An Ordinary Life

I’ve designed the sound for a short film called An Ordinary Life directed by Lorne Guy of GoodGuys Productions. This isn’t the first piece we’ve done together, in the past I designed the sound for a short entered into the parallel lines competition called Arklight:

This film however is very different in nature and deals with real human issues. Serco approached Lorne to commission a film that explored themes of care and the realities of the life of carers. The film tells three interwoven stories of those affected.

An Ordinary Life from Lorne Guy on Vimeo.

It’s very interesting the difference in working on these two shorts. Obviously with arklight as a fantasy we could go a little more outlandish, creating the sound of the spaceship from jet planes and seismographs. In an ordinary life we were a lot more subtle reinforcing the location recordings with subtle Foley or little sonic character points to steer attention and stress vulnerability.

Lorne was good enough to contribute his voice for some slightly heavier breathing for Bill’s character while I provided the wheezing. Being unhealthy does have it’s uses.

I really enjoyed working with Lorne on this project and hope to carry on this dynamic on other projects.

PD150 Training Series

I’ve produced a short training series on the Sony PD150 camera for Winchester university over summer. Don’t know your shutter speed from your frame rate? Wondering why camera operators are obsessed with zebras? Perhaps this could be just the thing.

Regardless of whether you own a PD150, something better or something worse the videos are designed to painlessly introduce you to the concepts inside all cameras and are broken into bitesize chunks.

Video 1:
Unless you’re a student at Winchester University an introduction to how to book kit is probably worth skipping this one.

Video 2:
Any cameraman worth his salt should know how to efficiently set up a tripod. This is demonstrated here with a libec TH650DV.

Video 3:
An introduction to the basic functions of the DV cameras such as powering the camera, different camera modes and where camera video outputs are.

Video 4:
The simplest functions camera framing are discussed… Zooming and Focusing

Video 5:An operator must know how to adjust the light levels of their camera and the reference changes to set them correctly. Key controls for doing so (iris, gain, shutter speed, ND filters and zebra) are all explained.

Video 6:
Good images mean nothing without good sound. Here I explain how to go about basic mic recording on the Sony range

Video 7:
A little bit of information about timecode, tape and recording formats

Masz

Masz is a forthcoming project that I have been working as on as 1^st AD, cameraman and editor for Yvon Bonenfant. We’d previously worked together on packaging his wonderful show Beacons into a trailer for producers.

Masz is a tribute to Diamanda Galás’ incredible work, Plague Mass, premiered at the MIX 2011 Queer Experimental Film Festival in New York City on Nov. 19th, 2011. Yvon is now circulating the final version of the work to festivals. I’ll list a link as soon as it has done it’s rounds.

For now here are some lovely stills to excite you: