To follow up on a post in the general filmmaking area - thought I'd let people know about something that we did for the opening titles of a short that we recently completed. (it's called "Art History" and it's a 22 minute heist film shot on the DVX100 Panasonic)
Anyways - I had this idea to lock two cameras together on a rigid bar - the aptly named "shotgun" rig...see photo below
The idea is to have both cameras running simultaneously and then to go from camera A to camera B via a very wide freeze frame (where the two freeze frames are stitched together) - it may be hard to visualise just from the sentence but the teaser sequence (the first 5 minutes of the film) shows off the entire opening title sequence in which we use this effect.
Wow! Pretty cool! What software did you use to edit? And how much money did the project cost? And where did you get all of the money? It seems most of the stuff cost a lot. Two Panasonic DVX100's. Great job man.
wouldnt you get the same effect just panning to the side? i guess im reading it wrong, i saw the video, looks really cool btw, but i still dont feel like i realy get it
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strangely I did not get notified of replies even though I ticked the box - so sorry I took so long to get back to you guys...
in turn here we go...
slimdog55: we used final cut 4 for the majority of the editing (only because the guy who was editing the main piece is a mac afficionado) - the closing titles and opening titles were done by me in Vegas 4.0 - although the overwhelming majority of the opening titles was after effects 6...I used photoshop to do the actual stitch since I have more control with it...(I used shake for a matchmove part of the way through the film but you would never see it because it's just a guy who did not go off screen fully so I removed him)
The panasonic DVX100 we owned already (bought it for another small budget project for the CBC) - the other one was owned by a guy who was working on the project doing the behind the scenes featurette.
So in total the project was a 4 day shoot with 3 main actors, 3 co-starring and some extras, 6 locations...etc etc...
The out of pocket expenses for us were $6500 USD...which sounds like a lot but isn't ridiculous for the amount of production value we were able to put on screen...the big thing is of course that post production in miniDV is so cheap we just used our laptops...
Just keep in mind though that with indie productions of this kind nobody's paying the actual book rate for any rentals - so for example we had a very low budget for grip/lighting/camera gear but were able to convince the rental houses to give us gear for very little cash.
One third of the budget went on food...the rest on a combination of gear, locations cost, some music rights, raw materials, gas, rental of a truck etc etc...but really for the quality we could pull off we were amazed.
US.Amateurfilmmaker: Yes we did use the 24p mode on the DVX100 with the cinema matrix setting...a lot of the look comes from having an experienced DP - a guy called Todd Williams - of course we color corrected in post - but we had a stellar image to begin with - the whole sequence in the "workshop" - visible in the trailer but not the teaser...is amazing...smoke machines, grinding etc etc - but hey you guys'd have to buy the film to see it...(we put a lot of work into making the dvd fun and informative so there are 2 full length commentaries - director/dp/b-camera and director/producer/lead actress - as well as a behind the scenes featurette...
Epsilon: the camera's are not synchronised together - they just pointed the same way (and we lined them up with 2 monitors we had on location) and then just turned them both on and away you go...
Justsomeguy: Hmm...no you would not get the same effect panning to the side.
because you see you've frozen the action...the full frame of the ccd is 720x480 (NTSC DV) - although we were using an anamorphic adapter on the rest of the shoot we only had one so we had twice 720x480....essentially
1440x480 to play with of video.
In practical terms you don't get that much of course because there's an element of overlap (a deliberate one to make the stitching easier) - parallax is an issue (imagine things right in front of each other in front of one camera - they would not be directly in front of each other on the other camera's screen) - so it's not as easy as it looks.
If your target resolution was web 320x240 and you were certain of this fact then yes you could try to do the same effect with one video camera - and just pan across in post...but you that's impossible in full quality DV unless you use more than one camera like we did (or use still cameras like matrix does for bullet time)
tallman_house: I think I answered yours already.
So thanks for the feedback guys - I'm happy to answer any more if you want - if anyone knows why the notifications aren't coming through let me know...
good to hear people think the effect is cool - I posted on here cause I figured it was something relatively straightforward that people could do themselves with two camcorders if they wanted to...
plus I just thought it was cool that there was a forum for practical and digital no-budget and low-budget special FX because I hadn't seen one before - so I learned a lot...
I appreciate people checking it out and commenting - thanks a lot...
so often on some forums loads of people download stuff and never comment (oh wait that's porn forums ha ha) jokes aside - you guys seem to have a great community here...
I checked out ryan w. site with the lightsabers and stuff - very informative...
as soon as we get an effects full production going I'll be back here to figure some more stuff out...(might well be a WWII thing in the making that I'm just securing the rights to)
. Neat technique... What program did you use?