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Think NLE or Camera maters? Watch this
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[Lance Bachelder] “British humor is one of my absolute favorite things in the world – sensed none of it from your posts.”
That’s because you need to read his posts in the voice of David Mitchell.
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[Andrew Kimery] “With that being said, due to drastic budget cuts many news stations (especially in smaller markets) are sending out reporters by themselves with inexpensive cameras and tripods instead of dedicated camera people because a poor presence is better than no presence at all.”
And hardly anyone is watching.
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There are plenty of things to pick this video apart technically, but it probably looks great on an iPhone 😉
Regarding the editing, the on-screen text says “assembled” not “edited”. That is, stringing together selects on location. Given that this was probably done by a high-profile agency, the final editing was probably done on something hilarious, like a Flame.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Given that this was probably done by a high-profile agency, the final editing was probably done on something hilarious, like a Flame.”
No more hilarious than shooting on an “iPhone” with thousands of dollars worth of accessories used to make it work.
Including lenses.
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Simon,
Who crapped in your coffee this morning?
I haven’t seen this kind of vitriol over a perfectly innocuous spot in quite some time.
Your vehement insistence that this spot is rubbish is quite over the top. The spot is what it is.Your reaction to it is puzzling. So, to balance out your vomitus spew of negativity, here’s my opinion:
I thought it was well shot, edited and effective. I LOVED the fact that they “assembled” the cut in the back of the car. That was a brilliant tie-in to an outstanding “feature” that only the Bentley can offer (His & Hers fold down iPads!)
The message was on point. The execution was first rate. The “assembled in the car” twist was a nice message to this community that we really have entered a new world order where expensive, exclusive tools are no longer needed to make quality images for clever marketing campaigns. Haters can hate, but I appreciate the leap forward in technology and production craft that this spot represents.
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Right. So these guys have all that iPhone gear and they don’t know how to click and hold on the screen for the AE/AF lock? Which does lock WB as well as part of the AE lock.
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Thank you Mark…exactly the reason I posted this.
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[Mark Raudonis] “I haven’t seen this kind of vitriol over a perfectly innocuous spot in quite some time.
Your vehement insistence that this spot is rubbish is quite over the top. The spot is what it is.Your reaction to it is puzzling. So, to balance out your vomitus spew of negativity, here’s my opinion:”
Ouch! Isn’t that a bit harsh? I think this piece raises some very interesting questions about a number of things, to do with marketing, with technical quality, with story-telling, with positioning and so on, and if I’ve overstated the case it’s just in the hope of drawing discussion rather than antagonising anyone, though I’ve obviously succeeded in the latter a lot better than the former, so apologies for that.
A couple of cheap quips about the Nouvelle Vague aside, I don’t think I’ve been unfair to it, to be honest.
I think we can all agree that technically this would be unlikely to get passed for broadcast without a special dispensation – the strobing headlights issue alone would certainly get it knocked back. The compression artifacts through the fade up on that opening shot as the guy walks to the car are pretty embarrassing. (The lens flare at 1:50 looks nasty too from this point of view.) If you’re making stuff for the web you need to be on top of things like this. The B&W treatment is also poorly executed – almost certainly a decision make in post rather than planning. I don’t understand some of the focus decisions if that’s what they are – to me they look a lot more like errors than stylistic choices of any kind.
As a piece of editing I certainly don’t “hate” it and I certainly don’t think and didn’t say that it’s rubbish, but then neither can I find anything to “LOVE”, I’m afraid. Content-wise it seems to me to be a very average corporate video with nothing remotely special to recommend it – quite what either Bentley or Apple think they are doing putting out something this humdrum, I can’t begin to understand. You’d have thought “premium” production values were at the heart of both brands, not to mention top quality creative … Those guys in the cars are bending our ears about design quality but an opposite aesthetic is being thrust at us in the visuals and the execution.
I would contend that in terms of “story-telling” it’s fairly weak – in particular the reveal of the hero feature seems to be very flat and lifeless. But I think what’s weakest is that there’s really no creative concept to speak of – or rather such a creative concept as there is (“we’re going to make this an iShoot”) is extraneous to the piece itself and is just not that interesting or even remotely original in May 2014.
(The truly bizarre thing for me is how lame a feature they have decided to highlight, but that’s another matter. In-car entertainment in a Bentley? Haven’t normal cars had that for decades by now? OK, so that’s exaggeration for rhetorical effect but surely an iPad glued on to a slide-out tea-tray has to rank as pretty unimpressive at this point?)
I think I find the assumptions behind the enterprise as a whole somewhat lazy. The big issue for me is really not just that the Emperor has no clothes but that the clothes he isn’t wearing went out of fashion about a year ago – and in today’s marketplace that’s surely a bit lame. I think at this point even tribes in the deepest Amazon rainforest are aware that you can shoot OK pictures with an iPhone and edit them on an iPad.
Also what is the take-away as far as the iPhone picture quality is concerned? I think the message is very confused.
Are we meant to be amazed at how good it looks? In which case it’s got to be judged a failure because it really doesn’t look amazing, surely even to the untrained eye.
Or are we meant to be seeing it as a new kind of DV-type grunge aesthetic? Probably not because that would be an odd kind of claim to be making.
Or are we just meant to be pleasantly surprised that it’s “good enough” and ask nothing else? Clearly it’s good enough for news gathering and the occasional insert where quality isn’t paramount. But the thing I find hard to understand is why you’d want to associate “good enough” with either of these brands. Since when did Apple start to espouse “good enough” as a marketing angle? Actually, don’t answer that because I’m rather inclined to think it has now crept into their lexicon and is here to stay. Which if it’s true is not just odd, but a downright shame.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
It was a simple statement. You can tell a story with simple tools This point seems to elude you.
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I applaud the creator, NOT the critic.
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