… so what do you think of part 2?

Cheers, Hywel.

Part three will be up on 28th September, with part four to come in October (I have to edit part four yet!)

Ariel is indeed a wonderful actress! Not that surprising as she went to drama school I believe. I’m sure she’d be interested in film roles…

She’s a real discovery, and she and I have several very interesting ideas we are working on. I want to do a bondage short film- which really feels like a short film rather than a video “point the cameras and everyone ad lib” shoot, and Ariel is hopefully going to collaborate with me on that. We’ve also got many other ideas in the works for our next shoot, of course!

Cheers, Hywel.

It’s a Panasonic DVX100 as the main camera, which I shoot in 25 p (progressive scan, PAL TV format, 25 frames per second) which gives a lovely film-like look and nice resolution with no interlacing artefacts. The cutaways and closeups I shoot on a Sony PC350 handycam, which also has 25 p mode. Where I shoot in widescreen I use an anamorphic adaptor on the front of the Panasonic, and the stretch mode on the Sony. This is a bit of a pain on the Sony as in the 16:9 25p mode you can’t control the exposure manually for some reason!

I love the look and feel of footage from the Panasonic, so if I get to be rich and famous a second one of those is high on my list of investments to make!

Cheers, Hywel.

Urgh, analogue technology, how quaint! I wouldn’t like to shoot on film particularly, I started off shooting stills on film and the digital revolution couldn’t come fast enough. If I had limitless resources I’d shoot on the highest of high def digital systems a la George Lucas.

We Europeans need the extra frame for the simple reason that our mains power is 50 Hz, so clocking things at 50 Hz or 25 Hz is very convenient- no need for complicated timing circuits, you can generate your clock right off the mains.

I have used Magic Bullet plugins to make a more filmic look on some clips (the Christina Carter dominatrix ones in particular- now gone from the site but coming to JBT before long). It depends what I am after. Usually I am after the feeling that every frame of the video is a Restrained Elegance still, which means very clean, very saturated, slightly warm colour response, lots of contrast. That’s a look that the Panasonic does pretty well out of the camera with the right settings.

The Sony Handycam that I use for closeups and cutaways isn’t anything like as nice. Matching its footage to the Panasonic is all but impossible- if you don’t start with a nice clean pure signal, nothing you do to it afterwards is going to help. That’s one of the things I dislike most about my own video work at the moment- it is usually painfully obvious when I cut from footage from the Panasonic to footage from the Sony.

The obvious solution is another Panasonic, which is definitely on the shopping list, although the new Panasonic HDV cams look very tempting… that may give me the same problems in the grading as the Sony vs. Panasonic does now, so a second dvx100 is probably a safer bet. (The Sony HDV consumer cams are 1080i only which is a pig because I really want progressive scan- by the time you’ve deinterlaced 1080i you might as well have shot in standard def progressive scan, it is more or less the same vertical resolution).

BTW I have just edited part four- due out on 26th October. Which I know is a long time off but I wasn’t sure I was going to finish the edit in time so I allowed myself a bit of extra time in the schedule!

Cheers, Hywel.