I have to keep one-upping myself with these holiday cards at work. It all started in 2003 when I did an “e-card” in Flash, hosted it on a website, and sent out the link. Every year it keeps getting to be more work and more complex. You can see some old one’s here: 2008 and 2009. As I mentioned in this post, this year we did a tilt shift video and added in a stadium card trick. It was a lot of pre-production this year. Emily Coey pained all of the free poster boards we got from Fox Marketing. Hey, it’s the ultimate recycling, they were going to toss them! I tested and tested and tested with my Canon 5D Mk II and the 24mm Canon TS-E lens, and with a 50mm lens. I kept pulling my poor co-workers outside and making them “stand there” and then “move around!”. I tried just using stills (@ 6fps) kinds of like the one Sam O’Hare did for Coachella and it was cool but seemed like a lot more post production than I was willing to do and video looked just as cool.
So day of shoot I was a nervous wreck. Even with all of my testing I hadn’t acheived the proper focus I was looking for in the shot. The quality of tilt shift is that the plane of focus is very narrow and specific. With such a long distance between me and the subject, and the fact that they look so tiny, made focusing hard. The night before the shoot I was freaking out and started researching focus on my camera and found a great interview with Vincent LaForet on the Canon website. I got some tips and the next morning tried again and gained my confidence back!
The actual shoot was super fun and exhilarating. I want to do it again and apply everything I’ve learned so far to make a better video. That said, I am happy with the results. The e-Card is fun, funny and entertaining. Enjoy.
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[…] work. The pressure to top myself every year gets greater every year. I though of this concept two years ago but didn’t do it last […]