March 10, 2008

Finished up work a couple weeks ago on a reality television pitch piece for Distillery Pictures. Was editing with producer Matt Hightower, on a show about Mark Tarbell, a chef in Arizona. Tarbell is a top-notch chef (he won 'Iron Chef!') who owns a restaurant committed to sustainable business practices. He drives around in a converted Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil.

The show is basically Mark driving around the country going on adventures and in general being the charismatic dude he is. Could be a fun show; hope it gets picked up.

This still is from a stills sequence I shot for some of our driving montage. The beginning of the sequence show Mark driving on the highway, while a Mark's VO talks about getting his car started in the morning ('Veggie oil gets a little gooey when cool.') and leaving L.A. Then this sequence of Mark writing in his diary is superimposed over the driving footage, as if he's just reading one of his diary entries.

The diary would play a pretty large part in the show. Basically, that's the way the entire story would be told: Mark reads his diary entry about whatever adventure he's on, and the camera follows him.

I shot the diary at 3-5 fps with the Nikon D40x, then converted the RAW images (DNG, then Tiff) to image sequences for import into After Effects, where I interpreted them at 3 fps. Then, and this is the important part, I used Frame Blending mode set to 'Frame Mix' to get a really nice effect; after I did that, and composited the sequence over driving footage, it didn't really look like stop-motion anymore. It didn't look like straight video of a diary entry either, though, which is why it looked good.

Here's a quick sample:



I got the idea when I watched this great doc on the NY Subway system on PBS; a lot of the bumpers consisted of modern-day subway footage that looked like it was shot with still cameras and then frame-blended to create a really interesting effect. It was a modification of the ever-popular time-lapse effect that is so over-used in docs. Definitely gonna keep this technique in my back pocket and use it in the future...