Category Archives: cinematography

BlackMagic Color Grade

https://mattkprovideo.com/2017/12/14/blackmagic-color-grade/

For a recent wedding shoot I had a freelancer use a Black Magic  camera. I have heard very good things about that camera, how the footage looks just like 35mm motion picture film!  I was very excited. And I was a bit nervous how that footage would mix in when edited in with footage with my other cameras.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com

It was so much smaller than I thought it would be.

What I saw in the viewfinder screen concerned me, everything was a dull desaturated greenish grey.  The camera operator told me to relax, that all blackmagic footage looks like that until color graded in Davinci Resolve.

Well I don’t have Davinci Resolve. I ran the footage through Adobe After Effects and added an adjustment layer with AUTO COLOR and a lot of vibrancy came back into the image.

Then I added “Brightness and Contrast”. Lowering the Brightness and increasing the Contrast helped even more.

It still didn’t look right.

I added a third adjust layer and used HUE AND SATURATION and increased the saturation of the reds and blues and it started to look like the other cameras.

I set it to render then read THIS article:

http://www.creativebloq.com/audiovisual/master-colour-correction-and-grading-after-effects-10134701

 

It says I should have used  Effects>Synthetic Aperture.

Hmm I will have to try that on the next shots. So far I am not that impressed.  It seems just like my video footage, not this marvelous film look I was expecting. Then again it is most likely the problem is my limited experience with color grading footage from the BlackMagic, and not the camera itself.

 

https://www.theknot.com/us/hellen-rivera-and-ruben-ramirez-nov-2017-713f54af-e37b-4754-8ef7-3675e3cf9125

Hellen and Ruben

November 25, 2017 • Cedar Park, TX

 

John Williams Documentary

Star Wars – Music by John Williams Rare 1980 Documentary

https://mattkprovideo.com/2017/12/07/john-williams-documentary/

 

A documentary on the amazing John Williams. He scored most of the great movie epics of the last 30 years: Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark and all its sequels, Star Wars and all its sequels!

His music is the best part of anything that he has worked on.

Williams score brought the fear and dread of the impending shark attacks in Jaws. He ( and George Lucas) had the great idea to have the music score for Star Wars contradict the pictures.  High Tech futuristic imagery with old style pseudo classical music underneath gave the potentially goofy movie a seriousness and elegance it wouldn’t have had otherwise.

 

Say what you want about the Phantom Menace…. John Williams music score, especially “Duel of the Fates” is excellent!

 

At 14:06 you can see the Carbon Freeze scene from The Empire Strikes Back with the original undubbed voices!

 

 

Best Star Wars Fan Films

Best Star Wars Fan films 

TROOPS! The first and greatest! A mash up ( before that word was in use) of the Tv Show COPS and  the first Star Wars Movie:

directed by Kevin Rubio

 

REBEL SCUM

http://www.bloodbrothercinema.com

https://www.inverse.com/article/10711-star-wars-fan-film-rebel-scum-is-too-good-to-exist

 

DARTH MAUL

 

Speedrun: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (Ep #3)

 

Star Wars The Lesser Evil

 

Star Wars Liberation

 

HardWare Wars!

Did I say Troops was the first and best Star Wars Fan Film?  How could I forget this Erne Fosselius shot on film parody from the late 70s?

 

TIE FIGHTER

 

Endor shooting location.

RETURN OF THE JEDI Endor forest speeder bike chase scene  shooting location.

mattkprovideo.com/2017/11/21/3692/

 

Owen Cheatham Redwood Grove in Northern California

 

I am a little confused, I thought I read somewhere that the Endor scenes were shot in a part of the forest that was “due to be clear cut anyway”.  And yet there it all still is.

I am assuming that trail was blazed by Star Wars fans wanting a picture by the locations, but actually that trail is there in the 1983 film. You’ve got to look real quick but its there.

If they made this film today there would be using newer, more advanced “steadi cams”  or drones or…. ( yukk!) CGI.  One idea I always had was the lay many MILES of dolly track with a real practical speeder bike on it and just film it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photoshop 2.5 Effect

Photoshop 2.5 Effect

This is an example of the “Photoshop 2.5 Effect,” where you take a still jpeg, duplicate it into layers, use the lasso, magic wand and pen tools to cut out each individual person, move them apart in after effects as if they were on a Disney Multiplane camera.

 

 

Logo Removal, After Effects

 

mattkprovideo.com/2017/11/09/logo-removal-after-effects/

A client wanted the red tape on the football players shirt removed. The tape was covering up a copyrighted logo. I exported the files into an Adobe Photoshop Stack, then used the clone tool to cover up the red tape.

 

Then I imported them into Adobe After Effects, and sequenced them back into order.