And now, here’s a handful of experimental shots. Trying my hand at the ancient and noble art of Matte Painting. But as it’s my first attempt, i did keep it on Black and white to at least not have to worry about color theory and color matching.
Oh, and… No AI was used in these paintings. If it looks like poop. It’s because I paint like poop.
And those poop like paintings were done in the wonderful Free and open source program called Krita. And video editing and soundwork was done in not free and open source (but really good anyways) app DaVinci Resolve. Source footage obtained with a BMPCC6K2G.
I just kind of thought it looked coool. Especially as I added the Motion-blur node and things moved too fast for it so it kind of broke and it started to show strange squiggly lines as artifacts. So of course I put edgedetect and xglow on it to accentuate it as electical squigglies.
As usual. The bleps and blöps are made by me with whatever I have in my “studio”.
Table of Contents:
00:00 – Titles 00:29 – The main feature. 10:29 – Outro
Ever wanted to be your own Wong Kar Wai? Ever wanted to try out StepFrame recording? Ever wanted to use 180degree shutters while going slower than normal framerates? Were you one of the few that saw my SlowRate Recording Test ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paAGscJ_kxg ) from a couple of years ago and wondered how to actually do what I did?
Did you think that the video needed to be 10 times longer and filled with bad voice-recording methodolgies and a constant noise that flows between the speakers continiuously throughout the whole video?
Well, to I have the video for you, mr/mrs/ms person who fit all of those strange criteria!
As I allude to in the video. Do not take this as a promise that I will start to do tons of exciting camera and Resolve tutorials. I may follow up with other tutorials and walk-throughs of how I do some of the stuff I do. Just like I am not a gear reviewer. And I am not about to start doing consistent content. This channel has failed to go pro ever since 2006 and I’ll be darned if I start to succeed now.
About a year and a half ago, I made most of an almost hour long video that explored how long a 4×4 single bit video at 24 fps could be without repeating any frames. Then… I somehow, through sidetracks… I kind of forgot to finish it and upload it.
Now, now that I was cleaning out old projects from my project drive on my edit bay. I stumbled over it once more. I thought… it’s kind of a shame to let this go to the bin. So. I took a few hours to do the remaining edits and gave it a noisy soundtrack. Note for sticklers of detail: the narration credits the Behringer DeepMind 12 as the instrument being played. But it ended up only being used for the first 12 minutes or so (fittingly), the rest is done with an arturia keystep running the same sequence on a combo of a MOOG Mother-32 and a DFAM. Where the M32 is going through the Chorus setting of my Mackie Mix12FX because I liked how it widened the mono signal of that moog.
So, if you have an hour to spare for looking at a video that is mostly just flashing squares in a 4×4 grid… I do hope you enjoy.
As the preamble tells it. I was reminded that the Perseids were going to be at maximum on the night of aug 12. So I gathered what gear I have and set out to try to record some of those quick light streaks.
And. Yeah. I did not record a single one.
But! instead, I did get to use the same cameras to record the unplanned Aurora Borealis that were going on right above my head.
If you’re wondering why I’m in a lot of these shots. The plan was to shoot the hero timelapse shots on my GH4 as it is better at timelapse-recording than my big BMPCC6KG2 camera. The GH4 can do full long exposures of several seconds. While the BlackMagic Camera can at most be pushed to 1/5 second exposures. So I set it up as I mention in my video on slow-rate recording, with the camera at Off Speed Recording at 5 fps. Shutter at 360 degrees and timelapse to only record every other frame. That way I get the maximum exposure of the camera while keeping a 180 degree effective shutter, with an effective fps of 2.5. So I rigged up a microphone and did claps to then do in camera narration.
But the 2.5 fps footage looked better at full 24 fps as I pivoted to capturing the lightshow instead of the shooting stars that I planned to film. And the ISO25600 setting, while noisy. Was surprisingly usable.
As usual. The noises you hear are produced and edited by yours truly. I still won’t call it music. But it’s something for the soundtrack side of things as I scrapped the whole idea of voice narration.
Listen to Walter Much talk about Worldizing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_py6jVyOqUY
I just realized that I didn’t upload this one. It’s not too hard to watch. I think. And according to Youtube’s statistics people want to see and hear more of/from the Zoom M4. At least that’s how I interpret the abnormal interest that recorder has on my viewership.
So, enjoy this little experiment in old school sound design.
Oh, and just to be clear. Unless otherwise noted in the video. I’m using my DJI wireless mic thingies to pick up normal speech. The M4 is only used for the worldized sounds.
So, I was sitting at the computer. Watching clips on youtube (as one does) and up popped a video that had a certain clip from a certain japanese show where young teens are forced to evangelize the birth of neon. And I thought. Huh. I could probably do what I saw in that clip.
Okay I may not be able to do the crisp character animation of the Eva Unit 01. But I was not thinking about that. I was thinking about the background. The red and yellow paint flowing past at incredible speed in the background. Reminding me of when filmmakers with little regards to their own safety film close-ups of volcano eruptions with a telephoto lens.
That. I think I can replicate that, at least.
So I opened Fusion and started connecting nodes. And the result was this.
Which resulted in this:
Ok. I couldn’t resist putting it angled over the virtual camera. And as there’s no foreground animation I went ahead and made the colors more contrasty.
All the animation in it is procedural. It’s basically just a few fast noise nodes that have been put through some distortions and colorizations. The only thing making it all move is a single expression that the noise nodes are linked together with.
Point(0.0, time*(2/3))
It moves the canvas of the noise upwards 2/3 of the total height of the resolution.
The eagle eyed of you might have noticed that there indeed are two saver nodes in that node tree. The other is there because I tried extracting the yellow with a color keyer and put it through an XGlow node from the Reactor toolset (please, someone pry me away from XGlow nodes! I love how they look but they take up soooo much time in my node trees! ;D)
The result reminded me of some kind of old school space battle where streaks of lazers burn through the view. Or maybe a kind of athmospheric re-entry of a vehicle. Anyway. It just looked plain cool.
So I had to give it its own render:
I’m not sure what I’ll use these for. It was mainly just an exercise to see if I can put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I can say. I know how to do that, and be sure that I actually can.
Oh, And I’m counting these in the weekly upload pledge that I am failing so miserably to fulfill. I may know how to do videos, But I struggle with stuff like weekly uploads.
A series of Fusion Comps where I tortured my computer for hours on end with lots and lots of glows, noise nodes and whatever I could think of. Loosely strung together with an exploring shape that’s sometimes a simple triangle and sometimes a 3D Tetrahedron.
I might revisit some of it to show how the comps were built if viewers want it.
So, here’s one of these uploads that I do that do very little to embiggen my subscriber-base. Instead, it is a sequence of clips I shot recently between 2.5-120 fps. Converted to BW and graded, and cropped to fit my windowboxing method that I am experimenting with.
Shot by me and auditory noise produced by me with a Deepmind 12
If, despite all logic, ye are curious what this “MalmScope” thing is all about. you can read a needlessly rambling post on this, my (in)frequently webpage:
In a vain attempt to force myself to get myself to do uploads more often I vowed to myself at new years eve that I will upload something each week. Something. Anything.
Well, I damn near failed at the first week. I had not filmed anything. So now, I was at the point that the vow meant. I need to do something. Anything.
So, here’s a series of shots filmed in pure desperation. And some sounds that I made to accompany it. Some may call the sounds music. I am not sure I would go that far.
I consider this the lowest effort. I hope I will make more interesting stuff for the coming weeks.
Just in case someone interested missed it. During most of December I uploaded a series of youtube-videos that charitably could be called an “Advent Calendar”. Each day there was Herr Nicht Werner and each day he presented another scream. Some other shenanigans did ensue. But that was the main thing.
I welcome you now to watch this whole series. Each episode is just a few minutes. So you can probably get through the whole thing in a single sitting.
If this is not actually to your particular fancy… I… I do not know why you are here. 🙂
Oh, and if you wonder why it’s 24 and not 25. Well, here in Sweden, we celebrate eves, not days.
