Last time we were in Israel, my brother Mikey took us to this amazing hummus place in Jaffa and we were really keen to go back this time. I also wanted to take my gear down to the waterfront in Jaffa and experiment with some time-lapse stuff.
The hummus was amazing, as always :) After filling our bellies, we headed down to the waterfront. There was a lovely spot to set up my 3Leggedthing Eric along with my GH4 and Edelkrone slider. Unfortunately, I forgot to pack my remote cable so I couldn’t use the Edelkrone motion unit to control the timing on the GH4 time-lapse. Luckily, the GH4 has a great in-built time-lapse function, so while the movement wouldn’t look 100% “right”, it wouldn’t be too bad.
So we set up and had about 20 minutes to wait for the time-lapse to complete. My brother is a passionate and very talented musician, so he pulled out his guitar and, in the beautiful weather, sat on the sea wall and played. He was doing his thing so I grabbed my A7s, slapped on a ND filter, and did my thing.
Initially I thought I would just set up my DR40 next to him to record audio of what he was playing, but I was getting way too much wind noise on it and didn’t have my dead cat handy.
Sidenote: here is an important lesson! NEVER trust your audio meters - always have a set of headphones handy and listen to your audio because there can always be issues your meters won’t tell you about.
To combat the wind, I grabbed my wireless lab mic and just stuck it to his shirt. While we still got a bit of sea noise, his playing was clearer by far.
He played away and I just shot various angles and experimented a bit with compositions and pull focuses. Normally I try to hold my shot steady for about 10-15 seconds, then reposition. But then I would have only had 10-15 sound bites of his audio. So I decided to just keep recording and then cut in the first few short shots I had gotten before I decided to “shoot long”.
Once I got the footage onto the timeline in Final Cut, I realised that what I should have done was to ask him to play the same song three or four times and capture different angles, but I didn’t at the time, so I had to work with what I had :)
Why would it have been better if I had the same song of the different angles? Continuity. You’ll notice when I cut away to my “b-roll” shots, his hand movements don’t exactly match, specifically when he slaps the guitar. I watched through the clips and marked where he did slap it and then tried to match it as best I could to the sound waves of when he did on the audio. Far from perfect, but ok for just messing around :)
The colour correction was really easy. Once you know what you’re doing in Final Cut, and if you expose well when you shoot, I have found S-Log2 pretty straightforward on this occasion to make it pop. So there you have it - a quick capture of my brother’s passion on a chilled afternoon.
Below I have also embedded 2 more clips. One is the same clip, but showing before and after correction and the other is a tutorial on how the CC was done.