Week Three ; Reflection

Contemplation for me revolves around developing my thoughts towards want I want to achieve & realistically what I might achieve, but at the same time understanding why healthy habits are not always easy to obtain. It’s not a bad thing if you don’t have a perfect workout schedule or skip a night cooking at home, sometimes you just have to melt into the couch and order UberEats.

I worked some ridiculous hours when I was a chef (think upwards of 80hr work weeks) and at that time I lost touch of a lot of my hobbies and interests. I became a product of my work, and that was it. So I’ve had to learn again that my own mental health relates back to looking after myself, and not beating myself up over relaxing, because relaxing is an important part of being. Exercise to me is probably 20% physical health and the remainder positive mental health; when I work out, I tune out, listen to my favourite album and it gives me a break from my usual thoughts.

 

  1. How did you author the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?

 

I filmed this on my iPhone 11 Pro using the rear camera. All shots were taken within the Filmic Pro app. I learnt my lesson after last week and avoided shooting this in a flat colour profile, and opted for a standard colour profile.

I filmed about 15 minutes of sequences all up and only ended up using a few shots. As I was filming myself I filmed all the wides of me in 4k so that I could manipulate the framing as I was editing in a 1080 timeline.

The opening shot was shot in 1080 in 120fps and slowed down. I was really drawn to the stack of bikes in my garage and thought that they would really highlight the grungy aesthetic of this workout video I was making. I set the phone to autofocus, 1080p, and 120fps and held my phone upside down at the cogset on the back wheel, and then I pulled my arm backward as I spun the phone around about 270 degrees. This was then slowed down to 20% in post in Adobe Premiere Pro.

The second shot was also shot in 120fps, I panned past the dumbells on the floor, and then once I went past the weights I whipped to the right; like in this video. Generally, if I’m shooting handheld, I think about entering the frame with a whip and leaving if the content calls for it. Obviously I won’t do this for more commercial business style, but in the context of a gym video, it fits the upbeat, grungy aesthetic. So I whip in, slow pan past my subject, and whip out. If I want to whip the option is there, if not I can just cut the video before the whip part.

All following shots were in 4k @ 60fps. There wasn’t too much consideration into why I picked these settings. The last 2 shots were curated as I could be, but the following were picked at 4k60fps for keeping my options open in post. I could time remap and rescale if needed, if not I would just interpret into 25fps.

In the final product, all of these shots were 1 shot takes. But a lot of footage that didn’t make the cut I would generally hit record, and then do multiple takes in 1 go to see what would stick.

Above is the timeline for my video. I used a VHS overlay that I got from here. It was used to attribute to the grungy aesthetic I was going for; just a lo-fi, hip hop, dirty garage workout.

A lot of the work was done in post. First I picked the song, which generally creates the rhythm that I edit around. I like to play with music not just as background music, but also as a part of the whole process. I decided to really lean into the song for this one more than I usually do, and I used quick scale zooms to accentuate the footage to match the bass drum hits. Like this;

Above shows the keyframing for the bass drum hits. So 2 frames before the bass drum hit is a keyframe of the actual scale size of 110, then on the bass drum hit I scale zoom to 114, then 2 frames later back to 110. Which gives the footage that pulsing effect on the bass drum hits.

I also used some transition effects that I purchased from 640 Studio.

I applied an adjustment layer over all the footage, to apply some colour grading. I brought out the oranges and crushed a lot of the other colours to give it the gritty grungy aesthetic. The original footage was quite blue, thanks to the cheap fluorescent garage lighting.

I used a royalty-free song from the YouTube audio library “Does it Float” by Otis McDonald – the song required no attribution at all.

Finally, I exported the project file in 720p at an aspect ratio of 16:9, which I wanted to utilise the full range of shots now that Instagram allows these varying aspect ranges.

 

  1. How did you publish the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?

 

I transferred the final export by cable to my iPhone and uploaded it from there. I didn’t use the cover feature, because I wanted the footage to just go from the start. I know that the opening shot of a bunch of bike spokes is quite messy, but the overall footage of it spiraling is quite mesmerising and thought that may allure people in anyways. I know I would be like, who starts a video with a messy shot of some bike wheels, but hey I like the effect.

My curation was much more particular than in the past 2 weeks. I think I finally found an idea that I was quite happy to run with, and as a result, my interest in the project was much more involved.

I took quite a lot of shots (15 minutes-ish as I said before) to see what I could edit within the end and knew that I only wanted to keep it around 30 seconds. Short and punchy.

I experimented with a lot of abstract shots, there was actually only 4 shots of me working out, the rest of it was me playing around with camera movements around the gym. After working out, everyone mentioned how long I had been working out, which I took the credit for, even though I spent most of it sitting down emulating camera movements with my phone.

The caption is in relation to the fact that everyone is obsessed with gains (gains meaning an increase in muscle) but at the same time, people obsessed with gains are also obsessed with the social media aspect of having those gains. So I guess by me making a video revolving around a workout, I’m on of those guys now.

The hashtags then revolve back to the fact that in the end I spent more time filming and editing than I did working out so #Edit, #Media, #Premiere & #Video all make an appearance. As well as the subject of the video #gym.

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