[Mark Suszko]

first this:

ISBN 13 978-0-941188-10-4

then this:

ISBN-13: 978-0761163237

And get a tripod.

[Mark Suszko]

Nobody here told you to do a careless job. Or to ignore craft.

But most of your posts sound like trolling, just to keep a conversation going, without any end or conclusion. Some people get off on that, seeing how long they can draw out the thread before everyone loses their collective (redacted). I find that incredibly sad.

These people have tried to help you. They’re telling you that you’re navel-gazing instead of executing. The constant re-hashing sounds like you’re stalling instead of making something. Everybody’s trying to encourage you to go and start by using established techniques and to master them first, and then, if you want to, go explore more exotic implementations later.

You’re trying to triathlon before you’ve learned to crawl. From your sample videos, and I’m putting this delicately, you show a need to further develop the basics of shot composition, editing, and writing first. And the acting was… not the best. Everybody starts somewhere, and nobody’s ever done learning. But when we teach a child to write or to do math, we start with mastering ABC’s and counting numbers. We don’t start with Dostoyevski and tensor calculus. Get solid in the basics. I’ve spent over three decades just trying to master the instinct for where exactly to put a cut. And I’m still working at it.

Learn visual grammar and how to employ it effectively and economically. The specific technical means has NEVER been the most important issue in film making. You can make a compelling film with just an iPhone – Tangerine proved that. You don’t need gimbals, you don’t need drones, you don’t need exotic lenses, dollies, sliders, jibs, or hovercrafts. You don’t technically even need a *camera* to be a film-maker, if you’re an animator.

You -DO- need a compelling, logical, story. Written, or found thru recording live people, their words and behavior.

You need -something- to capture it with. Whatever you can afford or otherwise obtain. It need not be the best, it need not be expensive, it just has to work.

You need a means to edit what you captured into a finished form and deliver it to some audience.

Everything beyond that is really peripheral. Really. Things that may be nice to have, that can enhance, but they won’t save a bad script, or a badly lit and shot scene. Or bad acting. And having them to use is not the point of the exercise. Technology is only a vehicle, a means. Not the end.

Let go of the circular logic, the endless debating without conclusions, and dithering about things that are not essential to the craft, and the pretensions. You want to be profound, -simplicity- is the most profound thing there is. Haiku versus Ulysses. You want help in achieving that, many people here will gladly help. But we can’t add water to a full glass. You’ve gotten dozens of versions of the same answer, and you won’t accept any of them. You can’t be helped until you *accept* the help and act on it. You won’t get better, until you put ego aside and open yourself to a different take on things.

There’s just one secret to becoming a good film maker:

Make films. Fail. Make more films.

Repeat, until you don’t fail every time.
(and always use someone else’s money)

[Mark Suszko]

This is a fundamental flaw in your approach to shooting and editing. Read Walter Murch’s “In the Blink Of An Eye.” The way our eyes and brain work, taking in and processing images, the eye and brain are working “cuts-only”. The eye has no zoom ability. But it DOES focus. Every time we blink, the brain is assessing the new frame presented to it and finding what’s changed from the previous moment. “Persistence of Vision”. The eye sees two shots, with the same general scene, in order: a tight and then a wide, and the brain does your “zoom” * for you.*

As part of our craft, we orchestrate the sequencing of these re-framings into a *montage*, and the brain interprets the sequence we’ve given it to synthesize a narrative. Not only that, but the nature of how we sequence the images gives a greater, intentional meaning, than the stand-alone images.

You trying to cover everything in one shot as an economy move, by whip-zooming, goes against all of that classic theory of visual communication, and to no benefit.

The earliest kind of filming of theatrical performance used a wide shot, locked-off camera, stuck in the third row center, with the POV of a patron in the seat. It documented what was going on, but that’s all. It was when the pioneers began changing the location of the camera and focusing our attention on specific details of a scene, and then cutting between these angles, putting all of this into a montage, a planned sequence, that we created modern visual communication, film grammar. It works, because it’s how our eyes and brains work,

Go make a movie.

[Mark Suszko]

For giggles, I went ahead and commanded the share over the objections of the pop-up warning; it’s rendering out now, I’ll look it over when done. In the dialog box for the share, in the area underneath where tags go, I did spot something I hadn’t seen before: it put in a tag that said: “excessive shake”. Maybe it’s just more than the stabilizer can handle?

Still want to know how to force the stabilizing to complete, though.

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t think high pass and low pass are necessarily the filters you want, if you’re just wanting to smooth out the dynamic peaks and valleys. I used to use a freeware called “Levelator” to treat my audio externally, then drop it back into the timeline, but you get a similar effect in FCPX using the Limiter audio effect plug-in.

[Mark Suszko]

You can use what his campaign has paid for and owns and gives you. News clips will need clearance and a fee from the TV station and/or network. Same for newspaper stills.

Screen-capping the other side’s commercials to pull shots and quotes from is iffy territory; better ask a lawyer.

This is one of the reasons to pay for a campaign “tracker”: he or she does nothing but follow the target everywhere, recording all the time. If a situation comes up where the target person makes a useful quote, you can buy it from the tracker straight away, rather than deal with the TV stations. The tracker’s angle may be a little different and framing or sound may not always be as good, but you own the footage free and clear.

[Mark Suszko]

Couldn’t hurt. Not knowing before going is much worse.

[Mark Suszko]

I couldn’t find the “Wayne’s World” Clip with the “excessive zoom!!!” lower third in it. These had to serve.

[Mark Suszko]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APHcYegE6ns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKOxbCx1LNc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIveqr4bMOI

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, in an effort to widen the discussion for the benefit of others, I’d say there’s a visual grammar to choice of shot and framing. It’s been evolved from over 100 years of motion picture craft in practice. Zooms are not something you want to use a lot, because they call attention to themselves more than to the thing you’re trying to zoom on. Better to make it with cuts, or a dolly shot. (Dolly could also be read here as Steadicam, jib, slider)

When you can’t make a physical move, for budget or other reasons, a zoom is substituted, but often that’s less ideal, because visually it’s not changing the parallax relationships between objects in the visual field. And this can have a subliminal consequence for the narrative. Best and first choice is to physically move the lens in and out, and add movement thru editing in a kinetic manner. Think of the zoom lens as more like a variable prime.

That said, I’ve made zoom moves, shooting mostly news, but also PSA’s and promos and pre-recorded addresses/speeches. When I do them, they can take over a minute to go from stop to stop, and I’m usually hand-rolling my focus at the same time. I’m trying my best to make the zoom itself imperceptible. These days, I like doing that zoom in the NLE, from a 4K res shot; the camera operator NEVER fails to get that move right:-)

A dead-slow zoom in or out, to reveal something in the framing or impose a new framing context, is certainly not a sin. But to use a cooking metaphor, it’s a condiment, not a main ingredient. Snap-zooms from tight to full-wide or the reverse, meant for the audience to see, IMO are best left for episodes of Power Rangers, or music videos where you often make up the rules as you go. To most of us here though, online power-zooms imply inept consumer camcorder home movie shtick.