Canon Live Learning Tour: Dallas

Even though our Editor Paul has been swamped with other projects, I held his feet to the fire and conned him into editing the footage the attendees gathered during the Dallas stop on the Canon Live Learning Tour.  The result, CLL Dallas, is the second installment of our ongoing mini-mini-series, Video Victims Unit. 

This concept - and the attendant dialogue - was generated and captured "in-the-moment".  I was wracking my brain for an angle and came up with the silly idea of "death by pixels".  After we used our Canon printer to generate sheets of solid red, green, and blue pigment, I rustled up a three-ring hole punch and began producing piles of pesky pixels. Dialogue was improvised as we blocked out our shot sequences.

For this Dallas-based mini-production, we expanded our camera coverage beyond the single location interrogation room we explored during the CLL Boson segment. Our Dallas team shot scenes in three locations and tried a variety of different camera support tools. These included the iDC Quick Release U-Boat, the iDC Run & Gun, a Blackbird Camera Stabilizer from Camera Motion Research, and a generic Camera Slider.

This group concentrated on image capture - almost everyone generated shots that were used in the final edit - so the audio was handled in a rather quick-and-dirty style. 

We used a boom-mounted a Sennheiser ME66 shotgun wirelessly connected to a master camera where we let the in-camera automatic gain control do its wacky thing. During our exterior scene, the audio recording suffered from an extremely high ambient noise level provided by a mix of trucks, dumpster-divers, and low altitude fly-overs. The hard walls of the interior location gave us a lesson in the perils of echo and 20/20 hindsight indicated that double-system lavalier mics would have been a better solution.  To take a bit of the curse off of the in-camera dialogue recordings, Paulie mixed in a bunch of police-action sound effects in post.  As always, I suggest that serious productions should utilize double-system sound a dedicated digital audio recorder.  Credit also goes to Editor Paul for the interesting and gritty approach to color grading.

Good job, Dallas! Seattle is the next stop on the tour and i can't wait to see what the CLL attendees come up with in the chilly northwest!

- Bruce