Shooting
A Canon 7D with Sigma 10mm fisheye lens was mounted to the dashboard of my car via Manfrotto’s 175 Spring clamp and a small ball head to capture the 48 minute drive.
The movie is comprised of 958 jpeg images taken 3 seconds apart – utilizing Canon’s TC-80N3 Timer Remote Control (not shown).
- • Exposure: 1/60 @ f/3.2, ISO 640
- • White Balance: Daylight
- • Focus: Manual, set to infinity
Perhaps the toughest part of the project was determining exposure. Since the sequence was initiated just before sunrise, the sky was going to brighten considerably before reaching my destination (even though there was a light rain that morning). I wanted to retain the darker ambiance of dawn, so I decided to let the sky overexpose as the drive progressed.
Final Cut Pro X
All 958 images were imported into FCP and assigned a duration of 1 frame. This can be preset in the Preferences before importing your images or by selecting all images, pressing ‘control+d’ and entering ‘1’ in the Playhead (timecode) window.
At 24 frames per second, the movie was only 40 seconds in length and I felt it flew by too quickly, so I lengthened the duration to 1:27 minutes with the Retiming function plus Optical Flow. 2-second hold frames were inserted at the beginning and end to allow for fades-in and out.
To make the overexposed sky more artistic, I applied FCP’s Glory effect twice to give it an edgy look.
Music is the soundtrack from Miami Vice by Jan Hammer.
Nice. Like the choice of music as well.