cheesy promo showreel I just made

[npcoombs]

http://www.workhorse.tv/suburbanshaman.mov

I did this for a friend pitching himself and his idea to the BBC. Any opinions on his presentation or the film welcome.

I know its very cheesy daytime tv stuff, but that's what he was looking for!

[Evan Kubota]

Not bad. I like the way it was shot although some more varied footage of the plants in the native context, etc might be good (and would probably come with a proper budget). The audio was generally good although about 1/4 of the way through there was quite a bit of wind noise.

[npcoombs]

Thanks for the feedback.

Audio is a continual bugbear, I keep meaning to buy myself an ME66 setup with Rycote, but always run out of money...next month I hope.

The shoot was infuriating between it raining solidly the first day, clouds drifting over on the day of the shoot (making it difficult to match colour temperature and tones), and the river where we filmed being full of tourists and cruise ships. It was very difficult to do anything other than the basics really.

I can't really say I had much directorial input into this, more of a point and shoot deal but still a lot of fun to make, and I got a nice Thai meal at the end of it for my work!!

[audadvnc]

Looks like an interesting project. You edited for the script, and the voice track makes sense, but it also limited your options because you seemed tied to the speaker, whether he was within effective mic range or not. My notes and suggestions:
- don't be afraid to use voiceovers - the one shot you did worked fine,
- get a boom mic operator for better audio (also consider a lavalier),
- watch those video clip levels; a couple face shots are way blown out,
- watch for camera shadows on the talent,
- shot continuity is haphazard - client walk-off/walk-on, facing left/right, etc.
- I saw an accidental zoom jump in the first onshore scene (might have been a good opportunity for a cover shot),
- time of day lighting conditions jump around: evening, mid-afternoon, and back.

[npcoombs]

Looks like an interesting project. You edited for the script, and the voice track makes sense, but it also limited your options because you seemed tied to the speaker, whether he was within effective mic range or not. My notes and suggestions:
- don't be afraid to use voiceovers - the one shot you did worked fine,
- get a boom mic operator for better audio (also consider a lavalier),
- watch those video clip levels; a couple face shots are way blown out,
- watch for camera shadows on the talent,
- shot continuity is haphazard - client walk-off/walk-on, facing left/right, etc.
- I saw an accidental zoom jump in the first onshore scene (might have been a good opportunity for a cover shot),
- time of day lighting conditions jump around: evening, mid-afternoon, and back.

1) Voiceovers were generally out because he wanted to be on-screen almost all the time to show off his presentation skills.

2) Definitely would have been great to have someone doing sound, but neither do I have a shotgun mic yet or could I have found an operator at such short notice, this limited compositions and options as you correctly point out.

3) The blown out face shots were on request to eliminate wrinkles!!!

4) I protested greatly about using the shot where the camera shadow creeped in but he preferred his presentation on that shot and I was overruled.

5) The zoom jump was annoying and accidental (somehow?)

6) Lighting conditions were a real pain. Not only did the time of day in which we recorded monologue change but it keep changing from cloudy to sunny back to cloudy all the time. I was relieved just to get some sort of continuity out of it - I spent a lot of time grading the shots to make them match better.

Thanks for the feedback Robert, I agree with your pretty much on all the shortcomings of the video. I would like to try and do something like this with adequate preparation and equipment, and preferably not on a river setting which was very limiting and time consuming.

Time to buy that Sennheiser set!

[Evan Kubota]

Like I said, I'm surprised the sound came out as well as it did. Were you using a wind sock? On rivers around here getting clean audio without a very good sock would be impossible. This sort of sunk a plan I had to shoot a water film near a wrecked boat.

[steve hyde]

..It's an interesting idea: covering ethnoboatanical field work and your ethnobiologist is good on camera, but the demo does not show any interesting processes. I think the demo would benefit from a short sequence that covers the process of a select plant being transformed into a commodity. For example, the camera needs to go into the world of the Thai restaurant where they use the herb that was referenced.

On a side note: I'm just back from shooting my film in the Peruvian Andes and while we were there we encountered an edible orchid that the local children of the valley where we were shooting were eating. It is a tiny yellow orchid with an edible bulb that tastes like watery mint. When we returned to town we looked up the orchid and apparently very little is known about it and it is unnamed in the book. The local Quechua word for it is shaka shaka. I'm sure the word is an anamonapia since the plant is crunchy like an apple.

Anyway, cool project idea..

[Nigel]

Very BBC. There were some framing issues that I thought were minor like to much headroom.

Otherwise it was pretty good. I dunno if I would watch it if it was all on MiniDV. It blew out to much and looked to flat.

Good Luck
PS--Get rid of the rowing/crotch shot.