Someone turned me on to this amazing short film earlier today, and I knew a lot of you would definitely be able to appreciate what the filmmaker's up to with this piece. It's a incredible marriage of time lapse footage, motion graphics, visual effects, color grading and killer title work. The integration with the soundtrack is top-notch as well.
Douglas Koke is the visual artist, and you gotta respect the way he was able to find a compelling subject and then add several layers of awesome. Even better, the footage itself was shot with a sub-$1,000 Canon T3i.
From Day 1 one of the biggest problems with shooting DSLR video has been the fact that the audio recorded by these devices is almost completely unusable. One of the earliest workarounds filmmakers adopted was to use the highly-regarded Rode Videomic mounted onto the hotshoe plate to achieve decent field audio. The Videomic ran audio out to an 1/8" audio jack that would fit right into the mic input on the DSLR body. It was a workable solution in some circumstances, and I picked up one almost immediately after getting my first T2i.
Unfortunately, there were still a number of filmming set-ups where this solution was inadequate for the job. Sometimes I needed to get professional audio from professional mics (like a lav) using professional standard cabling (XLR), captured at professional sampling rates (48k+). In these situations the Rode Videomic simply wasn't capable for helping me get what I needed.
Enter the Rode Videomic HD, an entirely new kind of mic, able to capture AND record digitally to an SD card. Could this be the all-in-one audio solution filmmakers need to handle all there audio needs..?
Hopefully you've had a chance to see Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol sometime in the past three weeks. It's pretty spectacular. Just as importantly, I hope you've had a chance to hear MI4, preferably in IMAX. This movie sounds spectacular.
But it doesn't sound spectacular by accident. Great sound is something you have to plan for from the very beginning. Your sound design directly affects how you shoot your film. To see more of what I'm talking about, check out this behind the scenes video on sound design in MI4...
