Creativity to Spare is a Video Podcast designed to instruct, showcase, and inspire creativity. Our purpose, is to honor the DIY spirit and to encourage others in their creative pursuits. Projects, helpful tips, and interviews will be featured in the fields of digital filmmaking, photography, and music. With this podcast and this companion website we will help you get the most out of your creative pursuits.
This is a short movie I did for a competition. It features stop motion animation using istopmotion for Macintosh OSX ($49). This entire movie was done in 48 hours from idea to final edit, including sound effects and foley, voiceover, and an elaborate title sequence done with a still camera and quicktime pro in a technique similar to the time lapse episode. The lighting is right out of episode 2, all work lights and diffusion. So here is an example of my ideas at work.
How many videos and short movies are ruined every day from bad audio? People will forgive mediocre video. If it is slightly out of focus, handheld, dim lit or whatever. But they will hit the stop button, change the channel, or grit through their teeth with bad audio. How important is it? What do you pay for on a airplane flight? They give the picture away for free, without the audio you don’t have the story, the emotion, the mood. Maybe I’m just an audio engineer, but I enter my work in a lot of film challenges and man is it a challenge to sit through most of these movies because the other movie makers neglect the sound.
So you bought a cheap camcorder with a built in microphone? Is there anything you can do to make this situation better. I will show you a few really fundamental tricks, while featuring the bad audio moving toward the good.
If your camera has an 1/8″ input for a microphone, purchase a small stereo mic that will sit on the hot shoe. Even the $30 to $50 units will improve your audio quite a bit. Get that mic closer to the talent, with an extension. It’s the same kind of cable that a pair of headphones uses. Get a microphone stand and mount the mic above the talent’s head pointing the microphone at their mouth. Turn off the A/C and any really noisy appliances. Listen to the sound coming from the camera with headphones, make sure it sounds good.
I’ve always been a fan of old movies and commercials. Such as all the movies used on MST3K, or the footage in Queen’s “Under Pressure” video. When I would see other media producers putting this old media into their movies I wondered two things. Where do you get all this great old footage and is it free to edit and use in my own movies without copyright concerns? I’ll discuss both issues.
In the past, I have found services that warehouse old footage and will convert it to various media formats for you, but it would cost hundreds of dollars. But today we have an excellent source for public domain footage and it is free. It is the Internet Archive Movie Archive. It hosts over 100,000 moving images online, from old commercials, and short films, to feature length movies. One of my favorite collection is from the A/V Geeks by Skip Elsheimer. And did you know “Night of the Living Dead” is public domain, it didn’t include a copyright and after a few years it became PD.
As far as rights to use this material, it says in a side bar. “This collection is free and open for everyone to use. Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.” I would still check to make sure it says Public Domain in the Creative Common license field.
Once you find something interesting you can preview it in MP4 format and then download it if you like. I suggest downloading this stuff at the highest quality you can choose, usually mpeg2. It will be large depending on the length, but it will look and sound the best. Most editing software will not allow you to directly use mpeg2 footage so you will have to convert it. I have used QuickTime before with mixed results, but a great utility for Mac OSX is Visual Hub. It is only $24, and is a great solution for all your conversion needs, from ipod, psp, DV, DVD, or to Final Cut. Just drag and drop the mpeg2 footage into the window and choose the output format. In my case that would be a DV stream and I also check the box for prepare for Final Cut. A few minutes later its ready to go. Have fun.
There are several ways to do Time Lapse Photography, my favorite involves using a Digital Still Camera and a controller. Once the photos are taken, I demonstrate how to to stitch the photos together into a finished movie. You could also use a Digital Video Camera with controlling software to do Time Lapse.
You will need a digital still camera, a Tripod or other alternative, And it will help if you have software within the camera menus or as a separate program in a computer to control the timing/interval. I use a Nikon D-100 (I just realized I said the wrong thing in the video / I was talking into a Canon doing a handheld self interview, oops). I purchased for my camera a Controller called the MC-36 also from Nikon. It will let me set an interval and also set delays and how many pictures up to 999 or until I stop it. This is a much better solution than I used to use. You can manually control this by pressing the shutter button or use some other remote cable, but it will be long and difficult to keep the timing even. My friend Victor has done this method and I have seen some other stop motion animations which are similar to time lapse.
My previous rig was a Laptop with Nikon Capture Control software. It had it’s benefits, like being able to see how the shots were turning out as they went and also remote control of all the camera functions such as Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO and when should it focus. But it had a few big problems, one was hauling around a laptop and leaving it attached during the whole shoot. The battery life of the laptop could also be problematic. The other major problem was in that the camera had to download each photo down slow old USB 1.1 to the computer. This would add a lag in the sequence.
The advantages of the new rig is portability, battery life, and no lag in the sequence, it will store right to the memory card and as long as the camera buffer can keep up with the rate. I’ve tested it down to 1-fps(the quickest rate on the controller) and it did fine with fully charged batteries at Normal quality and Small picture size. If I increase the quality I would have to slow the rate.
There are many new cameras that have Time Lapse built in. The Nikon D-200 and several of the smaller Point and Shoot Nikon Cool Pix cameras and Canons. I would prefer having all the individual frames instead of having the camera stitch the movie into a .MPG for me, which is something a few new cameras might do. What the feature might be called is just Interval. Having the individual frames will allow you to choose the size of the output movie up to a very High Definition size depending on the Megapixels of the camera. Also you can select the Frame Rate: Movies are shot at 24 Frames Per Second and Video is at 29.97 FPS.
Once you transfer the images into your computer into a separate folder, you will need QuickTime Pro. Which is $29.99 for Mac OSX. Once in there you will go to file and open image sequence. Select the first image in the sequence, and the FPS. You might not be able to play back the resulting file smoothly depending on it’s size and how fast your hard drive is. Don’t worry, you now will select export quicktime movie and select the Codec. The selection will depend on what you want to do with the footage, if you are bringing it into another editor than you may want to match the quality and codec of any other footage. Now you can open and play the finished exported file.
Another route to go is with a Digital Video Camera and controlling software. I tested out Boinx Software’s iStopMotion for Mac OSX. You can try the program out with a free 1 week license on their site. It worked fairly well. I’m disappointed at the huge price jump for High Definition output. It goes from $49 for Standard Definition to $499 for HD. And the quality of the sensor in most Video camera’s can’t match a Digital SLR. But in good lighting it is fine. The program really shines for Stop Motion animation which is something I’m going to explore sometime in the future.
For Windows you could try Stop Motion Pro which is also available with a free trial.
Continuing on with budget lighting, we explore using Fluorescent and LED lights, along with using available light, bouncing it with a reflector. These setups will work great for interviews, video casting, vlogging, and the like. These lights use less power and also generate much less heat then big halogen work lights. And the price can’t be beat. We also show the benefits of adjusting White Balance on your camera, with lots of before and after shots. If you are shooting independent movies, stay tuned at the end where we show lighting for shots using the interior of a car.
The LED lights are from Costco and are the LUMEN brand item#170530- 2 Wireless LED under cabinet lights for $12.95. They also come with 6 Duracell AAA batteries in the package. I just taped them together for the cast, but I plan on buying some more and modding them to be a panel with 40 LEDs or so.
The Fluorescent lights are from a suggestion I saw from Walter Graff, who mentioned buying inexpensive Flo’s for interview lighting. I bought 2 Utilitech 18″ Under Cabinet Lights for $8.95 each, from Lowe’s Item#240193. And for mounting I bought a 5 Tool Holder for the garage, the type for holding brooms and rakes. I cut the metal strip into 5 pieces, attached them to the back of the lights in a temporary fashion using Velcro and used the 5 clamps to snap around very inexpensive mic stands. It works great.
So we had an interesting weekend here at the Creativity to Spare studios (my house) this weekend. We entered into a short film contest where you mush complete a movie in 24 hours from concept to final edit. It was for the A3F (Almost Famous Film Festival) here in Phoenix, AZ.
At 12:00 noon on Saturday the guidelines for the movie are released: The theme – A Quick Escape, Prop – A knot (someone ties/unties a knot), Line of Dialog – “I have a bad feeling about this”. By 12 noon on Sunday we had to turn in our short. We spent the first hour and half coming up with the concept and working out who was actually going to be available to act and be in our small crew. The next hour we had to figure out all the logistics of where to shot how to shoot it. Now we had 4 hours to actually get it in the can as they say, before our light ran out. Next was a short dinner and then Log and Capture in Final Cut Pro. We used 2 cameras a Panasonic DVX100B for all the A roll main footage, and my Canon ZR for B roll: shot about 45 minutes on A, and 25 minutes on B. Log and Capture took about 3 hours, a nap was taken once the computer started grabbing the A roll. Got up at 1:30 AM to start a rough edit, by 5 AM I had most of the raw edit together, KK had helped unearth some sound effects. Another short nap was taken, at 7 AM we needed to get some more sound effects so we went out to do some foley with a portable recorder; H4 from Zoom and a shotgun mic AT4073. Ingested the new audio and had to make it mono using Audacity (free simple audio editor). Finished the main edit by 9:15 AM. Sent the project into Logic Audio to do a final audio mix and add some music (hopefully). The audio import does not go as well as I wanted, and I spend 45 minutes fixing crossfades and levels. Now I have about 30 minutes for music, before I have to bounce to disk the audio as a Stereo Mix and bring it back into Final Cut Pro to output the whole thing to tape (miniDV). Oops need some titles and credits, get that done along with a name finally. We live in Chandler and the Drop Off is in Downtown Phoenix, we have planned to leave at least by 11 AM just incase of road closure or bizarre Sunday traffic. Output to tape is finished just before 11 AM and now just have to watch it on a TV to check that it plays all the way through one more time. Just after 11 we are in the car and on our way to turn it in. And we have an early lunch.
Whew.
Sorry for not having a cast this weekend I will post a new episode later this week, and hopefully another by the weekend. We will find out Friday, if we made it into the top 20 films and the screening will be on the next thursday at an AMC theatre downtown. Out of 47 teams only 32 finished in time. Wish us luck.
UPDATE-
We premiered this thursday and won for best use of Theme. Here is the movie- profanity beeped.
Enjoy
I have a couple of designs for simple stabilizers for your digital video camera.
I have built these and have a few suggestions about use and some hacks and modifications.
The first design is from a site called
$14 Steadycam The Poor Mans Steadicam
From Johnny Chung Lee here is a link to his site where he has a kit if you don’t want to find the parts yourself. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/
It is basically 3-10″ iron pipes, a “T” connector and 3 end caps. A weight for the end and a mounting bolt for the camera. This is super easy to assemble except for the drilling of the end-caps. Since the pipes are iron you need a vise and a good drill and bit. Wear your googles. I have taken his advice on making a low mount. Mine is made from 2-90 degree angle pieces of steel, that I bolted together. This low rig is great for skateboarding videos, as you will see at the end of the cast. Thanks to the old man army for letting me shoot them one cloudy Sunday morning. http://www.oldmanarmy.com
The other is from instructables and is a take-off on the FigRig. It is a steering wheel design stabilizer and is made from PVC pipe and I modified the design by using some electrical PVC conduit to make a more round appearance.
Here is the Octagon design http://www.instructables.com/id/PVC-FIG-RIG/
So instead of all those 45 degree elbows I used the electrical PVC conduit which is pretty firm for short distances but can become a bit too flexible at longer lengths and heavier weights. So I will probably redo mine at some point and feature a top PVC pipe and side bars part to stiffen it up. There might be some other solutions- like bending PVC with heat, or maybe finding and actual steering wheel to modify.
The other mod is the middle mounting spot. Which I placed horizontal so that I could make a rest for the rig, to be able to set it down. When I use my Panasonic DVX-100 on this rig I use a Zoom Controller attached to the right hand side of the rig. The controller adjusts Zoom/Iris/Focus and Record with just your thumb it is awesome. I’ll add a picture soon. You can paint them but make sure to let it dry a nice long time. I used some black satin finish spray paint. The last mod is to add some grips using the type that a made for tennis rackets.
The real trick is practice, over time you will start making nice smooth shots. You will probably notice an immediate improvement in your shots just getting your hands off the camera. But true mastery will only come with time. The rigs are heavy, that is partly the point to add some mass to the little camera so you don’t fling it around so much. Walking with the rig is the hardest part, and will have to just be practiced. You see professionals advertising for a trained steadicam operator, so even with the big pro stuff it takes time.
Build your own Teleprompter. Now you can create videos just like the your favorite talking heads. Parts involve 2 pieces of wood, a piece of glass, some dark fabric and a laptop or flat panel monitor.
This project has been no out of pocket cost. FREE Teleprompter. Now if you want to get fancy, there are the links at the bottom of this post about the half-silvered mirror or if you don’t want to use a table to hold the simple prompter setup, there is a link for a design with a stand you can build or order.
Garage Band has a feature hidden deep inside that I’ve discovered. It can import Standard Midi Files through drag and drop (that is something many people know) but did you know it recognizes General Midi Program Changes?
General Midi is a compatibility system for MIDI sound playback devices (sound modules/keyboards/tone generators) The standard includes a list of 128 instruments and sound effects (one bank), a standardized drum map and channel, along with a couple of other concepts. It was meant as a stamp of approval for the consumer. It allowed someone to create a performance for one MIDI device, and then be able to move that sequenced music to another MIDI sound module or keyboard, for playback. It would insure the playback of the correct instruments and drums, instead of getting the typical circus music that occurs when the wrong programs are selected for playback on the keyboard or sound module.
Unfortunately most people have avoided using GM sounds for their MIDI sequences because the manufacturers have relegated them to the lamest, leftover sounds in the sound bank. Shame on Yamaha/Roland/Korg/Alesis and others for making GM, a very good idea for compatibility, instead sound as bad as it has.
Well now all that has changed.
Garage Band will understand the same programs that a keyboard would for GM, and its built in instruments are great.
There is one suggestion in order for this to work completely. You need to purchase the Orchestral Jam Pack. If you don’t have this already, and are a regular Garage Band or Logic user, you are truly missing out. This is a STEAL. For $99 you get 2 DVD’s of instruments and loops, weighing in somewhere around 8-9 Gigabytes. These are some of the more playable orchestral sounds I have ever used. The mapping of changes for articulation of string instruments, such as Cello and Violin, to the modulation wheel is genius. Do yourself a favor and get this upgrade right away.
Here’s how to try it out. You need a Standard Midi File (file extension .mid) that conforms to the General Midi patch list.
So let’s say you need some orchestral music for a movie you are doing, maybe its a StarWars fan film. Well you can’t use John Williams music or their lawyers will track you down quickly. How about using the same source of inspiration for Williams himself. Locate some standard midi files of Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’. This music will seem very familiar for many science fiction and space epic movie fans. And here is the beautiful thing; this material is currently public domain, so no copyright issues. And you are creating your own mix / arrangement so no sound recording copyright issues either.
Most classical music is in the Public Domain, that’s why its featured in so many movies and TV shows and cartoons. So search the net and you might be pleasantly surprised.
Full Compass Parts will be cheaper in bulk. This is as high as they could be.
NC3MDL-1 XLR 3pin Male Panel Connector
$2.70
NC3FDL-1 XLR Female Panel Conector
$2.82
This is the old style I used for the mic itself. It’s a bit difficult to put the mic element in the end.
NC3MX Male XLR Connector
$2.52
This part will be more money, but could make assembly way easier.
NC3MRC 3pin XLR Male Right Angle
$7.42
Then you need point to point wire for inside the box.
Thin very flexible wire for wiring to the mic itself.
Solder and irons. Heat shrink tubing can be useful.
Junction boxes and covers.
Screws to mount the panel XLR connectors.
Other Misc; A metal file – The knock-outs on the junction boxes are just a tad small for the Neutrik XLR panel connectors, so the hole on the ends will have to be enlarged. I have tried everything and a simple metal file (round) is the answer.
Drill Bits to make the hole for the screws for the panel Connectors. These Have to be able to drill into really hard metal (ie Buy a FEW).
One tube of 5 min epoxy will do for many Mics.
A 9 volt battery.
Something to test it with. (ie a mixer and headphones, and mic cables)
Hardest part of the whole thing is soldering the back of the mic, it is small and if you leave your iron on it for to long it will fry the mic electronics.
Suggestion buy some extra mic elements – they are cheap.
As far as my lavalier modification is concerned, you can use the wire that comes with inexpensive headphones if you want to sacrifice a set. And you will need something like an alligator clip to attach the mic to the speakers clothing.
They are similar to earthworks or any or small diaphragm microphones, they do not have a color to them, the microphones sound like how the instrument or voice sounds in that room.
