Charles Chaplin’s ‘The Circus’1923
Raced home so I could watch The Circus, running time 72 minutes, before I pick Charlie and Becky up from school and family daycare. This will make the five Chaplin films in the last 14 days amongst another two or three films on the Best Ever list. Very excited to see this one.
I had an appointment with my shrink, Joanne, today to check on how I’m travelling, so it was a quick dash home after we wrapped up to fire up the projector, draw the curtains & press
Things are okay, actually pretty good, and I’m on track.
‘Gold Medal Victory’ 2017
I’ve been editing my 4K footage from the weekend into a short film for 24- hours. Last night I stayed up all night going through half an hour of footage I filmed on Sunday of my niece, Lauren, racing in Sydney at a velodrome.
Late last year I bought myself a 4K video camera because of all the work I’d been doing directing concert films for the SSO as well as the other jobs I pick up here and there. I used it in directing George Palmer’s In Paradisum, performed by the Sydney Youth Orchestra, as well as hiring another two 4K cameras.
Now that my time has finished with the SSO after a wonderful decade of producing music recordings and directing web-streams as well as concert specials for Foxtel Arts, I’m in the fortunate position of having a superb camera to use in my other, personal, projects.
I’m not a cameraman so the challenge, I’ve learned, is to is to manually set the Aperture, the Gain/ISO, the Shutter Speed, then manually focus on the subject, which – if it happens to be a bicycle circling around a velodrome – in an oval shape – somewhere between 50 and 110 metres away – is a challenge.
Depending on my focus, when the racers are on the far side of the track if they’re in focus, 15 seconds later on the near side they’re now out of focus. So, I went through everything I shot, and made a 7m43s film with some music I’ve written for it, called Ride. The race went for 29 minutes and I’ve got almost 8 minutes of usable footage so I’m pretty pleased.
It’s being in the right place at the right time with the right camera and my niece happened to win the Gold medal for the Omnium November 12, 2017.
I’m making the first edit with music at the moment. The computer is crunching the zeros and ones and should be ready in 20 minutes.
