Lighting Control

This month's edition of DV has a great article on lighting. Jay Holben discusses how to diffuse light, thereby creating "a long transition between light and shadow".

He writes, "Many filmmakers who are new to lighting know that they want softer light...so they put diffusion on the face of their lights. Unfortunately, this has very little effect...If, however, you put that diffusion out away from the [barn]doors and fill it with the light, it becomes a much larger source and much softer light."



The article is a little tricky to access. After you go to DV's website, click on the magazine icon near the upper left corner of the browser window. A new window will appear and the full magazine will download.


The article is on pages 45 and 46 and is entitled "Character Study". Good stuff.

Monitor Your Audio

A common mistake for beginners is to fail to listen to the audio as you shoot. The results can be disastrous.

A flaky cable, dead mic battery or nasty RF audio interference can all cause problems. And if you're not wearing headphones and listening as you shoot, any of these problems can ruin your recording.


Ideally, you should use circumaural headphones that cover the ear. These help isolate the sound to help you distinguish between what the camera is capturing and the outside world. And when you buy a camcorder, make sure it will accept an external microphone AND has a headphone jack.

Adobe Premiere Pro Keyboard Shortcut of the Week

Here's the easy way to advance the CTI (Control Time Indicator) forward one frame.


Press the right right arrow key step forward one frame. Press the left arrow to step back one frame.

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction

Here's a great book to check out, particularly if you're new to documentary film and want to learn more about its history and sub-genres. Film critic Patricia Aufderheide's Documentary Film: A Very Short History lives up to its title while providing a useful overview.



To help define documentary, Aufderheide writes: "A simple answer might be: a movie about real life. And that is precisely the problem: documentaries are about life; they are not real life. They are not even windows onto real life. They are portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material, constructed by artists and technicians who make myriad decisions about what story to tell to whom, and for what purpose."

By briefly cataloging the wide range of films that all fall within the documentary genre, she helps refute some of the the criticisms typically issued by right-wing pundits at contemporary documentary releases. Filmmakers like Michael Moore are often under fire for a perceived lack of objectivity or neutrality, but as Aufderheide reminds us, "Broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow once said, 'Anyone who believes that every individual film must represent a 'balanced' picture knows nothing about either balance or pictures.'"

Adobe Premiere Pro Keyboard Shortcut of the Week

Here's the fast way to jump to the beginning or end of a sequence in your timeline. To go to the start, press the "Home" key. To jump to the end, press the "End" key.


You can also apply these shortcuts in the Source Monitor to jump to the beginning or end of a clip.

Speak Freely on Public Access TV

Today the Internet is frequently celebrated as the foremost electronic free speech platform. However decades before the Internet was widely adopted, public access cable TV channels provided citizens the opportunity to be heard on television.

While these tiny community stations have weathered repeated assaults by the cable industry (and now the telephone industry), and have too often been trivialized by commercial media outlets, access TV continues to thrive in communities across the country. And it continues to provide a vital platform for citizens and nonprofit groups to reach their communities on what remains the dominant mass communications medium today - television.

While many channel-surfers welcome these channels as local, noncommercial alternatives to the fare served up by commercial outlets, public access TV's mission is distinct from commercial cable channels too. Although commercial channels work primarily to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, access TV provides an electronic public forum to the community. Public access television programmers enjoy First Amendment protections to ensure that these stations encourage the broadest range of ideas and opinions.

Here's a short video I produced for Chicago Access Network Television to help educate viewers on this important distinction.

Adobe Premiere Pro Keyboard Shortcut Of The Week

Here's the simplest way to select a video track in your timeline. Hold down the CTRL key and use the "+" key to move up a track or the "-" key to move down a track.



Targeting a different audio tracks is easy too. Adding the shift key to the either of the commands above [Shift CTRL +] or [Shift CTRL -] will quickly move you through the audio tracks in your timeline.

Happy May Day

I can't let May Day pass without notice. Here's the trailer to Peter Miller's 2000 documentary film, The Internationale. The film explores how the legendary song became a rallying cry for oppressed groups around the globe





You can buy the film or rent the DVD or watch on line at Netflix.

More Free After Effects Tutorials

Here's another site that offers excellent free Adobe After Effects tutorials and animation presets. The site is VideoCopilot. Humorous and engaging tutorials are presented by founder, Andrew Kramer. In this example he demonstrates how to create the popular earth zoom out effect:



VideoCopilot also offers fun and useful After Effects plug-ins at very affordable prices. I've been working with Twitch for about a week now and am very impressed. It's easy to run and at $50, really cheap . Click here to see what Twitch can do.