Film & Editing Blog - Behind the Scenes

This mini online documentary shows behind the scenes of the filming for Student Adventures 2011 London to Paris (L2P) charity bike ride. The final footage was used in the online promotional movie which we produced for them.

The kit shown includes:
    •    Canon 5D with genus, Jag35 and Zacuto rigs - for stable DSLR based filming.
    •    Sennheiser Shotgun mics - for pro audio sound quality.
    •    Stickypod Director Pro Vehicle Mount - for action shots of vehicles and cyclists.
    •    Marantz PDM 661 Audio Recorder - for field audio recording.
    •    Canon XH A1 camera - no hard drive = no jumping!

Special thanks to the guys at www.ratherbecycling.co.uk who did the guiding for the event.

So when you're looking for outdoor adventure filming, give us a call and get in contact.
Spartmedia!

We've produced a behind the scenes mini documentary of the post production process of the making of the Pete Swims documentary. This includes editing, compositing, audio mixing, graphics, titles, animations and more.

What we're looking at here is approx 24 hours of work time (over 3 days) condensed down to 10 mins. And as one client said... "you make it look effortless" but that's because this is what we do and we know how to use the cameras, software and hardware to get the end results.

To see the Pete Swims Documentary go here.

For those media geeks out there, the screen capture was done using iShowU HD Pro and editing in Adobe Premiere where it went through 2 rounds of time ramping up totaling 1,000,000% speed up.

I then laid the audio vocal track over the top in one take using a Sennheiser K6+ME66 mic through the Marantz 661. For a bit of fun I made the opening animation in After Effects 5.5.

Enjoy

We're very proud to say that our latest video "Pete Swims", a documentary about Pete who swam the English Channel to raise money for his sons school in Leeds is now live on youtube.

This was a really tight delivery schedule. We filmed it on Wednesday morning and finished the editing on Sunday evening! It's an hour long and is shot in high definition. To find out more about the making of this video have a look here.

It's only been on youTube for about 2 hours and it's had 50 viewings already!

The MacPro is quietly whirring away as it processes some footage for image stabilization and so I thought I'd take a quick snapshot of the documentary timeline to show how the edit is going. The top three tracks are video and still images and the bottom tracks are audio. As you can see things are getting busy!

There's a lot that goes into post production and in this documentary we have the following footage and sources to bring together:

• Video from a flip camera (HD) taken by the talent.
• Video from a mobile phone taken by the talent.
• Music privided by the client (who is a musician).
• Film footage from 3 canon cameras (HDV 1440x1080) (HD 1920x1080) and (HD DSLR 1920x1080).
• Still images from various cameras.
• Generated Graphics.
• Mutliple composited sequences.
• Screen captured footage from web browsers (for twitter feed etc)

So as you can see it's quite a complex little beasty! The story follows Pete Windridge-France who swims the channel to raise money for charity and you can find out more at http://www.justgiving.com/peteswims. At the moment I'm just finishing the colour grading which is one step in a long list of steps needed to produce the final video:

1. Shooting
2. Editing
3. Compositing (titles, animations effects)
4. Sound and Audio effects and levelling
5. Colour Grading
6. Rendering
7. Uploading to youtube