Faren & Zubaidah - The Wedding By David Cheok On ExposureRoom

Comments

Steven Dempsey

July 16, 2008 12:19 PM

David,

You are obviously very good at what you do. This video (although I didn't have time to watch it all the way through), is very professional and cinematic. Most importantly, I'm sure your clients were thrilled with the epic feel you achieved and the sensitive way you portrayed the event itself and the family.

A few things of note:

1. I felt that the film scratch effect was unnecessary and distracting. You have already established a cinematic feel based on the 'scope ratio and framing. Seemed a little overkill.

2. Speaking of framing, there were some shots in there that seemed a little off. The first shot of the couple on the beach looked like you completely chopped their legs off and the framing just looked bad....Also, when the bride was getting her hair done (or maybe it was makeup), it seemed like you framed it too closely and again, the scope matte didn't work for me there. For the most part though, it worked very well.

3. I'm not a big fan of that Magic Bullet diffusion glow (whether you used MB or not) but I think you used it to good effect here. Although, just my personal preference, I would have held back on it quite a bit to make it more effective on the glamour shots. I also realize you used it for a slightly dream-like feel, which it had.

4. Camera movement was very imaginative and not over the top. You established a nice kenetic energy in many of your sequences.

5. Loved your use of natural light coming in from the window near the beginning with the bride and groom.

Given the challenges of shooting a wedding, particularly one as elaborate as this, I give you huge kudos for what you achieved. I haven't had any experience shooting weddings but I'm sure the challenges of shooting them never diminish no matter how much experience one has.

Nice job and thanks for sharing.

How do you like the EX1 picture? I've heard that the 24p still has a very video look to it...mathematically this shouldn't be so but I was curious about your impression (assuming you are shooting 24p, that is)

Also, one suggestion for this audience might be to edit it down to maybe 5 minutes of absolute highlights. 24 minutes is pretty ambitious :)

David Cheok

July 16, 2008 02:13 PM

Steven,

Thank you for taking the time to view this and comment. I'll remember them on the next project for most of your suggestions. For point 2, the cropping was due to an unplanned move to the wide scope on the final render with the scratches, diffusion and logo rendering. The original edit was in 16:9 so taking into consideration of the comments made here, I'll probably give them the final sequence without those. As for the 2nd part, it was actually a wider crop but my fingers got a bit itchy and I wanted a look from that scene. Really close and 'blurry'.

IMHO 24p, 25p video still looks like video esp on the EX1 without heavy post. Not for the cadence though but due to the resolution. Even 50p can be made to look film-like too if processed properly. I dont think this looks anything like film. Its not organic enough. Film is a lot softer due to the grain not being as fine as our digital pixels. Something I found out was that the 35mm adapters make images look more film-like because the vibration of the ground glass softens the image to that effect. But.. one thing i have to say is that the EX1's dynamic range is superb. It beats the crap out of my Canon still cameras with the Cine Gamma curves and the 35mbit codec gives us a lot to play with in post.

hehe. 5 mins is even more ambitious. I was asked to fill in a 30 min slot with this video and there were a lot of things I had already left out. Weddings here span over 4 days (normally) but this one had 7 events and 2 prewed sessions. The events were around 4-6 hrs each. So.. summarising avg of 35 hrs into 25 mins wasnt easy. Getting a story out in 5 mins would be even worst unless we just show clips of just the B&G without any of the unfolding of the events. People (family and friends) want to see themselves in these videos and not just the B&G.

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