Kelsey Wynns

Had a blast shooting all the fun dogs and pups! Bishop the Great Dane was a little older than 9 months when I shot this. Music by http://morehazards.com/. Had to take down Ratatat, luckily More Hazards more Heros are letting me use their music for free! Check them out!

I had an itch to try out a GoPro. So of course I bought a pair of them used on craigslist. With a newer version just coming out the week before I got a pretty good deal. In fact, I sold them back for more than I paid for them. They are amazing cameras for their price range and versatility. With attachments you can stick them on just about anything. Though quality is obviously lacking in some spots–mostly due to under-exposing the subjects–it’s a great buy. Can’t wait to find an excuse to buy the newer model with an updated sensor (old sensor sucks at medium to low light, and not as sharp).

I bought a harness for Bishop which I could easily gaff tape the GoPro to.  Also made a monopod out of pvc which made a great stick cam. My main goal was to get up close. This is very important as GoPros have very wide lenses, so objects will tend to look distant.

Everything was shot at 60fps and slowed down to 23.976. The super slow motion I got using Twixtor. I didn’t spend a ton of time with Twixtor, so you can see artifacting on some clips.

I was very lucky to have Kyle and Jen ask me to creatively film their wedding. Not only was it a amazingly fun wedding, but Kyle and Jen are beautiful, loving and kind people to work with.

The location was the Aerial, a rooftop venue on Broadway in Nashville Tennessee.

The weather was perfect.

I shot on my Nikon D7000 as usual with a 50mm 1.2/f at 720 30p. During the ceremony I used my 70-200mm VRII. I had a second shooter who shot with a Canon 7D. She shot with an L series 35mm at 1080 60p (for slow mo). Not sure if the settings weren’t optimal on the 7D, but the D7000 had a much higher quality image. No contest.

If it wasn’t so bloody hot I think I’d keep doing this macro insect thing. By the time I’m done I’m SOAKED with sweat.

Would love to find a Mantis with red eyes…as this guy was so little (about an inch), I wonder if his would eventually turn.

Used my 50mm f1.2 in reverse, with and without extension tubes.

The clarity is great…but I think a really nice micro lens would take it up to the next level. (Nikon calls them micro, not macro, which is actually the correct verbage).

I’ve been hit with the creative bug incessantly ever since the Nashville Cicada orgy began several weeks ago. (see what I did there?)

I’ve been meaning to get into macro cinematography and this was a great excuse (I’m actually not sure if that’s really a thing…either way it is now). I had to purchase a new reversing ring after upgrading my 50mm not too long ago. Got the ring in this week and took it out for a spin today. This is what I came up with:

I was surprised how much light I needed to make this work. With an aperture of f/16 and the addition of light robbing extension tubes I had to use a little bump in ISO here and there even on a bright and sunny day (shutter was 1/50). Also, since I’m not using bellows, my focus is controlled by BARELY moving the subject. I’m excited to try out other bugs, but with this setup the bug will need to be strapped down or dead. When filming nature this is probably not ideal.

We’ve had him for nearly 2 weeks and he has already gained 6 lbs since I took this footage…crazy!

I’ll have to do a couple of these throughout the next couple months as he gets huge.

Played disc golf several weeks ago at Two Rivers here in Nashville and noticed this sweet skate park as I was leaving. There was PERFECT light begging me to shoot but I knew by the time I came back with my camera it would be long gone. Came back the next day and captured this:

If you know anyone in this video feel free to pass this along and share! I wish I would have grabbed some of their emails…very thankful they let me shoot!

As far as how the shoot went it was both extremely fun and slightly difficult. This was mostly due to fast movement, never knowing when someone is going to do something sweet, and constant light changes (moving clouds).

I used a 16-85mm f/3.5, 70-200m f/2, and my 50mm 1.2/f.

Used Mocha to get the tracking info for After Effects applied to the intro titles (Could have spent more time on this).

The Nikon D7000 continues to impress me with it’s video capabilities.  I’m getting much much better at getting a great exposure just by look and feel, but if I happen to be underexposed I’ve learned the quality degrades fast. It’s just so hard to break the habit of shooting RAW and underexposing a tad.

Church in Semkhoz, near Moscow

When I post any creative media online (music, film, photo), I love looking through the window of analytics. You can watch it get passed along the internets to various blogs and social media.You can learn invaluable information on how people perceive it, whether good or bad. I love this because I can become better at what I do…not necessarily to please but to understand how people perceive it.

For some reason my last couple films on vimeo have been passed along in Russia…not a lot, but enough to pay attention to.  The beauty about film is that it’s so much more of a pain in the ass than other medias to rip, upload and post as your own. Because of this barrier, video gets much more accurate tracking when it comes to embeds and links on other sites. (unless of course you get auto-tuned, parodied, or it’s TV, etic)

Have you ever heard of http://vkontakte.ru? I hadn’t.  It’s a Russian born facebook clone. VERY similar to facebook. Wikipedia does a good job explaining vkontakte.ru here.

The short film Valentine is getting passed around there a little bit, with about 300% more views than on kelseyw.com. My favorite part is reading the comments…and yes, they are google translations from Russian to English…here are my top 3:

Stunning beauty spot. So thin from so movingly convey the feelings … The future for short films!

did not finish, I almost fell asleep …

so beautifully all. details of which only underlined the smoke of candles worth!

vkontakte.ru memberships are by invitation only…the site is actually in 67 different languages (including english of course) so I sent a message to someone who shared and liked my film–hoping they will see past my terrible google translation and add me, would love to check it out!

Valentine’s Day! Actually, I’m still not a huge fan of holidays that require you to buy crap for other people. Don’t get me wrong, I love to take care of my wife. I just think it’s moronic to have a day where I should feel obligated to take my wife out (or lover) for an expensive dinner filled with wine and overpriced food. I think it’s soooo much more special if I decide to do that out of my own free will (which I love to do!).

Not only that, but have you tried to go to a nice restaurant on Valentines day? Unless your lover likes waiting for 2 hours then you should feel stupid…learn how to cook a special meal and buy wine for half the price at a wine store.

Oh! The film…Preproduction was fairly limited to just an outline that I wrote a couple months ago. Even with something this simple I’m learning you can’t really over prepare for anything film. Doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t change things while shooting, but it took us a good hour and half just to pick out the the table accents. That could have been a full extra hour of shooting or planning more creative shots.

If I would have had a shot list I also could have left the lighting in place for more than one take. About every 2 minutes I was moving the lighting around. Luckily I had simple lighting.

I used the Nikon D7000 of course.
Nikkor 50mm 1.2 AIS
Nikkor 16-85mm f/3.5-5.5 dx
Manfrotto 501 HDV Fluid head
A little slider action at the end
Lighting was a cheap 300W focusing tungsten flood w/barn doors (first time using that)

I’ve got a ways to go in After Effects, but I figured I’d give blowing up a piece of Nashville a shot. Turned out okay, not great.

I think the Batman building will be my next victim…muahahaha

Switching  genres, today I will film a romantic short. I’m excited about the lighting, as that will totally make or break the mood. Or maybe I should randomly blow something up in the middle. We shall see.

Just finished about 12 hours of After Effects courses and it was finally time to start playing around. Didn’t take too long to become comfortable…This is far from mind blowing, but fun nonetheless

My two biggest takeaways?

1. Shortcut keys save soooooo much time.
2. Time for me to build another beast of a computer with 20+ gigs of ram :(

Some effects I used,

• Native motion tracking to grab the camera tracking as well as to track her eyes (didn’t feel like busting out mocha just yet)
• Animated liquify and some glow on the eyes
• Color balance and levels
• Rotobrushed her to put the blue fire behind (colorized to blue)
• Smoke media (w/motion tracking & colorized)
• Cartoon everything except for parts of her face and smoke (w/motion tracking)
• Time warp, original footage was 23.976 fps, and I halved that (great job of filling in the empty frames)
• The bright hits are just animated glow, the reason it looks so weird is the combination with time warp and the interpolated frames
• Vignette

I have no doubt I could improve on this quite a bit, but there are bigger and better things to start working on…