This October, Cinevita Films spent a few weeks working with a local church by the name of Crossroads. We produced several dozen videos that were being used in a financial campaign to raise money to help the city of Cincinnati Ohio as well as struggling cities around the world. This series of videos included musical videos, teaching videos, testimony videos, interview videos, etc. We were honored to be a part of this video production and to see the change that will happen in our own city of Cincinnati as a result of this campaign.
This series was shot in 4k for the purpose of being able to have a variety of video angles coming out of the same camera. Often when you are lighting and framing your interview, there is one angle that is perfect for both lighting and the framing of the subject and the background. All secondary camera angles somehow feel not as good compared to your main camera angle. One option is to shoot in 4k, which has 4 times the resolution of HD. This allows you to crop in on your framing and effectually create a second camera angle while using the same camera. You can crop in a lot or a little and change the framing within that image to give it the effect that many cameras where being used on the shoot. The alternative is to have a lot of cameras capturing many different angles at once which does two things; it raises the budget, and it creates a distracting environment for your subject. We want the subject to feel as comfortable as possible, so we don’t bring in 3-5 cameras to capture those variety of angles, when we are able to shoot several different ‘angles’ with one camera. The same applies to our typical lighting setups. Often we don’t need to bring in a truckload of lights and lighting modifiers. We can just use 1-2 lights and have a beautifully lit video that is very compelling and looks naturally beautiful. This creates a more natural and comfortable environment for the person we are interviewing as well. Below is an example of of the difference between the original full 4K image and a cropped version of that 4k image, showing how you can achieve the effect of having multiple cameras while only using one camera.
You can click on each image to see a better quality version of each picture. The result is very fluid and natural and the viewer ends up with a better experience. This method is also very beneficial when you are crunched for time. If on the day of production we have to move very quickly, shooting in 4k always allows to have that backup angle without taking the time to setup the secondary camera angle. The only drawback of 4k is a massive difference in file sizes and the hard drive space required as a result of that.
As mentioned, in this video production series for this non profit, we also produced several music videos and teaching series. Below are some behind the scenes images as well as a video sample.
Cincinnati Non Profit Video Production from Cinevita Films on Vimeo.
