Edelkrone Stay Home Challenge
This was a project that I did not have any idea of winning. It was something to keep me and my family entertained during the COVID 19 lockdown. It was such an amazing surprise when I found out that I had won. I’ve entered a lot of competitions in my career as a filmmaker and have never won anything. This was the first. Now lets get to the breakdown.
The Idea
Juggling three kids at home, working from home and home schooling is very overwhelming. I wanted to capture that idea so I went to work with coming up with this idea of the kids going crazy around the mom and the mom being in slow motion. It evolved slowly from there as I started adding different situations and techniques I could use.
One of the most difficult parts of this whole project was figuring out how this was going to work. I didn’t even know it would and not being a VFX guy I was very apprehensive that it would turn out at all. The first thing I focused on was figuring out how to do the main shot of my wife in slow motion and kids going fast and crazy behind her. After doing a bunch of calculations and seeing how fast my motorized slider could go I felt confident enough to give it a try.
Now I don’t own a green screen so I just used some green cloth we had in the house and put that between two stands. I shot everything BRAW in order to make sure I had the full 12bit color space as I figured I would need that in post. So after filming my wife throwing cards into the air a few times it was time to have the kids be crazy in the background. Now while I only filmed my wife for 9 sec the kids I filmed for over 10 minutes to be able to line the two shots up properly. Once this was done I put it all in the computer did a really really rough key and looked to see if it worked. It did! Way better than I had thought. Now there were a lot of issues but I knew at that point I had something really fun we could do.
From there it was simply finding interesting fun ways to film the insert. shots that would go in between each of the scenarios and how to get them all to connect in a way that felt organic. This proved to be one of my favorite parts as I got to experiment with a lot of different techniques. One of my favorite was using the probe lens on the slider and attaching a pencil to a head so I could get a slide down the pencil while it was rotating.
The final shot and most complex shot was the hallway shot. I had to program into the slider 6 different points and then change the lighting and costumes between each take and take it three times. It didn’t move quite as fast as I wanted it to but doing some speed ramps in post seems to do the trick in fixing that.
The whole project was filmed over the space of a week and there were about 3 days of editing. I was very proud of this project and incredibly grateful on winning the competition. I have entered a ton of contests over the years but this was the first one I actually won and it was very exciting. I had a blast doing it and loved the opportunity to flex some of my creative muscles while entering a fun contest.
The equipment I used were the obviously the Edelkrone slider with Headplus, BM Ursa Mini G2, BMPCC 4K, Probe Lens, CineMod Zeiss ZE lenses, Aputure 300D MkII and the rhino slider arc II as my second slider while doing the pencil sequence.