Camera DSLR

All-Ireland Skydive Challenge Mini-Doc on 550D

Posted on 19. Nov, 2011 by admin.

I was approached by two organizers about 2 and a half months ago to film an event they were organising in aid of their charity. It was to be a charity skydive event in aid of OláGolá (http://olagola NULL.com), for the prevention of suicide, depression and stress related ilness’s in young adults around the world. I was a little hesitant to accept something quite so heavy seeing as I’m only 15 and was afraid of mucking it up or something…but Liz, a co-organiser of the event told me what it was about and I then realised how important it was – so I accepted.

It took about 5 weeks to get this fully done. The main event was on one day so it was essentially like a wedding, where I couldn’t get second takes. I shot on one single 550D, with a fairly cheap rig I borrowed off a friend who got it on eBay (can’t remember the name of it), a 20 quid tripod and two lenses: Canon 18-55 kit and Canon 75-300; both cheapies. As you can tell this equipment is very light i.e not perfect, but I did what I could with it.
It was so windy on the day and even started raining heavily at some points, so it all kind’ve went downhill…luckily I got what I needed before the weather took over.

I shot the aerial footage 3 weeks later; my brother is a pilot and took me up in a small plane for about an hour – the sky was so stunning and was just after a storm so there were some amazing views to be filmed. In the final edit I only used about 20 seconds worth of this footage, but it’s some of the nicest shots in it.

For the interviews I just used the 550d again with the kit lens. I used all natural light because I don’t have any lights as of yet (which explains the bad lighting). For the sound I had with me a Sound Devices 702 DAR (http://www NULL.sounddevices NULL.com/products/702 NULL.htm) and the mic (can’t remember which one). Stupidly, I only brought a 2gb card for the recorder and it obviously ran out..half way through the interview…I had no other audio from it so I ended up having to use the camera’s audio! Sucks, but it turned out OK. The day after I was shooting the interviews with the two politicans featured in the doc and was all set with the DAR…the camera was all set, and I stuck the XLR into the recorder and next thing I know the whole device is f*cked up and totally uncorrespondant…so once again I had to abandon it!! :@

I edited it about 3 days before it was being premiered so I spent the majority of the day on it. I used Premiere Pro CS5.5 and colored using Magic Bullet Looks. Gert Kracht (Twitter: @iGert) was a huge help during this, by giving me a ton of help on bettering my colouring skills! Huge thanks to him for that!

The actual skydive shots were done by the Tandem Masters at Tandem Skydive Kilkenny (http://www NULL.tandemskydive NULL.ie/). Thanks a million to them for letting me use the footage!

The photos at the end were by Ronan Melia, and they’re all brilliant. Thanks to him for letting me use them too.

Music was the obvious Fix You by Coldplay…I used the instrumental version which I found online somewhere. And for the credits I used Noorgard by The Vaccines.

Liz Campbell and Eddie Hughes organised this charity event. Jumps took place at Kilkenny Airfield in cooperation with Tandem Skydive Kilkenny. Help Reduce Suicide, Depression and Stress Related Illnesses in Young Adults – olagola.com

Thanks,
Nathanael Macdonald

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Destruo | Short Film 2011

Posted on 18. Jun, 2011 by admin.

Destruo, a short film shot along the coast of Waterford, Ireland in 4 hours.

Done using only a 550d, £20 tripod, Canon 75-300 + 18-55 kit lens.

Music by Philip Glass –
“Pruit Igoe” from Koyaanisqatsi Soundtrack.

I wanted to capture the destruction of the waves, followed by calm images.

Edited on Premiere Pro CS5.5

I’m a 14 year film-maker from Ireland, so any help or constructive criticism is really helpful

Follow me on Twitter: @camera_dslr
CameraDSLR.net

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Fey | Short Film W/Lensbaby

Posted on 23. May, 2011 by admin.

I shot this just last weekend as a small test with the Lensbaby Composer I got recently.

This short film was shot entirely on a 550d, using only the kit lens, a 50mm 1.8, the 75-300 and a Lensbaby Composer.

The reason for this short was to test the Lensbaby to a certain extent. There is no general meaning behind the short, so I’ll leave it up to you guys to work it out!

Note: Not the whole film is shot on the Lensbaby.

To help me on this shoot was Lukas Hartmann, and the talent in this film is Alan Doyle.

The three of us are young filmmakers.

CameraDSLR.net (http://www NULL.cameradslr NULL.net/)

Twitter – @camera_dslr (http://twitter NULL.com/#!/camera_dslr)

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Sleeping Giant | CameraDSLR.net Short Film

Posted on 27. Apr, 2011 by admin.

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Leinster Bow | 550d Short Film

Posted on 10. Mar, 2011 by admin.

This was all shot in a few hours with only cheap glass, a cheap tripod and the fantastic 550d.

Me and my Dad drove for about an hour and a half up a huge mountain side to find this beautiful location for a shoot.

I wanted to shoot as much as possible in a short amount of time with a minimal amount of equipment. Well, with what equipment I have, which is very minimal ^^.

I had on me my intervalometer which I hadn’t used to shoot much timelapses yet, and was dying to use it. I only had one 4GB SD, and one 2GB SD because my 16GB for some strange reason, wouldn’t let me record!! So I was limited to how much video I could shoot as well as timelapse. And I was looking to do more timelapse anyway.

I shot all of the timelapses with an interval of 2 seconds using an 18-55 kit lens. We were almost at the top of the mountain, where I was hoping to get a wide panoramic timelapse when it started lashing down rain. We couldn’t risk going up any higher, so we slowly walked down the mountain, protecting the camera madly. As we got to the bottom we saw two rainbows appear. DOUBLE RAINBOW (http://bit NULL.ly/gjQCEV)! It was stunning and I just couldn’t resist timelapsing it.

Leinster Bow was the first film I edited on Premiere Pro CS4.  I had it edited on Vegas 10, but that programs so shit, that I decided to edit in PPro CS4 for once. And Vegas refused to render anyway! I’ll upload a tutorial on my sequence and render settings soon.

Thanks for watching, and follow me on Twitter @camera_dslr (http://twitter NULL.com/#!/camera_dslr)

NM

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Weekend | 550d ‘Commercial’

Posted on 30. Jan, 2011 by admin.

The title says it’s a commercial…well ‘Weekend’ is more of a commercial than a short film…a commercial for the weekend! It’s the shortest film I’ve made to date and I’m quite proud of it actually, even though I didn’t really shoot much for it.

The original idea was to do a summary/montage of the weekend in 60 seconds with new and original footage, but lack of a car and money meant I couldn’t go anywhere that I could shoot interesting footage of actual people during their weekend rather than boring nature shots.

So instead I cut together footage from some of my previous films with a really nice song that actually fits really well with the storyline. I wanted cheerful music in their, so I stuck this song in and it works.

All footage was shot on the 550d with the 18-55, 50 1.4 and 75-300.  The narration in the background is from the voice of my father. And believe it or not, I recorded that sound with the built in mic from the 550d. Surprise, surprise, ay?

Yeah, I agree that the sound quality for the narration is utterly crap but it’s all I can afford in this economy

It was all edited in Sony Vegas 10 Pro, and I colored the footage differently to my usual style this time, making it slightly golden-ey/light brown-ey and even stuck in some film grain for an added vintage look. It seemed to work out fairly good anyway. As for the slow motion, I used Twixtor. On camera, I shot at 60fps at 1/1000 and then used Twixtor in After Effects to achieve some super slow-mo!

If you enjoyed this film and blog post, please check back again soon for more and more 550d films and DSLR info!

Follow me on Twitter: @camera_dslr

NM

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Shine | 550d Short Film + I talk about Story in Films

Posted on 18. Jan, 2011 by admin.

I have been told a few times that my short films don’t really have a ‘story’ or a ‘mood cue’. But I do know, I mean everyone should know, that a film is not worth watching if there’s no story or emotional cue. It’s easy to shoot something that looks good, but very hard to shoot something that…feels good – if you get me.

I’m saying that it’s hard to create a story even if the images look beautiful.

So I kept this in mind while I shot Shine. When I make mood pieces like this, I rarely know how things are going to end up. I rarely know what location I’m going to shoot in, but instead just turn up at some random place that I think looks nice and set-up there.

But this time, I had a good think about what’s going to happen in this film. I knew from the beginning that I wanted my Father to appear sad and lonely at the start, with a meaningful soundtrack in the background. So I just shot several sequences of him doing whatever, while he appears lonely but is actually waiting for his partner e.g. him sitting at the table, watching T.V, hanging up the washing etc.

We then drove up to his girlfriends house, where I shot him walking up the hallway and opening the door. I kept the wide shot through the hallway long to create tension then cut to the extreme close-ups of both the subjects faces to maintain the mystery and tension of whats about to happen. I then cut to the mid-shot of the woman to reveal who she is and then as she enters the house I cut back to the wide shot and stay on that shot for emotion.

The last two shots were last minute decisions. I knew I couldn’t just end on the two of them hugging in the hallway so I shot a close-up and extreme close-up of my Dad as he smiles, to end the film and reveal that he is happy, therefore relieving the audience of any tension.

Shine was shot on the Canon 550d, using the 50mm 1.8 and 18-55 kit lens. I edited and colored the film on Sony Vegas 10 Pro HD.

Music is by Nancy Sinatra – ‘Bang Bang’ – and The Album Leaf – ‘The Light’.

Thanks for watching.

NM

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Logged | 550d Short Film

Posted on 12. Jan, 2011 by admin.

It was a Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t doing anything important so I asked my dad to drive me around to scout for some nice locations. The first location is where I shot the first few shots of the radio tower and fences. But the rest of that area was boring, so we drove a bit further out of town.

And then suddenly, it hit me. My brother is training to become a commercial pilot and he uses a local airfield to do some solo flights, and it’s a really nice location, so we drove there and it was beautiful! The sun was setting, and the lighting was perfect! I got a few cutaways of machinery that was dumped in a nearby field before heading up to the main airfield where small planes were taking off every few minutes.

Everything was shot at 24fps except for the shots of the planes so I could slow those down. I loved the flares so I tried to shoot as much of that as possible, without boring the technique out.

I got home a few hours later and cut it on Vegas 10 HD, again. I had been having problems with the memory on my computer, so I was slightly worried that I wouldn’t be able to cut for a while, but thankfully it held off and worked fine.

The music is ‘Stomp’, by Ben Frost which I used because I thought it gave a bit of an edge to the film. I colored it slightly golden-y to work with the beautiful sunset.

It was shot on the 550d, with the 50mm f/1.8, 18-55 kit lens, and the 75-300. I used the 75-300 for the plane shots to get as close as possible to them and the 50mm for the majority of the rest of the film.

That’s all I can say now, but thanks for reading this, it really means a lot to me!

Follow me on Twitter – @camera_dslr

NM

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The 25th | 550d Short Film

Posted on 02. Jan, 2011 by admin.

I can see how late this video is, but I could only upload it today since Sony Vegas 10 had problems rendering, claiming the computer was ‘Low on Memory’! Well anyway, it’s now uploaded so I’ll give you the info on how it was done, shall I?

Once again, it was shot on my 550d, but, this time I had the pleasure of using my new lens – the 50mm 1.8! A cheapy, but beautiful images!

I travelled 5 hours across the country to stay with my Mum and the family, so I decided to document it as well as I could, and seeing as I had the 50mm it was the perfect opportunity! Basically, I just set it on a tripod for most shots and recorded my mother making the Christmas dinner! Plus, the evening before I got a few shots of the family opening their presents, so I’m glad I shot that as it added a nice touch to it!

I edited it when I got back home on Sony Vegas 10, and again I also coloured it in Vegas too. I gave it a slightly vintage feel to it, hoping to make it a bit more homey, and for the shots of my family, you may have noticed are in B&W. This was a last second decision, which I thought added something special to it.

That’s all for the behind the scenes, but I just want to add a quick note! I got a 16GB Kingston SD card in the post which I ordered off eBay. Turns out to be a dud! Well, it works, but only records at the most about 6 seconds of footage, before automatically stopping. I tried a low level format to make it better, but that failed. I’m sure it just has to do with the write speed and all that, but sadly I can’t afford to buy another one! Oh well, maybe next time!

NM

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My 1st Timelapse Test | With 550d

Posted on 29. Dec, 2010 by admin.

Ever since I got my 550d I’ve been really interested in doing timelapse’s, especially after watching the works of, say, Philip Bloom and Tom Lowe.

Well two weeks ago, I finally got my 550d Intervalometer (http://www NULL.linkdelight NULL.com/R8A9-LCD-Timer-Remote-for-Canon-EOS-60D-550D-500D-450D-400D NULL.html) in the post! It’s made by Link Delight (http://linkdelight NULL.com) and I must say it arrived very quick! It’s built identically to Canons own intervalometer which costs a hell of a lot more at around $150 where as LinkDelights costs only $19. So it’s a bargain, and you get the same use out of this one that you would out of Canons one.

So I’ll skip to the part where I actually do the timelapse!

I went to Northern Ireland to visit my family for Christmas, and brought all my gear with me hoping to shoot some stuff for the blog. Well, I remembered half way through the visit that I have an intervalometer, which until then I hadn’t used at all, so I searched for it in the bag, popped the 550d on the tripod, stuck on the 18-55 kit lens and went outside to try some timelapse!

When I got back home I transferred the photos over and thought about the best way to merge the files into a timelapse. I used to use Quicktime Pro, by following the Philip Bloom tutorial (http://vimeo NULL.com/7127489) but for some reason this wasn’t working for me…I looked for other ways of creating the timelapse, but I didn’t want to download heaps and heaps of software.

So I tried Sony Vegas. I figured out how to do timelapse on Sony Vegas (which I’ll do a tutorial on soon!) and it worked perfectly. I did the same thing to all four timelapses and edited them together quickly with some music and HERE IT IS:

It’s short, but remember it’s just a test!

Tell me what you think down below in the comments!

Here’s what I hope to be as good as someday!

NM

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