We produce a weekly webshow for www.SelfGrowth.com. Episode 18 focused on achieving a healthy work/life balance. We thought we’d share this episode with you as most of our customers, like us, are self-employed or freelancers and most of us struggle to keep ‘normal’ working hours.

You can find more videos like this one at www.selfgrowth.com as well as a library of great advice covering all aspects of life. If you would like to produce a webshow, contact us via enquiries@lostmarble.co.uk or visit our website www.lostmarble.co.uk.

We’re big fans of LOST here at LMM so I thought I’d post up an interesting talk given by LOST creator JJ Abrams for TED. Some cool insight into his creations (MI3, LOST, Star Trek etc.) This guy can really talk!

TED website

We’re reworking the mpmvideo.com website and adding some tutorial videos. The first one deals with purchasing the video, filling out the form and file delivery. The second will instruct you on how to make the most of the videos you purchase. We realized that most of the buyers were not that familiar with online or viral video. We don’t want you wasting your $25 on something you don’t know what to do with, so hopefully these videos will help!

We get a lot customers shooting their own footage and hiring us to edit it and add graphics. A great example of this is SelfGrowth.com who send us weekly video of David Riklan offering ‘healthy living’ advice in front of a green screen. David and the SelfGrowth.com team have a good grasp on filming and how to use their cameras but not everyone does. Most can happily leave everything set to automatic, point the camera at the subject and push the red button but that won’t always get you the best result. Here’s a few simple tips to help you achieve a more professional result. In this blog entry, we assume you’re shooting indoors as most (actually, I think all) of our current customers do.

Tip #1
Evenly lighting your scene
This is a very simple procedure. Set up your shot first and make sure that everything is as you want it when you intend to start shooting. If possible ensure the lighting is constant. Natural lighting gets brighter and then darker during the day and more often than not will cause your camera to constantly fight to re-adjust itself accordingly to compensate. If you’re shooting indoors, it’s a good idea to close the curtains and rely on ample artificial lighting. If you find that the artificial lighting is not enough to light your scene, then mix the natural lighting with whatever artificial light you can add to try to add some stability.

Tip #2
Avoid using the auto-settings:
Setting the white balance
It can be daunting, but don’t rely on the cameras auto-exposure and auto/pre-set white balance settings. Once you have the scene how you want it, the lighting is right and any large coloured areas are already in place, go to your camera’s menu settings and find the white balance option. In most cases you will be presented with some or all of the following: ‘Indoors’, ‘Outdoors’, ‘One Touch’ (manual) and ‘Auto’. Although some of these features can be useful when shooting outdoors, we’re interested in the ‘One Touch’ option. You will need a white sheet of paper or a large plain white area to focus your camera on. With the sheet at least a few feet away from the camera, zoom in on the white area and make sure there’s nothing else in shot other than the white. Click the ‘One Touch’ or manual button and wait for the camera to adjust to the white. You should see that the shot you had was either too red or too blue but now it should appear as you see it with your eyes with the correct colour balance.

Setting the exposure
All cameras have at least two ways to control light: the shutter and aperture. The aperture is like an iris in the eye, and controls light by changing size. When a photographer takes a picture, the shutter opens briefly and the image is exposed. Leaving the exposure setting to auto is leaving the quality and detail picked up by the lens to chance. Again, auto-exposure features can be useful for the outdoors but for filming indoors, I strongly advise learning to master the camera’s manual setting. It’s extremely simple to do but is often ignored. Set your camera up and point it at a subject. Find the exposure settings in your camera’s menu and set it to manual. Now adjust the exposure negatively and you will see the light and detail drain from your shot. Now you might assume that adjusting it positively to the maximum setting would compensate and restore the detail? Try it, what you will notice on the preview screen is an almost white shot. What you’re looking for here is the perfect balance. Just like before you want the capture to look exactly, or as close as you can get to what you see with your eyes. It’s a good tip to set it to auto-exposure, then switch to manual and tweak it as you see fit for a better result. If you wish your scene to be brighter, that can be done in post production. If you brighten the scene using the exposure, you will lose detail that you can’t adjust in post.

Tip#3
Use a tripod!
Granted, this is an obvious one but it’s a very important one, especially if you’re shooting with a green/blue screen background. A moving/wobbling camera (or a fast moving subject) will cause motion blurs. This is a disaster when keying (removing) the green from the video as you now have blurs of colours mixing with the green. If you don’t have a tripod then simply set up the camera on a steady surface. If you have ever watched an MTV reality show you will have no doubt seen the hand-held style/technique of purposely moving the camera around and zooming in on the subject abruptly. If you wish to achieve this style, I would strongly recommend either filming multi-angle (with a second steady angle) or shooting a separate, steady second take.

Tip#4
Think about how you will deliver the video and where it will be seen
Where will the finished video be seen? This is where the vast majority make mistakes. If you intend your video to be seen via the internet, the chances are that it will be displayed in a small embedded video. Youtube’s default embed size is 425 x 344. If you have a shot with small content and fine detail, you have to keep in mind where it will be seen as you shoot because it might look good and appear visible on your monitor but when it’s on youtube people will struggle to see it.

Tip#5
Shooting with one camera and maintaining continuity
Not many people have access to more than one camera. If you’re not in the videoing business, why would you? However, you can always shoot the same piece twice from different angles and as long as you deliver it in the same way, you’ll be able to edit between the two shoots and the result will seem as if the two angles were shot at the same time. The big issues are obvious – don’t change clothing or move around items in the scene…but it’s the little factors that will catch you out. You may sweep your hair to one side while setting up the next angle, loosen your tie or roll up your sleeves. It may seem like nothing but when you’re trying to get across a point or sell an idea or service via your video, you don’t want the viewer distracted by the fact that one moment there’s a cat on the window ledge behind you and the next second it’s vanished.

There are many other hints we could share with you and may well do so in a follow up article, but for now these few basic tips should help you execute a successful shoot.

We recently launched mpmvideo.com. A new Lost Marble Media Sales site specializing in selling promotional videos to My Power Mall members. Below is the video we are ‘pushing’ on the MPMvideo.com distribute page. Within a 7 day period we are posting links to, and embedding the code for the video you see below. The idea being that we show that you can amount over 1000 views in 7 days with very little effort.

Now and then we get those awkward situations where we have to tell a client that we can’t add something to the project without charging extra. Oftentimes the customer will ask for something in particular, we finish the project to spec but are then told ‘that’s great but let’s try something else’. That’s fine as long as it’s understood that starting over on a whim will cost money. Another misconception is that if we’re being paid for 3 minutes of motion graphics work, for example, that adding an extra minute of live action to the video is simply a creative decision that will not raise the cost of the project. These kind of uncomfortable occurrences and many others like it can be avoided with good preparation prior to the buyer proposal. Below are some good tips to aid this process.

Have something in mind before initiating the project
We have a lot of cases where we’re simply asked to ‘make a promotional video’. Now, while this is obviously a good starting point, we’ll need a bit of extra information before we can begin. What is the video promoting? What style do you like or would you prefer? How long do you wish the video to be? Where will the video be displayed? What is your approximate budget? We fully realize that quite a lot of the time you might need direction with these matters and we’re always more than willing to help out but even if all you have is a youtube video you can show us that is similar to what you would like your video to be, it will be of great help to us in getting the job started.

Price versus product
If we’re approached by an individual or start-up with a low budget, we will do our best to work within that budget. What you need to keep in mind though, is that we’re being paid for our time. Basically, if you’re looking for a 60 second web commercial and you can only pay $300, the chances are that we won’t be able to hire actors or sets to produce the piece. Logically we cannot do this without making a loss. The same goes for revisions, if we’re being paid a minimal, non-negotiable fee to produce a 60 second video you shouldn’t expect to get 3 or 4 revisions of the video to choose from. It just doesn’t work out from a business stand-point (in higher paid work we do provide numerous versions for our clients to pick from). In these cases it’s best to either have a specific idea in mind or to talk to us and throw around some concepts before work begins. More often than not we can quickly render a rough version to let you see how an idea would play out before you give the go-ahead or at least show you some samples from our past work.

Using incorrect terminology
We never expect our clients to know the technical jargon. Part of the reason we get hired is that this line of work is a specialty. Unless you’re in the business of web-orientated media creation, why would you know insider words and slang? There’s rarely ever a problem because a customer doesn’t know what a key frame is or has never heard of an alpha channel. However, problems arise regularly because people tend to drop in words that they don’t fully understand. The most incorrectly used is ‘Flash’. A good example of this is a job we were approached about a few months ago. We were asked to create a ‘Flash Powerpoint presentation’ with slides and ‘flash animations’. We talked this over as far as scripting, voice overs and style. We started some preliminary work on the piece and it wasn’t until we asked the customer about controlling the pace or navigation of the slides that we realized they simply wanted a video presentation and not a slide presentation. The problem here was that the customer had heard some words used in conjunction with web presentations and without knowing what they were asked for a ‘Flash Powerpoint presentation’. In truth, I can’t think of a single video type that we produce that we haven’t had requested as a ‘Flash video/presentation’. The key here is to simply describe to us exactly what you want, where you want to use it and if possible provide a link to something similar.

We do believe that the above tips are good ones but the most important thing to keep in mind is that communication is the key.

We’re taking a quick break from Friday the 24th till Tuesday 28th. You can still reach us via email.

We’re beginning to shift our focus to motion graphics and so thought it appropriate to create a highlight reel of some of our recent motion graphic work.

You can read more information about our motion graphics services here.

We get a lot of jobs that involve keying out backgrounds. More often than not, the client had decided to buy a piece of green material from Ikea and shoot it in the basement. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that to be perfectly honest. Setting up the scene is usually where they mess up. Above is a comparison image. On the left is an actual still from footage we received from a client who had no prior knowledge of setting up a green screen shoot while on the right you can see a capture from a well thought out, professional shoot. Simple mistakes make our job of editing the results a hundred times more difficult and thus it takes us longer, the quality suffers and it costs the client more money. With that in mind, here are some hints, tips & tricks to setting up and filming a successful green screen shoot.

1. Choose green over blue screening whenever possible. Blue screens often bring out jagged edges in your keying results. Green also reflects less than blue.
2. Keep your lighting as even as you can manage. The more solid the color the easier it is to remove in post production.
3. Avoid using sunlight to light your scene (even if you have artificial lighting as well as sunlight). Clouds will change the shade of green in your background and you’ll see patches of green return to your keyed out background.
4. Light each person in your scene individually to avoid them looking like they’ve been filmed separately.
5. A great addition to your lighting setup is a Halo Light, basically, a light that is placed above the subject and positioned slightly behind them.
6. You should try to keep the distance between the subject and the green screen approximately equal to the distance between the subject and camera. This helps to dull shadows.
7. A simple and obvious one: Use a tripod! If you have motion blurs in your shot it’s going to be a long edit trying to properly remove the green when it’s blurred with the subject.
8. Keep your shot clean. No visible cables or monitors and definitely no other people in shot.
9. Another obvious one: DON’T wear green! White is also not a good choice as it picks up some measure of the green surroundings. Ditto with reflective surfaces such as belt buckles. Red will produce a bleeding edge where the green and red blends.
10. Remember that as good as your scene may appear with your eyes, the way the camera sees it is much more important. Manually set the exposure, white balance and focus. It’s best to set up a monitor or laptop with a firewire cable to view the results as your cameras built in LCD screen often displays inaccurate results. Check that what you see with your eyes matches what you see on your preview screen.

Good luck and happy shooting!

Our premier export is video content but we do occasionally create websites, pages and Flash content.

Our strong suit is the design elements of a website. We do not provide ‘back end’ content such as data base driven  features (we advise using this company for that). What we do is create headers, logos, design the layout and create interactive Flash presentations & content and most forms of media.

Here are some examples of our work:

Trevor Reed Photography
A Room In The Sky
Durham University Video Player
World Changer Mall Video Player
Williams Creations

You can view more information about our web and Flash design services by visiting our website.