I just finished a project that involved creating 20 one minute video clips. This project, titled Zone Manufacturing by the creators, is to be an educational role playing game designed to teach students how a modern manufacturing facility operates. As the game progresses, players are encouraged to view short videos that reflect the current state of the factory. Unfortunately at the time of this blog post, there is no public website available so I am unable to share a link. Below is one of the assembly videos created for the Zone Manufacturing project.

Zone Assembly Scene 02 from Fourth Order Light on Vimeo.

I shot the scenes with a Canon 5D Mark II at 1920×1080 and 30 frames per second. I used a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L lens for all the shots. Since we weren’t going for a dramatic look, I lit each shot with two 500 soft box lights to provide flat, even illumination. Low quality audio was captured by the camera to be used for syncing purposes. High quality audio was recorded with a Sennheiser ME 66 shotgun microphone tethered to a Zoom H4n recording device.

Given the script provided by the Zone producers, I storyboarded each planned shot and created animatics to provide a simulation of what the scenes might look like. Although my drawing skills have much to be desired, and we never follow the animatic exactly in production, it provides an excellent guide on how to get started as well as a road map of what we need to capture in production. The storyboard animatic plays in a linear fashion, but we shot the scenes out of order per camera and lighting setup. This is typical in film production, but was not popular with the volunteer participants. However we did shot the plan I prepared and had ample coverage to stitch together the scenes that were mapped out in the storyboards. Below is a sample of my fine drawing skills.

Zone Assembly Storyboard from Fourth Order Light on Vimeo.

For post production I followed the Stu Maschwitz DV Rebel approach of editing low resolution proxies of the video and then onlining the finalized scenes in After Effects. I first used After Effects to render out half resolution proxies, in this case 960×540, for editing. My video editing of choice is Premiere Pro and I’m currently using the Adobe CS3 suite. Half resolution proxy videos playback just fine in Premiere Pro on my PC, so editing this way works out well. Once I’ve locked a scene edit, I then sync the high quality audio from the Sennheiser micrphone to the low quality audio recorded by the camera. There is no automated way to sync sound in Premiere Pro at this time, so I have to sync the sound by ear.

Once I’ve mixed in the high quality audio, I then import the Premiere Pro project into After Effects and replace the proxy video with the original video. Since i used flat lighting and a tungsten light preset for white balance, the exposure on the shots matched fairly well and required very little tweaking. I bumped up the brightness a bit with the levels effect, and then utilized the Mojo plugin from Red Giant Software to boost the contrast.