Adventure of the weekend

Aug 08, 2021 22:31

We went to Connecticut to visit a childhood friend of Ken's. He's a teacher at a private high school, where he teaches physics and theater. The excuse for the trip is that he has a pretty good theater set up with lights and backgrounds and so forth, and Jocelyn wants to try to make a professional looking demo reel of her circus skills. We struck out trying to find a place to do it here - we were trying not to do it in the backyard, because that didn't seem very professional looking. So we called up Keith and he was delighted to have us come visit, since we haven't seen them in over two years (duh), and he's always delighted to screw around in the theater.

Turned out that both of his kids were visiting (hadn't seen their parents in two years); we had seen them as kids growing up in occasional visits, so it was fun to see them as adults. One of them had gone to Reed college, so Jocelyn got to have conversations about that.

There was a foo-foo-rah about actually filming. Jocelyn's boyfriend's sister does photography professionally, and while she wasn't available, she gave advice about using a better camera than the one we've always used before. So we rented one (them being like $3000). But when we got to the theater, it turned out that the lens that had been recommended was too zoomy, and it wasn't an adjustable zoom thing. A bit of the problem was that we had misremembered the size of the theater, and also they had reoriented it so the stage was on the long side rather than the short side of the rectangular room, reducing the distance from camera to subject, but also when testing the camera we hadn't really realized how the field of view compared to the distance from subject.

So there we were, Friday night, with the wrong camera. We tried on Saturday morning to call a camera rental place, but they weren't renting anymore during Covid. And they were over an hour drive from Keith's house. There were some other similarly distant options that might have worked out, but might also not have.

However, we were inspired by the "shot on iPhone" advertisements, and one of Keith's kids had an iPhone 10, and it seemed like with the right settings we could get professional looking video. So that's what we did. We spent all day Saturday reconfiguring the theater for lighting and setting up Jocelyn's apparatus and doing many takes. It was kind of boring that sometimes, but we also got to visit with various people and take walks around the grounds of the school, which is beautiful, and such.

Hopefully I will be able to post some of the results after the clips have been edited together, though I probably will spare you the extremely high resolution version, to save on download time.

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kids, trips

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