blog [thedavidbase]

It’s been quite some time since I’ve really exercised the video muscles.  That’s not for want of valiant attempts - as a pile of unlogged and uncaptured MiniDV tapes from New Zealand will attest too.  (You can watch LOTR to hold you over.  If you watch the extended editions (total running time - 3.47 years) I might actually be finished editing my own footage by then.  If the heads on my camcorder hold up.  But I digress.)

But, leave it to a little bit of charitable effort to get me back in the directors chair and editing console.  Rediscovering my inner documentarian, I shot 19 interviews at a recent convention of the California Council of the Blind, working diligently with my wife (who was serving as a delegate from the Greater Los Angeles chapter) to wrangle and schedule candidates for the shoot.

While part 2 of the project will be a series of testimonials on how CCB has improved the life of the blind community, part 1 is a little more general purpose - “What Blind Isn’t”.  Taking a different angle from the usual “being blind means you can’t [insert activity here]”, we wanted to illustrate everything being blind is not.  I think we did some good work here, and it was an excellent reminder of the power of people sharing their personal experiences, and how every story has a power and weight all its own.  I’ll let the videos speak for themselves.

However, I can’t resist giving a few production notes…

Not wanting to deal with my aging non-HD circa 1999 MiniDV camcorder, I used the closest tool at hand - Melissa’s iPhone 4. (Yes I continue to slum it with my 3GS. The iPhone 5 can’t arrive fast enough.)  I gotta say, the picture quality on there really is impressive, and there was plenty of room for the approximately 190 minutes of footage we shot.  The small Gorillapod iPhone tripod and a $70 external mic made setup easy without the need for a lot of extra equipment.

Of course, there were a couple gotchas.  The iPhone video camera view is zoomed in by default in order to fill the frame of the screen in an attractive way and to accommodate the onscreen controls.  Which means certain items that are seemingly off screen are actually on.  Like any good gift, this one keeps on giving - even if you shoot test footage, and then review from the library, your footage *is still zoomed in and cropped*.  Unless you double tap to get the full picture, you shoot away, blissfully unaware of the tips of microphones, barn doors of lights, and edges of backdrops that are actually in your footage.  Until you get into the edit bay. Which is a little late to be getting that kind of info.  Good to note for next time, but I’ll have to plan a lot more time for  test footage as I foresee a lot of “shoot”, “double tap”, “review”, “move mic/move lights”, “shoot again”, “double tap”, “review”, “move some more” going on.  (To be fair, it’s still an acceptable tradeoff given the form factor of the iPhone 4, the image quality, and oh yeah - it’s a freakin’ phone.)

On the image quality, I knew that without good lighting, things were not going to go well - big thanks to dad for lending me the light kit, which made all the difference in a dim hotel room.  The sheet I used as a backdrop - yikes… really would have done that over again if I had the chance.  But getting seamless on a plane was never going to be trivial.  And this led to one other iPhone nit - color balance. I would have figured that with consistent lighting and background, it would have stayed the same across interviews.  Um, nope.  And with no white balance function or other way to turn off the auto-“correction”, things got pretty wacky.  Sigh.  But hey, that’s what post production is for, right?

Speaking of post, wow has iMovie come a long way.  While I definitely think I might go the Final Cut Pro route (now that the price is much more attractive), it was definitely up to the task, with enough “advanced” ability to where I didn’t feel like I was completely constrained with a toy rather than a tool.  And the export to YouTube and Vimeo is pretty brain dead simple.

I also have to thank mobygratis.com - really splendid of Moby to make some of his tracks available for small productions like this, and the music (pardon the pun) really hit the right note.

Massively huge thanks are in order to Melissa for all her help in the editing.  I think her blindness was actually a big plus - she could just really listen to what was being said and focus on the message - critical stuff for a project like this where it’s the words that really matter.  

And of course, many thanks to those who took the time to share their stories - it’s no small feat to make the world a bit wiser.  I hope by sharing this out there that we’ve accomplished a little bit of that.