crazy busy week

At the moment working on a music video for justice through music , finishing off the shooting of the fife excellence awards for mcl. Working on a secret project shhhhhh but very exciting, developing a doc for these guys which is incredible click here got a photo shoot tomorrow, developing a budget for a feature finalizing work for a very cool company (more info to come) and looking at working for an LA company (more info to follow) and helping set design for a Russian theater group!

Great week!!!

working for MCL and the director gets arrested!

Hi David and I are working for MCL at the moment on the fife partnership awards, these awards are for groups in the community in fife that are improving the area and we had to work with the police this week. Here is a still from one of the clips. We set up a shot and we needed an extra so David kindly stepped in and got arrested. We are shooting everything on the 7d which is nice.

work and motion

At the moment shooting the fife excellence awards for MCL, on the 7d whooo which is nice getting some amazing footage, and also doing some graphics work for MCL using apples motion and i was wondering if anyone used motion for anything? I'm a bit confused about it as a program. I use after effects for all my graphics work usually but the project for MCL has been created in motion and I find it well interesting to use.It doesn't seem as user friendly as AE and quite complicated to do simple tasks and i was curious to find out if other people had the same experience with Motion.

Sound and the 7d

Hiya

At the moment I'm working with a company called MCL and I'm filming nominees for an awards ceremony later next month. The 7d so far has produced some amazing results the footage looks stunning and is great to use. I do feel slightly inadequate not having a big camer but when I watch the footage back it really is impressive.

Now on to the sound issue. At the moment I'm shooting 25p HD on camera and recording 48k 16bit on the zoom. It is the easiest and quickest way i have found of recording sound without any sync issues although it is a shame not to use a higher bit rate but for the projects I'm working on at the moment it's not really an issue.

I'll up load some shots when the projects finished.


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Location:Edinburgh

glide cam and 7d

as promised here is a shot scene of the glide cam in use

7d and audio

hiya,

This is turning into a more technical blog than I initially thought but I had a look around the internet and could really find the information I was looking for! So here goes, the 7d's built in audio is pretty terrible and so i use a two system solution and the zoom h4n is the ideal tool for that heres a pic:

It records at great quality you can find all the specs here. It sounds great BUT and its a big but when you use phantom power which i do with my mics with average batteries i get around 6 min of battery life!!!

When i dont use the phantom power i get hours. This becomes a big issue when you can't plug in anywhere or your on location.

Also the sync with FCP is interesting. I use plural eyes which is a great tool to sync audio but settings wise you do need to be careful. Shooting at 24p i dont have a clue how to resync my audio as it drifts over the scene. So shooting at 25p it works ok. I think there is some sort of issue with FCP and audio sync so if anyone has any solutions please email me as how i have it set up at the moment, i shoot at 25p, record at 48k 16 bit (when i shot at 21 bit audio drifted). The other issue is that it is very difficult to ride audio levels when you are recording as it sits ontop of the camera and the controls for input levels are on the side and very trick to use if you have a shot gun mounted next to it.

So thats the moan out of the way. apart from that the clarity of audio is amazing. The price is incredible and it is very light and well made.

If anyone has a good work around for the level issue please email me as i am really keen to work out a solution as the kit is amazing!

glide cam and pain

I was helping a friend out shooting some stuff for his show reel his name is Rob and this is his website http://mycreativedge.com/ and I was asked to shoot a scene from angels in america, in the original it is a steady cam shot with a few cut aways in between. So I thought it would be an interesting idea to shoot it all in one shot. Rob had borrowed a glide cam and I mounted the 7d on it.

Thats the glide cam, and after an 8 min take it is a total killer! The shots are nice very fluid and look like a steady cam rig (ish) but the pain!!! The main issue with it is the handle it is incredibly difficult to hold steady for any length of time.

Ill post some of the tracking shots when they are done so you can see what it looks like.

light pads

Ive ben looking at these click here rosco light pads, richard jobson first showed me them and they look incredible!!

They can run off batteries, mains are water proof can be cut to any shape and they are totally light weight and portable AND cheap!

They are LED tiles and so the light is really nice and constant across the whole area.

If anyone has used them let me know as Im really keen to find out how quickly they can be set up and used.

test with toonit

Last week i did some filming on the 7d for an advertising agency down south and the footage i had i thought i would play with after the job was finished. Ive got a great plugin for after effects called toonit and i thought i would have a play with it and this is what i came up with:




Im animating a music video for justice through music at the moment and it is going to look similar to this. The idea is to get it to look a bit like Mosh by eminem and scanner darkly.

Which should be fun. 

Wow love the iPhone

Ok so I can write a blog on my phone. I'm sure this has existed for ages but it's quite exciting when you use it for the first time!!


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Location:My sofa

the fun of facebook

im trying to get the blog to link to face book if anyone has a quicker way than my solution please let me know!

So at the moment the blog is linked to twitter then to facebook!

Lets see if it works!!!

One song Gig

David Lumsden is the director responsible for One Song Gig he is a really good friend of mine, ive worked with him for 6 years and we work on most projects together. He has come up with the most amazing idea and website you should check it out as it rocks!!! click me

His own website is here click me

elph

Ive worked with elph for several years hes is one of the most talented graffiti artists/ web designers/ graphics dude in Scotland.

Twitter and my blog!

Ok so the wonderful word of technology! im linking my blog to my twitter page and then to my facebook page!

pin hole camera

Before I starting producing films i started out as a photographer doing fashion/commercial photography and i still love taking pictures. I found this great website on how to convert your dslr into a pin hole camera here's the link click here and these are the first stills I took.

my new blog

Ok im kind of new to blogging but here it is.

Im going to post all the films that i do on here and also put some of the really old stuff on over the next few weeks/months/years.

Just a few really cool things that if anyone hasn't seen they should check out.

If your into DSLR video then check out philip bloom he's awsome! - click here

Elph who is an amazing artist click here

And weekly inspiration they are selling some of my prints but also have loads of great other work on the site. click here

if you have any questions drop me an email to matt.films@me.com

Cheers

Matt

Boudiche christmas advert

This was a little advert we shot for an exclusive lingerie company Boudiche in Scotland

The Gobi

This was a doc, i produced following 28 runners doing an ultra marathon across the gobi dessert.

my experience on the canon 7d

Ok so my experience working on the 7d has so far been amazing. The camera itself is a great bit of kit, its sturdy and light weight and feels very well made. Whats great is the amount of lenses you can put on the camera. I have a nice selection of primes from canon plus nikon primes and a couple of tamron lenses a 90mm macro plus a 125mm f2.2 which is old battered and looks great.

the short falls of the camera, firstly the look of it, when you take it to a shoot and you show the client they are like what that? It's a stills camera!!! it takes quite alot of convincing to win them around UNTIL they see the footage. But ill go on to that later...

The second issue is audio the in camera audio is terrible i MEAN really terrible!! but with a 2 tier system (a 2nd audio solution) using my zoom h4n the audio is great. The standard of audio from the zoom is great 4 track recording phantom power with 2 line in xlrs. Down side to the zoom, it eats batteries and is tricky to to work while attached to the camera, if you manually set up the levels you cant see them or ride them during recording so it makes life awkward.

But the biggest problem i have is the post, i do alot of work with fast turnaround times and having to convert all the h.264 files into something usable (usually apple pro res) it takes alot of time. I batch convert using mpeg stream clip which is a great free application but takes a long time 16gb's of footage takes me about 4 or 5 hours on my macbook pro which means that realistically i have to leave it over night. Then there is the audio sync, on small clips its easy but when you get into complicated multiple set ups and locations i end up using a program called pluraleyes. This is a great tool for syncing audio its amazing and its surprisingly fast but when you get to 20+ clips with 4 channels of audio its a nightmare.

Overall though you don't use a DSLR camera for video without knowing its limitations and the one thing that is worth all the hassle above is the quality of the footage. It is mind blowing, i've used so many different cameras in my life from 100k+ rigs to £1000 handy cams and the 7d blows all of them away, the DOF (depth of Field) is stunning but is not the be all and end all of the camera it is the cherry on the top. The DOF is well covered on other sites so i wont wax lyrical about how great it is. For me what is really amazing is how it handles the mundane, the standard head and shoulders interview stuff, the establishing shots and the fast motion. This camera will work in an area under any pressure (except extremely long lens with lots of movement that = jello effect!) with a bit of thought and prep you can shoot truly amazing stuff.


To finish im a big believer in the right camera for the right job, and the 7d will not be suitable for everything but overall this is a great, great, great camera and in two or three generations time canon will have all the problems overcome and whats amazing is that you can already start building your lens collection now.

Oloroso promo

This is a promo for Oloroso a great restaurant in Edinburgh

Pola music video

This is a music video i shot and edited for Pola for the track strangers in the street.

music video edit

This is a music video i edited for justice through music

music video on 7d

Heres a still from the music video for the young fathers, I will upload the full video when it gets released.

my new rig 7d

This is my new rig, 7d with various lenses including a nikon adapter mount, i got a glide track as well which is amazing. The audio is a zoom h4n.

go fast

Earlier in the year we shot the world record attempt for a jet pack from go fast, i want one springs to mind! Check out aload of cool other stuff as well at Go Fasts website.

advert stills

7d on a jib which was nice

Colours behind the scenes

Model team put together a big shoot before Christmas and we were asked to film it.

Here it is: