It took me around 5 minutes to walk to the Flagstaff gardens, and I always want to spend some time capture beautiful moments in the garden by filming.

It took me a whole afternoon to shoot this footage and then edited it, mixed sound, and color graded it.

The final version

This is the version with BGM and Fades

This short video’s main goal is to find beautiful things and discover different hiding relationships inside the Flagstaff gardens. I arranged to shoot three different areas in the park and mixed them. The dog walking area has the most people and is the first place I decided to film with. I tried to capture some lovely puppies and some actions from people with their pets. There is also a small playground for kids in the garden, and I am trying to film something about family relationships and things about childhood. The third part of the garden is the large area of grass, which attracts many couples to spend their afternoon, and I am lucky to find some cute couples and capture the beautiful moment when they are chilling with each other.

I use a 35mm lens during this shoot and keep the white balance at 5600k to create these warm scenes. I keep the F stop around 4 to 5.6 in order to create some depth of views but still have enough information in the frame. I also crop the frame to create this cinematic look. And because there is only an ambiance sound and seems to be too flat and boring, I add a soundtrack in the video to improve the mood and help the audience immerse into it.

This project is more likely to be a montage b-roll in a cinematic documentary about this garden, and that’s what I want the audience to feel when they are watching this. I love using this fade in/out with the slow pace of editing to create silence and peace. That is what I love about the Flagstaff gardens. The video is definitely lack of some Characters and Themes. If I can get another chance when the Covid-19 is over and when we can meet our friends, it will be great to produce a proper documentary about this park and how it gives us a place of happiness.

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