Posts Tagged ‘Video’

The Roundhouse Camden. An Iconic Brand and Venue

The Roundhouse in Camden holds almost legendary status as a cultural and historical melting pot, most famously known as a music and performing arts venue. To name but a few, it plays host to the iTunes Festival, Electric Proms and recently solo greats such as Smoky Robinson and  Bob Dylan (of which I was lucky enough to get a ticket). However it isn’t just a venue, it’s a charity that prides itself on its strong youth focus with its doors open to 11-25 year olds who are free to use and encourage the learning of TV, Radio , Music and Media Production in any of the 24 state of the art studios that reside underneath the iconic, acoustically prolific upper performing space.

This year’s Turning Point Festival kicks off on 17th September and runs for three days over 5 stages, featuring more than 300 artists. It will feature Live music, dance, circus, comedy, cabaret, theatre, open mikes and much more and is staged almost entirely by the youth groups of the Roundhouse, offering them a unique opportunity to put the studio lessons into practice. The festival also encourages funding and youth participation from some of the less privileged areas local to Camden. So when we at Access were offered the opportunity to donate our services to such a good cause, we jumped at the chance; not to mention the hope of a few tickets and a good knees up!

30 seconds in Wales
(17 hours behind the scenes of our Welsh TV commercial)

We all met up in a dark underpass in Cardiff one chilly evening in May. Our star actress, the lovely Ffion, had to walk back and forth for about 5 hours with a scary guy stalking her and we soon attracted a row of onlookers gathering to watch what was going on. We were all very impressed by the girl who turned up at 8pm and stayed all night long watching, she almost felt like one of the crew in the end! I was glad I’d invested in some new gloves earlier that day as it did get rather cold, but our 11pm pizzas kept us going till about 1am before we packed up all our equipment and went back to the hotel.

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Over the past few months I’ve been messing about with different software to help me record some time-lapse video with the aim of making a short movie. Well here is a 3 and a half minute video I’ve managed to make by editing together 10 different time-lapse videos taken from the windows here at the office. Soon there may be more movies uploaded to my YouTube channel so take a look. Hope you enjoy it!

P.S. There is music so pop your headphones in!

A friend of mine on Twitter brought my attention to this uber clever stop motion film from Takeuchi Taijin. Photographed first and then filmed again – the overall result is cracking.

Ever wanted to create an super realistic miniature model and then painstakingly craft a time lapse video? No me neither, but thanks to the amazing technique of Tilt Shift photography you don’t have to – just find a suitable location in the real world and choreograph each… OK maybe it would be easier to create a model.

Take a look at 50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography, or if you’re truly geeky you might want a technical explanation.

Of course, there’s always another way…

As we all know, Macs are vastly superior to PCs. Seems like Microsoft knows it too. It has been discovered that the recent ‘I’m a PC’ TV ads were actually created on a Mac! Apparently, a Flickr user called LuisDS made the ironic discovery after looking at some of the metadata embedded in the video file. It was made on a Mac using Adobe CS3 software. Microsoft kind of defended itself by saying:

“As is common in almost all campaign workflow, agencies and production houses use a wide variety of software and hardware to create, edit, and distribute content, including both Macs and PCs.”

OK, they fobbed it off onto the Ad Agency, which as we all know use Macs. That’s not the end of Microsoft’s tale of deception though…

A new ad for a Windows only piece of software called ‘SongSmith’ has just been released. This lets the user start singing and the software creates a tune on the fly. Sounds fun, wish they had it for the Mac…

Going off the TV ad it would appear the software IS available for Mac users as it is shown running on a MacBook Pro!

They’ve attempted to cover the Apple logo with stickers but it’s still easilly identifyable as a MacBook. 20 seconds later it’s shown running on a real PC laptop that looks about 6 inches thick.

Here’s the ad. I’m sure the general cheesyness of the ad must be intentional, although why I can’t imagine. There’s a really funny part where one guy says “Microsoft huh? so it must be really easy to use”

Hmmm, pull the other one Microsoft, they’re probably running it on a Mac because it’s more stable at running Windows than regular PCs are.

It has been suggested that the placement of the MacBook is intentional so as to cause a storm and be a viral hit on youtube. Perhaps, but if that was the case you’d make damn sure you did a good job on the ad, make it on a Mac even.