It's slow season ya'll with way more time than work. It's that time of year when I'd honestly prefer shriveling up into a wad of insecurity and self-doubt and drink coffee till things get better.
St. Anne the Wife has been around long enough to know when I need to get out and go film something. Thankfully I got out to The Farm before the January temps in Oklahoma dropped to angry Minnesota winter levels. Oh, and by "The Farm" I mean "my-parents-land-forty-five-minutes-from-Oklahoma-City."
Obviously, I'm always hoping for good light but that's harder to come by now with two young kids. Normally I'm running one kid to school around sunrise and then cooking, eating, and/or cleaning up after dinner during the evening light. My window to shoot these days feels like a relentless insult of the midday sun.
It was still that "Hey dummy, no one likes you" type of overhead light while I was out the other day. The thought was to try and shoot anything around The Farm and how it was moving with the wind. I also had a can of Atmosphere Aerosol with me, but it was too windy for it to make a difference. The footage was all shot on a 35mm CP2 between 5-8k widescreen on my RED Weapon Helium at framerates between 60-150fps.
All the footage got edited down to its good bits in what I call a "cuttingboard" timeline/sequence. That sequence then gets copy-pasted to a new "v1" sequence and I go from there. I always end up pulling frame grabs from the footage to feed the Insta-beast and color that nonsense as I go. VSCO is my go-to photo editor on my phone, but I'm also learning to use Adobe Lightroom. There's also the idea of making custom LUTs in Lightroom and bringing them into Premiere Pro. I tried making a couple for this edit, but in the end, I went with a pre-made LUT in Premiere. The color correction and grading process is always the most intimidating part of any edit for me. I'll reference my edited stills, but those looks rarely end up being appropriate as part of a whole in the final edit.
Music is the next part of the project. Obviously, I always get the music rights for client projects, but that's not always the case for these random projects I'll put together that'll be seen by like six people. Recently I've been digging through SoundCloud for music; some let you download, others don't. It's great to find a song you like and then it'll refer you to other work you might also like. For this edit, I used "Fireworks" by Pham. I'll break the full track down into bits, normally looking to keep the total edit to around 60 seconds. Again, gotta feed that Insta-beast.
Once I get the music close to where I want it, that's when I start laying down the edit. Again, for this edit I wanted to do something with how the wind was moving the grass and trees. The footage alone wasn't enough, so I also added digital zooms and subtle rotation at times. Editing something like this is mostly gut-level for me. I'm not looking to tell a story, but I'm VERY intentional about how each clip feels and interacts with others in the timeline and how they play off the music. It's a constant process of building and releasing tension and concluding with some kind of resolution.
UPDATED: 3/18/2024
Beyond just going out to make something, these exercises produce original content and digital licensing opportunities in the form of stock footage. This project is part of my Filmsupply portfolio and is available in its own section: Field Scenery. Certainly, I'm stoked to see additional revenue from my independent projects, but it's always wild seeing how other creatives use and re-purpose your work. The video below from The Trevor Project uses one of my clips at 1:56.