Thanks Nathan, for allowing me to share my hobby with your FaceBook group. I have been putting together my
ideas for this project for several months. When
I reached out to your members for volunteers to help me, Lyle Miller, The-Armorer.com, stepped up without
skipping a beat. I am so appreciative of
him for coming out to my house with his own considerable passion packed neatly
in his trunk and back seat - to help me launch mine. Since that day, I have harassed and niggled
him night and day for more information, IDs, and questions. He has been nothing but graceful and
forthcoming and I cannot thank him enough.
That said, I need to point out that the project I am working
on with Lyle and The-Armorer.com, is not ultimately what I am trying to do. Stated simply, it is way, way out of my
comfort zone. Along the way, however, I
bumped into some folks who do create this kind of video and it has sparked (yet
another) interest in learning how to do this well.
With Lyle’s generous assistance, I was able to test out my
location, video cameras, mics, lighting, ever-changing weather patterns, and
finally, a completely new kind of video editing. Following is a partial list of what I have
learned (in no particular order):
Natural lighting is challenging. Ambient noise can be part of the flavor of
the story - or wreck havoc on audio. I
love the cicadas in the background. A
friend who does audio professionally doesn’t share my appreciation of cicada
charm. If only cicadas were my worst
audio problem here. I learned about
ground loop with my leveler mic. As my
friend pointed out, you cannot unf*ck bad audio. I tried. Bought software. Tried to bury it. Studied audio fx. Learned about equalizers. This was just the beginning of my audio
training. Now I get it. Or, at least know
where to find help. Sort of.
I also learned a
painful lesson about cleaning the heads on my mini-dv. I can’t fix that. I can’t un-f the video
either. The mushy,
pixilated parts of the video nearly
drove me to chuck the whole idea. I finally learned what caused some of
it. I learned how one tiny wrong setting on the camera can
change everything on the end product. Duh. I learned about matching settings for the end
product. Compression. Size. Frame rate. Painful lesson. I thought I understood it. I have a better grip now.
On a personal level, I have discovered that an old friend
who makes fun of me for saying, “uh huh, uh huh, right, right,” is .. right.
I thought she was just kidding. I
do it. Incessantly. Annoying.
I am watching for it now. I
learned that I don’t have to split and cut audio to remove constant ums and ahs
– there are other methods to hide them. Working
with the audio elements was fun but painful to hear my own stuttering froggy
voice. My daughter pointed out that if I
don’t know the material, I tend to uh huh a lot and my voice is strained. Going into this, I studied chainmaille a
little but really went in cold- I could not fathom why a person would make it
or how in the world they would use it. Turns out it is quite an industry and per my
male friends and family members,
chainmaille on hot models is fairly interesting. Who knew?
Lyle has an animated cadence to his speech with pauses between words. My original thinking was that I could speed
it up and cut out all the ums and ahhhs and pauses to save time and make the video
shorter.
The first draft is Gawd-awful
and does not have a natural pace. I put
Lyle's ums and pauses back in on the 2nd and 3rd drafts but tried my
best to leave out my ‘uh huhs.’ It has a more natural pace but the video is
longer than I had intended.
I used two cameras to film this. Both camera angles were wrong. One camera was framed properly but the angle
is off just enough to make me stabby. I
have some footage of good angles that are almost right but what I thought would
be a cool effect- me reflected in a mirror behind Lyle .. yeah.. no. That didn’t work either. It was muggy.
My hair… my stomach.. JHC. Also,
swapping audio from one camera feed to the other.. two very different pitches,
volumes and background noise. I still
want to do the barn interviews but an indoor setting will work better until I learn more. I am putting together a couple of ‘studio’
spaces that I can use at my house. Some
of my videos will be on location but indoors.
I’d still like to shoot in the barn, when I get it figured out.
This is just the short list of mistakes and lessons
learned. There are many more things I
learned and continue to discover about this obsession with film and video and
storytelling.
Again, thank you Lyle.
You have no idea how much I appreciate you. Your work on chainmaille is simply
amazing. I am in awe of the art you
bring to armor. The models and photographers who
gave me permission to use their work.. very generous and all very, very patient
as I forgot their names.. over and over and, who took which photo ... and all the rest.
Nathan, I have loved seeing this group develop and
evolve. Thanks for including me.
