Waves crashing against lighthouses can be impressive and I remember seeing an interview with a lighthouse from the series of images below. The idea of seeing the individual who is photographed and hearing things from his perspective are interesting. When I find that video I will link to it.
“If you were young and healthy and if they needed labour then you were selected as slave labour. You would have suffered a slow death rather than a fast one”. This soundbite is 13 minutes in.
In this documentary a concentration camp survivor takes two girls who are the age she was when she arrived through the camp and tells them about her experiences.
We owe it to future generations to keep re-sharing these accounts and documentaries to prevent such actions from ever happening again.
I have just finished watching the documentary and I feel almost shell shocked. I have been to the camp and I have read about the topic. I have also watched a number of topics on this topic. What makes this the most poignant documentary is that this woman, this grandmother of eight is making sure that future generations are aware of what Auschwitz life was like. She tells us about survival.
When I was in Spain I started to read “The Bomber War” because it’s a topic I do not know much about the topic. It’s interesting to read about the technology that they used for guidance, for detection and for the bombing. It’s also to read about how one thousand bomber sorties were sometimes orchestrated. I’m only 40 per cent of the way through the book at the time of writing.
While reading the Bomber War I also watched a French documentary available on curioisitystream called Bombing War: From Guernica to Hiroshima“. It is a two-part documentary looking at bombing, from the experimental bombing of Guernica and the request for bombing not to target civilians to the bombing of London, Berlin and many cities in between. It takes a look at what motivated the change in bombing tactic.
By the end of the documentary, I thought that they should have addressed the cultural cost of bombing Europe. Plenty of beautiful old cities were destroyed in such a manner that we now travel to specific towns to see what Europe looked like before the Second World War and its bombing campaigns.
One sentence from the second documentary that may stick with you is that it was more dangerous to be in the bombers on their sorties than in the cities that were being bombed. This is due to the air defences, whether Flak, enemy fighters or mid-air collisions.
In the book, we read about the challenges of finding the way to the correct bombing site. They needed to navigate by the stars but also using dead reckoning. Eventually, both sides used beams to guide bombers to and from targets. If you’re interested in technology then the book is worth reading.
Although slightly off-topic the documentaries have some nice images from the war to give you a glimpse of how things looked at the time. It appears that some of the footage was colourised which is both a shame because it becomes a creative representation rather than accurate, and great because it brings certain images to life, making footage easier to interpret.
A topic that I had not come across until watching the second documentary is the dropping of Napalm on Japenese cities with more than 300,000 people, and then on cities of more than 100,000 people. You have images with a percentage of the cities that were destroyed by bombing.
360 timelapse videos provide us with interesting new opportunities. Imagine for example placing the camera out to see near Weymouth beach and watching as the tide comes towards the camera and then beyond it towards the city. Imagine watching as the sun rises on one side of the Leukerbad Valley and sets on the other. Imagine that BBC Natural history unit sequence of sand dunes moving across the landscape one day at a time for a year.
Two days ago I was tempted to try a timelapse video with the Ricoh Theta S. My plan had been to take the camera up to La Barillette and film a timelapse. From this point of view you can see the whole of the Lac Léman. You can see from Geneva to Villeneuve on a good day. With a weather system like we have at the moment you can watch clouds form and dissipate. You can also see the shadows left by those clouds and more. With a standard timelapse camera you would see just a small part of the scene. With a 360 timelapse you could look out towards the Alps or around at the cars and hikers. You could look up at the mast and more.
I say that you could do this because there are high winds up there and you need a heavy tripod to keep the camera from falling and breaking one of the lenses. You also need to find something to do while the camera is working.
Yesterday morning was clement, we had clouds and blue sky so I was able to try a timelapse. I set the camera to take an image every ten seconds for an unlimited amount of time. The settings on this camera give you great flexibility with timing. You can go from every eight seconds to setting a much longer amount of time.
You can set the interval to take pictures from every 8 seconds to every 60 minutes and 59 seconds.
You can either preview the image as a spherical image or as an equirectalinear image. Once you are happy with the settings you can start capturing. In yesterday’s test I was able to get more than 600 images on a single battery charge when the camera was set to take a picture every ten seconds.
The obvious limiting factor with this camera for timelapses is battery life. As soon as the camera is plugged in to a power source it turns off and starts to charge. As a result charging and taking pictures at the same time is not possible. There is also the minor issue of having the USB charge port right next to the tripod screw. You would need to modify a plate to charge the camera at the same time. The camera lasted for about 100 minutes before the battery died.
With the Ricoh Theta S and final Cut Pro X post production is efficient. You are dealing with images with a resolution of 5,376 x 2,688 pixels. That qualifies as UHD. You can import the image sequences from your timelpases straight from FCP X cutting out the need for other apps. Once the images are imported your your event you can open a new project at full resolution. I added the UHD image sequence to the timeline, created a compound clip and then used the speed tool to adjust the duration.
I still need to do some research about how to export the edit at full resolution. As I was given an error message I decided to export the video as 1920×960. This worked flawlessly. I used the Spatial Media Metadata Injector to add the necessary image meta data and then uploaded the injected video to youtube.
I look forward to finding ideas and projects that will take advantage of what 360 timelapse videos have to offer. I feel that it provides us with an opportunity to better understand how time and light evolve in a spherical environment.
Spy-cam wildlife filmmaking is an interesting discipline. It builds upon the decades of innovation that the documentary film genre has built upon. From the earliest images by the Lumière brothers of the workers at a factory to the development of film editing by Eisenstein and Dziva Vertov demonstrated by “The Man With the Movie Camera to sync sound with the Crystal sound system used by Jean Rouch for Chronique d’un été.
The BBC is seen as the leading example of high quality television programming and this has been the case for decades. The Natural History Unit is responsible for some of the best wildlife documentary films and series and with good reason. They adopt the latest technology, hire crews for months or even years at a time, to capture nature’s spectacle and beauty, and bring it to living rooms around the world.
Sensory: BBC Wildlife Director John Downer & the technology of ‘spy-cam’ filmmaking from Getty Images on Vimeo.
This attention to detail and this dedication to getting the best images has resulted in some of the best looking documentaries around. the Blue Planet Series, the Planet Earth series, Life and others have provided people with what I like to call a video encyclopaedia of the natural world.
The technological innovation that we see in the video above demonstrates how animals and behaviour that we had seen through a tele-lens can now be seen up close and with as natural a behaviour as possible. Almost every book I have read about the documentary genre speaks about capturing life with as little alteration of natural behaviour as possible. This technology is making that wish a more realistic goal.
Translated from French, Sport the nicest of meetings reminds me of the legend that is told in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. In Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso we hear about the guy who waits outside a woman’s window for one hundred days and nights to show his devotion to her, and in the end he loses interest.
This is following the same theme except that rather than a man lusting after a woman it is the other way around. Instead of a woman using crappy dating apps and other rubbish she sees someone she finds visually appealing and so decides to take up running. At
Eventually she excels beyond the group and she pulls alongside the guy, just long enough to make us believe in the stereotypical ending but nope, she pulls ahead and continues running. You take up sport because you want to seduce but eventually your passion for the sport takes over.