The Berrics Push Editing Contest

There is a contest that was put on by a skate company called The Berrics. The contest, called the Push Edit, asked those participating to download some footage of skateboarding and re-edit the footage into a video. There were no directions besides this. Participants were allowed as much creative freedom that they wanted.

I've been working with action sports filmmaking since I was in the 8th grade. I've done both snowboarding and BMX bikes, but never skateboarding. However these different types of action sports for the most part had a pretty straight forward recipe. This involved weaving lifestyle shots with scenes of tricks being performed. The focus of the film was on the tricks, as these represent the most interesting thing in an edit. Here's an example of one of my short edits that I made two years ago: 


Reverse Apathy from Wendell Frink on Vimeo.

To me, this is the way to go with action sports videos. It gives a nice combination of lifestyle and trick shots, with a majority of the clips being of tricks. With the Push Edit contest, many contestants entered in their films but emphasized lifestyle shots in slow motion, heavily edited trick shots, or had more lifestyle shots than trick shots. This really took away from the part that mattered: the skaters performing their tricks. Here are several examples:



The Berrics Push Edit Submission from Andrej Bucalo on Vimeo.



Now I'm not knocking these individual's ability to edit, just commenting on the fact that these videos are emphasizing the wrong parts of the video which make it difficult to follow and less like a skate film.

Red Bull's Latest Video & Forced Perspective

Red Bull just released a new BMX video, and it plays heavily with forced perspective to add an interesting element for all viewers, BMX fans or not.

Wikipedia defines forced perspective as: A technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It is used primarily in photography, filmmaking, and architecture.

Here's a picture for example:




and here's a video Arturo showed me a few years ago really highlighting forced perspective.

So after seeing some other examples of forced perspective, here's the BMX video:

Panasonic DVX200

Browsing NoFilmSchool today after not reading the site for well over a month I discovered that Panasonic released a camera called the DVX200. This camera is a successor to the DVX100, a 4:3 CCD camera released in 2002. At its time, the DVX100 was the first camera to support progressive scan video recording at an affordable price. Since then other cameras have been released, such as the HPX500, the HVX200A and the HMC150, which were released in the 2000s.

Several years ago I owned an HMC150 that I bought after saving up for over a year while working at a NAPA Autoparts store in my town. I loved that camera. At the time, I was shooting action sports videos of my friends snowboarding and riding BMX bikes. The HMC150 served a versatile tool for the type of filming I was doing. Action sports filming is a run'n'gun situation. Many times we would arrive at a location and after a few minutes of scoping out shot locations begin to film. Content was key, the more the better (as always), and we never wanted to miss a moment. The first video I have posted above is a edit from footage I shot during one year for my friend Shane. His video was being shot when I bought my camera and is the first one that I shot part of with my HMC150. The second video was made about a few years later. By this time I had become much more adept at using the camera.

The release of the DVX200 is important because it brings 4K quality video recording to the build style that favors action sports videos as well as documentaries as well. Most 4K cameras are not built for run'n'gun style shooting as they require a monitor and a complex setup that is suitable for studio work in a controlled environment. Sports and documentary filmmaking involve quick setups, the ability to zoom easily with a servo zoom motor, attachment of shotgun mics with onboard XLR ports, as well as other features, such as ND filters. All-in-all I'm excited about this camera.