Alan Travers

A happy-go-lucky scamp with delusions of grandure. Learning VFX (compositing), making films and taking lots of photos...

[alan-travers]

“This Thunderous Heart”, the always-brilliant Macnas Parade was held on Sunday 22nd July as part of the Galway Arts Festival 2012.

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It was a horrible night, absolutely lashing down, but my girlfriend did a great job of holding our big umbrella up over the camera for the whole parade and even managed to keep it out of shot of my wide-angle lens (most of the time)!! I shot in 50fps and slowed everything down to 50% to get the nice slo-mo effect. The opening shot doesn’t have any effects whatsoever. It’s a guy walking down the street with a huge set of firecrackers going off over his head, but created the cool “man holding fire” effect when slowed down to 50%!!

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Apart from some grueling editing, post-production was all about the colour-grading. It was dusk, lighting was terrible and no matter what I did with the camera, everything was coming out washed-out and dull. It needed an injection of colour and life, so I upped a lot of reds and some greens in the shadows, a bit less in the midtones and a small bit of reds only in the highlights. It was my first ever attempt at colour-grading and I think it turned out pretty well. Especially compared to the original footage! Thankfully, there wasn’t need for any difficult image stabilisation, as the slow-motion solved any slight jerkiness of the camera. I was using a tripod anyways.

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The editing process took a while, but as soon as I found a piece of music that captured the atmosphere of the parade, it almost edited itself!! Except it didn’t… I did it.

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Music:

“spring_thaw” by The Green Kingdom

“Nacht en gan Eden” by Szelrozsa

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Featured On:

Galway.com

[alan-travers]

Routine Re-imagined Rhythmically…

A typical morning imagined as a looping drum beat. The idea that people’s morning routines become so practiced and repetitive that they get stuck in your head – like a song…

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Chosen as one of 30 entries to be shown as part of the Input Media “30 Minute Film Festival” where 30 one minute shorts are shown during the Galway Film Fleadh.

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Shot with a Nikon D3S, “jazzed up” with After Effects CS3 and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. For the audio, I used a mixture of sampling and looping of the household sounds on a Kaoss Pad and manual syncing and recording with a neat little freeware program called Audacity.

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The main effects created using After Effects are the wiggler (the shakiness of the camera when the alarm clock goes off), fake depth of field (the shower head) and general filters and brightness settings. The rest was a lot of copying and pasting and pre-rendering and deleting and pasting again in Premiere Pro. The “animations” of the smaller squares are done with Motion Keyframes, changing the state of the Position and Scale.

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The audio was recorded as a foley artist would. The sound of my feet stomping on the ground were done by punching a cushion. The sound clips were recorded, sampled, looped and applied effects by my Kaoss Pad and then edited and synced using a great audio track freeware program “Audacity”.

The hardest part was syncing the audio and video…

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Special thanks to Joe Travers for the loan of his camera ( joetravers.ie/ ) and to Deirdre Whelan for a lot of patience and tolerance!

[alan-travers]

Galway recently hosted the finale of the Volvo Ocean Race 2012. It meant a week and a half of partying and some great concerts, parades and festival atmosphere throughout the city. Smack dab in the middle of it all fell 4th July. For this, part of the city was assigned as the “America” section, and a big fireworks display was to take place that evening. I saw this as a great opportunity to test out a “bokeh” effect on the fireworks show.

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To achieve the bokeh effect on the fireworks and create the “circles” in the night sky, I set the aperture to it’s lowest setting (F1.8 on a 50mm lens), exposure to a relatively long setting (I’m not sure of the exact setting, unfortunately, as I had to experiment a little bit at first) and the ISO to a low 160. All the time, adjusting the manual focus to almost infinity (experimenting until getting a fairly crisp set of circles). The exposure setting was important to capture large bokeh circles from the fireworks and also (along with the low ISO) to make a black sky out of a still-relatively bright sky.

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Very little was needed to do in post. A lot of editing mostly. I found a great piece of royalty-free creative commons music (“Clamantis” by M-PeX soundcloud.com/mpex) and the editing kind of fell into place. I shot the whole thing in 50 fps, so I had lots of options to slow down the footage to fit the music. It also allowed for some more dramatic shots (like the intro, the “waving” shot and the final slow-mo fireworks finale). I tried a bit of motion stabilising in After Effects, but moving coloured circles against a completely black background made for absolutely zero tracking points, so I gave up on that idea. Most of the shots were fairly short, so I tried a bit of “manual tracking” – I key-framed motion and position and tried to keep it as smooth as possible. For some of the “jumpier” shots, I took advantage of the 50 fps slo-mo to take attention away from the jerkiness of the camera.

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Shot on a Canon 550D with a EF 50mm F1.8 lens.

Music: “Clamantis” by M-PeX (soundcloud.com/mpex)

[alan-travers]

For my first attempt at stop-motion, my girlfriend Dee and I worked solidly for a full week to create this video where ingredients around the house come together to make Dee’s Legendary Chocolate Biscuit Cake.

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The video was to tie in with Dee’s entry in “Chef Factor” an Irish cookery competition from Cully & Sully. Dee had suggested spending a Saturday afternoon making a stop-motion video where her cake makes itself. After two days filming marshmallows and butter, we realised the amount of work and time that is needed to make just a tiny stop-motion video. After 2 days, we had 18 seconds of footage!

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A full week (and a lot of coffee) later, our video was finished. The whole film is a collaboration between the two of us, we each set up different shots and took turns “animating” depending on varying energy and enthusiasm levels. I did the editing afterwards, which although presented a number of challenges, was the easiest part.

The photos were taken with a Canon 550D, imported as “numbered stills” in Adobe Premiere Pro where they were edited according to length and to go with the timing of the music. Any effects were done in After Effects and/or Photoshop.

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Dee didn’t win the competition, but Cully & Sully honoured us with an award for the “Best Video” in Ballymaloe during the finals. 

Receiving the “Best Video” award from Cullen Allen at the Chef Factor final in Ballymaloe

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A re-edited version of “Stop-Motion Biscuit Cake” was selected as one of 30 short films shown as part of the “30 Minute Film Festival”, part of the Galway Film Fleadh 2012. It was honoured with two awards: the Audience Choice Award and the Judge’s Award which was presented during the Galway Film Fleadh Closing Ceremony.

Receiving the Judge’s Award at the Galway Film Fleadh

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