One year ago, I came across a picture of Roger Smith, showing him towering over his diorama of a baseball stadium. Spectators lined the balsa wood bleachers and players covered the felt field. Each person – there were more than a hundred in all – was meticulously carved from the pit of a peach. I was at the opening of an exhibit showing portraits of rural and traditional artists by photographer Dean Dixon. My previous film Let Your Feet Do The Talkin’ was playing alongside it and while I was waiting for the screening to start I became mesmerized by Roger’s picture.

His work was quirky without being kitsch; the characters were lighthearted and playful yet each seemed to have a personality as if they had lived an entire life before they walked in to the stadium. The carvings were astonishing, the craftsmanship flawless, the subject matter brilliant, but what made me want to learn more about Roger was his face. He was absolutely lovely. I looked up Roger in the phonebook the next day and the following weekend we began making the film.

Roger Smith with one of his creations

The first couple of times I met with Roger we would sit at his dining room table and just talk. Occasionally we would talk about his art and inspiration, but mostly we talked about his cows and the weather. As Roger and I became more comfortable with each other I brought over a Zoom H4n and a Canon 7D and recorded some of our talks and eventually started directing our conversations towards topics pertinent to the film. Over the course of three months I had done four one-hour interviews and shot about 11 hours of footage mostly on weekends and intermittent week nights. I had gathered enough material to cut a trailer. This is an essential step for me for a few reasons: A) Cutting a trailer lets me develop the look of the project and helps convey the overall aesthetic of the film to whatever crew may come aboard during production; B) The trailer is essential to fundraising, in our case, a small crowd sourcing campaign that financed the entire project; C) Making a trailer early in production lets me see how a subject reads on camera and helps me direct more efficiently as I get deeper in to production. Thanks to the trailer, we were able to round up $3,500 which afforded me the opportunity to take off for a week, hire a sound person and cameraman, and spend seven days shooting to complete the movie.
 

On location

In one of our early conversations Roger said, “When I’m carving I turn a seed over and over and look at it for a long time to see what would be right to carve from it.” This stuck with me and when my dear friend and fantastic photographer, Cody Stokes, came to shoot for a week we tried to apply the same technique to our filming. Instead of chasing around action we would set up a frame and let the camera run longer than normal. The result was magical. The subtlest things became significant; a change in the wind or a shift in the light felt dramatic. I believe that emulating Roger’s process gave me a deeper understanding of how he perceives the world and the pace, tone, and feel of the film reflect that revelation. 
 

Shooting with the 7D

Mr. Smith’s Peach Seeds is my first documentary using a DSLR. I ran into all the familiar problems associated with video-capable SLR cameras i.e. capturing sound, shooting handheld, recording time limits, etc. But the strangest hurdle I faced was overcoming the seduction of the DSLR image quality. I’m not a gear nerd. I never have been. But there was a moment during the shoot when I found myself using a slider and I realized I was in danger of drifting wildly off course. DSLRs and their seemingly endless arsenal of lenses and accessories provided a creative freedom that I had never experienced in video. However, I got dangerously close to falling down the rabbit hole of tilt-shift lenses and time-lapse b-roll. DSLRs are incredible cameras that can produce fantastic and wonderful images, but I had to take a step back a couple of times and remind myself what I was doing: I was there to tell Roger’s story and be respectful of his reality, not contort and distort his universe to make it look “cooler” on screen.

Marshall monitor on the 7D

After we wrapped production I let the footage sit for about a month before I started editing. It took about two months to edit and when I finished I sent it to a friend in Nashville, David Poag, to color it. My father, Kyle Copeland, did the score. I don’t like my subjects to see any footage while I’m still shooting. I feel it alters the way they behave on camera, but I always watch a rough with them before it’s finished just to make sure there isn’t anything embarrassing or uncomfortable for them in the piece. When Roger first saw the film he teared up and said, “I wish my mother could have seen this.”

 
Equipment:
Canon 7D (2)
Canon 50mm f1.4
Tokina 11-16mm f2.8*
Canon 24-70mm f2.8*
Canon 70-300mm f4-5.6
Redrockmicro Follow Focus*
Marshall 7” LCD Monitor
Cavision Shoulder Rig
Manfrotto 055XB Tripod
Manfrotto 501HDV Head
Zoom H4n audio recorder
Sennheiser G3 Wireless Lavalier
Audio-Technica AT875R Short Shotgun Mic
 
*The equipment marked with asterisks I rented from Lensrental.com. They are an incredibly helpful company.
 
Stewart Copeland is a documentary filmmaker from Tennessee. His films have played nationally and internationally and broadcast on POV and The Documentary Channel. Stewart is also the recipient of the prestigious Individual Artist Fellowship through the Tennessee Arts Commission. His last two documentaries were Jennifer and Let Your Feet Do The Talkin’, both films are available through the Grammy Award Winning label Dust-To-Digital. See his work at www.stewstew.com or follow him on twitter @stew_stew

What does it take to tell remarkable stories on the web? It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. Some films, slideshows and websites rack up tens of thousands of hits in a week, while others seemingly go unnoticed. 

What isn’t a mystery is how important good storytelling is. Although it makes financial sense for publishers to chase the short clickable pieces, we’re beginning to see a shift in the direction of long-form crafted stories (in lots of different mediums) with an emphasis on quality. With so much information online, people are looking for content which engages them and rewards their attention.

It’s time to join the race to the top, not the race to the bottom. 

In the last year I’ve become convinced that the only way to make sure your journalism has the impact it deserves on a crowded web is to, as Brian Storm says, ‘bet the farm’ on quality. It was this idea that led to the creation of ‘Inside the Story: a masterclass in digital storytelling by the people who do it best’. It’s a collaborative ebook I’ve produced with the help of some of the best digital journalists working on the web. 

Several of them are Dslrnewsshooter regular contributors, including Jonah Kessel and Felix Clay, and of course, Dan Chung himself. It’s full of advice focused on crafting high quality narratives, whether in video, still photography, words or even design.

Each contributor was handpicked and asked to share a killer piece of advice about how to tell good stories on the web – in just 200 words. This tough word limit forced them to cut the waffle and get straight to the gold. The result, I hope, is a book that you can get through in under an hour, but return to over and over again. 

It’s got some really useful advice on how to structure stories the right way, from award winners like Poul Madsen and Henrik Kastenskov at the Bombay Flying Club, Amy O’Leary at the New York Times and Claudio Von Planta. The all important topic of finding stories and strong characters is covered by film makers like Drea Cooper of California Is a Place and Mackenzie Sheppard.   
 
There are lots of books and plenty of great blogs about digital journalism, including this one, but I think Inside the Story is something unique. It was produced and designed to reflect the high-end quality of the stories we want to help other people produce. 

Will it turn you into a renowned filmmaker overnight? Certainly not. If it was that easy, the craft wouldn’t be worth pursuing. But it gives you a valuable insight into the processes of people who have spent years honing their craft: take that advice on board, and you’re a big step closer to producing more great pieces of your own. 

Inside the Story: a masterclass in digital storytelling by the people who do it best is available for digital download now. It’s priced at £3.50 and all proceeds are donated to Kiva.

Ocean : West Away from Mark Tipple on Vimeo.

The idea behind West Away:
A number of years ago I used to meet up with my friends Mike and Luke in various remote parts of the country to spend a week surfing, camping in the dirt and telling stories; then part ways with plans to meet for the next swell or favorable wind pattern. As the years passed I left that lifestyle behind but for some time now I have been itching to get back into it. As I enter my thirties I still have the drive to search and explore – I wanted to discover what motivates me to do this.

So last year we reunited for a week and drove more than 6,000 kilometres. On the way we found some super fun waves and explored places we had previously researched on the map but had never reached before. We left knowing that December isn’t the best time for waves out there, but hoping the swell and wind would align and make the effort worthwhile.

‘West Away’ is a short about the passion behind the endless kilometres travelled to the places we want to explore, which I hope will resound with people who either live that lifestyle or, like me, can relate to the effort we used to go to just to get a few waves.

Shooting West Away:
I was somewhat of a newcomer to the Canon 5D mkII for filming. In late 2009 I was working on a shoot for a shark diving film where we were looking at HDSLRs to put in an underwater housing – helping us get physically closer to the sharks than our housed Sony EX-3 camcorders could. I ended up choosing the Canon 7D to utilize its 60P function. I had been looking at and using the 5D mkII and loved the image, but the 60P mode on the 7D outweighed this and 8fps for stills meant it was a very practical cam for underwater and sports.

Since filming Shark Diver I’ve used the 7D primarily for stills, with a bit of filming in-between for other projects. I’d used a friend’s 5D mkII sporadically for photo assignments, but it was always as a backup to my regular 1DS mkII, my workhorse for above-water stills shooting.

Then I used the 5D mkII on a short film in the middle of last year and was surprised at the difference in quality from the 7D. After some number juggling I decided to make the switch from the 1DsII to the 5D mkII for everything above water.

When I was planning for ‘West Away’ I spent some time thinking about camera format and each logistical challenge, as well as the actual feel I wanted to convey to the audience. Did I want to shoot everything at 60p to have the option of slow motion, or did I want the realism of 25p even though it’s not as smooth as 60p? Would the 5D mkII full frame sensor cause more problems than it was worth or would the 7D 1.6x crop work better for the style I wanted?

I knew we’d be bouncing over dirt roads and scaling down cliffs for most of the trip, and with sand, dust and salt spray I wondered if something like the Sony EX-1 would be better than a DSLR (inbuilt neutral density filters and sound recording options would be appreciated and would avoid accessories dangling off the side of a DSLR). But I knew the water footage would be on the housed 7D, so I settled on the 5D mkII for the land footage as I had previous experience of switching between formats on my previous Shark Diver filming – I wasn’t keen to repeat this again.

I wanted the viewer to feel as if they were in the car and on the cliffs journeying with Mike and Luke. I planned to shoot the exploration mostly handheld – but use tripod for locked off shots and smooth pans for the land-based surfing footage.

The format I wanted was footage of searching and surfing, overlaid with them talking about the trip and why they choose to take a path less travelled. I’d get this narration from a sit down interview. I also wanted to let the surfing footage run longer than just the start and finish of the wave, to give a better sense of the whole experience. This alone would be different to what’s been done before in the surf scene, and would let us see their reaction to a failed move or a blown barrel.

This all seemed like a good idea until the fifth hour ticked over on a 38 degree windswept beach, hiding under a towel to swap cards and digging my buried backpack out of the piled-up sand.

At times when we were running over sand dunes I knew that the footage I was shooting would be shaky and possibly not even usable; but since the trip was all about exploration and the journey I’d be able to reference this in the sit down interview. Later in the edit I was surprised at how the shaky footage fitted and helped bring the viewer along for the ride.

In the middle of the trip we were bunked down in the dirt for a few days, miles from town for a few days. I was thankful that at the start of the trip I had completely overstocked with six 32GB memory cards and eight batteries – a few days of surfing and exploring took up most of my available storage. I also had a small HyperDrive Colorspace with me for emergency backup. After the third day of camping we packed up and drove 90 minutes to a pub for a well deserved meal and data transfer. While eating and downloading footage I got online through my tethered iPhone – we found the live stream of the Fronton surfing competition in the Canary Islands which gave us a mid-trip amp. We must have confused the heck out of the local farmers looking at three punk kids with computers, cords and cables running everywhere.

I chose the kit Canon 24-105mm f4L lens for the shots of us searching. I’m not usually the biggest fan of an f4 aperture lens but the image stabilizer was a godsend for hours of handheld shooting whilst running over sharp rocks. I also brought the Canon 100-400mm along for the land surfing footage.

Traditional surf photography that’s shot straight ahead, closely cropped on the wave and surfer, has never really interested me. When we found a beach with rock protrusions and steep cliffs in the background I was stoked to put something in the foreground and utilize wider apertures. It also meant I could sit in the sand and take the pressure off my old weary back. ND faders were on each lens at all times; however, I found wide open on the 100-400mm the image wasn’t exactly sharp and had to stop the lens down instead.

I didn’t want the added bulk of a shoulder rig, but also didn’t want to shoot handheld. I looked at the Zacuto Target Shooter and other similar rigs. I eventually went with a DIY rig made of a cut-down curtain rod and two umbrella flash swivel brackets for chest support and a point of contact on the face with an LCDVF loupe. It worked, but I kicked myself on the first day as the way I’d attached the wireless lav receiver and Zoom recorder to the rig – with cable ties – fell apart.

Luckily, the format I wanted would rely heavily on the interviews to provide the dialogue for the film, and so I felt comfortable not worrying too much about the location sound. The on-board shotgun mic feeding camera audio would be fine. I didn’t end up using any of the location sound anyway.

We used both cameras for the interview; as an afterthought I asked Mike and Luke to use the 7D to shoot each other handheld for another angle to cut to from the locked off 5D mkII. In post I found the handheld style fit better with the cutaways for brief talking sync. In hindsight I wish we had used the 5D mkII for this as well – it would have made grading a little easier.

In the water I used a small SPL underwater housing and Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens on the 7D shooting at 720/60p.

Style is subjective, but this is one that I’m drawn to and chose for the purpose of bringing the viewer along for the ride. It is also a style that is drawn from my photography background, the difference being that the final product is a 10 second clip vs a single frame.

Mark Tipple has emerged as a notable documentary photographer over the past 3 years.
As the principal photographer of The Underwater Project, an ongoing reportage showcasing Australia’s relationship with the ocean, he aims to bring light to stories traditional media shies away from.
Mark’s clients include Edify, The Salvation Army, World Vision, Christian Surfers, House With No Steps, Planet Ocean, Beyond Water, The Guarani Project, and 100Revs. His work has been seen in or on The Australian, The Telegraph, The BBC, G1.com, The Independent, National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

The new Rycote Softie Lyre mount MHR

Rycote mic covers:
Microphone accessory manufacturer Rycote have launched a few products that may interest real world shooters. Firstly there is the new Softie Lyre mount with MHR. The kit consists of the ingenious Lyre mic suspension (the hotshoe mount version of which is already popular with DSLR shooters) modified so that it mounts directly to popular camcorders – freeing up the hotshoe for other accessories. The Lyre technology reduces unwanted vibrations from camera handling or noise from lens motors getting to the mic. Whilst I haven’t tested it I am hopeful that the new suspension will work on newer large sensor camcorders like the Sony F3, Panasonic AF100 and Canon C300.

Secondly they have a new, smaller wind jammer for lavalier microphones. Named the Ristretto it is a smaller version of their regular lavalier windjammer. It is secured to the mic capsule by a foam connector and a rubber ring. We missed interviewing Rycote at NAB 2012 but fortunately they produced their own product video:

Thinktank bags:
Thinktank have just announced some interesting looking new bags. There are three new additions to their Airport line of backpacks as well as a new member of the Retrospective family.

The new backpacks are the Airport Essentials , Airport Commuter and Airport Accelerator. They vary in size but all meet international carry on size requirements (although maybe not weight limits on some carriers if loaded with camera gear). The Airport Accelerator is the largest of the three and can take two pro sized DSLRs, six to eight standard zoom lenses, a 500mm f4, ipad and laptop up to 17 inches. The smaller two bags take less gear but are designed to also fit under the seat of a US regional commuter plane.

I have always loved Thinktank backpacks and rollers since getting one when they first came out – the new additions certainly look like a worthy upgrade and I hope to buy one soon.

The Thinktank Retrospective 7

The Retrospective 7 is a compact bag designed to carry a basic SLR system and an ipad or 11 inch Macbook Air. Like other bags in the Retrospective range it has a classic style that does not look too much like a camera bag at first glance. It is available in three colors: Black polyspun nylon, Blue Slate and Pinestone cotton canvas.

BlackRapid LensBling caps:
BlackRapid are best know for their range of camera straps but are now branching out into other camera related gadgets. The latest is a series of lens caps that are clearly marked with focal lengths so they can be quickly and easily identified whilst on a shoot. The distinctive designs will be available in Canon and Nikon fit initially with the following markings:

Canon: Sizes 24mm, 24-70mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 70-200mm.
Nikon: Sizes 24mm, 50mm, 85mm, 70-200mm and 105mm.

The BlackRapid LensBling caps

While this is a good idea I personally prefer my simpler solution of printing labels using an electronic labeling machine.

I label my lenscaps with an electronic labeler

Triggertrap Mobile iphone/ipad timer remote:
Another gadget that DSLR shooters who love timelapses may find useful is the new version of Triggertap for Iphone and Ipad. It consists of a $9.99 app + $19.99 adapter & cable to allow the Iphone to be used as a remote trigger for many popular DSLRs.

Unlike other triggers on the market Triggertap mobile is able to harness the power of the iOS to allow for some interesting triggering options. As well as regular time interval timelapses you can shoot eased timelapses (see tutorial video) , HDR timelapses and also most interestingly a distance lapse mode.

It can also trigger the shutter (and possbily video on some cameras) by using a sound sensor, shock & vibration sensor, Metal and magnetism sensor or facial recognition.

You can buy the app here.
and the appropriate dongle and cables here.

Every year we get back from NAB and realise that there was equipment that we should have reported but somehow missed. This year is no exception but our good friends at FreshDV and Wideopencamera were there to get the interviews we didn’t.

Here are a few of the things we didn’t get a chance to report fully that deserve attention:

PRG Trucolor Foton remote phosphor lighting

Convergent Design Gemini 4:4:4

Adobe Premiere CS6 new features

Cinevate’s new interchangable FS100 mounts and new rigs

Digital Bolex

Unruly GoPro cages

G-tech RAID

One of the main concerns I had when testing video on the Nikon D800 was moire in some images. This is almost certainly the result of the way Nikon engineers are binning pixels to downscale an image to 1080P from a much higher resolution 36MP sensor. This moire patterning was also a common feature of shots from the Canon 5D mkII and something that many DSLR shooters are used to contending with.

One solution that some 5D mkII shooters have been using is an Optical low pass filter from Mosaic engineering which fits inside the camera in front of the sensor. The filter is effectively doing a controlled blur of the image to combat moire and it works quite well. The downside is that the backfocus of lenses is thrown off by having the filter in place – close focussing may be lost and lenses focus past infinity. Even so it is a sacrifice many shooter have felt was worth making.

The Mosaic engineering filter for Canon 5D mkII

When I tested the D800 I speculated that a similar filter could solve the moire issues – now several weeks later I have been contacted by Jacob Fenn to say he has been shooting with a prototype Mosaic Engineering filter that does just that. He has posted several examples on his blog and we have reproduced a few here with permission.

D800 without Mosaic filter

D800 with Mosaic filter

Without Mosaic filter

With Mosaic filter

Jacob told me that the Mosaic would soon have an updated filter with even better results.

This all looks very promising and I am keen to see what a D800 can produce when this filter is combined with external HDMI recording using a Ninja 2 or other external recorder.

When I recently tested the Nikon D800 and Canon 5D mkIII side by side in New York the one thing that I could not test was the quality of D800 footage when recorded externally. The clean 1080P HDMI output of the D800 is one of its most talked about features. We had a Atomos Ninja SSD recorder on hand in New York but due to some firmware issues we were not able to get the Ninja/D800 combination to function correctly.

In that test I concluded that the D800 recording internally to CF card was slightly sharper than the 5D mkIII but I was not seeing huge differences in colour, noise and detail at lower sensitivities. I was also concerned about moire effects with the the D800.

Fast forward to NAB 2012 and Atomos have a Ninja that now functions correctly with the D800 and are claiming significant improvements in image quality compared to the image recorded internally to CF card.

Shooter Ron Adair has been testing the combo and posted some very convincing footage to back up Atomos’ claims. Compression artifacts seem much reduced and the image seems very detailed.

To further improve the image quality of the D800 Ron has been shooting using the TassinFlat Picture Control settings which are similar in concept to the Cinestyle picture style for Canon cameras. You can download full res frame grabs of the video footage comparisons that Ron has done here. Ron has also posted this video on Vimeo but suggests you log in and download the original file before evaluating the footage – avoiding Vimeo’s additional compression.

You can find out more about the TassinFlat Picture Control setting in this video.

To add to the image quality improvements the Ninja 2 has a raft of useful features including focus peaking, adjustable zebra and false color.

Atomos have also included a new feature called SmartLog which if it works as described could possibly be the best thing since sliced bread for the busy news shooter. You can now log in and out points on your footage directly on the Ninja – while out on the field – before you get anywhere near your edit. You can also add keywords such as ‘good shot’ or ‘bad shot’ to alert an editor – hence saving valuable time in post.

The combination of the Ninja 2 and the D800 certainly improves the performance of what was an already good camera. It would be very interesting to compare again with the Canon 5D mkIII. Ron has promised further test footage very soon – watch this space.

D-Focus were showing a new cage for the Panasonic GH2 at NAB this year. It features a rugged metal construction with full access to ports and battery compartment. Price and availability yet to be announced.

They also have an interesting gadget called the D-Zoom – a simple zoom lever which mounts to 15mm rods and is priced at $175.

Shot and edited by Scott Karlins.

Robert from Genus talked to me about the company’s new Cheese range of accessories and their new monitor arm. The Genus arm is actually manufactured by Noga.

Shot and edited by Scott Karlins.

In this video Bruce Sharpe of Singular software demonstrates the upcoming version 3.0 release. The software features a video and audio interface and is ten to twenty times faster than Pluraleyes 2. Bruce also discusses Cloudeyes – a cloud based audio video sync utility for developers.

Video shot by Matt Allard and edited by Scott Karlins.

Full disclosure: Dslrnewsshooter.com is a Singular software affiliate.