Production Wisdom



In-Field:

Photography

  • Make sure all of the ratios (16:9, 4:3, widescreen, fullscreen, etc) and time and date settings on your cameras are the same as well.

  • Take photos of everything:

    • Working
    • Learning
    • Researching
    • Moving within the cities
    • People (don't be afraid of taking their picture, won't hurt if they don't know)
    • In between cities
    • Relaxing
    • Eating
    • Interacting with others (gruppo and Italians)
    • Try and capture emotions and thought processes
    • Shoot from different angles - try from the hip!
    • People shopping (Milano - Salone)
    • Capture the feel of the place
    • Gruppo having fun!!! (its not always about work, so have fun with it)
    • Signs (it helps when you visit 5 different churches in a day)
    • Take shots when no one else is i.e. packing, loading vehicles, riding the metro, in the middle of the night, or during the morning sunrise.

Videography

  • Charge batteries EVERY NIGHT
  • Always carry an extra battery or two. Interviews can run in excess of an hour.
  • Be prepared to shoot everything. You never know if you're ever going back to certain locations.
  • If you're using a tape-based camcorder, bring extra tapes with you for the day.
  • Don't worry about running out of tapes, you can always buy more tapes over there.
  • If you're using a hard drive-based camcorder, back up your raw footage on an external hard drive (500 GB should be plenty) at the end of each day.
  • Bring an external microphone (RODE Videomic or ZOOM H2 Mic). During a handful of our interviews, environmental noise nearly drowned out the speaker, making it incredibly hard to make out what they were saying.
  • Don't try anything that may destroy your camcorder. Don't hold your camcorder over the side of a 300ft bell tower, don't shoot with one hand while biking, and don't put your camcorder in a ziplock bag and dunk it underwater.
  • Perhaps invest in a steadicam for steady walking shots. A steadicam is like a tripod that you hold to stabilize your shots while moving. There are multiple tutorials online on how to make your own!
  • You can't tag videos like you can with photos (that we are aware of), so name and organize your captured files well.
  • We were fortunate enough to have two camcorders. This allowed multiple angles and shots, as well as the ability for one to get in close to record sound while the other recorded group and overall shots.
  • If you have access to more than one camcorder, it would be beneficial if they were of the same brand (ours were Canon) so you can share batteries, adapters, and other accessories.

Audio

  • Consider bringing a good and reliable audio recorder (Zoom H2 Mic, or along those lines). This is helpful when doing the video-editing work in Post-Italia, as there were certain parts of the audio that the camcorders were not able to capture in-field.
  • Have someone dedicated to recording sound. This will ensure good audio quality and prevent the need for subtitles for your videos - don't involve more work when you already have a lot to do for the video, reduce the workload.

Post-Italia - IAT 394

File Storage

  • Invest in some portable hard drives (250-500 GB USB drives) for frequent data storage and transfer.
  • Consider buying a 1 terabyte external hard drive (or more) to have a back up of everyone's photos and videos, and possibly even previous work from 391, 392, and 393.

File Management

  • Figure this out beforehand
  • Have consistent folder structures (see Photo Management):

  • Have consistent naming conventions:

    • Italian vs. English names of places (ie. Colosseo vs. The Colosseum)
    • Canadian spelling! (Neighbourhood)
    • Decide on whether you will be using formal or informal names: Katrina or Kiks, Helen or Rei, Yosuke or Yoshi, etc.

Photo Management

  • Picasa should be available for Macs by then, so investigate the cross-platform options as an alternative to Adobe Lightroom, which is what our group used. Lightroom is good at organizing and quickly editing photos, but Picasa also has its advantages.

  • Folder structure:

    • Person
    • City
    • Date

  • Common tags:

    • People
    • Cities
    • Place
    • Time of day
    • Name of art work, building, restaurant, etc.
    • What type of shot?

PC and Mac Compatibility

  • Be mindful of who in your team is a PC or Mac user. If you have to transfer a lot of data between each other, do your best to ensure that the files work. Some video codecs on Macs don't work on PCs.
  • You'll be working with large files, so if you can, don't use FAT32 file system because it will limit your max file size to 4GB.
  • Another option is to segment files into smaller components using a program like WinRAR.
  • Some hard drives are formatted only for Macs or only for PCs, which can make transferring data tricky. Set aside a drive or two that are formatted for both systems.
  • Program compatibility is an issue too... PCs don't have iMovie for example. Consider the programs of choice in the team you're in.

Web

  • Keep monitoring the usability of the website and ensure that it is intuitive to navigate, especially when clicking into other pages.
  • Make template pages/content holders if you don't have content for a specific page yet. It's as simple as making a page with all the standard formatting (CSS, header, image, etc) and a nice "Coming soon" message. Nobody wants to click on a link that a) goes nowhere, or b) goes to a "File not found" page.
  • Get Webdav access as soon as possible if you even remotely are interested in helping out with web production or any aspect of it (Russell is in charge of the mailing list that lets you log in with your SFU ID - this will help avoid delays).

  • If there are multiple people working on the web content, make sure the everybody is fully aware of their OWN responsibilities as well as those of OTHERS. This is to ensure that there isn't any overlap which could cause:

    • Files overwriting eachother --> loss of content/changes
    • Confusion and extra work
    • Errors in the website
    • Incompatibility
  • Make a task sheet on Google Spreadsheets to let people know what's done, not done and who's doing it. ALWAYS keep each other posted as to your status on a particular part of the site/project.
  • Always back up your files. Sometimes changes are made that need to be reversed. Even though there are 200 GB of files to back up, do it.
  • Make sure that everybody has the same fonts when working with Flash content.

Studio Interviews for the Web

  • Book the fancy rendering/editing rooms for longer time while editing the footage. This will make it go faster and allow you to work without distraction.
  • Gather notes other students wrote in-field. Comparing them will tell you which parts were more important than others.
  • When going through each interview, write out notes so it's easier to organize them according to key ideas.
  • When editing, make sure that you set standards for the details like cross fades, font and size for titles, exporting settings, etc. so multiple people can work on separate interviews and have the same quality.
  • Back up the files! You don't want to end up redoing an hour and a half long interview.
  • Check twice, render once.

Slideshow

  • Use Final Cut Pro, or any other non-linear editor, such as Adobe Premiere.
  • Make sure all the sound is at the same volume. Classical and instrumental songs will sometimes need to be boosted up to double the volume to match the more upbeat songs.
  • Go through the soundtrack ahead of time and maybe plan out a bit of it so that you know the types of photos and videos to shoot while in-field.
  • Russell is going to have a pre-set selection of songs. Instead of focusing on shooting for specific songs (ie. having a song-driven slideshow), focus on planning out the story you want to tell and then match the length/color/size/transitions of the imagery to the songs (a content-driven slideshow).
  • The process of photo selection is important. You may want to have a small team that goes through every photo and selects potential ones. This will remove pressure on the other people not working on the slideshow since they don't have to spend time filtering through their photos. Just get a huge hard drive and dump them all on.

  • Final Cut Pro:

    • Use markers and snapping to line up video/photos to the beat of the soundtrack.
    • Apple Motion can be used to edit titles super easily within FCP.
    • Final Cut can be a hassle when it comes to rendering clips, especially for previewing purposes.
    • Adobe Premiere CS4 might be better for this, and it should have an improved workflow between it and After Effects.
    • Premiere/Photoshop/Illustrator project files can automatically be updated in AfterEffects project files, making the workflow much easier.

  • iMovie:

    • iMovie is good for creating quick slideshow prototypes. For the real slideshow, use Final Cut Pro.

    • There are a few inconveniences with iMovie:

      • It is not in a timeline structure so it's more difficult to synchronize the transition of the images to the speed of the music.
      • You can't drag the sound clip in sync with the image clip.
      • When you make one change to the slideshow, it automatically affects the timing for the rest of it, making you have to compensate for the change in another part of the slideshow. However, it has a more graphical interface so you are able to locate images more easily.
    • In general, we would recommend using Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere because those programs allow you to manage the changes more easily. The slideshow is bound to go through a few iterations, so it's important that you're able to make those changes with ease.