Real Progress

I've made real progress this week. OK, I had to re-film everything I did last week, but we got through it much more quickly, the sound is good and the lighting is much better too. It should be, I have a total of 6 tripods set up in a very small space!











With just this one light on, you can see how dazzling it is, so you can imagine what it's like with all six on!















Doing the close-ups is more difficult than wider shots. Not only do we have to make sure that important things don't fall off the edge, as it were, I also have to remember what illustrations are going to be put onto the screeen with each shot, and make sure I leave room for them in the picture.








I've improved the sound by using a conference microphone. The sound is clear, no popping, but it is in mono. Fortunately the editing software can deal with this and map the left channel onto the empty right channel. I'm getting a short extension lead made up so that I don't even have to do that - it will feed one signal into both channels.

I have one last technical problem to overcome - Colour-matching. I'm finding that with some of the close-up shots in particular, the colour on the film is very different from reality. My hands are bright orange and the mat is very dark. In other shots the colours are more true, and I don't know why this is. I can tweak the colours almost indefinitely on the computer, but this wide level of control is itself a problem - what parameters do I change? Such control makes it easy to screw the image up completely, if I'm not careful. Less green, more blue, dim the highlights, lighter overall, darker overall - the possibilities are endless.

I'm doing some more filming tomorrow, and some of that needs to be outside, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the weather.