SHOW NOTES

Video Title: Candy Shots

Video length: 10:03

Video format/size: m4v/89MB

Host: Dawn Casey

Guest: Carl Weaver

Director, Editor, Cinematographer: Dawn Casey

Edited using: Final Cut

Intro/Outro Music: "Hot Rock"- Kevin MacLeod Licensed under Creative Commons

Body Music: "Aitech" and "Cherry Blossom" (loop)- Kevin MacLeod Licensed under Creative Commons

URLS mentioned in the video:

www.carlweaver.com

www.candyusa.com

candydishblog.com

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PRODUCTION NOTES

-all pictures are actual screenshots from the video-

What better post to have right before Valentines Day, than one about candy? But, better yet, since I talk about photography and video, how about a video all about someone who takes pictures of candy?

To quote myself, "Did you ever wonder how you get a job like that? And how do they do that?" Well, I asked Carl Weaver those exact questions in this video.

Carl does quite a few different things for the National Confectioners Association, in addition to being a photographer on his own. For this video, I met him in his basement studio and followed him around while he took some really nice pictures of the "models". Both of the photos he picked as 'the best' are featured within the video itself.

After doing the interview, Carl gave me candy. I ate it. I am bribable.

So! Now that the process is done, did I have problems? Oh... yes.

For starters, I've decided to never film myself doing the intro (screen shot above!) at eleven o'clock at night directly after filming the feature section. I was super tired and my hair had been in a ponytail. I actually cracked up laughing at my first attempt because in the playback, my hair was doing a perfect Alfalfa. After flattening my hair, I did it again. And again. I did it four times, actually. I say this every time: talking directly at a camera is a lot harder than it looks! That's my living room right there, and the plant's name is Howie.

The next day I uploaded all the video I'd taken. I had used two cameras, one as a hand-held, and one as a static wide-cam. Since I shoot with editing in mind, I almost never end up with mountains of video.

When reviewing my footage, I discovered something normal: a hum. Have a look at the screenshot of it being cleaned up:

I circled in red the offending "noise." You've heard the expression before: white noise. But what does that mean, exactly?

Well for starters, it's every where. You don't notice it because it's always there. It's the odd hum coming from your television, your refrigerator, your computer, and your LIGHTS.

Imagine the problem: I just shot a lot of video in a basement that was lit up with great big photography flood lights.

Ah.

The problem was basically fixed when I applied filters to get rid of the noise, specifically the AUMultiband Compressor and the expander/ noise gate. In English I pretty much just squashed all things that didn't sound like words. This usually works very well. Sometimes you can overdo it and it sounds like you're either talking through a tin can or you're having a conversation under water. Sound is something I take good care of (I run a live sound system almost weekly) and I try to never clip things like that.

A second huge problem was the lighting. Since there were big lights over the shooting table itself, the words "backlit" don't even cover how difficult it was to see in the resulting video. The wide angle shot was DARK. Very, very dark. This screenshot is a spot where I can be seen over the shooting table, and if you take a good look at the shot on the left you'll notice you can't even see Carl standing there. The shot on the right is the SAME screenshot, but with adjustments.

I also have a side-by-side of the interview with Carl, and as you can see, the different camera angles created a HUGE difference because of where the lights in the studio were placed. The second set of screenshots do NOT have any adjustments- that's how the shots looked from the different angles. In the video, I adjusted the dark clips to match the brighter ones.

My second camera also had a hard time focusing. Since it was essentially an unmanned camera, it was in auto-focus mode. Note to everyone with a camera like that: the camera gets confused by bright lights... sort of like a deer in headlights. The camera would be searching around frantically on something to focus on when there wasn't a person in the frame. Fortunately, I could fix the exposure in post. (I simulated the effect in the screenshots- you can tell this because the logo in the lower light of the top shots looks a bit bleached out. In the video, the logo is in a different layer and isn't affected like it is in this still.)

The shots I was taking close up came out beautifully, though, as you can see. The candy looked amazing sitting on that glowing white background, and I put my camera in manual focus mode so that I could get really close to it. Those are Carl's fingers in the frame as he adjusted things.

After finishing the video, I went in and re-did something very specific: my logo. If you take a good look at all these screenshots, you'll notice the first one is different. Originally, my logo was just a white square sitting in the lower right corner, like you see in the candy close up screenshot.

However, I discovered that when the video was being watched, my eyes kept wanting to drag to the right and look at the logo. I realized that was because of the hard lines within the logo.

I opened my logo up into an editing program and removed the alpha channel, making it transparent. Then I replaced that layer within the video and was much more satisfied with how it looked.

Travel to location: 1 hour

Shooting: 1.5 hours

Upload: 3 hours

Rough-edit complete: 4 hours

Music edit: 1.5 hours

Final Edit complete: 12 hours

Export & conversion: 1 hour

Total time to make this video: 24 hours

Not a bad way to spend a day :) Please comment and ask questions about this video by clicking the link below!