So the new Muppets movie – whilst wasn’t all I had hoped it would be (but still brilliant nonetheless) – did at least reignite my love for the Muppets in general.
I decided that I needed a Muppet in my life.
After searching online & failing to find a Muppet replica I could buy to sit in the corner of my lounge, I stumbled upon the Muppet whatnots from FAO schwarz. Sadly they cost $100, and don’t ship worldwide. I can’t afford to go to NYC either.
Then I found the whatnot kits at Toys R Us in the US. Now they did ship worldwide, but it was still going to cost about £70 by the time I got one. I also found reviews questioning the quality & size, So I decided ‘what the heck, I’ll make one’.
Here’s a time lapse of me making Marshall. If you make it through all 6 minutes of it then you’re mad!
This week I got to do one of my favorite things – being creative with a video camera!
Jonny asked me to help him film the new WikiRiffs video for this week. If you don’t know what it’s all about, then essentially he click’s ‘random article’ on wikipedia once a week, and writes a song about it – with a video. Head over to his youtube channel: youtube.com/wikiriffs where he can explain it better than I ever could.
I’ve helped him out a few times before with camera work & editing tips etc, but this time I really felt I was able to contribute creatively towards the video – being ‘director of photography’ as Jonny put it. He was fed up (understandably) of always filming around my house & garden, so we’re really appreciative of being allowed to use the local school hall late on Tues evening!
We’re both really happy with how this has turned out, so without further ado, I present Sara Sommerfield. Please let us know what you think.
Last night I took my Bro-in-law Jonny to the school hall, where my church meets each week, because he wanted a stage setting for his latest video (see youtube.com/wikiriffs for awesomeness). Plus he needed a cameraman, so it was great to be involved & have some serious creative input into it.
This weeks song was a piano based jazz style ballad thing, so clearly we needed piano shots. This upright lives in the hall so we thought it’d be a great iea to dismantle the case and film the inner workings as he played.
I snuck a few photos in between takes and I’m really glad I did.
The video we shot will be on the wikiriffs youtube channel early hours tomorrow morning (17th)
At Soul Survivor this year I went to a seminar about video making. Given the event is aimed at teenagers I was expecting a very basic introduction to the art, so I went thinking it’ll be helpful to hear again all the things I’ve already learned.
Instead I learned an awful lot I didn’t know, but the one thing that has radically changed my way of thinking was when the guy defined ‘amatuer’ for us.
I know I’m not the only one guilty of applying this term to someone who is not great at something and isn’t paid for it. How wrong could we be.
Amateur is a French word that comes from the Latin ‘amatorem’ meaning lover. It describes someone who is passionate about their field & does it purely for the love of it, regardless of remuneration. So the kid in his attic with a mobile phone camera & a box of Lego is an amatuer, but as long as the passion and attitude remain – so are Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron & Steven Spielberg. They are all amateurs in my opinion.
After the luxury of a decent camera & Final Cut, I set myself the challenge today of making a video solely in iMovie & using my inbuilt webcam on my Mac. Here’s the fruits:
Well I finally got my act together before Easter & did some work.
Our good friends Owen & Lou got married last September & I’ve been sitting on the video of it since then (for various reasons, some not my fault…), so I put on my editing hat and produced a DVD for them consisting of the main video:
There seems to be a little buzz about tilt shifting at the moment, plus I saw this video:
So I thought I’d give it a shot myself.
I’m not skilled enough to do it properly with the camera, but I also didn’t want to just shove my photos though a website processor, so I compromised and did my tiltshifting manually in photoshop.
Here are my first two attempts on photos I took at High & Over while trying to get my vertigo shot for the Tuesday Challenge:
Let me know what you think. I might try my hand at video tiltshifting next.
It snowed very unexpectedly at the weekend (at least for those of us that aren’t paying attention to weather forecasts). Yes you read right. Snow. In Southern England. In April. The most unimpressed of us was Boxer, who we’d let out to play in the sun while we went off to church. 30 minutes later there was 6 inches of snow outside. He made sure we were aware of this when we got home.
We, on the other hand, were very impressed and started the afternoon with a quick geocache and snowball fight followed by an outing to Stanmer Park to try our hand at sledding.
At 
