Sound is 50% of a movie. Most people stop watching your movie when the sound is badly recorded. With the whole revolution of shooting on DSLRs, new types of microphones have been designed. Rode has come up with the Videomic Pro and the Stereo Videomic Pro.
We have those microphones available to us so what is better than making a blog post about it? That's right, a video on our bbrevisited channel! Watch it and discover how these Rode microphones perform under different circumstances.
Some afterthoughts
I must say that it is rather annoying that the Nikon D7000 has no sound metering. This caused some of the recordings to be distorted as the signal was clipped. I did put the internal amplification on medium. The distortion could have been avoided by leaving the setting on automatic. That aside, the rest of the test went rather well.
The cardioid patterns of both microphones are very useful to pick up less sound behind the camera and more in front. They still pick up sound from a quite big environment though and do not filter as much out as a shotgun or a lavalier mic. I can agree that for the Stereo Videomic Pro this is rather an advantage than a drawback as it is designed for grabbing that environment. The big advantage for both is that they can record straight into the camera so no separate sound recorder is needed and they do beat the built in microphones of DSLRs hands down.
I found that the Videomic Pro picked up a bit more bass than the Stereo version but both performed well. The Stereo Videomic Pro records two channels which no built in mic can do.
Battery life is really not an issue. More than 70 hours on the Videomic Pro and even more than 100 hours on its stereo brother is really good performance. It will last you many days if you turn off the microphone every time you are not recording. Both microphones are also quite compact so they won't take up too much space in your bag.
If you are serious about recording sound properly I really recommend these two models from Rode.
Toilet Run is Belgian Boomsticks' second production.
The idea
Queueing for a public toilet is something which happens to all of us now and then but is never pleasant when you need to go urgently. It gets worse when it is out of order and you need to find another one. What happens when it becomes a race to get there first but the path to it is full of obstacles? Since all obstacles are in different locations we wanted to have something which tied it all together. Using the map with the animated heads was the ideal solution to avoid discontinuity in environments. All obstacles are merely accidents. We didn't want them to be induced by direct rivalry between the two characters.
Equipment
We used almost the same camera and sound equipment as with Agent Orange (check this link) but we did have some extra ropes en rigs to get over the ditch. The rope was a regular climbing rope and we had an issue getting reasonable tension on it. Without tension Jef-Aram would get wet feet rather quickly. Luckily we had a Grigri with us, which helped us tighten the rope. We know that this is not the proper way of using a Grigri but it worked and that is all what matters when you need to shoot stuff in a couple of hours time.
Again we tried to use the GoPro to get some nice shots on the cables but the shots didn't work that well. It is better to cut them out as bad shots would bring the quality down a lot. I guess we still need to train more on how to position the GoPro camera. The lack of a viewfinder just doesn't make it easy.
Music and Sound FX
We tapped again into our royalty free library of music and sound FX but this time we also added more of our own foley recordings. All cloth movement and some impacts were done by us. We noticed that when two objects collide you do not need one sound but two. Both objects have their own distinguished sound. The truck hitting Jef-Aram is a combination of a metal sound from the body of the truck and a human impact sound. This makes it much more dramatic.
Post Production
The first small bits to fix were the toilets. As a matter of fact those are not toilets at all but electricity booths. The first one was solved practically with the"out of order" messages. On the second one we painted out the voltage signs and added a toilet sign in After Effects.
A bit of more work was the map. We designed one big map in illustrator and colored it in Photoshop. The colored map was then taken into After Effects for the animation. In the end we showed only a fraction of the map in the clip. It was useful to draw the whole map as it gave us more continuity while editing.
The full map. Click to enlarge.
The biggest challenge in compositing was the truck hitting Jef-Aram. We first wanted to hit him with me driving a car but since all the obstacles were more things that just happened as accidents instead of direct rivalry, that seemed too violent. We decided to go for a truck instead of a car as the impact would be more dramatic. The problem was that we didn't know anybody at all who could drive us a truck. At first we were thinking of using an image of a truck but that idea was quickly ditched as we realized there is no perspective change on a translating image. So we jumped in the car and drove around an industry area where lots of trucks pass by. Most people are not too happy getting caught on camera so instead of filming a truck passing by we drove by a parked truck ourselves. This gives exactly the same result in perspective change. After some rotowork and color grading the truck fitted right in.
A still of the truck while driving past it. Just using a photo of a truck would never have the right perspective change while driving by.
The truck moves so fast that it was not even necessary to animate the wheels properly to make the effect convincing enough. Luckily for us the weather was the same as on the day of shooting the electricity booths. The cloudy sky provides soft shadows in both images.
What's next?
Jef-Aram and I are already working on our next short. Make sure to stay tuned. You can do this by following us on twitter or by subscribing to our YouTube channel.
Jef-Aram Van Gorp and I joined forces as the Belgian Boomsticks and we produced our first YouTube short. In this post I explain the how we made it all happen.
The Idea
Jef-Aram and I are fans of shorts like the ones made by Freddie Wong and Brandon Laatsch. They are low budget, have decent enough effects and have often great stories.
Since making shorts is fun we decided to give it a go ourselves. Guns and action are always well received with the YouTube public but we wanted an original angle on this so Jef-Aram came up with the idea of using bananas as guns just like kids usually do. To extend this a bit we added the double barrel leek to the arsenal. With the general theme being fruit and vegetables, sugar and salt was quickly added as the so called drugs as these are bad when eating them in big quantities.
We consider this a hobby project so we had only limited amount of time and resources to complete this next to our full time jobs.
Equipment on set
We both have some filming equipment so we threw everything together for this shoot. Camera's:
Panasonic HVX 200
Nikon D7000
Canon 600D/T3i
GoPro Hero2
Sound:
Rode VideoMic Pro
Rode NTG2
Rode NTA2 (studio Mic for additional sounds)
and also some tripods and the Edelkrone Pocket Rig (Link to Edelkrone Pocket Rig review). The HVX 200 is an older camera so it was the limiting factor resolution wise. 720P is more than enough for YouTube so we decided to stick to that.
The biggest problem when shooting with different camera's is color balance. Every camera has it own characteristics so we had to solve this one in post production. We did make the mistake to shoot a bit overexposed. The H264 codec in the DSLR's is a lossy 8bit format and does limit the things you can do when color channels get clipped to their maximum value. We left out any footage from the GoPro camera. Although we had some cool shots, the angle was so wide that even the shadow of the camera man filming with one of the other camera's was in view. Since we don't have a clip on LCD screen for the GoPro it was hard to estimate what we were shooting exactly. Something we need to prepare better next time around.
A screenshot from the GoPro. Although it looks cool it is useless because the shadow of the camera is visible in the lower left corner.
The microphones did give a good results. These are condenser microphones with a cardioid pattern which helps just getting the voice of the actor and not so much the environment. Luckily for us there was not too much wind that morning. It was -15 degrees Celsius though which made it hard to manipulate the small knobs on the cameras without our fingers freezing off.
Music and Sound FX
All music is royalty free. We bought these some time ago at a big discount. This is a good way to get cheap music which does not infringe on the youtube copyright rules.
The sound FX were free samples on the net. These were also royalty free. When you grab files from the web, make sure to check their license before using them.
Post Production
Post production consisted of cleaning up bits and pieces we didn't want to have in view after all, adding muzzle flashes, some smoke, a bullet hole in my head, a bit of blood and the orange disks which we use for the glasses of Agent Orange. The effects are quite rough but they'll do the trick when everything is moving fast.
Using compositing to clean up the plates is really powerful and it is not too hard to do. When something is just visible for a couple of frames it easy enough to copy the background from a couple of frames before. If the camera is handheld it is a bit trickier but nothing a tracker cannot solve.
The banana in the lower left corner came a bit too early into view when Agent Orange points it to my head. It was easily repaired by taking a part of the wall two frames earlier.
The Muzzle flashes and dust clouds come from the Action Essentials 2 pack from Video Copilot. The pack is not to expensive but I am sure you can find free muzzle flashes on the web. Check if they got an alpha channel as it makes compositing them over your footage much easier. If they are against a black background it is easy enough to pull your own matte.
The blood spatter is just a paint splatter image we pulled from the web. We created a matte, gave it the right color and made it blurry. Since it sticks to the lens, there is no need to track it in.
Frame without the blood spatter.
Frame with the blood spatter and the hole in my head.
The more tricky effects are the ones you need to track over more than 10 frames. Both the oranges and the bullet hole in my head do move around. We started with a full 3D track but everything moves so much that it would become a nightmare to clean up the jumpy tracking points to get a solid track.
So we switched to the classic four point track instead. We let the computer do the track but every so often the computer got totally lost and you have to correct it manually. The perspective change was done by hand as it was just quicker to do this for a couple of frames then for the computer to try and figure it out.
Oranges fixed with gaffer tape to the glasses. Didn't look very cool so we had to replace them in post.
Oranges replaced by a clean image.
What's next?
Jef-Aram and I are already working on the second short. Make sure to stay tuned. You can do this by following us on twitter or by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Links: Belgian Boomsticks YouTube Channel Jef-Aram's Blog
