DVC 5 Feedback - Still Life

Meryem Ersoz · April 15th, 2006, 08:09 AM

agent smith?? that's pretty funny. look for bradley marlow in starring in "The Matrix 6: More Elliptical Than Ever"

i gotta say that i told him to do the whole thing slooooowly. i was shooting for a haiku effect and was trying to walk a line between normalcy and creepiness. so any critique of V/O technique rests on my shoulders. i probably should have just given him the lead, like a good jockey trusts a thoroughbred!

Robert Kirkpatrick · April 15th, 2006, 01:34 PM

That was beautifully done. Coincidentally, I was talking with some filmmakers in town about trying to do a film with stills; watching yours, I can see how feasible that would be. Also, I found the voice to be rather soothing, which I thought you were shooting for.

There must be something in the water here at DVinfo.net. This is the third DV Challenge film I've watched that has the main narrator/character actually be dead during the telling of the story.

Bradley L Marlow · April 16th, 2006, 03:25 PM

lol Mereym! "The Matrix 6: More Elliptical Than Ever"

On another note: You definitely squeezed beauty out of the other end of the lens.

:)

Best Wishes~
Bradley

Kris Holodak · April 16th, 2006, 05:04 PM

What a workout for a new piece of gear. The results looked great. After all that are you loving your camera or hating it? I shoot stills a bit myself on the side so I'm always interested in what cameras people enjoy.

Meryem Ersoz · April 17th, 2006, 10:09 AM

i'm so busy trying to watch all these other shorts that i barely have time to respond to my own thread....these challenges challenge us, all right, in oh so many ways....

kris, when folks discuss different cameras, the conventional wisdom is to go with the one that feels right. like a fine musical instrument, the one that feels right is the one that is right. i like that line of thinking in general. but what i learned when i bought my XL2 is that sometimes you have to force yourself to make it feel right, whether it feels right or not--that's the bane of being a left-handed person in a righties' world. the XL2 feels terrible in every possible way, from a physical standpoint, but then again, so did my brothers' baseball mitt, which i had to borrow when i was a youngster. didn't stop me from playing!

so, about the DsMark II. i hated everything about it when it arrived, except for the fabulous 16 MP resolution. ergonomically, it is a challenge because it is chunky and weighty (although hearing what still photographers whine about in terms of what weighs a lot makes me chuckle--it's nothing compared to a loaded-up video camera!). the worst part is that, in my opinion, it is not intuitively designed. you really have to LEARN this puppy. what buttons to use in what oddly arranged, non-intuitive combinations....

now, however, i am loving it. after spending a month with it, i've adjusted to the weight and the design. thank you, DV Challenge! i'd love to get my hands on Mike Teutsch's dolly, but the biggest reward already is that i can use this camera with ease. piling big lenses on it to shoot birds and squirrels and such has made shooting with any lesser camera seem almost too easy! using this badboy has made me better able to operate my smaller camera, which is a nice by-product.

this weekend i shot easter egg hunting photos of my daughter with a digital rebel and a reasonable tamron 24-135mm walkaround lens, and it felt like a toy camera, after lugging this big gun around for a month. my camera was still bigger than every other parent's point n shoot (oh my lord how the dads hate that!! it's hilarious how anxious they get that a GIRL has a bigger lens than they do! you just wouldn't believe the comments, though i'm usually the only one laughing....).

(fortunately for me, this time, there was another mom with a 10d and a canon 24-85mm, who worked in a camera store, how refreshing to have another mom to talk lenses with, for a change....)

anyway, this is getting away from your question. i am enjoying this camera quite a bit now. it feels good. i think the pictures look good.

one other thing that's tough about it, it's not practical to use for internet exchanges. i learned that the files it produces are so darn big that my internet service provider bounces them back to me. &%$^#%^ comcast!

so if i know i am sending around these pictures in e-mail, it makes a lot more sense to use my rebel. otherwise, i'd have to go to the trouble of re-sizing the files in photoshop. i'd download stuffit or something similar, but i'm touching against the limits of this internal hard drive as it is, so something else would have to go to make room.

that's probably more information than you were asking for, but it's my chance to get on that soapbox and say, if you think something DOESN'T feel right, sometimes you have to suck it up and wrestle that big camera to the ground. otherwise, we would not have ANY southpaw XL2 users!

Kris Holodak · April 17th, 2006, 10:39 AM

I've heard that kind of comment more than once. Please. My response is usually, wait till you see what I can do with it. One of the things I like best about DVinfo is the lack of that kind of attitue. But I digress.

I appreciate the detailed response, it was exactly the kind of info I was after. It's good to know that sometimes the learning curve is worth it. Especially since I've been known to make final decisions on still cameras based on what feels best and is most intuititve.

Smile,
Kris

Chris Barcellos · April 17th, 2006, 05:01 PM

Meryem:

I ve done a lot of pan and zoom projects with still photos for things like memorial videos, and birthday and anniversary celebrations. In my early days before I became enamored with digital film, I had a darkroom, and shot a 2 1/4 camera (Kowa 66). Still have the gear, but I am finding digital stills easier to work with. Your photos are beatiful ! I never considered a "dramatic" naration in stills, but yours came out very nice !

Andrew Khalil · April 17th, 2006, 09:44 PM

I agree with everyone else and since I'm also into stills, I really liked how you were so creative with them - beautiful photography.

Meryem Ersoz · April 18th, 2006, 07:29 AM

it sounds like a couple of you are considering a video with stills project. if you ever complete one that gets on the web, i'd love it if you could send me a link. it's a bit difficult to learn from what other people have done or are doing because i don't know of too many of these types of films. the one i had in mind was the classic of the genre, chris marker's short black and white film, "la jetee."

if any of you haven't seen "la jetee" and plan to make one of these types of projects, it's absolutely must-see viewing! what's great about the film is how deliberately the form meets the content. by that, i mean, the choice to use stills completely reflects the frozen-in-time time paradox at the center of the narrative....(ugh, my inner professor unveils itself--i think i have taught this film one too many times....). anyway, my students always loved this film. it was one way to feed them an art film, while they were thinking they were getting a freaky science fiction film.

i wish i had the talent to storyboard things. it would have been much more efficient undoubtedly. with every video i've ever made for myself, i get an inkling of an idea and then walk around shooting stuff, and the stuff generates more ideas, until eventually the whole thing takes shape from that process of thinking a little, shooting a little, looking at what i collect, and thinking about it a bit more. it seems sort of random, but i think it's about tapping into a stream-of-unconsciousness.

it's not very efficient! it seems like the ability to storyboard one of these would save you lots of head-banging.....

chris, the filmmaker chris marker uses only one pan in his story, and since the rest of it is without motion, other than dissolves, that single pan carried a weighty meaning. i looked for an appropriate place to put pan/zoom motion into my little film, but ultimately, with all the snowy scenery, opted for a more frozen look.

i'd be open to suggestions for good spots for selective motion.

in chris marker's movie, he only uses one additional ambient sound, a jet engine, and the rest is voice. i recorded some ambient sounds--the skateboard park, the coffeehouse, footsteps tramping through snow, etc. but ultimately, i thought those muddled the sound mix, rather than adding anything. everything you choose to add to a still video is more dramatically emphasized, it seems, automatically...

i'd love to see how other people work with these issues!

Hugh DiMauro · April 19th, 2006, 07:37 AM

Meryem:

Your piece moved me the most (thus far). Believe it or not, I am very esoteric by nature (althought I don't allow many people to see that side of me). I can talk with folks for hours about the hereafter and the true way of the mind.

"How do you know when your eyes have closed for the last time?"

Who came up with that? That line will haunt me (in a good, thought provoking way) for the rest of my days. Thank you for a magnificent movie. This is getting tougher by the minute.

Meryem Ersoz · April 19th, 2006, 08:51 AM

wow, hugh, thanks! i'm moved that you are moved! it makes it all worthwhile.

i stole the line (with permission, of course) from a friend, who is using it to introduce her own video project for her MFA. i belong to a monthly video critique group. we give each other feedback and help each other hone our work. she opened her project with a beautiful sunrise image and this inscription. she said she borrowed it from someone in her program, who said it was a zen koan. i tried to look it up, in books of zen koans, and never found it. so maybe she made it up. i'm not sure. i thought it worked with my project, synchronously, with my friend's project. what has been fun is seeing how we are working with the identical line in such different projects. we differ so stylistically, there's not a lot of danger of overlap.

thanks for viewing....

Chris Barcellos · April 19th, 2006, 09:51 AM

[QUOTE=Meryem Ersoz]
chris, the filmmaker chris marker uses only one pan in his story, and since the rest of it is without motion, other than dissolves, that single pan carried a weighty meaning. i looked for an appropriate place to put pan/zoom motion into my little film, but ultimately, with all the snowy scenery, opted for a more frozen look.

i'd be open to suggestions for good spots for selective motion.

[QUOTE]
Meryem:

I wouldn't presume to think I could improve on your work by adding motion. First of all, you do have motion in your film, without pans or zooms- The "rapid fire" sequences themselves create a sense of motion. I also recall the crow and squirrel scenes have successive frames that create a sense of motion. If I was going to play with anything for motion effect, (1) I might try a zoom effect on the photo from behind tail of crow, with an appropriate transition to the the nest landing. (2) With a couple of the Static landscapes, I might have considered just a slight pan or zoom, almost imperceptible.

Meryem Ersoz · July 30th, 2006, 02:57 PM

anyone here from minnesota?

my DVC5 short film will be screening at the Twin Cities Underground Film Festival which runs from Sept. 1-3rd in Bloomington, MN.

where the heck is bloomington? why aren't they calling it the bloomington FF?

oh well, it's a nice bonus when a DVC video gets into one o' these events. so i learned how to operate my still camera and squeezed in a film festival credit. in a week--oh never mind, this one was a month, wasn't it?? it's all a blur now. oh well, it was all worth it.

yo dylan, you should start a list of these things. i know sean has screened some of his stuff, and didn't bill gardner move his award-winning film from local to global? it would be fun to gather outside data on just how much "cheaper than film school" the DVC actually is!

April 17th, 2006, 10:39 AM	#21
Kris Holodak Major Player Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Washington, DC Posts: 302	hey little lady, big lens you've got there... I've heard that kind of comment more than once. Please. My response is usually, wait till you see what I can do with it. One of the things I like best about DVinfo is the lack of that kind of attitue. But I digress. I appreciate the detailed response, it was exactly the kind of info I was after. It's good to know that sometimes the learning curve is worth it. Especially since I've been known to make final decisions on still cameras based on what feels best and is most intuititve. Smile, Kris

April 17th, 2006, 05:01 PM	#22
Chris Barcellos Inner Circle Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Elk Grove CA Posts: 6,838	Meryem: I ve done a lot of pan and zoom projects with still photos for things like memorial videos, and birthday and anniversary celebrations. In my early days before I became enamored with digital film, I had a darkroom, and shot a 2 1/4 camera (Kowa 66). Still have the gear, but I am finding digital stills easier to work with. Your photos are beatiful ! I never considered a "dramatic" naration in stills, but yours came out very nice ! __________________ Chris J. Barcellos

April 19th, 2006, 07:37 AM	#25
Hugh DiMauro Trustee Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Central Florida Posts: 1,205	Meryem: Your piece moved me the most (thus far). Believe it or not, I am very esoteric by nature (althought I don't allow many people to see that side of me). I can talk with folks for hours about the hereafter and the true way of the mind. "How do you know when your eyes have closed for the last time?" Who came up with that? That line will haunt me (in a good, thought provoking way) for the rest of my days. Thank you for a magnificent movie. This is getting tougher by the minute. __________________ Interesting, if true. And interesting anyway.

April 19th, 2006, 09:51 AM	#27
Chris Barcellos Inner Circle Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Elk Grove CA Posts: 6,838	[QUOTE=Meryem Ersoz] chris, the filmmaker chris marker uses only one pan in his story, and since the rest of it is without motion, other than dissolves, that single pan carried a weighty meaning. i looked for an appropriate place to put pan/zoom motion into my little film, but ultimately, with all the snowy scenery, opted for a more frozen look. i'd be open to suggestions for good spots for selective motion. [QUOTE] Meryem: I wouldn't presume to think I could improve on your work by adding motion. First of all, you do have motion in your film, without pans or zooms- The "rapid fire" sequences themselves create a sense of motion. I also recall the crow and squirrel scenes have successive frames that create a sense of motion. If I was going to play with anything for motion effect, (1) I might try a zoom effect on the photo from behind tail of crow, with an appropriate transition to the the nest landing. (2) With a couple of the Static landscapes, I might have considered just a slight pan or zoom, almost imperceptible. __________________ Chris J. Barcellos

April 15th, 2006, 08:09 AM	#16
Meryem Ersoz Wrangler Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Boulder, CO Posts: 3,015	agent smith?? that's pretty funny. look for bradley marlow in starring in "The Matrix 6: More Elliptical Than Ever" i gotta say that i told him to do the whole thing slooooowly. i was shooting for a haiku effect and was trying to walk a line between normalcy and creepiness. so any critique of V/O technique rests on my shoulders. i probably should have just given him the lead, like a good jockey trusts a thoroughbred!

April 15th, 2006, 01:34 PM	#17
Robert Kirkpatrick Regular Crew Join Date: May 2004 Location: Little Rock, AR Posts: 199	That was beautifully done. Coincidentally, I was talking with some filmmakers in town about trying to do a film with stills; watching yours, I can see how feasible that would be. Also, I found the voice to be rather soothing, which I thought you were shooting for. There must be something in the water here at DVinfo.net. This is the third DV Challenge film I've watched that has the main narrator/character actually be dead during the telling of the story.

April 16th, 2006, 03:25 PM	#18
Bradley L Marlow Major Player Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Central Wyoming Posts: 484	lol Mereym! "The Matrix 6: More Elliptical Than Ever" On another note: You definitely squeezed beauty out of the other end of the lens. :) Best Wishes~ Bradley

April 16th, 2006, 05:04 PM	#19
Kris Holodak Major Player Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Washington, DC Posts: 302	What a workout for a new piece of gear. The results looked great. After all that are you loving your camera or hating it? I shoot stills a bit myself on the side so I'm always interested in what cameras people enjoy.

April 17th, 2006, 10:09 AM	#20
Meryem Ersoz Wrangler Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Boulder, CO Posts: 3,015	i'm so busy trying to watch all these other shorts that i barely have time to respond to my own thread....these challenges challenge us, all right, in oh so many ways.... kris, when folks discuss different cameras, the conventional wisdom is to go with the one that feels right. like a fine musical instrument, the one that feels right is the one that is right. i like that line of thinking in general. but what i learned when i bought my XL2 is that sometimes you have to force yourself to make it feel right, whether it feels right or not--that's the bane of being a left-handed person in a righties' world. the XL2 feels terrible in every possible way, from a physical standpoint, but then again, so did my brothers' baseball mitt, which i had to borrow when i was a youngster. didn't stop me from playing! so, about the DsMark II. i hated everything about it when it arrived, except for the fabulous 16 MP resolution. ergonomically, it is a challenge because it is chunky and weighty (although hearing what still photographers whine about in terms of what weighs a lot makes me chuckle--it's nothing compared to a loaded-up video camera!). the worst part is that, in my opinion, it is not intuitively designed. you really have to LEARN this puppy. what buttons to use in what oddly arranged, non-intuitive combinations.... now, however, i am loving it. after spending a month with it, i've adjusted to the weight and the design. thank you, DV Challenge! i'd love to get my hands on Mike Teutsch's dolly, but the biggest reward already is that i can use this camera with ease. piling big lenses on it to shoot birds and squirrels and such has made shooting with any lesser camera seem almost too easy! using this badboy has made me better able to operate my smaller camera, which is a nice by-product. this weekend i shot easter egg hunting photos of my daughter with a digital rebel and a reasonable tamron 24-135mm walkaround lens, and it felt like a toy camera, after lugging this big gun around for a month. my camera was still bigger than every other parent's point n shoot (oh my lord how the dads hate that!! it's hilarious how anxious they get that a GIRL has a bigger lens than they do! you just wouldn't believe the comments, though i'm usually the only one laughing....). (fortunately for me, this time, there was another mom with a 10d and a canon 24-85mm, who worked in a camera store, how refreshing to have another mom to talk lenses with, for a change....) anyway, this is getting away from your question. i am enjoying this camera quite a bit now. it feels good. i think the pictures look good. one other thing that's tough about it, it's not practical to use for internet exchanges. i learned that the files it produces are so darn big that my internet service provider bounces them back to me. &%$^#%^ comcast! so if i know i am sending around these pictures in e-mail, it makes a lot more sense to use my rebel. otherwise, i'd have to go to the trouble of re-sizing the files in photoshop. i'd download stuffit or something similar, but i'm touching against the limits of this internal hard drive as it is, so something else would have to go to make room. that's probably more information than you were asking for, but it's my chance to get on that soapbox and say, if you think something DOESN'T feel right, sometimes you have to suck it up and wrestle that big camera to the ground. otherwise, we would not have ANY southpaw XL2 users!

April 17th, 2006, 09:44 PM	#23
Andrew Khalil Major Player Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 424	I agree with everyone else and since I'm also into stills, I really liked how you were so creative with them - beautiful photography.

April 18th, 2006, 07:29 AM	#24
Meryem Ersoz Wrangler Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Boulder, CO Posts: 3,015	it sounds like a couple of you are considering a video with stills project. if you ever complete one that gets on the web, i'd love it if you could send me a link. it's a bit difficult to learn from what other people have done or are doing because i don't know of too many of these types of films. the one i had in mind was the classic of the genre, chris marker's short black and white film, "la jetee." if any of you haven't seen "la jetee" and plan to make one of these types of projects, it's absolutely must-see viewing! what's great about the film is how deliberately the form meets the content. by that, i mean, the choice to use stills completely reflects the frozen-in-time time paradox at the center of the narrative....(ugh, my inner professor unveils itself--i think i have taught this film one too many times....). anyway, my students always loved this film. it was one way to feed them an art film, while they were thinking they were getting a freaky science fiction film. i wish i had the talent to storyboard things. it would have been much more efficient undoubtedly. with every video i've ever made for myself, i get an inkling of an idea and then walk around shooting stuff, and the stuff generates more ideas, until eventually the whole thing takes shape from that process of thinking a little, shooting a little, looking at what i collect, and thinking about it a bit more. it seems sort of random, but i think it's about tapping into a stream-of-unconsciousness. it's not very efficient! it seems like the ability to storyboard one of these would save you lots of head-banging..... chris, the filmmaker chris marker uses only one pan in his story, and since the rest of it is without motion, other than dissolves, that single pan carried a weighty meaning. i looked for an appropriate place to put pan/zoom motion into my little film, but ultimately, with all the snowy scenery, opted for a more frozen look. i'd be open to suggestions for good spots for selective motion. in chris marker's movie, he only uses one additional ambient sound, a jet engine, and the rest is voice. i recorded some ambient sounds--the skateboard park, the coffeehouse, footsteps tramping through snow, etc. but ultimately, i thought those muddled the sound mix, rather than adding anything. everything you choose to add to a still video is more dramatically emphasized, it seems, automatically... i'd love to see how other people work with these issues!

April 19th, 2006, 08:51 AM	#26
Meryem Ersoz Wrangler Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Boulder, CO Posts: 3,015	wow, hugh, thanks! i'm moved that you are moved! it makes it all worthwhile. i stole the line (with permission, of course) from a friend, who is using it to introduce her own video project for her MFA. i belong to a monthly video critique group. we give each other feedback and help each other hone our work. she opened her project with a beautiful sunrise image and this inscription. she said she borrowed it from someone in her program, who said it was a zen koan. i tried to look it up, in books of zen koans, and never found it. so maybe she made it up. i'm not sure. i thought it worked with my project, synchronously, with my friend's project. what has been fun is seeing how we are working with the identical line in such different projects. we differ so stylistically, there's not a lot of danger of overlap. thanks for viewing....

July 30th, 2006, 02:57 PM	#28
Meryem Ersoz Wrangler Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Boulder, CO Posts: 3,015	anyone here from minnesota? my DVC5 short film will be screening at the Twin Cities Underground Film Festival which runs from Sept. 1-3rd in Bloomington, MN. where the heck is bloomington? why aren't they calling it the bloomington FF? oh well, it's a nice bonus when a DVC video gets into one o' these events. so i learned how to operate my still camera and squeezed in a film festival credit. in a week--oh never mind, this one was a month, wasn't it?? it's all a blur now. oh well, it was all worth it. yo dylan, you should start a list of these things. i know sean has screened some of his stuff, and didn't bill gardner move his award-winning film from local to global? it would be fun to gather outside data on just how much "cheaper than film school" the DVC actually is!