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- Tips and Techniques – Jennifer & Morgan
Reader Question: How do I shoot a 2-hour multicam dance performance?
TIP: Shooting fireworks - Take 20 – with: Brian & Charlie
Reader’s/viewer’s videos
Submission #8 “Matt’s Lemonade”
Producer: George Miller of York, Pennsylvania - Viewfinder – Brian interviews: Matt York on 20 years in video making, (part 2)
View the Transcript
Multi-cam Shooting – Shooting Fireworks
Welcome back to Tips and techniques. I'm Morgan Paar.
Jennifer O'Rourke: And I’m Jennifer O’Rourke.
Morgan Paar: We’ve got kind of, actually two big things here.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Really.
Morgan Paar: So we’re going to have to truncate them a little bit. Let’s start with this one we got of the Worldwide Internet. John Carter wrote in, he said, I’m a bit nervous and hope you can help, you can help me. Excuse me. I’ve just been commissioned to shoot a 2h dance performance using two cameras. Can you give me any tips to watch for in advance? I’m afraid I might miss something important.
Yeah, this stuff is…
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah, this stuff is really important. And it’s really hard to do it right.
Morgan Paar: Uhm.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Pre planning.
Morgan Paar: Pre planning, definitely. Two cameras, I’ve done this a couple of times. I’m comfortable with three cameras, and I’ll tell you why, John. Because what I do is, if you have an opportunity, you can adjust with just two cameras.
But I like to do it as, I have one camera wide, covering the whole stage, depending on how big your dance is. I don’t know if it’s, a ballet is going to be quite different than like a folk dance, but I like to have one camera locked on, I don’t touch it, covering the stage. That way no matter what I do with my other two cameras, zooming or whatever I do, I always have a camera I can go back to. I guess you can do that with two cameras. You can have one that’s wide-
Jennifer O'Rourke: One that’s just a wide lock down, yeah.
Morgan Paar: And the other one you can try to go up and get the close ups. And if you’re shooting by yourself, I guess that’s a good option, because one camera you can zoom in and –
Jennifer O'Rourke: Or two, if you’re shooting stage like this, you got some action in one corner, you maybe want to do a cross shoot that the third one, the wide one up in the stance can, that would be good.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. One should always be wide is my, what I think.
Jennifer O'Rourke: That’s your cover camera.
Morgan Paar: If you’re shooting mini DV, and you don’t stay here, if you’re shooting like one of these card drive cans, you’re set.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: Because… But if you’re shooting mini DV, tapes are going to work one hour. So you’re going to have switch tapes. Here’s the big one. I learned this the hard way, by not doing this.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah, me too.
Morgan Paar: Stagger your tapes. So, when the performance, or, before the performance starts really, set one to record and anticipate, say, five minutes, or ten minutes, actually five minutes is a good number. Up to ten minutes, record. And don’t start your second camera yet. And so, what happens is that when that first tape runs out, and you’re watching your watch and you know it’s about to run out, your other tapes is still recording, and you can go back to that tape.
Jennifer O'Rourke: So you don’t miss anything going on in the performance.
Morgan Paar: Right, so you switch the first one, now you have five minutes to get to the other camera and switch that tape out.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Now, do you do the same thing with batteries? Are you preplanning that with batteries because you never can tell when?
Morgan Paar: Yeah.
Jennifer O'Rourke: How long the juice on the battery is going to be.
Morgan Paar: I was inside, I hoped I would be plugged in. And there was another tip I wanted-
Jennifer O'Rourke: Synching them up.
Morgan Paar: Oh, synching them up, right, thanks.
Well, there’s a whole bunch of ways, and this I learned the hard way, too. Dance is a little more difficult, because you’re usually not zoomed in on someone’s mouth and it’s a little harder to sync.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Catch the lip sync, m-hm.
Morgan Paar: So what you could do is when both of your cameras are actually rolling, what a lot of people use is a flash, like a camera flash.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Oh, that’s a good idea.
Morgan Paar: Because that’s a visual at least. But if you have a clap board, you can get it in both cameras, that works too. Because there’s only one frame. This is going to be down touching that first frame. When it touches, it makes a noise that both mikes pick up. Then you have the audio and the video.
Jennifer O'Rourke: That’s what we use here on the set. I’ve heard some people said doing the, clapping ahead of time, that’s when you can actually control your talent. But if it’s a performance, you obviously can’t control your talent.
Morgan Paar: But you’d like to sync those cameras. So, that’s a really good idea.
All right.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Our next tip. Fireworks. It’s the time of year, and 4th of July is coming up real quick, and a lot of people are looking into shooting fireworks. And we had people writing and asking about the way to shoot it, but they just can’t get it quite right.
So, we’ve got a couple of little tips, technical things you need to do with your cam, and there’s tricks to make it look a little bit better.
Morgan Paar: And it looks like we’ve already started.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Technical. Manual focus, always. You do not want ever shoot your fireworks with auto focus, or auto iris because as soon as you have the burst going on with fireworks, the iris will open up, as soon as it goes dark, the iris is going to close up, you’re going to constantly have your aperture opening and closing like that. So…
Morgan Paar: Whenever you’re in low light situations, your focus is really got to be manual, because it’s going to breathe, and that’s really a sign of amateur videos when you see a focus breathing.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah, you can actually see it pulsing.
Morgan Paar: So, this is, you got to get in, and you’re going to be almost all manual. In everything.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: But definitely on iris and on focus.
Jennifer O'Rourke: On focus. Setting up your camera. If you have an Infinity setting on your camera, definitely get Infinity, because that gets everything in focus from the beginning, the end of your focal length. If you don’t, then you want to maybe pre-focus on an object beforehand, maybe in the daylight. Pre-focus on a building or something that’s about the same distance as you anticipate where the focus, where the fireworks are going to be.
Don’t try to focus when it’s already dark, trying to focus on the burst of fireworks, that’s just not going to work.
Morgan Paar: If they are able to go all the way wide, that could work, right?
Jennifer O'Rourke: M-hm.
Morgan Paar: Depends on how far the fireworks are, where you’re positioned.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Right, right, right, when it’s that dark and wide, you’re not going to see critical, you’re not going to see anything critical. Anyway, fireworks, because they’re moving.
Morgan Paar: Right. But if you’re a certain distance away, you’re going to have to zoom in a little bit
Jennifer O'Rourke: If you are shooting fireworks and people, you want to get shots of the people, they’re, ooh, ah, yeah, the people are watching, don’t shoot the fireworks and then the people, fireworks, and then people, because you’re going to have your iris opening and closing, you’re going to be messing up with your focal length and your focus, and you’re going to end up losing good portion of both parts of it.
Shoot the people first and, I always do that, I shoot the people first because the first couple of fireworks that you have going off are kind of a throw away, they’re, it may be twilight, so it’s not going to be full dark, and you can experiment with the most fireworks display, for at least 20 minutes long, so you’ve got a lot of time to practice.
So, shoot the people first, and then move on to the fireworks afterwards.
Morgan Paar: That’s something people might not think about. They are trying to get the fireworks the whole time, but it’s really going to make your video interesting if you show people watching them, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get that reflection, sort of a dark face, and then the firework goes off and illuminates the face. This would be really cool.
Jennifer O'Rourke: It would be really cool, and then when you’re editing, you just intercut them in between, and it looks like they’re watching that fireworks that’s glowing on their face, and people think, wow, that’s so cool.
Morgan Paar: And again, if you can get two cameras, if you can borrow a camera from your friend, and maybe even borrow a friend, you could be shooting both at the same time.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Right. Right. Much better.
When you are shooting the people, shoot the camera at a low angle. You want to shoot down below them, because, they’re looking up at fireworks, so you want to give that impression that they are looking up at the fireworks.
So, and get really close to that person. Again, you’re losing a lot of light when you’re shooting people at night, so, the closer you get, the wider you can make your timlins and your depth of field.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. That’s a general rule for me, is getting close.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Fill that screen with that person. And you can get a little bit of a rim light coming off from the back of them, from the street light or torch light, and then you’ve got a little bit of definition going on around there.
But you don’t want to have too much light going on anywhere in there, especially on their face. Because if you want to try and get that glow from the burst of the fireworks, you’re going to lose it if you have any light coming in.
Ah, the exposure. It seems for some people, it’s counterintuitive, they want to open up their iris really wide because that’s what you do when it’s dark. But this is the opposite. You want to keep it as closed as you can so you can get a good color. The wider you go, the less color you’re going to get. You’re going to get more of a washed out saturation of your shot. So keep it at F8, F11 if you can.
If you know how to work with those filters, you might want to try to put one of those on there, but experiment with that.
And no background light. In the fireworks, I’ve talked about the background lights on the people, but not on the fireworks, because if you’re going to dissolving in between, and intercutting in between, the background will move and change and shift a little bit, unless you are doing like, you’re from New York, and you have these beautiful, beautiful displays over there with Statue of Liberty, and, those, those are very important buildings and statues to get there, but otherwise you don’t want to, try not to have building, houses, cars, people, in the background.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. It’s going to be more difficult to control.
Jennifer O'Rourke: And use a tripod. That’s, I mean, that’s…
Morgan Paar: We mean the same line.
Jennifer O'Rourke: That’s a given, I know, but people don’t.
Morgan Paar: Yeah, you really need to on this, because it’s going to be hard to, it’s, you have enough difficulty already, with trying to get your exposure right, and trying to anticipate where the fireworks are going to go off, so get it on the tripod, be ready to tilt and pan a little bit, because things will be moving around. Try to anticipate where the fireworks are going to go, but, I mean, it’s got to be on that tripod.
Jennifer O'Rourke: And hopefully you have it loose enough that you can move with it. But still, steady on the pod.
Stay wide at first. This is really important. To get a feel for the wind, and where the bursts are going to be, they don’t always go straight up, they may go a little bit to the sides. If you’re wide enough, you’re going to be able to get a good viewing for where most of them are going to land, you’re going to anticipate.
If you have fireworks, if you have the streamers, you can actually see the streamers go up and guess a little bit about where they’re going.
Morgan Paar: And one other thing with wind is if fireworks are with a lot of smoke, I shot once in New York, and I was downwind from the smoke, and what happened was, the fireworks were getting sort of lost in the smoke, so…
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah. Yeah.
Morgan Paar: I don’t know. It’s a lot of planning if you could figure out where the wind is going, and adjust yourself, but you might not have that much control.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah, and if you can, even talk with the fireworks people ahead of time, and ask them approximately which direction they think it’s going to go. They know, they’re experts, so watch for that.
And don’t stop recording, you want to record the whole thing, of the burst, let the burst go completely to black, because once it goes to black, then you can take the next burst, that’s also coming from black, and cut those pieces together, and instead of four seconds of black in between, you’re going to be able to edit them, boom boom, boom boom boom.
Morgan Paar: And cross them and dissolve them together. I mean, never stop rolling tape, are there any fireworks that go for more than an hour?
Jennifer O'Rourke: Not that I have seen.
Morgan Paar: So, just let the tape role, but also keep your camera on that a couple of seconds after it goes to black.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Now a couple of little techniques. Again, experiment, with still fold photography, you’re going to be shooting the fireworks full in the screen, or little bit to the side, to the left. We talked about the rule of thirds and everything, but once in a while you can try some zooming. Zoom in on one of the fireworks, let it just fill your screen, and go to black, and maybe start zoomed in tight and pull out getting the fireworks.
That way you’re getting nice little cross dissolves.
Morgan Paar: You’ve done this before.
Jennifer O'Rourke: A number of times. When you did movies for 20 years, you shoot everything twice, three times, four times.
And another technique I like to use is pan across the sky. I start panning from black, across the sky like that, and let the burst of the fireworks come into the scene, and then keep on panning across and then pan out.
Just gives you a little bit of different movement, instead of just a still, steady shot.
And now we have a couple of little examples that show you, these are with still shots I’ve put together, but we got some video. This one right here we shot, make sure that lower left third, and this one we had an upper right third, so when you shoot the pictures together, and do a dissolve, and cross dissolve on them, it comes off as both bursts were in the scene and at the same time. One pops in, the other is popping out.
And, again, that’s why you want to keep your black in there when you’re shooting, and let it go full to black.
And this is another one where we just zoomed in and zoomed off away to let the black fill in the screen, and then the next shot we started it on black, and zoom it out to pull on the fireworks, and again, that works really well. Cross dissolve. In this case, the cross dissolve was in the black point.
And see, this is two different fireworks dissolve each one in, and this is a number of them zooming in,
And this is VHS, this is all VHS stuff. So, don’t judge the quality of this fireworks.
Morgan Paar: So, that’s it.
Jennifer O'Rourke: That’s it.
Morgan Paar: Good luck. It’s going to be tough, you’re going to make some mistakes, but just keep going and you’re going to get enough to be able to cut something together. And hopefully by the end of the show, you’ve got your, the exposure is looking good, you’ve got some shots of people watching, and, you’ll be able to put something together nice.
Jennifer O'Rourke: And once you get to the grand finale, boom, it’s good. And again, real quick on audio tips, lot of them is going to hear the booms coming ahead of time, so you have a clue to get onto the next one. And so, watch for that, and good luck. And happy 4th of July.
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Welcome back to Tips and techniques. I'm Morgan Paar.
Jennifer O'Rourke: And I’m Jennifer O’Rourke.
Morgan Paar: We’ve got kind of, actually two big things here.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Really.
Morgan Paar: So we’re going to have to truncate them a little bit. Let’s start with this one we got of the Worldwide Internet. John Carter wrote in, he said, I’m a bit nervous and hope you can help, you can help me. Excuse me. I’ve just been commissioned to shoot a 2h dance performance using two cameras. Can you give me any tips to watch for in advance? I’m afraid I might miss something important.
Yeah, this stuff is…
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah, this stuff is really important. And it’s really hard to do it right.
Morgan Paar: Uhm.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Pre planning.
Morgan Paar: Pre planning, definitely. Two cameras, I’ve done this a couple of times. I’m comfortable with three cameras, and I’ll tell you why, John. Because what I do is, if you have an opportunity, you can adjust with just two cameras.
But I like to do it as, I have one camera wide, covering the whole stage, depending on how big your dance is. I don’t know if it’s, a ballet is going to be quite different than like a folk dance, but I like to have one camera locked on, I don’t touch it, covering the stage. That way no matter what I do with my other two cameras, zooming or whatever I do, I always have a camera I can go back to. I guess you can do that with two cameras. You can have one that’s wide-
Jennifer O'Rourke: One that’s just a wide lock down, yeah.
Morgan Paar: And the other one you can try to go up and get the close ups. And if you’re shooting by yourself, I guess that’s a good option, because one camera you can zoom in and –
Jennifer O'Rourke: Or two, if you’re shooting stage like this, you got some action in one corner, you maybe want to do a cross shoot that the third one, the wide one up in the stance can, that would be good.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. One should always be wide is my, what I think.
Jennifer O'Rourke: That’s your cover camera.
Morgan Paar: If you’re shooting mini DV, and you don’t stay here, if you’re shooting like one of these card drive cans, you’re set.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: Because… But if you’re shooting mini DV, tapes are going to work one hour. So you’re going to have switch tapes. Here’s the big one. I learned this the hard way, by not doing this.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah, me too.
Morgan Paar: Stagger your tapes. So, when the performance, or, before the performance starts really, set one to record and anticipate, say, five minutes, or ten minutes, actually five minutes is a good number. Up to ten minutes, record. And don’t start your second camera yet. And so, what happens is that when that first tape runs out, and you’re watching your watch and you know it’s about to run out, your other tapes is still recording, and you can go back to that tape.
Jennifer O'Rourke: So you don’t miss anything going on in the performance.
Morgan Paar: Right, so you switch the first one, now you have five minutes to get to the other camera and switch that tape out.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Now, do you do the same thing with batteries? Are you preplanning that with batteries because you never can tell when?
Morgan Paar: Yeah.
Jennifer O'Rourke: How long the juice on the battery is going to be.
Morgan Paar: I was inside, I hoped I would be plugged in. And there was another tip I wanted-
Jennifer O'Rourke: Synching them up.
Morgan Paar: Oh, synching them up, right, thanks.
Well, there’s a whole bunch of ways, and this I learned the hard way, too. Dance is a little more difficult, because you’re usually not zoomed in on someone’s mouth and it’s a little harder to sync.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Catch the lip sync, m-hm.
Morgan Paar: So what you could do is when both of your cameras are actually rolling, what a lot of people use is a flash, like a camera flash.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Oh, that’s a good idea.
Morgan Paar: Because that’s a visual at least. But if you have a clap board, you can get it in both cameras, that works too. Because there’s only one frame. This is going to be down touching that first frame. When it touches, it makes a noise that both mikes pick up. Then you have the audio and the video.
Jennifer O'Rourke: That’s what we use here on the set. I’ve heard some people said doing the, clapping ahead of time, that’s when you can actually control your talent. But if it’s a performance, you obviously can’t control your talent.
Morgan Paar: But you’d like to sync those cameras. So, that’s a really good idea.
All right.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Our next tip. Fireworks. It’s the time of year, and 4th of July is coming up real quick, and a lot of people are looking into shooting fireworks. And we had people writing and asking about the way to shoot it, but they just can’t get it quite right.
So, we’ve got a couple of little tips, technical things you need to do with your cam, and there’s tricks to make it look a little bit better.
Morgan Paar: And it looks like we’ve already started.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Technical. Manual focus, always. You do not want ever shoot your fireworks with auto focus, or auto iris because as soon as you have the burst going on with fireworks, the iris will open up, as soon as it goes dark, the iris is going to close up, you’re going to constantly have your aperture opening and closing like that. So…
Morgan Paar: Whenever you’re in low light situations, your focus is really got to be manual, because it’s going to breathe, and that’s really a sign of amateur videos when you see a focus breathing.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah, you can actually see it pulsing.
Morgan Paar: So, this is, you got to get in, and you’re going to be almost all manual. In everything.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: But definitely on iris and on focus.
Jennifer O'Rourke: On focus. Setting up your camera. If you have an Infinity setting on your camera, definitely get Infinity, because that gets everything in focus from the beginning, the end of your focal length. If you don’t, then you want to maybe pre-focus on an object beforehand, maybe in the daylight. Pre-focus on a building or something that’s about the same distance as you anticipate where the focus, where the fireworks are going to be.
Don’t try to focus when it’s already dark, trying to focus on the burst of fireworks, that’s just not going to work.
Morgan Paar: If they are able to go all the way wide, that could work, right?
Jennifer O'Rourke: M-hm.
Morgan Paar: Depends on how far the fireworks are, where you’re positioned.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Right, right, right, when it’s that dark and wide, you’re not going to see critical, you’re not going to see anything critical. Anyway, fireworks, because they’re moving.
Morgan Paar: Right. But if you’re a certain distance away, you’re going to have to zoom in a little bit
Jennifer O'Rourke: If you are shooting fireworks and people, you want to get shots of the people, they’re, ooh, ah, yeah, the people are watching, don’t shoot the fireworks and then the people, fireworks, and then people, because you’re going to have your iris opening and closing, you’re going to be messing up with your focal length and your focus, and you’re going to end up losing good portion of both parts of it.
Shoot the people first and, I always do that, I shoot the people first because the first couple of fireworks that you have going off are kind of a throw away, they’re, it may be twilight, so it’s not going to be full dark, and you can experiment with the most fireworks display, for at least 20 minutes long, so you’ve got a lot of time to practice.
So, shoot the people first, and then move on to the fireworks afterwards.
Morgan Paar: That’s something people might not think about. They are trying to get the fireworks the whole time, but it’s really going to make your video interesting if you show people watching them, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get that reflection, sort of a dark face, and then the firework goes off and illuminates the face. This would be really cool.
Jennifer O'Rourke: It would be really cool, and then when you’re editing, you just intercut them in between, and it looks like they’re watching that fireworks that’s glowing on their face, and people think, wow, that’s so cool.
Morgan Paar: And again, if you can get two cameras, if you can borrow a camera from your friend, and maybe even borrow a friend, you could be shooting both at the same time.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Right. Right. Much better.
When you are shooting the people, shoot the camera at a low angle. You want to shoot down below them, because, they’re looking up at fireworks, so you want to give that impression that they are looking up at the fireworks.
So, and get really close to that person. Again, you’re losing a lot of light when you’re shooting people at night, so, the closer you get, the wider you can make your timlins and your depth of field.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. That’s a general rule for me, is getting close.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Fill that screen with that person. And you can get a little bit of a rim light coming off from the back of them, from the street light or torch light, and then you’ve got a little bit of definition going on around there.
But you don’t want to have too much light going on anywhere in there, especially on their face. Because if you want to try and get that glow from the burst of the fireworks, you’re going to lose it if you have any light coming in.
Ah, the exposure. It seems for some people, it’s counterintuitive, they want to open up their iris really wide because that’s what you do when it’s dark. But this is the opposite. You want to keep it as closed as you can so you can get a good color. The wider you go, the less color you’re going to get. You’re going to get more of a washed out saturation of your shot. So keep it at F8, F11 if you can.
If you know how to work with those filters, you might want to try to put one of those on there, but experiment with that.
And no background light. In the fireworks, I’ve talked about the background lights on the people, but not on the fireworks, because if you’re going to dissolving in between, and intercutting in between, the background will move and change and shift a little bit, unless you are doing like, you’re from New York, and you have these beautiful, beautiful displays over there with Statue of Liberty, and, those, those are very important buildings and statues to get there, but otherwise you don’t want to, try not to have building, houses, cars, people, in the background.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. It’s going to be more difficult to control.
Jennifer O'Rourke: And use a tripod. That’s, I mean, that’s…
Morgan Paar: We mean the same line.
Jennifer O'Rourke: That’s a given, I know, but people don’t.
Morgan Paar: Yeah, you really need to on this, because it’s going to be hard to, it’s, you have enough difficulty already, with trying to get your exposure right, and trying to anticipate where the fireworks are going to go off, so get it on the tripod, be ready to tilt and pan a little bit, because things will be moving around. Try to anticipate where the fireworks are going to go, but, I mean, it’s got to be on that tripod.
Jennifer O'Rourke: And hopefully you have it loose enough that you can move with it. But still, steady on the pod.
Stay wide at first. This is really important. To get a feel for the wind, and where the bursts are going to be, they don’t always go straight up, they may go a little bit to the sides. If you’re wide enough, you’re going to be able to get a good viewing for where most of them are going to land, you’re going to anticipate.
If you have fireworks, if you have the streamers, you can actually see the streamers go up and guess a little bit about where they’re going.
Morgan Paar: And one other thing with wind is if fireworks are with a lot of smoke, I shot once in New York, and I was downwind from the smoke, and what happened was, the fireworks were getting sort of lost in the smoke, so…
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah. Yeah.
Morgan Paar: I don’t know. It’s a lot of planning if you could figure out where the wind is going, and adjust yourself, but you might not have that much control.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Yeah, and if you can, even talk with the fireworks people ahead of time, and ask them approximately which direction they think it’s going to go. They know, they’re experts, so watch for that.
And don’t stop recording, you want to record the whole thing, of the burst, let the burst go completely to black, because once it goes to black, then you can take the next burst, that’s also coming from black, and cut those pieces together, and instead of four seconds of black in between, you’re going to be able to edit them, boom boom, boom boom boom.
Morgan Paar: And cross them and dissolve them together. I mean, never stop rolling tape, are there any fireworks that go for more than an hour?
Jennifer O'Rourke: Not that I have seen.
Morgan Paar: So, just let the tape role, but also keep your camera on that a couple of seconds after it goes to black.
Jennifer O'Rourke: Now a couple of little techniques. Again, experiment, with still fold photography, you’re going to be shooting the fireworks full in the screen, or little bit to the side, to the left. We talked about the rule of thirds and everything, but once in a while you can try some zooming. Zoom in on one of the fireworks, let it just fill your screen, and go to black, and maybe start zoomed in tight and pull out getting the fireworks.
That way you’re getting nice little cross dissolves.
Morgan Paar: You’ve done this before.
Jennifer O'Rourke: A number of times. When you did movies for 20 years, you shoot everything twice, three times, four times.
And another technique I like to use is pan across the sky. I start panning from black, across the sky like that, and let the burst of the fireworks come into the scene, and then keep on panning across and then pan out.
Just gives you a little bit of different movement, instead of just a still, steady shot.
And now we have a couple of little examples that show you, these are with still shots I’ve put together, but we got some video. This one right here we shot, make sure that lower left third, and this one we had an upper right third, so when you shoot the pictures together, and do a dissolve, and cross dissolve on them, it comes off as both bursts were in the scene and at the same time. One pops in, the other is popping out.
And, again, that’s why you want to keep your black in there when you’re shooting, and let it go full to black.
And this is another one where we just zoomed in and zoomed off away to let the black fill in the screen, and then the next shot we started it on black, and zoom it out to pull on the fireworks, and again, that works really well. Cross dissolve. In this case, the cross dissolve was in the black point.
And see, this is two different fireworks dissolve each one in, and this is a number of them zooming in,
And this is VHS, this is all VHS stuff. So, don’t judge the quality of this fireworks.
Morgan Paar: So, that’s it.
Jennifer O'Rourke: That’s it.
Morgan Paar: Good luck. It’s going to be tough, you’re going to make some mistakes, but just keep going and you’re going to get enough to be able to cut something together. And hopefully by the end of the show, you’ve got your, the exposure is looking good, you’ve got some shots of people watching, and, you’ll be able to put something together nice.
Jennifer O'Rourke: And once you get to the grand finale, boom, it’s good. And again, real quick on audio tips, lot of them is going to hear the booms coming ahead of time, so you have a clue to get onto the next one. And so, watch for that, and good luck. And happy 4th of July.
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