Vancouver anti-war rally clip

[Keith Loh]

*note* Chris doesn't want political discussion. But if you would like to comment on this on a creative and technical level that would be appreciated.

I videoed Saturday's Vancouver anti-war rally and edited together a short clip.

http://www.keithloh.com/main.html

It's in Clipstream format and I had a lot of trouble trying to get Cleaner 5 to output a QuickTime so if you don't have Java enabled in your browser you won't see much, unfortunately. :(

(If you look in the PC NLE section I have a plea for help to try and figure out why Cleaner hates my avi.)

[Keith Loh]

This is my technical whine thread.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...&threadid=7995

[Aaron Koolen]

Hey Keith. Liked the clip. It was good there was a band there, gave some good music to place the footage to.

Yeah I taped a rally this weekend also, and had trouble with productivity like you sound like you did (From your site). I got an hour of footage and turned it into a 3 minute clip, but with my unfamiliarity with Vegas Video and all that footage it took me several hours to do. I think after doing that I realised a couple of things that I want to improve.

1) Learn to be more selective of what I shoot. I shot most anything I could to make sure I had a lot (In fact I only took one tape, thinking I wouldn't need it and filled that up, having to switch to <shudder> LP at the end haha!). If I had of had more vision for what I wanted or more of an idea as to what was good and what wasn't, I might have saved all that time capturing, and sorting through it.

2) Similarly, be more brutal with the rough cut. I reviewed all the clips, arranged, reviewed and rearranged....If I had of gone with my gut instinct more I would have thrown out clips earlier. I can always go back and grab it if I need something else.

3) Variation is important to keep interest. I was "reasonably" happy with my clip and what helped was that I also got interviews with some of the people on, and watching, the rally. There was also an "after rally" demo where people went to consulates and stood outside for a but of a police face off, so that was a but more spicy ;) Like I said, the music in yours helped and gave a good mix fo something for your ears and something for your eyes, but not the same thing.

4) I liked some of the angles, especially the peace symbol. Gave it an almost conquering look with that low angle.

Cheers
Aaron

BTW: I haven't ever used clipstream myself, but viewing through it was annoying. When I first loaded your page, it loaded the entire clip, then resized the windows, and reloaded it.. I gave up then and viewed it at work instead ;)

[Keith Loh]

My clip should have been a lot shorter because I had earlier planned on just keeping it to the "Revolution" song. Unfortunately, right in the middle of the song I must have switched my audio settings for a moment and the song had a break. So actually, I extended the clip with other audio backing to make up for it! That's me. Always fiddling at the wrong times.

On the Clipstream encode, I shouldn't be dissing my own company but it required me to have more time to get the encode right - which I didn't accomplish as well as I might have for a paying client. After being frustrated with the QuickTime I only had time to do a quick encode before I had to jet to work.

My problem with the QuickTime I think I have narrowed down in that I mistakenly outputted the finished edited .avi source as 30fps not the native 29.97 which Movie Cleaner wasn't able to parse, it seemed. Otherwise I would have offered both formats.

As for the actual filming of the rally I think it helped that I had been to two previous ones and knew what to expect. So I knew how to get into the crowd and which parts of the crowd to shoot and what the more interesting parts were. You may notice that I didn't have any of the speakers audio, just showed them in a montage. I really didn't hear anything very new after being to the first two so it was me being bored.

I'd like to see your clip if you have a link to it.

[Aaron Koolen]

Yeah having other images going on as speakers talk can add something empowering to the message that isn't there if you just shoot someone standing at a mic.


My clip is here, reasonably compressed for the site it's on.

http://www.indymedia.org.nz/front.ph...&group=webcast

It posed a problem for me, this rally. The main demo went from one place to the end, but then a smaller group went back down the main street to the consulates. So, chronologically following it would look strange to viewers cause it looks like the demo goes...

start->march->to park with speakers->get together again->march again.

I didn't do voiceover, so I added a text commentary. Not totally happy with it, but better than no commentary I decided. Then again I could have dropped the chronological idea and did something else but I was happy enough with the result. Things to think about next time I guess.


Cheers
Aaron

[Keith Loh]

I like your clip, especially the very abrupt end with the kid saying : "stop the war". Followed by the quick cut.

I like the interview style and the narrative that you put together. Good camera angles, especially when you had movement.

To me, especially because of the ubiquity of the protests, it was more important to catch the flavour of being in the middle of the rally and less important to tell the story of it. This is because nothing really extraordinary happened in the Vancouver rally (which is to be expected). If something did, then I would probably have wanted to do a narrative such as you did. I thought your work was coherent. I liked length of the comments that you got in the interviews too. Some of the other rally clips I've seen really are too long and let people blather on too long when all you really want is to get a selection of people's faces and personal statements.

All IMO, of course.

[Aaron Koolen]

Thanks for the comments.

The kid was a last thought as I was going over the interviews, and I didn't have any real way of ending the clip. Also I had no choice but to stop short cause he sort of got distracted immediately after saying that and it didn't look right ;)

Yeah some of the people I talked to blathered on for quite a while and I definately thought that needed to be chopped down a bit.

I had quite a bit of fun, just running around and trying different things, different angles and the like. It's all part of the learning I guess.

Catchya
Aaron

That reminds, me I need to catch back up with DVDA and the umbrella thing to see what came of it.

[Keith Loh]

//That reminds, me I need to catch back up with DVDA and the umbrella thing to see what came of it.//

Haha can you believe I'm still cutting that? I'm padding it with so much Flash I'm losing my mind.

[Aaron Koolen]

That's funny. Cause I was going to do something for it, but got busy and then thought, well no point it must be finished by now. Did any others put in entries cause I'd like to see them too.

Aaron

[Keith Loh]

I finally outputted a Quicktime version of the antiwar video just now.

http://www.keithloh.com/main.html

What a struggle. Still don't know why Cleaner didn't like the original avi.