Sample footage from the anti-bailout rally
On Sept 25th, Alex and I went to an anti-bailout rally and march around Wall Street. There was pretty good turnout, and we had the opportunity to give our new camera/microphone rig a try. The conditions were actually very different from what we’ll really be filming in (lots of noise, lots of loud sound sources, tons of people you had to maneuver around), so the video and sound is not very indicative of what the documentary footage would be like. That said, I thought I’d share just over a minute of footage. All in all I thought the new shotgun mic did a pretty good job, and the video quality is very good (though I did a pretty poor job of keeping the camera stable). I haven’t taken any video editing classes yet (as Alex did), so using Final Cut Pro to do this 1-minute clip was actually a bit challenging at first, but I think I’ll get the hang of it as we do more of these short edits.
What you’ll see are several short clips with the audio of one of them going throughout. This technique can be useful, for example, for playing an interview’s audio before the person being interviewed appears on screen, which is fairly common in documentaries and helps put scenes together. You can see the video in HD quality by clicking on the vimeo link or HD button.
There were so many video cameras at the rally, that at first they seemed to outnumber the attendees. Apart from a few professional/TV people there were tons and tons of more low key videographers, a lot with pretty nice equipment. I was pleased to see a few people with the same microphone or camera that we got. There were also a few with interesting Steadycam-like setups to keep the camera stable. Good-quality film-making has definitely become a lot more affordable than it used to be.
Yet to come: a photo of our camera rig. Oh, and the Sony V6 headphones worked great.