A tribute to blue skies. . .

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It’s getting ridiculous. This no shooting thing is getting to me so much, I’m getting all melancholic and down. I decided I needed to cut something last night and so I obsessively hunted through the footage banks from the last couple of months, (in which not a hell of a lot of fun, non work-related, shooting has gone on! :/) and pulled what shots I could into a sequence.

There was a criteria – Blue skies, good weather, fun times. . .that was it. . .This, friends, was an exercise in positivity. In trying to see past the drab and dreary world outside to the vibrant, colourful world it can be in the right light.

It is by no stretch of the imagination a masterpiece, nor is it cohesively structured in any way. It’s just some shots that I’m fond of cut to a track that I fell in love with while I was trawling the drives for footage. Unfortunately I couldn’t find enough footage to really go crazy with the cut. It’s great going into something with too much footage, that way you can be really brutal with the edit. There’s a certain excitement I get when I’m giving shots that I could realistically hold on for 7-10 seconds about 2-3 seconds screen time. It’s not appropriate all the time, but it can leave people wanting to see it over.

It’s a bit of hodge podge of locations this one, there’s some container ships down at Moffat Beach, a little bit of the Glasshouse Mountains, some Kayaks in Cotton Tree on the Maroochy River, some aerial snippets from over Mooloolaba and Maroochydore, Osprey soaring over the Headland in Moffat Beach & a random Surf Boat crew in Mooloolaba.

All of it was shot on the 7D and some of it was that long ago, that I cannot for the life of me break down how and what I shot everything with. I know the Opsrey’s were shot on the Canon 100-400 L, that I remember. It was so hard to get and keep the suckers in focus. I have a very healthy respect for die hard bird photographers who use constant manual focus. Big ups to you!

The aerials were definitely shot on the Tokina 11-16 and were Smoothcam’d in Apple Motion. I did it in Apple Motion because I am one of the users suffering from the annoying and unfixed Final Cut Pro Smoothcam bug, where it looks great rendered in the timeline, but when you export it, it looks as though it hasn’t been applied. It’s very annoying and I wish Apple would fix it! Come on guys! It’s not like you don’t know about it, it’s all over your discussion boards and all over the web! What’s the hold up?

There’s definitely a couple of shots on the Canon 70-200 in there too. The Kayaks are one I’m sure of. . .the others. . .hmmm. . .I don’t know. Sorry.

I do love shooting this kind of stuff, but I’m finding more and more I wish I had people to work with, to put in these situations so the viewer can identify with them and become more involved in what’s going on. Pretty pictures are all well and good, but at the end of the day, they don’t really create an emotional connection with the viewer, they’re just nice to look at. I’m thinking I need to get some of my friends in on the action and get them doing some fun stuff. We’ll see how that goes. . .when the sun comes out next. . .

What niggles me about this clip is the Aerial shot at the beginning, even though I love it, it’s had to be zoomed a little too much and it’s not so sharp anymore. It looks darn average! That was before I got the Glidetrack Shooter and started using it as a stabiliser up there. At least it won’t happen again!

The music, if you’re interested is off a new mix CD from Renaissance. It’s called The Mix Collection and it’s mixed by Gui Boratto, a Brazilian Techno producer who happens to make very good music and consequently have very good taste in music. The track is called ‘Daten-Übertragungs-Küsschen’ and it’s by Dominik Eulberg. Ha! How’s that for a mouthful! Awesome track though and rather indicative of my head space right now.

Anyway guys, that’s me done for now. . .hope you enjoy this little morsel. . .I give my word there will be more substantial fare soon!

For you Vimeo Lovers!