Straight from the lab...

I've been spending a little too much time watching Scott Bass's (of Ampisound) videos over the past few weeks. They're all great - you should go check them out.

...but not yet! Wait! First watch the results of this experiment Sean and I conducted yesterday:

Scott's oeuvre has made me realize my own videos have all been universally awful. Well, not awful... just thoughtless and boring. If a picture is worth 1000 words, I think a video can be worth 1,000,000.

You all know my tenancy to be didactic. I will happily talk about health, fitness, food, and Fifth Ape for hours. But even after an hour (or three) of talking, I don't think I can do a particularly good job of explaining what Fifth Ape is and why it is important.

Perhaps a well made two-minute video can accomplish what I cannot do with just words? If I can put a viewer in the middle of the action and give them a visceral sense of what skillful, powerful, agile movement feels like, well, then they might just begin to understand.

Plus, it'll be a ton of fun for me, the ex-film-school guy, to play with some decent cameras again. The video above is our first experiment with using a counterweighted handle to allow for smooth hand-held tracking shots. We began as simple as you can get... i got my cheap-o tripod, telescoped the arm out all the way, put the cheap-o camcorder on it, found the spot on the handle where the rig was balanced, and held it lightly there.

The results? After a bit of experimentation, I think we got some good stuff! Up-and-down jiggle was much improved. There was still some issues with side-to-side jiggle, but we got better. Given the simplicity of the setup, I'm pretty happy. Now that I'm actually paying attention to video quality, I get to complain about the quality of the Youtube version... the "real" version on my computer has much smoother motion. Grumble grumble. I think the most impressive shot in the video is about 40 sec. in when Sean follows me down a pretty sizable level transition. One-handed parkour while holding a camera rig is not easy folks. And it looks decently smooth!

I'll be paying a visit to my favorite place soon to get the parts for a more complex rig I want to build. Stay tuned for more experiments... hopefully leading up to a video that will actually be good.

Let me know what you think?