The joys of editing
I returned to the forest trail with drone in hand, making sure I was definitely outside of the no-fly zone to try out filming between the beautiful spruces. I also brought me with a lovely green dress that I thought would go well in the wooded environment. I had been thinking about the juxtaposition between women walking in hiking gear, strong boots, trousers, rain jacket, compared with the perhaps more fragile perception of women in the woods, along with an essence of wood nymphs, myths and fairytales and also in my mind Clarissa Pinkola Estés's interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood as a battle with the female psyche.
So to the woods I went. I initially played with the "follow" setting on the drone to capture some walking up the trail alongside my phone on a tripod. I then played around with the rocket shot which I really like for providing a different perspective. In this setting the drone goes vertically above you to a designated height and has an option to turn as it goes. I decided to play around with some of the movements that I had recorded on the hill the previous day. I then repeated this all in the green dress and barefoot on the trail. Luckily the ground wasn't too prickly on my feet.
Quite happy with the footage I decided to get out of the green dress just as a women came walking her dog! I'm pretty sure she's not used to seeing someone barefoot in a dress on her dog walk!
From there I started working with the remote control to capture footage of the trail and the forest more widely. I wanted to capture an essence of the length of the track going through the forest and the lack of people around as it disappeared in to the distance. I began with just travelling along the track and found changing height as the drone flew forwards created an interesting perception of the trees and the path ahead. My flying skills are still a work in progress so there was quite a bit of faffing around and nearly flying into a tree.
On a last minute whim I decided to fly up higher as I travelled along the track and, with the video showing on my phone as I flew, I suddenly saw the loch appearing beyond the forest which looked magical and got a bit carried away before realising the drone was out of my eyesight and somewhere high in the sky. I quickly hit return to home and it magically captured some fabulous footage on it's way back to me as well of the mountains beyond. Ideally there would be a second person keeping eyes on the drone which I'm finding would be helpful as it is difficult to look at the shot you are creating on the screen whilst also keeping one eye on the drone, which is already pretty small and even more so when it's high above the trees.
Nevertheless I was very happy with these first pieces of footage and created a short reel on instagram with some of the overhead shots.
Having felt fairly happy with this short edit as a first go I decided to work on a longer edit incorporating move of the shots and spent the next 24 hours working on this, moving things around I wasn't happy with until eventually I decided that what I had put together, despite the changes really wasn't capturing the essence of what I wanted. I also came across issues of colour balance between the different cameras and spent some time watching tutorials and tried some new editing software which I concluded wasn't really for me and I will go back to adobe. So eventually the decision was to start again but below is the edit for documentation purposes and so I remember what I don't neccessarily want it to look like.
Comments