and a few hundred dollars. It was a glorious time to be fascinated by filmmaking; it was filled with light sabers, crappy green screens, boom mics on brooms, and makeshift Steadicams made out of tripods weighted with duct tape rolls. These great memories can be found on our YouTube channel.

As cheap cameras started recording higher quality video while getting smaller and lighter (to the point where they can be built into our cell phones), we gain one huge downside: unintended camera shake. The unintended camera shake started as a physical downside to an evolution in video technology; as electronics get smaller and lighter, its harder to hold them steady. One solution to this problem is quite simple: add more weight.

Well, if it were that simple, there wouldn't be an entire industry dedicated to camera stabilization. Stabilization for a little DSLR camera is about adding weight to bulk it back up.  Adding weight allows us to treat it like a heavy "cinema" camera. For a Glidecam\Stedicam Merlin style device, I learned it was about precisely countering the weight if you wanted a "floaty" style feel rather than just adding weight.

In case you are making the transition from the classic DIY glidecam to a Glidecam 2000/4000, I would recommend the following video to learn how to balance your new good friend.

Glidecam Tutorial from Cristina Valdivieso + Jon Connor on Vimeo.

In Part II of "My Good Friend, The Glidecam", I will give you a list of tips I have learned from my last year with my good friend.

-Posted by Jason

Producers

In 2012 Jason and I took a tour of the Warner Bros. public lot. During the tour we got to see stages, props, actors, warehouses and everything in between. Our tour guide told us many "lot stories" including one of studio producers. In sitcoms producers come in, listen to a story, tell the writers to fix it, arrange for advertising sponsors, tell the show runners they needed to fix things again and repeat. Listening to our tour guide I thought that these "producer people" were kind of bossy and obnoxious.

Fast forward to 2013 when Jessica steps into her own shoes of a producer. I would not say I asked to be a producer, but it just happened.

Time and time again Jason thinks of an idea for a video, writes it down, mulls it over and finally is ready to bring it to me to discuss. He reads me his idea and I tell him what to change or how we need to scrap the whole thing (Sorry, Jason). 

When we are shooting the video I come in and oversee how everything is going. I make sure our crew gets breaks and has food and drinks. I constantly tell Jason that something is in his shot or point something out that he does not hear or realize. I am Captain Jason's First Mate.

After production, Jason edits the video and I step in to watch it and tell him how I think it should be reworked to include shots he forgot he even had. He plays it for me again after he gets lost in the edit room and I give him another list of changes. Step and repeat.

Once the video is uploaded it is my job to post it to our Twitter, Facebook and Blog to get our viewers to watch it for the very first, and hopefully many more, times.

Looking back I realize that "producer people" are not bossy or obnoxious; instead they are people who facilitate getting a product from point A to Z in an efficient and effective way. Producers have to have a certain skillset to be able to think of all of the possible issues that may even slightly arise. And more than anything, producers have to be great managers who are strong and assertive.

-Posted by Jessica

Technical Breakdown: Zipped

We released "Zipped" as our official entry into Bloody Cut Films' BCHorrorChallenge a couple of days ago. The short is about the battle between sanity and psychosis after being kidnapped and left alone.

This short is definitely our best to date and we are very happy and excited to share it with all of you. Now for the good stuff. Here is our technical breakdown:

Production: Rigs, Cameras & Lenses

This short was shot on our Canon T3i with a Tokina 11-16mm F2.8, Canon T2i with a Tamron 17-50mm F2.8, & a GoPro Black using various mounts (although none of the GoPro footage was ultimately used in the final edit). Ninety percent of the garage shots are completely handheld and rigless, while the other ten percent were shot on a tripod. The outside scenes were shot using a Glidecam. 

We shot with both cameras set wide open at F2.8 to let in as much light as possible and ISO was set between 800 and 1250. Both Canon cameras were tuned to Prolost Flat picture styles. Originally, I intended to use the Flaat picture profile since we shot everything in very low light.

Unfortunately, I was rushing on set and did not double check equipment before we started rolling. Luckily, I had both cameras already set in Prolost as a habit. Since this short was going to be highly stylized in post, this could have been a huge problem if the cameras were set to different picture profiles; this would have resulted in numerous additional hours of color correcting.

Post Production: Edit & Sound Design

This was my second project working on Adobe Premiere CC, and it was a decently smooth experience. Sound Design was first done in Premiere, and then moved to Adobe Audition for sweetening. While I wanted to color in DaVinci Resolve, I simply did not have enough time so it was colored & graded in Premiere using a combination of the Colorista, Filmconvert, LUTs, and Lumetri plug-ins layered together.

Here are some of our before and afters for the color correction/grade:

The biggest challenge for me as an editor on this project was the rapid cutting and the sound mixing. Since I am not a huge horror fanatic, this was an extremely fun, educational and experimental short. To start, I watched a bunch of horror shorts on Vimeo and took note of themes in sound design and editing I liked. I used the popular television show, "American Horror Story", as a reference to how I wanted our short to feel and sound. My goal for the short was to making it feel and look weird, strange and creepy. 

Even after filming the short, it really did not come alive until I went crazy with the sound mixing. Little aspects like warping the fog machine sound, adding the zip tie sound effect at ten percent and increasing the volume of the music as the short progresses all subconsciously guided viewers towards the finale.

Just for fun, here is our finished timeline:

We hope you enjoyed "Zipped". We are currently working on the Behind The Motion for YouTube so stayed tuned for scenes that ended up on the "cutting room floor".

-Posted by Jason

Happy New Year!

Today we reflected on how far we have come from that evening we watched the life-changing Dr. Pepper commercial to yesterday when we released our best short to date, Zipped. 

We have taken countless tutorials, spent hundreds of hours locked in our edit room and have gotten recognition by not just our own families this year. We are truly so happy with our accomplishments in 2013 and we cannot wait to show you what we have in store for 2014. As a sneak peak, here are Cinetic Studios' New Year's resolutions:

• Create, produce and finish more videos
• Write more "day-to-day" blog articles so our followers can know the ins and outs Behind The Motion
• Start writing film reviews for our blog
• Improve at overcoming and excelling in inevitable production disaster(s)
• Continue to learn and practice post production skills
• Learn how to write a short

-Posted by Jessica

Planning

In my opinion one of the most important stages of any project is the planning phase. Getting a solid concrete understanding of the any job allows everyone in a team to execute in a more cohesive and efficient way.

Even though we at Cinetic Studios know this to be true, we are also culprits in failing to plan. Sometimes we get caught up in trying to "get the shot" or "quickly get this done". The time it takes us to get the quick shot more than likely takes longer when we do not think it through beforehand.

In the last video we shot for the BC Horror Challenge, we developed a story, Jason wrote a script, we talked through shots with our cast and we got our crew excited about the end video. As a result of our careful planning we got tighter, cleaner and better content out of our 6 hour shoot. Instead of "getting that shot" we got multiple awesome shots to choose from.

"Getting the shot" is extremely important and sometimes there may not be time to plan; however, if we can plan, we definitely will from now on.

-Posted by Jessica

Taking On Only What We Can Chew

Here at Cinetic Studios we are guilty of trying to fill our plates with more food than we can eat. Now, the smart thing to do is to serve ourselves one serving at a time.

We are definitely always coming up with new video ideas, but we are also coming up with other "stuff". We have all been victims of coming up with an idea like starting a Vlog channel, writing more blog posts, making tutorials, doing "test" videos and various other elaborate ideas. The great part of this is we are constantly thinking and working to make Cinetic Studios better. The bad part is that at the end of the day we sometimes feel disappointed in our lack of execution.

It is extremely important for us at Cinetic Studios to be realistic with our time and what ideas simply need to be "shelved" indefinitely so we can awesomely execute the ones we need to work on. So yes, we want to pile on the good stuff, but small portions are the way to go.

-Posted by Jessica

Artist v. Art Gallery

Making YouTube videos is definitely an art. Those who make art are artists. I have to say that working with Jason definitely feels like I am the art gallery and he is the artist.

At the beginning of Cinetic Studios our goal was to produce content, a lot of content. We even went so far to say that we wanted to upload a video every two weeks. Well, that obviously was unrealistic because we do this on our free time and apparently we have a lot of responsibilities.

About a month into watching Jason edit Finger Guns I realized that deadlines were an unrealistic concept this early in the game. We did not have the skillset to be able to produce consistently and at the level we wanted to. Instead, we needed to consider adding more time to our budget to compensate for our lack of skill.

Adding more time turned into letting Jason be the artist he is and watching him fix and fix and fix things that I thought were already great to begin with. We started the artist meets art gallery dynamic. I would ask for the finished product and he would delay based on something he was not done working on: sound, tightening the edit, color, etc.

Weeks went by because the art gallery did not give the artist a clear drop dead due date. Without the deadline our artist would not give up the product and our viewers could not experience the art we created.

We have learned that our artist needs drop dead due dates that even the art gallery cannot extend. Recently we started to make videos for video contests because it allows Jason to be accountable for being late or failing to make the application deadline. Finally, the art gallery has a way to tame the artist and our viewers get to watch our art.

-Posted by Jessica

Released The Remote

We released our second short, The Remote, this week. This video played on the same storyline as Finger Guns with a little bit of a twist. The video portrays two friends fighting over a TV remote which results in a long drawn out Nerf gun battle.

Before the video was ever shot, Jason decided that he wanted to use wires for in camera effects. Needless to say there was a "wire" effect that allowed him to "slide" on the floor to avoid being hit by the very threatening Nerf gun. In a way the video was developed around an effect Jason wanted to try.

One of the biggest challenges we had was managing our time while filming the short. We started shooting the video in the afternoon hoping it would only take a couple of hours; instead those couple of hours turned into several hours and we ending up wrapping close to midnight.

Our lack of time management would have been minor if we shot everything with the same lighting; of course we did not. The opening shots took place during daylight and by the time we could move on, it was dark outside. If we left the original story line the same, our viewers would definitely be a little skeptical of the continuity of the video. To fix this we added the classic "a few hours later" to one of the shots to indicate we had definitely intended this to happen.

While we could have left the inconsistency in our lighting stop us in finishing the project, we saw it as an amateur filmmaking challenge we needed to overcome. Another video, another badge of accomplishment.

In case you have not seen the video:

And if you would like to watch our Behind the Motion:

-Posted by Jessica 

The Silent Partners of Cinetic Studios

Being independent filmmakers at Cinetic Studios means we don't have the big blockbuster budget to spend on anything our creative hearts desire.  Instead, we are using the resources we have available.

Each of us have different passions in addition to Cinetic Studios that contributes to our projects.  Whether it is knowing how to hack gadgets and gizmos, being a beer and wine specialist or crunching numbers, we all have an extra something.  Well, that was easy.  The three of us already know what we can do.   But what makes a great production company is knowing how to use the strengths of the people that help us.

Each of our friends and family members have skills.  We have parents who are great at providing encouragement, even when they may not understand what exactly we are doing.  We have brothers who will engineer 3D-printed Go Pro mounts and perform stunts in our shorts.  We have sisters who will help provide additional behind the scenes footage and get their friends to watch our videos. We have friends that will drop their Friday plans to be actors for a night.  And we have the support of our fans, to keep doing what we're doing.

The point is we use any contribution, idea or volunteer to get our projects to the next level and fake our blockbuster budget.  Without our friends and families, we'd just be some kids running around with a camera.

-Posted by Jessica

The Newsroom Voice

While editing and rewatching our first Behind the Motion for Finger Guns we noticed that both Jason and Jacob have what we call "the newsroom voice".

We shot the first Behind the Motion with limited expectations. We made a script and they both read lines from one our TVs in the office. What we didn't expect was "the newsroom voice" that just happened.

Our Behind the Motions are intended to be like a conversation with our viewers, and instead Jason and Jacob read lines like they were on channel 7. It's a big joke now actually.

A couple of days ago we filmed a BTM for "Screaming Artist". Before we started I reminded them that they need to be less newsroom and more talking to me. Instead of having them read lines, we filmed without a script and let the camera roll. I asked them "Jeopardy-style" questions and they had to answer them by first restating the question. When the two of them were answering my questions the answers came out more naturally and they did not feel like they were on the spot, in front of a camera.

We are learning with every video, even in our BTMs. We are even developing new content to flex those interview muscles and get us in top shape for our upcoming videos.

From channel 7, this is Cinetic Studios over and out.

-Posted by Jessica

Released Finger Guns

Success! We released our first video and BTM this week.  It was very exciting because the three of us were all together when we finished up the annotations and marked the videos as "public" for the first time.  We posted the links on our Facebook and Twitter and in that moment we shared our dream with the world.

The three of us have explained what Cinetic Studios is to our friends and families, but it really clicked when we were finally able to say, go to our website and watch the video.  It is amazing what sixty seconds of video can do to explain what we are up to these days.

In case you haven't seen our first short, Finger Guns, please check it out.

And if you want to see some raw footage, please check out our Behind the Motion for Finger Guns.

-Posted by Jessica

Technical Breakdown: Post Production on Finger Guns

Not sure about you guys, but I personally love "Making Of" featurettes and Behind the Scenes videos. In fact, it's usually the first (and sometimes only thing) I watch on a BluRay or DVD. Besides taking you behind the camera to discover the how that production was created from script to screen, it can also take you deep into the minds of the creators, hinting at creative decisions you'd never hear about otherwise. My curiosity isn't limited to feature films and TV, as I equally love BTS content for YouTube and short films. My interest is to such an extreme, even I cannot deny it has delayed the launch of our channel as I found myself drawn into the vortex that are VFX \ Color Grading breakdowns, tutorials, and demo reels available on YouTube and Vimeo.

Between shooting our first short and it's delayed release, I had the unique opportunity to attend local professional groups such as LACPUG and DMALA, allowing me to meet and learn from geniuses such as After Effects Guru Andrew Kramer and Colorist Alexis Van Hurkman. If there are similar groups in your area, I highly encourage you to attend, ask questions, and bask in the knowledge being offered to you. While you can learn tons by reading and watching tutorials, learning from the experts is akin to watching a magic show from behind the stage, seeing behind the curtain.

While we will always have a BTS featurette for all of our shorts, we try to keep things fast paced and watchable to a general audience. That being said, some of the topics I find most interesting (and sometimes the most time consuming aspects of production) are the highly technical and often overlooked aspect of post production: color correction, color grading, visual effects, and the importance of maintaining an ideal workflow starting in pre-production. Each of these can be expanded on in future articles, so please do let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.

As the editor, vfx artist and colorist for Cinetic Studio projects, there were certain challenges I faced even before I made the first cut on "Finger Guns". As we shot on a Canon DSLR camera, I jumped on the popular Cinestyle picture profile without doing any camera tests of my own. This decision proved to be a HUGE mistake, as I never discovered the quirks and intricacies of the technology, which included the minor fact that the image seen on the camera LCD during shooting dramatically differed from the image recorded to the SD card. The final result was footage that was 2.5 stops underexposed, extremely dark and excessively noisy. Being recorded in the fragile H.264 video codec in a 8-bit color space (as is a limitation with all Canon DSLR footage) didn't leave a lot of latitude for correction either.

The "Fix it in Post" workflow developed to "rescue" the footage came from weeks of our own testing and  tweaking, and  advice such as Vashi Nedomansky , the color scientists over at VisionColor, and numerous experts at LACPUG & DMALA. Huge thanks to those guys!

The h.264 raw footage from the camera was transcoded to Cineform 4:2:2 files to lighten the final render time. The project was edited in Adobe Premiere CS6 with basic compositing and VFX done in After Effects CS6. All footage was heavily denoised, basic color correction done with native filters in Premiere, and final grading done with FilmConvert. While the final render time ended up being quite heavy (15 hrs with CS6, 8 hrs with CC), it allowed us to get the best possible quality out of our poorly shot footage. Filmconvert really shined above all other solutions, as it allowed me to emulate a specific Kodak film stock (as if I shot it on film exact 5207 Vision 3) and apply a slight overlay of 16mm film grain to give it some texture that was lost in the denoising process. It's certainly not the best looking short even after everything I've done to it, but it was a massive learning experience that taught me tips and techniques that I'll be using on every future project.

Hope you enjoyed this adventure into the mad scientist lab here at Cinetic Studios. Till next time.......

-Posted by Jason

YouTube Experiment

Recently I introduced my grandmother to the world of YouTube because she was curious of what could be taking up all of our time.  More importantly, I showed her the side of high production YouTube shorts.

Going into it I had already planned a little experiment.  My hypothesis was that the videos with no dialogue and simple concepts were the videos she would be able to relate to the most.  After showing her multiple videos from several of the most popular channels, I found that my hypothesis was true.

The niche videos involving video games and the like were too complicated for her to relate to.  Instead, she preferred videos with pretty colors, "nice" music and simple concepts.

So what does this tell us at Cinetic Studios?

The majority of the YouTube audience is male, 13-17 years old.  So, you would think that we would want to cater to that market.  Yes, we do.  However, even if we cater to the 13-17 year old guy, we still need to keep it simple so we do not limit our audience.

-Posted by Jessica

Yellow Production Sign

Cinetic Studios does arts & crafts!

If you ever drive around in Los Angeles you might see those yellow signs on freeway exits or street corners with word(s) and an arrow. The yellow signs typically have a "code word" for a production.  For example, the "code word" for Pixar's movie, Up, was Balloons. The "code words" are used so that it is harder for people to find and crash hot film sets.

Ok, so we don't have the budget that these film productions have to order these fantastic signs or the following to require a "code word" (yet).  But we do have skills from elementary school to make our own cheap and practical sign.

While the sign may not have been a total necessary thing to spend our time or money on, it makes us happy. Sometimes you need to take a moment and do something that has some instant satisfaction to keep you going during those long hours. Let me tell you, every time I look at our rinky dinky sign, it gives me a little inspiration to keep on going.

How I Made It: I found a yellow plastic sign/board in Home Depot ($4) and printed out all of the characters. Carefully, I cut out all of the letters and then used rubber cement ($3) to put it all together. Ta da! Our own yellow production sign.

-Posted by Jessica

Managing Our Capital Investment

Recently I have found myself going back to the lessons I learned from John Greathouse's class.  His reading assignments have seemed to creep up on me when I need to make a decision or discuss business concepts with the guys.  John Greathouse also has a great blog, InfoChachkie, about start-up advice that I recommend to any current or future entrepreneur.

One of the topics that is extremely relevant to any venture is the idea of capital.  Some start-ups choose to fundraise at the very beginning and borrow money from family or friends.  Others may be able to get a successful kickstarter going or find some angel investors.

For our little venture we have decided to fund with our earnings.  Since we don't have revenue (yet), our personal income and savings will suffice for the moment.

Using our own money also means we likely pay a lot more attention to the things we spend money on.  We constantly discuss new gadgets and gizmos we want to get.  I am sure between the three of us we could go out and buy $10,000+ worth of stuff in an hour that we think would help us.  The key is that we are not going out and splurging.

We have chosen to make a list of the items we think are relevant and will help us in way X, Y, or Z.  We are adding, deleting and changing the list based on new information and our team meetings.  Yes, the three of us all had a moment when we just wanted to buy, buy, buy; but we knew that if we spent X dollars on something really cool and shiny, those dollars would be gone for something that we might actually need in the near future.

So yes, capital is extremely important; however, it is also extremely important to manage those dollars wisely.

-Posted by Jessica

The Cinetic Studios Office

Cinetic Studios is progressing from a cool idea to something more.

The three of us have come to a realization that we needed a space more suitable to work in.  While the living room is a great place to hang out, "research" and brainstorm, we also want a space to be able to sit down and work.

The stereotypical thing for us to do would be to set-up shop in our garage.  Unfortunately, we do not have a garage available.  We do have a "catch-all" bedroom that was just waiting to be used to its full potential.

With a little "summer cleaning" and some donations to The American Cancer Society Discovery Shops, we have cleared out the space for three workstations.

I guess if we had the funds we could have found a fancy office to rent or something, but we don't.  Instead we are using our $0-budget mentality and trying to use the resources we already have available.

One day we hope to have a real office, but for now, our office location works for us.  After all, it has great bathrooms, a full-functioning kitchen, conference room and nap suites.  Really, how could we beat that.

-Posted by Jessica

The Shift+Delete Series

Along with our narrative videos we will be releasing Behind the Motion in video format.  Our first video is finally ready to be released, but we needed to finish up our Behind the Motion before all of you wonderful people can check it out.

Last night Jason, Jacob and I got together to film it.  We got our lighting, set and narrative ready to go and shot for about an hour.  After we were done, Jason wanted to immediately get the footage off of the SD card and on to the edit machine.  Jacob and I sat back and relaxed waiting for Jason to finish before we could start the next task.

While Jacob and I were casually talking, Jason made an OMG face.  I looked at him and knew something really bad just happened.  Jason accidently pressed shift+delete (permanent deletion of files) on all of the footage we just finished shooting.  There were no words to explain how the three of us felt.

Thanks to Jason's computer knowledge he was able to recover some of the footage, but not all of it.  The three of us jokingly agreed there should be a Behind the Motion of our Behind the Motion.

Lesson learned: Do NOT press shift+delete.

-Posted by Jessica

"Welcome" Video

We have been participating in the YouTube Creators Academy. One of the lessons taught us all about the importance of the "Welcome" video.  The three of us agreed we would try and actually develop, shoot and upload the video within the week.  (A challenge we have said a couple of times and have yet to execute...)

On Sunday Jason and I thought of a way we could make a video with of our voices played to kinetic Cinetic typography.  Instead of developing the Cinetic typography ourselves we actually purchased a template to try and make the turnaround time a lot less.

Jacob came over tonight, and after discussing the original idea, we realized that producing that video would take longer than we wanted.  To get a video up on our page ASAP we thought on the fly and said, "How can we shoot this in fifteen seconds and be done?".  Because of the time constraint we agreed to go for the run-and-gun video and quickly started writing a script, setting up the lights, balancing the steadicam and changing into non-branded shirts.

Thirty minutes after shooting started we got a one-cut shot that was good and we could totally upload.  We watched the good take and said, "Let's just do one more since we already got it."  Fifteen minutes later we reviewed another take and realized it was 55 seconds long.

Jacob asked Jason, "How long is this supposed to be?" According to Jason it is supposed to be 30 seconds or less.  They both looked at each other and boom a spark just lit a fire under them; Jason and Jacob sped up their lines to cut the video time in half.

An hour of shooting later, we got our 30 second, one-cut shot.  Boom!

-Posted by Jessica