For those curious about the making of my Tribute in Light short film, here are a few production notes, loosely structured. It’s as close to a behind-the-scenes as I can do for this project.
Exposure: All the takes were shot as stills on my Nikon D3S using a Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8 G lens. The built in intervalometer in the Nikon bodies is super handy and it’s a shame more cameras don’t have this feature. I used intervals ranging between two and four seconds, depending on the amount of motion in the scene. Typically, the long-distance shots were on a four second interval and the closer shots were on either two or three second intervals.
The exposure time for each frame was usually half of the interval time. In other words, for a four second interval, I usually used a two second exposure. This is equivalent to the 180º shutters used in traditional motion-film cameras. It lets the motion in each frame blur nicely into the next. For a few of the shots, I used a slightly greater exposure ratio—three seconds on a four second interval—to further smooth things out.
Everything was shot wide open at f/2.8 to keep the monster of aperture flicker at bay. The lens I was using usually isn’t too bad about introducing flicker, but I didn’t want to have to spend time in post fixing anything that appeared so I played it safe. One of these days, I’m going to find a lens or two that I can fix the aperture on instead of having it cycle on each exposure.
Locations: To determine where I wanted to shoot from, I did a lot of research looking at where great photographs of the lights were made in years past and then reversed engineered roughly where they were taken from. There’s more about how I did this in the interview I did with Lou Lesko on Photocine News.
The Edit: I assembled the still frames into 4K resolution video clips using After Effects. I then edited the clips into a finished product using Final Cut Pro X on my 13" MacBook Air. Without a discreet GPU and a limited color gamut screen, it wasn’t an ideal machine to use for this purpose, especially with the 4K resolution files. By using proxy media for playback, however, it worked out decently enough as long as I exercised patience. I also borrowed an external display at a few points during the edit to see the colors more accurately. There were many moments when I wished I had a new Sandy Bridge 15" MacBook Pro in New York with me.
As to the structure of the edit itself, I had a story arc in mind during my pre-production research. The sequencing of shots from far away to close up and then to the new building was part of the concept from very early in my thinking about this project. I’m really happy that all the footage that I created enabled that vision to be realized in the final edit. Speaking of which…
Music: The soundtrack is a 83-second edit of Simplicity by Emmett Cooke that I licensed via his commercial website. I was sold on it as soon as I heard the break at the 30 second mark which lined up perfectly with the close-up shots on the story arc. In fact, once I settled on this piece of music, the edit you see came together in just a couple of hours as I returned to the west coast from New York. It’s almost as if the composition were made just for this project.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.