USC Ski & Snowboard: The Weekend

Subject: USC Ski & Snowboard Team
Filmers: Abe Kislevitz, Matt Cook, Levi Rodriguez
Location: Mammoth Mountain, CA
Music: Icona Pop - "Ready for the Weekend (Club Mix)"

It’s November which means another ski season has rolled around. Opening weekend in Mammoth gave us a great start to the season and a peek of what is to come! This video is entirely shot on the new GoPro HERO3 Black Edition. I was excited to try out this platform in my full normal style. I never truly put the camera or workflow through its paces until I make a Ski Team edit. Much to my amusement, I was very happy with the result in terms of camera functionality and cleanliness of the footage.

This whole video was shot with ProTune on and WB set to Auto. I was using all new cameras from the production line and didn’t have any freezing problems whatsoever – was pretty excited about that.

About 80% of the shots are 1080-60, a few POV shots at 1440-48, and a few static and car mounted shots at 2.7K 30.
For editing I transcoded it all to ProRes422. Editing was done in FCP 7. Did coloring in DaVinci Resolve (which is free!)

In Resolve on the first baseline color correction node I switched it to use Cinestyle LUTs which made the correcting much easier. Found this set of LUTs on another site –
http://iconstudios.eu/cinestyle.zip
Probably not the best/correct workflow but it worked for this project.

On every shot I started with a baseline of the cinestyle LUT correction, a selective desaturating of the yellows in the snow, and a small vignette. From there I added nodes to shots where necessary and evened out all the levels.

After the color correction I brought the whole edit into AE to add the effects of color & burns.  The shapes were all created in AE from a set of film burns.  I used the CC Kaleidoscope effect in AE on some pre-comped layers of shapes I created by masking the burns.  I did some keyframing with the Kaleidoscope effect, wiggled the opacity, and changed the transfer modes to fit the shot.  For the rainbow colors in the snow I painted matte layers frame by frame and used some film burns over those.  Most of the transfer layers for those were set to color or soft light.

All the audio was straight from the camera, no external mics. Felt like the camera did a really great job of delivering consistent & very smooth video. Overall really pleased with the way the camera handled in the different lighting conditions. Definitely took some color correction but ProTunes ability to stretch the image and regain good control of what you want was really cool. Didn’t use any noise reduction or sharpening on the footage. I liked the natural look out of the cam.

Related

USC Ski & Snowboard – Road Trip

USC Ski & Snowboard – The Flashback

Fiesta Movement: Summer Adventures