I'm Evan, a web designer and developer from Richmond Indiana. Learn more about me by visiting the "
Interesting Stuff
The Unwelcome Guest
The first weekend in January 2005 was extrememely productive. Well, sort of. All day Saturday I was working with my new camera and learning how to use it to its fullest extent. One of the features that I really like about my camera is the fact that it can record 640x480 video at 30 frames per second, which is broadcast. In short, I have a home camera built into my digital camera.
That got me thinking about what quality of movie I could produce using just my digital camera and the limited supply of video-related software on my computer. The result of the project was "The Unwelcome Guest". My brother-in-law Jamie comes over about every weekend and we always make fun of him because he just sort of sits around, eats our candy and watches TV. So, that was the plot of our first "movie".
The Unwelcome Guest Screenshots
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Production was quick and dirty and lasted about 2 hours. The other 2 of the 4 hours of production were spent in front of the computer editing the footage together. The process was surprisingly smooth. My digital camera uses SD memory cards so we would record as much video as my card could hold and then dump the QuickTime video files onto my computer. Once we had done that many, many times (because my card was only 16Mb and only held around 13 seconds of full quality video) we were ready to start putting it together in Adobe Premiere.
The quality of the recording was wonderful most of the time. The only time it wasn't was in low-light situations, and then we just had a little more artifacts than we wanted. I converted the video to black and white and added matte bars in Premiere and also adjusted some of the levels in the dark shots. Other than that the final version is 100% Minolta Dimage Z1 in effect. Not too bad at all.
One of my recent purchases was a DVD burner, and one of the reasons I wanted it was for projects such as this. It was wonderful to be able to see your digital creation come alive on the not-so-big screen. There was a program that came with my dvd burner that allows you to make dvd menu systems and while it worked just fine in my dvd player, I wasn't happy with the level of customization that it allows. I like to have complete creative control over the look and layout and this program restricted me to predesigned widgets and menus (though you could import custom backgrounds).
We're planning on producing a dozen or so of these shorts and putting them on the local public access channel. I think they're weird enough to get some attention. Who knows. I'd like to try and do one a week, with most of the work being done on the weekends. Check back here for future projects.
Check out the VideoThe Unwelcome Guest
You've read the story, now see it in action. If you've got the interest (and the broadband internet connection) download this bad boy, watch it, and let me know what you think! |