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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Special Effects and Puppetry


The effects in this piece was probably the most fun I've ever had editing video.  The fire balls were recorded well after the studio shot where the actors were shot. The fire ball were just a lamp wick ball soaked in kerosene on the end of a wire.  They were shot against a completely black background. Then I use a luma key to remove the black.  This created a fire ball that I could put over any piece of video and it looked like the fire ball was there. Then using key frames I was able to animate the fire balls and give them character and life, and even allowed them to interact with the characters.

I had a BLAST with this piece.  It just reminds me how much I love animation.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Jimmy be Free

One of my regular computer training and maintenance customers, Rita Sandler, asked me if I could direct and edit a program for cable access.  I said sure and the following is the result.


We first spent a good hour recording the video of Jimmy Free playing his violin while I used the robotic cameras and the video switcher in TVCTVs studio B to create the smoothly flowing flowing and blending video of  Jimmy playing.  The next hour was spent interviewing Jimmy about his violin, his many spiritual experiences, and his choice to live a raw food vegan lifestyle.  As you can see from the program I had to decide what to cut from the interview and that selection was made easily.  The tale of how he came to be a ray food vegan didn't seem to fit the mood that was set by the music.  Although that portion of the interview was great it didn't fit and was left on the cutting room floor.