When you hear the term 'high-res' thrown about with such abandon when it comes to images for web use, have you ever stopped to think just how big or how high quality and image meant for the web needs to be?
There's an assumption that high-contrast images are more dynamic, more compelling, more inviting. Have a go at some low-contrast photography. You might surprise yourself with the results.
Photographing buildings doesn't have to mean wide-angle lenses and fretting about correcting for the keystone effect. Any lens, and angle. Don't believe us? Let us show you!
I was browsing Quora the other day, and found an awesome question: What's the benefit of studying photography? At first, I just answered 'Not much'... But then I erased those two words, and let things get a little bit out of hand. Enjoy:
Let's take the first things first: Having a degree in photography doesn't make you a photographer. Taking photos makes you a photographer.
With that out of the way, let me start by answering with an anecdote: I studied Journalism in university, as an undergrad. I have to say, it was the biggest waste of time of my life.
On the flipside, it did give me an 'excuse' to spend a lot of time on other projects. Since I was a 'student', nothing was expected of me - other than being a student- and the three years I spent in Uni were incredibly productive - just not in terms of university work.
After University, I was utterly demoralised, and decided I would never work in journalism again, so I set up as a photographer. I was able to snare a few early client, and ended up doing quite a lot of work as a photographer - some fashion work, some architectural stuff, etc. I also started blogging about photography.
You learn best when you're curious...
As a photographer, I am completely self-taught. As a journalist / writer; well, I do technically have a degree in Journalism, but I wouldn't say that it was useful in any way, shape or form. The academic parts of my degree were interesting from an academic standpoint, but they were completely useless to my career as a journalist. The practical aspects of my degree were so far removed from the real life of a journalist, that they were completely useless.
I think I can very safely say that everything I know about writing and photography, I've learned outside of formal learning - and I guess, given that I currently write about photography for a living, I must have done pretty well at both of them.
Mark Twain said: I never let school get in the way of my education. I think that's a pretty healthy path to take.
By all means; if you're interested in having 'MA' behind your name, do it. If you think you are interested in the academic side, and want to study photography from a historical, or a social point of view, knock yourself out.
If you want to be a photographer? I wouldn't bother with a degree.
You learn to be a photographer by taking photos. Be the best photographer you can be: Start by emulating others. Find your favourite photos on Flickr, and recreate them. Then, add your own slant. Make them better. Make the style yours. Combine, create, develop. Work on the artistic side of your photography (the ideas). Work on the technical side of your photography (turning your ideas into photographs). Work on both at the same time. Keep challenging and pushing yourself.
Once you know how to take good photos, you need connections to be able to do anything with the photos. Whether you want to have fine art exhibition, you want to start selling your pictures to magazines or agencies, etc etc etc, it's all about the connections you're able to make.
Making connections is hard, but it's a skill that's completely unrelated to the photography side of things; so whatever you do, don't do a degree just to make connections. Drop an e-mail to your favourite photography blogger. Go to a local Flickr meetup. Go to small photo gallery openings locally, and start talking to people. Show off your work to anyone who'll take a look, and get some feedback. Talk to people, submit your photos to magazines, get your local pub to hang a couple of your photos on the wall, create a website, get active on DeviantArt, Flickr, etc... Get involved.
Success as a photographer doesn't happen overnight. Hell, it doesn't happen over many nights. I know many extremely talented photographers who never got a break - but to be honest, I also know many mediocre photographers, who believe they should have had their break a long time ago. I don't have the heart to tell them that they've got a long way to go before their work is where it needs to be, in order to break through in an incredibly competitive market.
This is where being self-critical and being able to critique your own work comes in: It's not easy, but it'll be one of the most powerful tools you have available to you.
First of all, have a quick look at the video as a reminder of what it was all about:
This video is mostly stop-motion animation.
Step one: The audio
Since I knew that I wanted the video to be short, I had to think about what I actually wanted to say. In the film world, this means that you have to write a script. In my case, I've written quite a few voice-over and radio scripts before, as I studied journalism under the rather illustrious Richard Rudin, who is a bit of a broadcasting legend in his own right. Of course, this was all ten years ago, but some of the key points still stuck in my mind.
Eventually, I landed on a script that was going to be about 2 minutes long, which I figured would be a good length for a Kickstarter video. From my days at T3 (I used to edit the gadget website T3.com), we did a fair bit of research about video length etc. Later, when I was producing FiveFWD, we discovered that 2-5 minutes was the perfect length for a web video, but that the longer videos only 'stuck' with people if they were patient and interested in the product. There are examples from Fifth Gear and the Gadget Show, if you're particularly curious.
Anyway, so I decided to make my script as short and to the point as possible. I spend 10 seconds introducing myself, 5 seconds setting the scene for what I've done before, and then, only 21 seconds in, I tell my audience what the idea is, and what it does. 26 seconds in, the hard sell happens, in that I rattle off the main bread-and-butter features of my device, and then at 41 seconds, I start what I believe to be the 'killer feature': The auxiliary port, which opens the device for use in god-knows-how-many-ways: A hackable camera trigger for people who aren't hackers.
Next, I recorded the audio with the video function on my Olympus E-P1. I do have both better cameras (the Canon T1i springs to mind) and better microphones than the one that was built-in, but I wanted to keep it a little bit lo-fi.
When recording the videos, I did re-takes whenever I stumbled over words (you have no idea how hard it is to say 'auxiliary port'. Or 'pressure sensor'), and then edited the audio together in Final Cut Express. I kept the video of my face whilst editing the audio, because it's often easier to edit audio smoothly when you can visualise it, as well. I don't know if you can tell, but the final audio track has about 20 edits in it. The only one that's very obvious is the one where I go from live action (i.e. the very first 4 seconds) to recording sitting much closer to the camera.
The audio recording and editing session took about 90 minutes in total, I think.
I then put my script into Google Spreadsheets, and went through the audio, and timecoded the whole thing. By using a little bit of spreadsheet magic, I was able to automatically calculate how many frames of animation I would need for each phrase or idea in my script, and so I had a shot list.
The full script, should you be curious, is downloadable as a PDF here.
In the original script, I didn't have everything in capitals: Usually, only the words you would emphasize are in capitals, and you would also include extra punctuation to remember to take breaks whilst you're speaking.However, when the time came to start doing the shots, the odd capitalised word was distrating, so I put it all in caps.
Like this: in the ORIGINAL script, I didn't have everything in capitals ... Usually, ONLY the words you would EMPHASIZE , are in capitals ... and you would ALSO include extra punctuation , to REMEMBER to take BREAKS , whilst you're speaking.
It takes a bit of time to get used to reading scripts like this, but once it becomes second nature, it makes it a lot easier to read 'naturally' into a microphone.
Planning the shots
With a solid audio track, I started planning out each one of my shots. My lovely girlfriend Ziah (who has worked in the film industry for many years) helped by asking lots of difficult questions about how we were going to visualise everything.
The video was going to be a mixture of stop motion (i.e. moving toy cars around and taking photos of them), animation (i.e. drawing an idea or a sketch, and taking a photo every few lines, so it would look as if the thing is being drawn right in front of you), Collages (basically, still frames shown on screen) and live footage (Me speaking to camera). As it turned out, once we got about half-way through making the video, it turned out that the sheer amount of rapid cuts we used would have turned the original video into a sensory overload. It is already pretty intense as it is - imagine the same video with another 20 or so cuts added. It wouldn't have been very pleasant to watch.
Anyway, so we reduced the number of shots we needed, and instead expanded the length of some of them a little.
Stop motion animation
Stop motion is when you move an item a few millimeters, take a photo. Move a few millimeters, take a photo. When the photos are played in quick succession, it gives the illusion of movement - hence stop motion. Let's start with an example:
For the stop motion animation of my video, I used the fantastic iStopMotion, by Boinx software to put it all together. It's really easy to use, and if I had a decent video camera (or a good web-cam), it would have been very fast to do the actual animation, too.
Sadly, I didn't have the appropriate camera, so I used a Canon EOS T1i instead, with a home-made remote trigger. I did consider putting together a quick clap sensor (clap your hands, take a photo) especially for this, but figured a quick button to press would work just as well.
In the video, the part with the robots and the Arduino and the chips moving around is all stop-motion animation.
Animation
Now, my particular brand of animation wasn't exactly super high tech; cell animation (like what you expect from old Disney movies, for example) is a lot more work. Instead, I was inspired by a video I saw by PhD comics:
Of course, there's a pretty big difference between PhD comics and myself: They know what the hell they are doing, and I, quite clearly, do not.
But that has never stopped me before, and I decided that whilst nobody would back Triggertrap with a single nickel if I showed the final drawings, perhaps if I animated it, it would come to life a bit more. I gave it a shot, and it looked like it worked well.
Creating the animation was pretty simple: Set up the camera above the drawing paper, tape the paper to the table, and take a photo. Draw a bit of a line. Take a photo. Repeat.
Again, I imported all the still frames into iStopMotion, and exported them as a movie file. This movie file was then imported into Final Cut Express, and matched up with my audio track.
Editing it all together
Editing this beast turned out to be a royal pain in the arse. After all, I had more than 700 frames of animation, a load of video clips, some photos (of the books and the Triggertrap), and it all had to be edited down to a 2-minute video. Ouch.
For the stop motion, Lightroom turned out to be a complete lifesaver: I was able to make the photographic adjustments to just one of the frames (color balance, crop, spot editing, contrast, etc), and then just copy the settings over to all the other frames, too. If I would have had to do that manually, I think I would have just given up.
Of course, we didn't animate anything more than we absolutely had to, which means that I didn't have any extra footage to 'cut into'.
This is where the still frames came in handy - At the end of each animation, I used the same frame for a few frames (usually about 15; so half a second) to give the reader a visual cue that there was a cut coming. That makes it less stressful to watch, and it saved me from having to come up with extra bits to animate.
The final brainwave I had when I exported the video the first time: The animation doesn't lead the viewer's eye very well, so it's not always clear what I want you to look at - so I introduced 'video movement'. This is basically done digitally, where there are slow zooms out or in (or, in the case of the segment about the auxiliary port, fast movements from important bit to important bit), to help the viewer fix their eyes on what is important.
After a few hours of tweaking and fiddling, it all came together nicely in Final Cut Express. I added some final credits, and decided that would have to be good enough - there's only so much time I was going to spend on a video, after all.
The whole thing - from script writing via sound recording, to animation, to final edit, was about 20 hours of solid work, and Ziah helped me for about 6 hours as well, animating part of the video (the bit with the mad scientist is hers, that's why it looks way, way better than the bits I did myself), and coming up with clever ideas for some of the segments.
So, there you have it - The making of the Triggertrap pitch video.
I know you're just itching to see it one more time, aren't you? Awesome. Head over to Kickstarter and press 'play'. Then, if you're impressed enough by what the Triggertrap actually does, why not pre-order one? You know you want to...
After a few hours of tweaking and fiddling, it all came together nicely in Final Cut Express. I added some final credits, and decided that would have to be good enough - there's only so much time I was going to spend on a video, after all.