Capturing an Event with a Flip MINO HD

We had the perfect event storm here in Phillipsburg, NJ the other day– The final day of a “Thomas the Tank Engine”  full size train ride experience for kids and families up the street from Union Square, where we live, and “Heritage Days” in Easton, which is a stone’s throw across the river from us.

The Free Bridge prior to the Fireworks

Easton, PA, and Phillipsburg, NJ are both joined– and separated by– the 100 plus year old “Free Bridge”. It’s called that because it’s, well, free, as opposed to the toll bridge on Route 22 a minute or two and 75 cents away.

Heritage Day concluded with fireworks on the river, and so all roads leading to both sides of the bridge were closed off, making the Free Bridge the perfect vantage point for the fireworks.

Phillipsburg– especially its historic downtown– has seen some tough times but it’s undergoing something of a renaissance. Money has been put into redoing the streets and sidewalks of the main drag– Main Street– and local merchants have tried to build up traffic by any number of means. The Urban Enterprise Zone has worked hard to bring new businesses into town.

But building traffic is tough. There is of course Easton, across the river, Bethlehem, Allentown, and any number of artistic and quaint and fully developed communities in Eastern Pennsylvania and Western New Jersey. Clinton. New Hope. Flemington. Jim Thorpe.

I’m not crazy about fireworks. Nothing has compared– ever– to my memory of the display on the river in Norwalk, Connecticut when I was five.

But looking out our front window with its perfect view of  the bridge and Union Square, I was struck by the traffic.  No, not the motorcycles and muffler-free trucks we listen to every weekend– but the foot traffic.

So, at the very last minute, we left our fourth floor walk-up and decided to experience the fireworks on the river.

Fireworks as seen from the Free Bridge, Phillipsburg, New Jersey

And I took with me my Flip MinoHD.  I didn’t plan on using it, but once I started I couldn’t stop.

The next day, I put together a quick edit using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Pro Pack, natural sound, and finally, a voiceover track featuring my off-the cuff comments as the edit played back on my laptop screen.

The Flip is a nifty little device; it has surprising picture quality (especially in 720p HD), and it’s ability to pick up ambient sound is great.

It does not have image stabilization, which means without a tripod chances are very good there will be a little shakycam. You could image stabilize that in post, but then you’d be rendering for a half a day, and I wanted to get this thing done quickly.

What was REALLY surprising was how good the fireworks look.

But maybe you should take a look and let me know what you think. it’s a pretty casual approach for me, but it was fun, and it plays to these little mini-cam’s strengths– the ability to capture reality with a minimum of invasiveness.  People don’t ask “When will this be aired?” and other things like that, and they don’t alter their behavior for the camera.

You can find the video on YouTube here. Remember to click on the HQ for high quality in the lower right of the player. And comments or questions are welcomed.

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Tribute Videos are videos that celebrate a person, couple, group, or institution. They can be engagement videos, anniversary videos, memorials, retirement videos, milestone birthday videos, company histories, leadership stories, school reunion stories, award-winner portraits, and more. They are at home in the living room, rec room, boardroom or ballroom.

Tribute videos are how I got my start. (See “AVSquad” in the links.) And they remain the most satisfying of the work that we do. There is nothing like telling a people story.

A lot of people are into video these days, some as a hobby, some as a potential profession, some as part of their job duties. There is a perception that video is easy, thanks to point and shoot miniature cameras, computer editing, and thousands of tipsters on-line telling you how easy it is and selling something– usually hardware.

But hardware is only part of the problem, and hardware and editing software are covered pretty readily via training web sites, DVD lessons, and more.

No one is training people on how to tell a compelling story. How to interview, how to move pictures, how to choose music, how to pace videos, how to get a visceral reaction from an audience!

That’s where “Tribute Videos for Love & Money” comes in.

Tribute Videos for Love & Money

It’s an ebook that details my communications beliefs and systems. If you like samples of my work, and you want to know how and why certain creative decisions were made, this is the place to start. It concentrates on the “Tribute” people story type of video, but frankly, if you can tell that kind of story, there isn’t much you won’t be able to do as you grow your capability or career.

For more information, go to videostoryschool.com.

I hope you like it and find it valuable.

I was updating this blog– adding “widgets”– and noticed something called “One True Media”. Enticed by the ostentatiousness of the name, I decided to try it out.

It’s an online “slideshow” and “montage” maker. A slideshow is defined as a series of images with no sound but lots of weird backgrounds and stylesets;l a montage is a slide-sound show with effects, music, and is timed– to an extent– to the music.

I have strong opinions as to what makes a real slide-sound show, and while this isn’t quite it, it is the first on-line offering that seems to get some of the sync-sound concept. (Go to SLIDE-SOUND.COM for more of my thoughts on this.)

It begins with uploading a slew of pictures. I uploaded 100, but there is a limit. My pictures had been “webified” so many were not as good a resolution as the system prefers. (You’ll see graininess in the sample, but I think that’s the fault of low-res pictures.)

Once the pictures are uploaded, you can slip and slide them in order. Then you decide whether you’re making a slide show or montage (which is my idea of a slide show.)

For each image you can specify zoom or no zoom, zoom direction, and a transition between images. You can choose the length of time the image is on the screen, and the length of the transition. This can be wholesale for the whole batch, or one at a time.

Now, the sound part. You don’t upload music. You choose it. You choose from various decent compositions done in a variety of styles by beat, genre, or type (wedding, anniversary, business, etc.) You can choose well-known pop songs which are rerecording of hits (so that OTM only pays for the composition, not the performance. This is a premium feature– more on that later.)

Choose as many songs as you need, order them, and then pick on which slide you want that song to end. The system assumes that the next song in your playlist will start with the next slide. Repeat, and when you tell the last cut to end on the last slide, you’re done.

One True Media is free with a limited feature set- no text, no pop songs, only three songs per montage, no downloading of your montage (you can share it on their sight or embed it on yours.)

For $3.99 a month you get those extras, plus extra themes, transitions, effects, etc.

Here’s my masterpiece:

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Plusses: Easy, fast, free, some sync to sound possible.
Minuses: No uploading of voice or music; limited timing options, must upgrade to download shows, use pop songs, access more special effects and transitions

Slide Shows. Slide Talks. Slide-Sound Shows.

These phrases strike fear into the hip and trendy.

And why not? Say “slide show” and your brain is filled with Dad’s vacation slides or a grade school filmstrip on how to brush your teeth. Or maybe you envision an old audio-visual presentation you saw when you were a summer intern: “Improving Tolerances in the 303B Die Cut Assembly.”

But some of us know better. We know what slide shows can really be. And the first thing we need to understand is that they’re not slides, and not even powerpoint. They are moving picture presentations, tanks to today’s advanced slideshow making and video editing software.

As a baby-boom-aged audio-visual and video producer, I should know. I started out in “slides.” And the first thing I and my colleagues across the country did was try to turn the slide show into more of a “movie”— a theatrical experience.

This required sophisticated soundtracks, fade and dissolve effects (pairing two  slide projectors and a “dissolve unit”, and synchronization between sound and picture. Soon, the only thing we couldn’t do was talking heads (thankfully)— the rest was simply using the language of film… wide shot, medium shot, close-up, cutaway, rinse and repeat.

Because motion picture film was expensive, and industrial video hadn’t yet been mainstreamed, slide shows became the corporate norm through the mid-eighties.

Across the country and around the world people produced award-winning communications using slides.

Of course, once video became affordable to the corporates, that changed. But often, the video productions that replaced slide shows actually weren’t as good— why work hard when you can feature talking heads?

But people who were in the slide business adapted their hard knocks techniques to video, and produced some pretty incredible stuff. Video cameras weren’t as portable as a Nikon and a cassette tape recorder, but extraordinary soundtracks, awesome editing, and location video made for a very nice mix— a lot better than corporate talking heads.

Often, the best videos featured still photography— company histories, executive biographies, fund raising appeals. Historical materials were usually print, and fund raising can benefit from the unique emotional power a great still image or still image sequence can create.

Today, video is everywhere— affordable, digital, distributable on the web, on DVD, or on an iPod or flash drive. But a great deal of the video that is out there is “out there”— not really communications, but more real-time stupid human tricks or ego-driven monologues. We all want to be the next big thing.

And so, the thought leaders have forgotten slides, photography, still life, and historical documents.

If we need a slideshow type “thing”, we use Powerpoint, a background template, and a bunch of words and some small picture or clip art inserts. That was special 15 years ago; its not so special now.

But if you mix the editing and distribution power of digital video with the emotional language of truly great slide shows, what so you get?

Well, an award-winning PBS series or ten from Ken Burns, as an example.

A stirring tribute to the retiring head of a company.

A love story more compelling than any wedding video.

A family scrapbook with pictures, clippings, old movies, new interviews, and stirring music guaranteed to reap adoration and applause.

The satisfaction of a a job well done, and even, perhaps, a corresponding income as an independent producer.

Whether you use a slide show program, or a video editing program, slide show techniques are alive, and well, and communicating every day. Put them to work for you!

The view out my window here at Union Square in Phillipsburg is pretty neat. We look out onto the Northampton Street Bridge, also known as “The Free Bridge” (because it is a free alternative to the toll bridge). Because it is free it is awfully busy. The bridge crosses the Delaware connecting Easton, PA and Phillipsburg, NJ.

Add to that a gas station on the Jersey side (nearly 30 cents less than tax-heavy PA), and you have two-way traffic that never stops flowing.

I discovered a neat program called iStopmotion from Boinx for the Mac.

It specializes in stop-frame animation– claymation type stuff. But it also does time-elapsed videography as well. Set up a camera, and it will record stills to your hard drive automatically at whatever interval you set.

There are a lot of programs out there to do stuff like this, especialy on the Windows side, but this one seems particularly easy and elegant. Note however, that the price increases dramatically if you want to do Hi-Def. That kind of ploy can only last so long as high definition becomes the prevailing standard.

Anyway, here’s a little ditty I did out my window– a four hour stretch in the afternoon during the bridges peak hours. Note the freight train coming straight through the square and the sun moving across the top of the picture… and the slow lapse into night.

Union Square, Phillipsburg, NJ, 4:30 pm from brienlee on Vimeo.

Shot and edited by Brien Lee