Film making

We’ve been to New Zealand recently to soak up the beautiful, natural landscape. The lure was the airshow—Wings over Wanaka—but we spent time travelling from Auckland down through the North and South islands. Highlights of the trip included the Huka Falls near Lake Taupo and the seal colony at Ohau.

We tested out Chris’s new camera, but still have a long way to go to understand how to use it to take great landscape shots. I am keen to use high res shots in video work— I have been experimenting with layering and animating a combination of photos (from Huka Falls and our fish pond), plus digitally manipulated photos, plus painted images (also digitally manipulated).

Screen shot from Adobe Premiere Pro project

I’m not yet happy with the result and it’s a painstaking process to layer and manipulate in Adobe Premiere Pro. But I’m getting closer to working out how many images per second to use and how to manipulate opacity and motion to get the effects I want. The Premiere project screen shot (at left) shows how many images I’ve used in approx. 1 second’s worth of footage—and that’s still not enough to get really effective depth and movement!

Feral koi in Huka Falls

The second screen shot (at left) is from the video project and shows our Ogon Koi swimming in the Huka Waters—of course, Koi are considered noxious and a threat to other species in NZ!

It’s an interesting challenge to try to recreate the movement of the koi through water using only still images.

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog lately—getting stuck into lots of different projects—but will soon be ready to share some of the results of those!

1992, and Donna Wijngaart and I decided to make our first dance video. Of course neither of us knew much about making a video, but that would never stop us. I was studying dance on film and Donna was studying sculpture/performance. Anyway, we decided to collaborate. This work was to become the practical exploration for a paper I was writing where I proposed that to effectively make dance films, the choreographer had to understand and make major directorial and design decisions. If not, the work likely lacked coherence in its resolution of dance, design and film media.

I am really proud of this work. Donna did enter it in one of the Metro award seasons and won. But beyond that it wasn’t half bad for our first attempt, and spurred us both on to make other films.

We had plenty of other people contributing – Chris, Lara, Tasha and Danielle were all there and never forgetting Daniel La Forest who did the edit for us in my loungeroom, overnight, so that we could meet our respective assignment deadlines. Daniel also then set us up with our own analogue video editing equipment which provided many hours of fun, frustration and exhaustion.

We learnt a lot about what not to do in using effects on film, but it was pre-digital, so it was timely.