(Watch in HD if you have bandwidth)

Filmdash is an annual 48-hour film-making challenge where participants plan, script, shoot, edit and upload a film based on a theme and an individual brief to include certain lines of dialogue and a prop.

Last year I did a music video, but this year with the them of “Happiness”, I thought I’d do something a little different. Here’s “Grandma’s House”, which was exactly that – a trip to see my parents with the little ones.

This is a music video I made today for the track Ut Nos Vivicaret taken from Xela’s forthcoming album In Bocca Al Lupo, on our label Type.

Best viewed using the Full Screen option at the bottom right of the player, and use headphones instead of speakers if you don’t have much bass.

Film Dash

I’m taking part in a 48 hour film-making challenge called Film Dash, which is part of the Hello Digital festival happening in Birmingham next week.

Last night we were given a brief to produce a film in 48 hours, to be finished by 7pm on Sunday.

The Brief

The brief was based on the work of Birmingham film producer Sir Michael Balcon who’s having a retrospective as part of the festival. He’s most famous for his work at Ealing Studios including the film Whisky Galore.

Each of the teams taking part in the challenge were given a quote that had to be included in the resulting film in some way (they wanted dialogue really, I think) and for the title of one of his films to be used as a motif in some way within the film. “To keep us all honest” these were given out at random and only last night at 7pm.

So my brief was: Use the line “A sign of what was coming to us”, taken from the film Whisky Galore, and the title of the film “The Square Ring” as a source of inspiration.

There was a five minute limit on the length of the film, so I’ve edited Xela’s lengthy 12 minute track into a four minute track that uses key parts from the full piece.

It’s bleak, it’s a little bit ’scary’ as my daughter puts it, but she did say ‘again’ a few times this morning. It’s a bit of a visual riddle too.

I was limited with everything for this, so I thought I’d keep things simple and just use what kit I had to hand.

My setup and process

I don’t use video too much these days (I was a VJ for a few years), but I do have a good snappy pocket camera (a Leica D-Lux 3) that takes video, but my problem with it is while it’s got a good lens, it just wasn’t going to be able to give me the really shallow depth of field I use in my photography.

If you’re familiar with the Japanese term ‘bokeh‘ (a certain quality of blurriness in photographs), you’ll know that it’s important to me. So, I have an old Hasselblad that is gathering dust on a shelf, which has a nice, large, focussing screen.

Combining the two in a TTV (through the viewfinder) style, I used the Leica as a video camera to record the focussing screen of the Hasselblad, whilst balancing various magnifying lenses, glasses, objects on and around it to create the visual effects you see here.

Oh and this was all in an hour from 6.30 until 7.30 while my daughter was making ‘I’m about to wake up’ noises from her room. So in the other hand (think that’s the third one) I had the baby monitor!

Anyway – I took a handful of short videos, loaded them into iMovie on my Mac (which took longer than I thought), did a short edit, had some breakfast, added the music, exported it all as a full quality DV file, then converted the DV file to a Quicktime MOV and uploaded it to Vimeo.

So I don’t know if that’s of any use to anyone, but I thought it worth just noting down a bit about the process to prove that you don’t have to have a really really expensive video camera to shoot a Youtube quality video (even if you don’t like the end result!), and often you should just use whatever you have to hand.

I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with on the Film Dash!