Fiesta Movement: Summer Adventures

Subject: Fiesta Movement Mission #3 - Summer Adventures
Filmers: Abe Kislevitz
Location: Whistler, BC, Sonoma, CA, Stockton, CA

This is my 3rd video in conjunction with the Fiesta Movement.  Each month is a different theme and they provide specific “missions” we can choose related to that theme.  This month’s theme was #Adventure, and my mission was actually to learn to Kiteboard; however I was away in South America for 3 weeks which prevented me from getting that one done.  I was just stoked that Ford was going to pick up the tab on some official kiting lessons!  I was able to swap my mission to one that was a little more vague and more in line with some of the things I had lined up for the coming weekends – a lot of different adventures.  This way I was able to utilize some of the Whistler footage we shot during Camp of Champions Film School week as well.

This video was shot mostly on the GoPro HERO3 Black Edition, with a few slow-motion shots from the Sony FS700.  Scott Edwards, who owns the island where we wakeboard, also owns the FS700.  He let me play with it all weekend, utilizing my Canon lenses and learning some features on the big-boy camera.  I have quite a bit of content that I hope to put together into another video, but we’ll see if time allows.

The FS700 can do 1080P at 240FPS for 8 seconds.  It has an end capture mode where you are always ‘recording’ and when you hit stop, it’ll save the previous 8 seconds.  It’s super handy for wakeboarding or getting any moment captured at high speed. I was impressed with the camera, but didn’t really dig deep into the nitty gritty settings.  It was fun being on something other than a GoPro though 🙂

When it came to editing, all of it was edited natively in Premiere CC, with effects in After Effects CC, color in Davinci Resolve, and a few minor tweaks in Photoshop – yes Photoshop! I’ve been playing around with a patch for Camera Raw v8.2 that enables a GoPro lens correction in Photoshop and Bridge.  For a few of the shots I was able to rid myself of the bubble distortion and go with a wider more DSLR look.  This was particularly helpful for one of the spinny car shots (more on this mount later) where the car was looking like a big jelly bean.  See the before (left) and after (right):

car

To implement this, just open your video in Photoshop, convert the layer to a smart object (right click > convert to Smart Object), then use Filter > Lens Correction.  GoPro should be in the list of manufacturers, and it’ll apply the lens correction to straighten out any curves in the lens.  It won’t work on all shots, but for some it really adds a nice effect! I used this throughout the video in certain instances, try to spot which ones have straight lines!

The spinny mount on the car was not my invention – it was devised by GoPro media employee Tyler Johnson.  He created it from a painter’s pole, 4 GoPro suction cups, and a lazy Susan wooden spinner.  It’s not the most solid device in the world, and it was pretty windy while I was filming this segment, but it got some insane shots! You can’t drive on a public road with it because it’ll stick out pretty far.  We had some open back roads at Sonoma Raceway the weekend of the GoPro Grand Prix.  You can see the setup here in this shot:

carspinny

Fun fact – the first shot in the video is on a GoPro! It was shot in 2.7K ProTune with the color temp locked at 6500K.  This gave me a long video timelapse that didn’t fluctuate in white balance at all.  If you look closely, I’ve timelapsed the clouds, but left the water as is by masking off at the shoreline.  I applied a lens correction to the entire clip, but in After Effects rather than Photoshop this time (CC Lens).  I gave the clip the slightest amount of motion by keyframing the center of the lens correction filter so it looks as if the camera is physically rotating slowly to the right.  This is more dynamic of a move than just panning a lapse horizontally or vertically in post. I added some grain and cinema crop bars for some style.  See the side-by-side raw (left), graded & corrected (right) – oops shot it a bit crooked!

intrographics

Hope you all enjoyed the video, I’ve got so many more in the works! I just have to find enough time to get to it all!  For my next Fiesta Movement Mission, well, we’ll see how this comes together! http://www.fiestamovement.com/agents/abekislevitz/the-dark-arts

summeradventure