The whole 40 second sequence took three weeks to complete, and was created mostly in After Effects.  What’s most interesting is the approach he took to dealing with high resolution images in a short timeframe:

But still time was an issue, especially when it came to producing 2K images. “Because I work as a digital artist on films everyday I knew it would be very difficult to deliver the film on time if I worked at 1920×1080 because every second of the film was going to be VFX images,” Michel explains. “So I decided, after making some tests, to work in 1280×720 pixels and then resize all the film at the good resolution (with some sharping and graining process) and it worked pretty well. At the end nobody can tell if it is truly 1080p images or 720p streched…It just works. You can see the result on those 2k images. The second reason why I choose this format was to be able to see all the images in my 4/3 computer screen without zooming/dezooming! Everything is good to save time.

It’s basically a camera stabilisation filter which has been ported from Shake. It processes your footage to create a vector map of all of the objects and movements, then using that data to manipulate the original footage to create smooth camera motion.

The processing of your footage can take some time, but it’s a one-off task, and once it’s done, you can make changes to the filter settings without the need to re-process. You can make adjustments to the amount of each transformation the filter applies. One of the other things it does is to automatically zoom the image to mask any black areas which appear, due to the compensation of the transformations – and you can also set the level at which this is applied.

I’ve been working with some footage which was shot in a hurry, with a Z7 mounted on a tripod strapped around my neck and braced with both arms. A lot of it was fast-paced and there were a few bumps, which is why I wanted to run SmoothCam through its paces, to see whether I could get an authentic syeadycam look with my shoddy, rushed footage. I shot in HDV, but the end result is going onto a SD DVD, so I had plenty of flexibility in how much I could zoom the image, which in turn, allowed me to ratchet up the SmoothCam settings quite high.

And it looks fantastic! It’s not perfect, but it goes a long way to tidying up the material. And with filmic grading, and 1.35 letterboxing, it looks quite authentic.

It’s certainly not a cure-all, and is best suited to tracking shots, or slow pans. It can have trouble with irregular movement, or fast pans, at which point you have to chop your footage and carefully splice filtered and unfiltered clips together – it can be time-consuming, but then you can’t have everything for free.

I just wish I could show off the final footage, but sadly it’s a private commission which can’t be broadcast publicly.

Stick “SmoothCam” into Google though, and you’ll get a heap of articles on the subject – some with examples of test footage.

Corio Raptor Care and Rehabilitation is a centre specialising in the care and rehabilitation of birds of prey, or raptors. The center is run by Nick and Anji Henderson, who provided us with access to the birds they look after, and to talk about the work they do.

This is a really – and I mean really insightful video of a talk given by a filmmaker going by the name of M dot Strange.

He talks at length about how he created a feature-length animation on his own terms. He learned the skills from scratch, funded it himself, and built up a community of inclusive audience members. He got accepted at Sundance, turned down movie deals (the contracts he delves into are shocking) and is now funding his next film entirely through self-distribution of his work.

This is a really inspiring talk, and really opened my eyes to the possibilities which are emerging for the independent filmmaker.