Moving Image: Assignment 3 – Framing

For the third exercise for this class, we were tasked to create a storyboard that explored traditional film framings and the 16:9 film resolution. I decided to create a fictitious and no-holds-barred short narrative on a guy with an interesting fetish –

I am satisfied with what I managed to come up with. Although the weather has been rainy and cloudy the past week, I’m glad I managed to find a short window of time to shoot when the sun was still out at the SRC. All in all, it was an interesting assignment and a great learning experience.

Moving Image: Assignment 2 – Timelapse Photography

For our second assignment, we were tasked to create a timelapse as part of an exploration of time. Timelapse photography and videography had always been something I was intrigued by but I never got the chance to learn more about it or try it firsthand. As such, I was very excited about this assignment.

With my camera and tripod in hand, I proceeded to the overhead bridge just outside NTU to take a timelapse of the cars on the road. I had previously shot here for an exercise for DP2001 and thus knew that the vantage point from this bridge was fairly good.

I decided to try two different methods to make my timelapse video. For the first, I took a 15-minute long video and sped the footage up in Premiere Pro.

Over on Premiere Pro, I increased the speed of the video to the maximum of 10,000%. The downside of shooting using the video function of my DSLR were that I had to keep my shutter speed to a comfortable 1/50 in order to prevent any slowing down of frames. To combat the dark exposure, I had to crank up my ISO to 800 and even so, the blacks in my footage were still crushed and created a rather flat image.

Decent but not the look I was going for. The light trails were also missing which defeated the purpose of shooting a timelapse at night.

The next method required some research before I headed out to shoot and with the new information ready, I proceeded to embark on my first interval timelapse photography experience. With more leeway now to exposure settings, I was able to set my camera to a 2-second exposure to capture just enough light trail details. I also preset my interval settings to shoot 375 photos.

The key to getting a smooth motion in Premiere Pro was setting the ‘Still Image Default Duration’ to 1 frame.

And with that, this was the result I got

With this method, the benefits were a more fine-tuned exposure setting that retained a higher dynamic range. The photos could be shot on a low ISO, slower shutter speed, and open aperture and as such did not compromise on overall image quality. The blurring of movement also fully translated the idea of a timelapse and did not make the cars look so static as compared to the first video.

In conclusion, I am very happy with the outcome of my video and can finally understand and see how this method of making a moving image is both interesting and visually appealing. I am also glad I took the time to explore a feature of my camera that I had never used prior. The possibilities are endless and I would very much like to continue working with interval photography.

Moving Image: Assignment 1 – Cinemagraph/GIF

For the first exercise of this class, I decided to try my hand at making a cinemagraph. During the first lesson, I had successfully created a simple sequence using a clip from the movie A Single Man.

By creating a simple mask, I was able to isolate movement to only a single part of the image. After the first export, I realized that my GIF was a tad ‘jerky’ because, after the last frame, the sequence immediately jumped back to the first.

As such, I decided to ‘loop’ the GIF by adding reverse frames such that the action became seamless:

Taking what I had learned from the first class, I decided to make another GIF, this time using my own video footage. I wanted my next cinemagraph to be more subtle and contain much less movement but still draw the viewer in. Initially, I began by importing a whole sequence as frames into Photoshop. This resulted in many frames just for the simple movement of my subject blinking her eyes.

After showing this in class, Prof Elke reminded me that since there was no movement at the beginning of the sequence, I could just use one frame and increase its duration. This would make the whole GIF much cleaner and also reduce unnecessary file sizes.

Breaking up the sequence with an 8-second pause, I was able to loop the GIF and make the pacing somewhat believable as well:

In conclusion for this exercise, I experienced firsthand how moving image can create an interesting response as compared to a still image. In the example above, the simple blink of an eye added life into what would have been a static shot. In the original project, this girl was the protagonist and she spent her days waiting for her husband to come home and yearned for his attention. This feeling and emotion was thus amplified by taking this shot from the film and deliberately making viewers wait for something to ‘happen’.