Feb 12
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The park on the island in the Dneiper was one of the spookiest places I’ve ever walked to. I was hoping to do a photo safari, but the deserted place was overrun with packs of wild dogs. These guys here attacked me as I was trying to leave.
There was an air of menace about the place … it’s never a good idea to go to deserted public places, where only surly skinhead drunks are your tour guides.
Feb 12
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Almost every group of students nominated the girls to be the ones to sit in front of the cameras and read the prompter. I took the opportunity to show them why so many TV personalities wear so much makeup – because when you sit in front of the lights, any shiny surface on your skin starts to reflect so much light that the camera then “clips” that region. Which makes it look like a part of your face is on nuclear meltdown…
Feb 12
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I just liked the way the light was coming through the window; the leaden skies here make things look so moody.
Feb 12
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You can see some of the environment we shot in here.
Feb 12
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Here’s a short video of some of my students, waving at the camera. No big deal; just experimenting with the upload/bandwidth tolerances here at the Hotel Podol Plaza … sometimes, trying to send files larger than 5 megs over hotel internet services makes anti-spam filters kick in & kill the message. So far, so good…
Feb 12
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We were all cracking up – this group’s segment was focusing on the magical nutritional powers of the potato, and she delivered the it all in an accent that was described to me as “the Ukrainian equivalent of Hee-Haw.”
Also – notice in the background how the bluescreen has visible creases and folds? You wouldn’t think that something so minor would have an impact when it comes time to matte out the background and pull the key, but it does. Trust me, it does.
Feb 12
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One of the more difficult tasks I tried to lead my students through is grabbing Flash video off the web, transcoding it to a digital intermediary, and then dropping that raw .avi onto the timeline of their Edius (yeah, I know – it’s a strange, strange environment) video editing program and cutting it to sync with the v/os that they shot against the bluescreen.
Some of the students were already ahead of me when it came to pulling down .flvs from the web … I showed them how to install add-ons to their Firefox browsers that will handle this kind of thing, but the struggles they had with installation were instructive. The language barrier has not been too much of a barrier here – most of the students speak some English (some quite a lot, actually), but the menu settings and technical jargon that comes with web compression settings taxes even my vocabulary.
Feb 12
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…and on the third day here, we took the students into the practice TV studio next to the classroom, and taught them how to shoot chromakeys. They really responded to this part of the lesson – I guess it felt like “grown-up” work, because it involves professional lights, a backdrop and people sitting on the other side of a glass window yelling instructions at them.
The Sony camera I’m adjusting here was a great tool for them to practice with. Probably not the type of equipment that they are going to use back at the newspaper or web organization that they return to, but at least they get to have some hands-on experience with the stuff the real pros use.
