Event filmmaking is all about the storytelling. The stories that we tell are all made up of smaller story sequences. When shooting a story sequence, one must anticipate the action. A good storyteller will be on their toes all day.

Questions to consider while shooting…

• Where’s the action headed?
• Where do I need to position myself to be in the right spot?
• What shots do I need to shoot to get me from point A to point B?
• What do I need to shoot to get the most story out of this scenario?

As you are shooting, one must constantly ask themselves, “Does this tell a story?” If it doesn’t, move on to something that does. You only have so much time during a live event shoot to get what you need. Don’t waste time shooting things that don’t matter.

While practicing effective story shooting you’ll come to realize that you’ll actually shoot less and edit less, but your films with be richer than ever before. Stay alert and focus on what matters.

I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on how you achieve the most story from your shoots. Please comment below.

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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When Dani and I were married back in May 2008, we had two of our assistants shoot our wedding video (I helped shoot the father/daughter dance which made for a really cool photo op). Our assistants shot with my cameras and I ended up taking all the cameras and footage with me at the end of the wedding day. During our honeymoon, Dani and I ended up watching all of the footage from our wedding on one of the TV’s in our cabin. It was so much fun for us as a couple to just sit and watch our own raw footage the day after. I haven’t forgotten this over the last few years and I try to apply what I learned with my own wedding experience to our continuing workflow.

No matter how much our industry moves forward, we still need to be honest with ourselves and remember that we are documenting a real event involving real people with real emotion.

I understand that we want to knock our clients socks off and we should. That’s what they are usually looking for in a modern event filmmaker. Doc edits aren’t going to be something that you’ll share on your blog or use for marketing, but it is going to be something that the couple and their close family will treasure more than you ever know. We don’t typically have the emotion connection to the people giving the toasts, but the couple does. If you highlighted the father of the bride’s toast within the feature, the couple will love to remember all the “dad being dad” quirks that might otherwise be hidden forever if you didn’t share it with the couple. The full ceremony and toasts still have value even if portions of them didn’t support the story you are trying to tell in the feature.

Do you offer extended/documentary edits to your couples? What methods are you using to up-sell them? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks for watching!

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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Click here to view the embedded video.

“You can photoshop me to look better, right?” We’ve all heard that line from a bride or member of the wedding party. Well, after this tutorial we hope that you can respond, “As a matter of fact, I can!” Blemishes are a fact of life. We all have them from time to time and unfortunately so do our brides and grooms. In this tutorial, Josh will show you how we helped out a groom who cut himself shaving the morning of his wedding. Enjoy!

Andrew Waite

Supreme Commander of HDM/Lovestruck Films conquering Land, Sea, and Air in the world event filmmaking. Not satisfied with the camera always being no more than 6 feet off the ground, Andrew has pushed his work to new "levels" by incorporating underwater and aerial cinematography into his wedding films.

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So you just finished up a beautiful 20-minute wedding feature and you are so excited to send it off to the couple. You create and upload a trailer to tease everyone and everybody cannot wait to see the final product. But wait! The full wedding film is on DVD…only.

But there are dozens if not hundreds of individuals eager-to-view, what about them? How will they get to see it? One solution is for the couple to buy some extra DVD/Blu-ray copies, but for the most part, couples are unmotivated to do so and have more on their plate.  If the full wedding film is restricted to optical media only, most of the guests at the wedding will never have the chance to see the full, finished masterpiece that you spent the last 2 weeks piecing together.

Making your longer edits (features, short forms, or whatever the kids are calling them now-a-days) available online creates an open avenue to display your true talent and product to anyone connected to the happy couple. The video above shares some ideas and some basic how-to’s to get you started if you haven’t already began sharing your longer edits online.

The couple is going to be thrilled that their film is online and easily shareable. You can offer full wedding video hosting as an addition to a package or surprise the couple with it after they receive their package. It’s up to you as to how you’ll offer it, but the key is to understand how important it is for the couple to have it sharable online. Happy couples should always be your top priority!

Since everyone’s sites are setup differently, I can’t tell you the best way to add an online checkout to your site/blog. We use PayPal because it easy and most web-savvy folks have a PayPal account. I’d encourage you to explore some of the options that PayPal has for merchants. Google Checkout is another popular online selling tool which has grown in popularity the last couple of years. Definitely worth looking into as well.

Has sharing your features online worked out for you and your company? Let me know. Have some concerns? Lemme know your thoughts

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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dis•trac•tion |disˈtrak sh ən|

noun

a thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else : the freaking photographer jumped in my shot, causing a distraction from the bride.

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin distractio(n-), from the verb distrahere (see distract).

In this tutorial we will demonstrate how it is possible to remove a person (in this case a photographer) from a moving shot using simple rotoscoping techniques in After Effects. Although this tutorial is 28 minutes long, the technique only takes about 10 minutes to complete. For the purposes of this tutorial, we choose the most difficult scenario in which to demonstrate this technique. It’s worth noting that we typically spend less than 5 minutes “fixing” a typical shot. Also, this technique can be applied in any and all situations whether it be a wedding, corporate video, music video, etc.

Andrew Waite

Supreme Commander of HDM/Lovestruck Films conquering Land, Sea, and Air in the world event filmmaking. Not satisfied with the camera always being no more than 6 feet off the ground, Andrew has pushed his work to new "levels" by incorporating underwater and aerial cinematography into his wedding films.

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Hello interwebs!

It’s been awhile…I missed you all. Super excited to share and interact with everyone again! Today I’m talking about the most heated and controversial issue in not only the event filmmaking world, but the entire broadcast and film industry. If you haven’t heard, Apple released the newest edition of their editing software, Final Cut Pro X. Within hours of its release on the App Store, industry professionals berated the product and the company and made it extremely clear they it did not meet their high expectations.

Even weeks after the software’s release, the dust still has not settled and the mere mention of the term “FCPX” draws heated debates and furor on social media sites and blogs.

Below are comments from one of Epic’s shooters and editors, Stewart Smith. He and I are on the same page when it comes to Final Cut Pro X, and I wanted to share with all of you what he has to say.

By now obviously, we all know about FCP X and it’s flaws and the massive debate that it’s caused the pro video world. Everywhere you look it seems that people either absolutely hate it or absolutely love it. It doesn’t seem that there’s anyone that’s “on the fence” with the product. Well, I, like so many others, awoke last Tuesday with the pleasant surprise of seeing FCP X available to download in the Mac App Store. So, with my Apple Fan Boy membership card gripped tightly in hand, I too threw my hat into the ring and forked over the $300 to download the latest and greatest software. And upon my first launch of the software, I was completely impressed. I could natively edit raw h.264 files from my Canon EOS cameras, adding color correction, effects, and transitions, and then preview my timeline WITHOUT HAVING TO RENDER!? Coming from FCP7, that is completely phenomenal. What would have used to have been a 3-5 minute render bar that locked up my interface now sat humbly in the background chugging along as my timeline played back without a hitch. I was in love.

It wasn’t until later that day that I saw the tweets come rolling in, with users complaining about the lack of multicam, inability to import legacy FCP files, and importing and exporting XML, OMF ,and EDL files. I realized that maybe this release wasn’t quite what we all assumed it to be, but it certainly wasn’t a waste of a software. Now, I’ve read some pretty ridiculous blog posts and seen some die-hard Apple fans jump overboard only to be swooped up by Adobe’s CS5.5, but do we seriously have nothing better to do than to complain about the features lacking in FCP X? The last I checked, my copy of FCP7 still runs just as well as it did last month. I can still edit incredible footage from a ton of codecs, multicam, and export whatever I want as whatever codec I so desire.

I’m not saying FCP X is the perfect end-all beat-all solution for everyone, but I am saying it has some tremendous potential. It’s a complete rewrite of the entire framework of the NLE that we all know and love, and it packs some insane performance and features some really innovative ways to edit and organize media.

As a FCP user for the past 4 years, I’ve grown to love the interface of the legacy FCP, but the fact is, it was designed over a decade ago and simply expanded upon until it reached the previous FCP7 iteration. It was time for a new design, a new foundation, and a new architecture, and that is exactly what Apple has created with FCP X. No, it may not be where we would all have hoped that it would be on launch day, but I’m sure that given time, Apple will listen to us and will provide an answer to our prayers. I’m not opposed to learning to use Adobe Premiere Pro, and in fact, I’m training myself on it, as well as FCP X right now. I do believe however, that the best tool in any filmmaker’s arsenal is his or her ability to tell a story…whether they use FCP7, Adobe CS5, FCPX, Avid, or any other NLE is a secondary consideration. In time, I think that the new features that FCPX presents to us will allow us to tell stories more effectively and more efficiently, and for now I suggest that we embrace the new framework and learn how to use this new tool so that when the time is right to take our businesses into full blown post production using FCP X, we will already be efficient in our storytelling.

Some of the things I LOVE about FCP X:

-64 bit processing: Simply put, it lets us FLY when we’re editing.

-OpenCL support: Like Motion has for a while now, our GPUs will accelerate our editing speed

-Smart Collections: It’s really awesome to be able to find clips based on keywords, rather than by knowing in which bin you put them.

-ColorSync: To match the color of one shot to another with little effort is truly awesome.

Some things I HATE about FCP X:

-The new color correction interface- just from habit I really still prefer the wheels to manually CC footage.

-The lack of a straightforward way to media manage, save forms of projects, and hand off edits to clients.

-No support for Multicam, or exporting/importing XML, EDL, and OMF files.

Given time, I think Apple will address our qualms with FCP X, and we will all be happy and sleep well at night once again. I’d like to quote Larry Jordan in saying “…I think that within the next 18 months virtually all of us will be running FCPX and wondering how we lived without it.”

If you feel that Premiere Pro better suits your needs as a professional editor, yet you intend to still run Macintosh machines, then you should consider the following:

Adobe refuses to support OpenCL and instead they insist on using their proprietary CUDA architecture through NVidia in their Mercury Playback Engine. Basically that means that, if you are running a multicore machine like a quad core i7 or a Mac Pro, you will see performance gains from the 64 bit architecture. BUT if you are using a MacBook Pro or an iMac, you will not see GPU accelerated rendering because there are currently only 3 NVidia graphics cards that are compatible with the Mac Pros exclusively. Therefore, on a new MacBook Pro, you can import and edit native DSLR h.264 footage, but the moment that you add a color correction filter or any other effect, you must render the file in order to get full quality playback at the full frame rate. Contrast that to FCPX where you could add 5 or more effects to the clip and still get perfectly smooth playback without having to pre-render.

At this time, I do not think that there is a perfect software solution to our needs as editors. I do however think that it may be coming in an update to FCP X. We should use the software that best fits our needs as editors, and that helps us to tell the most compelling stories in as efficient of manner as possible.

It doesn’t matter if you’re using FCP X, Adobe, Avid, Edius, Vegas, FCP7, or iMovie. If it helps you to tell your story, it’s the right product for you.

Eric Kmetz

Eric Kmetz is the lead filmmaker for Epic Motion, based in Detroit, MI. Named one of the 2010 EventDV top 25 filmmakers, Eric has been a full-time wedding filmmaker since 2009. In his spare time he devotes himself to being as kmawesome as legally allowed. Furthermore, 83% of people agree…he's the bees knees. True story.

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This video post will teach you how to create a simple visual organization of your backlog using a wipey board and post it notes. Learn what you can reap when you add a “Rewards Jar” in the mix!

I want to know how this works for you. Leave a comment below on what you choose to put in your rewards jar so that others can get inspired too!

To gain access to Chris P. Jones backlog training, click here, and if you want to get the training for free, simply submit an educational video to the In[Focus] blog.  That offer is launching soon, so read more about it by clicking here.

Meg Simone

Wedding filmmaker, avid skier, and travel enthusiast!

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G’day, blog followers!

Jet Kaiser here today to share a little time/money saving technique for us event filmmakers.

Those that are using DSLR’s know that it can be a pain to locate clips and stay chronological when editing from multiple cameras. When you transcode your footage, the original date created time is terminated since it is a newly created clip, making it impossible to view the clips chronologically once in FCP. Batch renaming your clips prior to transcoding will ensure that your clips stay together just as they were shot. When you are editing, you will have all you ceremony footage together and the toasts and dances from all angles will be sequentially and chronologically numbered to the precise second.

Batch renaming workflow is as follows-

1. Back up the footage!
2. Place all of the footage from all your cameras into one folder (some might choose not to include prep footage with the batch considering their might be footage from 2 different locations that you might not want to be sequenced together).
3. Using a renaming program, batch rename all the clips together while the files are arranged under “original date created”. Renaming a file does not change the date/time created (shot), only the name.
4. Transcode files as normal (MPEG Streamclip, Compressor)
5. Import in FCP

First and foremost, this workflow has increased our delivery times and has saved us a lot of time searching within our FCP browser to find related clips. Batch renaming clips might not be for everyone, especially those using the EOS plugin within FCP. I have not found a way to log and transfer renamed clips using this plugin.

Download Many Tricks’ Name Mangler

Thoughts? Comments? Am I out of my mind? Let me know (in the nicest way possible) by commenting below.

Bye!
Jet Kaiser
Jet Kaiser Films

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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Bins are the simplest form of organization in FCP. Organizing footage in bins based on a system you understand can help you locate footage very quickly. I prefer to organize by the events of the day such as preps, ceremony, and rehearsal. You can take it a step further too and separate bridal and groom footage, photo sessions, etc. In addition to footage it is often helpful to sort different audio sources from the ceremony and receptions in this manner as well. Bins can help bring overall organization to your project and help you easily locate necessary clips.

Labels are a commonly overlooked organization tool within FCP. Labels allow you to assign colored overlays to clips in the browser and timelines. I commonly use green labels for all clips able for use within an edit and red labels to mark clips that have previously been used. Finding a system of labeling that works best for you will undoubtedly help you navigate all of your media.

A method I find very useful is using a combination of labeling and sorting footage into sequences to easily scrub and pull clips for short form trailers. After sorting footage into bins, placing the footage then into sequences provides a quick and easy method to scrub footage rather than opening clips in the browser and scrubbing through. As I mark clips for use I can pull them into the V2/A3A4 tracks from V1/A1A2 and copy and paste them into my final sequence. The labeling comes into play by assigning a separate color for all used media in the V2 tracks, these labels will also be reflected in the browser.

These are some methods that I use to navigate the large amounts of media that come with filming weddings. I encourage you to explore the organizational tools within your preferred editing program to keep your editing schedule on track and cut down backlog.

Dusty Frey
Northernlight Filmworks

John and Jennifer Moon

Hi there, everyone! Jet Kaiser is here to remind you stay comfortable while you work!

Several years back, when I was first getting my feet wet in the industry, I was looking to save money every chance I got, even if it meant placing time, health & comfort on the back burner. Now that I understand the true value of time this isn’t the case anymore.

We [filmmakers] are the biggest assets to our businesses and we need to treat ourselves right. Sacrificing comfort to save a couple extra bucks is not smart. Our money needs to go where our time is spent.

Most people don’t realize how much time goes into a wedding film. Hours and hours are spent in the same position, starring at pixels during the editing process. How ergonomic is your workstation? Below is a basic list that I’ve conducted to help with setting up your work areas with comfort, health and time in mind.

A big comfy chair.

This is number one. Choose a chair that is comfortable and gives you support. Chairs with armrests that are the same height as your desk helps you eliminate shoulder stress.  I recommend the Ergohuman ME7ERG.

Monitors that are at eye-level.

I’ve seen workstations where the editor has to look up to see the screens (like playing sample video games at Wal-mart). It won’t take long for the editor to develop some nasty neck and back pain. Keeping our monitors at eye level (or slightly below) will help avoid stress in your neck and ensures that we are seeing our images clearly.

Ergonomic Mice.

Luckily there is a nice assortment of ergonomic mice on the market. Be sure to choose a mouse that fits your hand and has plenty of customizable buttons. I have found that Logitech has some great mice for folks with large hands like myself. Your mouse should fill up all the space under your hand.

Wrist support.

This is a big one and is commonly overlooked. Computer gloves and wrist supports keep your wrists at an optimal ergonomic position and helps prevent Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Last year I started using an IMAK computer glove for my mouse hand and it was the best $15 I spent in 2010. Also, when the UPS guys delivers and notices your glove when you answer the door you can tell him that you are training to become a cagefighter. :->

Lighting.

This also commonly overlooked. We moved into our new home studio last year and I designed it so we would be able to eliminate any glare on our screens. I studied how the big studios (Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, etc.) lit their workspaces and then applied the same principles to our studio. No direct light, only subtle glows.

Shuttles/Controllers.

Whether it is embedded in your editing keyboard or a stand alone like the Contour Design’s ShuttlePro, a shuttle can speed up your editing time all while keeping your hands and fingers in a comfortable position. Check out this post for more information on the ShuttlePro v2.

Have any other helpful ideas regarding ergonomics? Comment below and share your thoughts.

Stay comfy, ya’ll
Jet Kaiser
Jet Kaiser Films

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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