Saturday, March 14, 2015

End of the World is Looking Medium Cool

Most of the footage from this morning in downtown Fort Worth I thought would be useless but would be worthwhile for the sake of the exercise, etc, etc.

One very easy trick that looks cooler than I thought it would is making cars disappear.  Stopping and starting the camera permits simple tricks which have been done ever since people starting shooting 8mm home movies but they're still good tricks.

For this trick, film an empty street.  A car appears on it, drives toward you, and disappears from camera range.  Continue filming the empty street.  In the edit process, blade the video from about when the car reaches mid-screen through to where it has disappeared.  The disappearance of the car is seamless and I was impressed by it on playback even when I knew what did it.

So long as I get down there at the same time or a bit earlier tomorrow, I should be able to get more footage which will blend well with that from today as the weather and temperature should be similar. There were definitely too many cars this morning but that should, I hope, be much better tomorrow.

It's trickier but not impossible to make buildings disappear.  The simplest way coming to mind immediately is to overlay a cropped image of the sky where the building was.  Poof.  No building.

(Ed:  you're seriously saying there's a point?)

Sure.  The transience of any material reality is something I hammer all the time.  Cars come and go, buildings come and go, but music never dies.

The timing is the biggest question as there are three or four minutes of clips from this morning and I will likely get at least that many more tomorrow.  Even if I use only those clips and nothing from the Rockhouse, the video is already too long.

It makes for an interesting challenge as the story has to be developed quickly.  There will be dreary, depressive chords during the downtown end of the world part and no-one wants too much of that so I'm thinking two minutes, tops.

So, I'm pleased with progress and more to come.

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