The above is part of my learning process: an audio slideshow built with frame grabs from HD video I shot at an enjoyable night before New Years Eve gathering at North Vancouver’s Anatoli Souvlaki. Using video as stills is hardly new, but I needed to run through an exercise to see what was involved and what the drawbacks and benefits are. I know this is hardly first-class art: for one thing, the lighting is inconsistent and the images are grainy as the result of low light levels.
But while it might not work as storytelling (or, more appropriately, storyshowing), it was a successful experiment. Here’s what I learned.
The downside of the process is the time involved. Subtract the time that I spent recovering from errors I made, and it was still a two-hour process to capture three-and-a-half minutes of video, find a series of images and then find the frames that gave me the sharpest image, export those as .pct files and then convert them to JPEGs (and add a little sharpening) in Photoshop. I also exported the sound as an AIFF and used Amadeus Pro to create the 1:15 soundtrack, which still has a bumpy spot or two. The easiest and quickest part was creating the slideshow itself, thanks to Joe Weiss’s Soundslides. But creating a similar piece that started with still pix would have taken half the time or less. That’s a considerable difference.
There are several benefits, though. The video camera captured images that my less-than-top-end digital still camera wouldn’t. Having 30 frames from each second of action meant I could choose the exact frame to gave me the best combination of sharpness and composition. The biggest benefit was that I had the choice, at the end of the session, of either still or video — or a combination of the two — to suit my storytelling needs.
I’m going to want to try this again, under more ideal conditions to see how much quality I can wring out of the video images. I’m also going to pass the techniques involved along to my students. It’s not an ideal way to work in day-to-day journalism (given the time involved), but it opens up new possibilities and takes away the need to shoot both video and stills when the story isn’t particularly timely, and when the end result is delivered online.
Oh, and it was a great party.
TAGS: VIDEO, PHOTOJOURNALISM, STILLS, SOUNDSLIDES
