My dSLR Camera shoots HD Video – Canon Cinema Caravan

One week ago today, I was in Chicago for the Canon Cinema Caravan, a two-day workshop with stillmotion.  stillmotion is a very unique company of artists who create wedding photography and wedding cinema.  Wedding cinema?  I first became attracted to their work after watching this 3.5 minute cinema of JC + Esther.  It was probably the first “wedding video” I’ve ever watched where I actually wanted to watch because it was so engaging and not obvious how it was going to end. It combined beautiful footage AND compelling storytelling.  The story is more about the couple and less about the walk down the aisle.  While the wedding day IS about the walk down the aisle, I like to bring the couples’ personality into their photography as stillmotion has done with their wedding cinema.

I really wanted to attend this workshop for two reasons.  First, I’d like to improve my storytelling ability.  I LOVE making wedding albums and telling the story of how people felt on their wedding day.  Second, I wanted to explore my camera’s High Definition Video function.  Such an amazing feature to have on my camera that I rarely used.

During the first day, stillmotion presented very helpful materials about lens selection.  With that statement, I’m over-simplifying what exactly we talked about, but it was extremely helpful.  Kind of made my head spin and one week later– I’m still thinking about it.  Next we talked more about shooting video with a dSLR body and some advantages and challenges with it.  I got to use the hand-held Merllin Steadicam to capture this video below. A little wobbly, but I think I did pretty well after only holding the rig for just a few minutes.

About the video: Tt was the end of the day and I was ready to finally press record and make a run for it…literally.  Amina and Justin (both from stillmotion) are yelling to get our attention and let us know that day one was over.  Steadicam is a rig that you wear or hold to make video while the camera is in motion.

Tech specs: Canon 5D MarkII body with 14mm f2.8 rectilinear lens. Merlin hand-held Steadicam rig.

More images from day one on the tour’s blog.  They also had a “smilebooth” setup in the studio.  This image from here. He loves me……

On day two, we discussed workflow, storytelling, and lighting.  We also formed small groups to create commercials and put our newly learned skills to use.  See anyone you recognize?  That’s me on the left (duh) working with two of the other attendees and our model, Lindsey.  I was in charge of lighting this scene.

If you want to follow along for the rest of this month, here’s the link to stillmotion’s blog they’re running about the tour.   I thought that this workshop was amazing, and definitely worth the time and money.  The lecturers were excellent artists who explained both the creative process and the basic procedure of  how to create and edit cinema.  SO much of the content was new for me which I found to be both stimulating and exciting.

Now it’s time to tell a better story……