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A promotional video I shot and edited for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. Bit of a last minute job, I turned up on the day expecting to film a few technical demonstrates and the powers that be said that was out and now we are doing a promo video.

It was a compact few hours and trying to get all the shots I wanted while a live course was going on was a struggle at times but happy with how it turned out. I think the single biggest issue was that I was using a mixture of macro and wide lenses from different manufacturers the focus direction was opposite for each which really helps to pull you out of the flow when you focus in the wrong direction.

That and all of the weird colour casts from the different celling lights was another fun piece. But that is the challenge and I got very lucky with a few movement shots and the talent only spiked the lense a couple times so overall not much to complain about.

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I was looking for a Bruce Lee poster with a motivation quote for someone birthday. I wanted it to be bright visually but couldn't find one I liked so I made one instead. Pretty happy with how the wave turned out. It was a struggle to get the text right and I am not 100% happy but over it came together well and got it printed in time for their birthday.

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My fourth video in the series was the largest yet and featured extensive motion graphics which took me a very long time to do. It was also the longest and made me realise that I need some kind of telepromoter if I want to do videos like this better. I can only remember so much of the script at a time which results in so many takes and my energy flags and you get grumpy Rumhann in the edit.

To that end I have went a backed the ParrotPro kickstarter whic has been beset with delays and back communication. So not sure when the next video will come out as I was hoping to us it with this.

But aside from all of that I am quie happy with the end result, I think the animations work well together and it gave me a rense of achievement getting this up, finally.

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For my third “A Step Greener” video I focused in on the Bank I use and what impact that has on the environment, spoiler it is pretty bad. Which is why I decided to change to a building society. For the video itself I used my new Panasonic S5 as my B-Cam. I quite like the image from it and have been curiose about trying a full frame camera for video as I have been working with mostly MFT for the last five years. I really like the options it offers on the wide end of the focal range and having good image stabilisation is great.

I have a couple older canon FD lenses that I have been wanting to try out so I decided to use them for this video. I like the image from them but the 50mm f1.4 does render quite a bit sharper images when put next to the 28mm f2.8. And unfortunately for this set up I ended up putting the 50mm on the S5′s whos sensor oversamples a 6k image down to 4k so you get a very sharp initial image. Then combined that with the faster lenses and there is some clear difference between the two. But it is good to be reminded of these things.

On this video I also used overlays for the first time in this series. With the nature of banks and their investments there wasn’t much opportunity for me to film B-Roll footage myself I thought this was a good alternative and overall I am quite happy with how they turned out.

I do think that my performance could be a bit more energetic and hope to move more behind the camera instead of in front of it for my next project once I’ve completed this series.

Also have to give Natalie a big shoot out for al the help she has given me on this project. Thanks for the help honey.

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This is a very short highlights video from a workers rally in Glasgow. This was the first time in a while that I had used my Pansonic g85 and I was reminded again why I like the camera so much. You just pull it out of the bag, slap on a microphone and start filming. The codec in which the camera records is limited but just from an ease of use it is great.

I was more there to attend the rally than record video but I still feel that there were a couple  shots I left at the event that would ahve helped in the editing process. It’s always good to get a mixture of Close, Medium and Wide, I could have done with having a few more medium shots and getting to the event extra early so that I could record segents form all the speakers.

I was quite happy with the music that I found for it and have to give big thanks to MUSOPEN

https://musopen.org

They have a load of really nice classical pieces free to use and a cheap membership if you want some higher quality recording. I feel that as is always the case it’s the audio that makes the video and it is the music which really drives it forward.

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I finally managed to get the 2nd video for “A Step Greener” filmed and edited. It has been a busy few months but I am very happy with the progress I have made. This is the first video that I have edited and colour corrected using Davinci Resolve and I don’t think I will be going back to Premier for anything that features raw video or requires much grading. I think the options it offers and the overall quality of the image or quite noticable.

Also for this video Natalie helped out behind the camera, having a 2nd person involved was a real help in terms of focusing and spotting background detail issues that too often I end up not noticing when I am solo shooting.

I am quite happy with how the video has turned out and am excited to see how my next projects turn out with Resolve grading them.

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It has been a while since I have taken many photos and it was really good to get back into it on a trip back to Ireland. I eneded up using my BMPCC4K camera to take the pictures which isn’t the perfect photography camera. It takes nice raw images but you can’t review them in camera so it becomes a little like a film camera where you don’t know how your photos look until to get home and develop them. Which can be nice in it’s own way.

Overall I was very impressed by how much latitude the DNG files gave me to process them after the fact and it is something that I hope to experiment more with in the future. I was using a cheapish M42 speed booster and some vintage lenses and really liked the look they gave the photos.

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This was my entry to Cine-D’s competition with Fujifilm to win one of their new flagship camera’s the X-H2S. The challenge was to tell why you deserved to win a new camera in 10 seconds. I couldn’t say I was the most deserving but my first camera was a Fujifine pix and that was the first camera on which I made a movie so I thought I would go with that and try to make it as visual interesting as possible.

I only found out about the competiton two weeks before the deadline so I didn’t have a lot of time to plan or film but overall I am happy enough with what I managed to fit it. It isn’t perfect but I got it done and submitted and that is good enough right now.

Here are some stills from the project

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A Step Greener is a video series in which I plan to chart my journey this year to be more environmentally conscientious. This first video outlines the five areas in which I hope to assess and improve my overall carbon footprint. I am also using this as a way to get me back filming my own stuff after a work/life lull that has seen me not film/finish too many personal projects.

The single largest challenge of this project was our Cat Maisy is was quite insistent to join the video. You can hear her in the background quite a bit, there was also some interference from the road outside. For the next video I’m planning to experiment with some new mic placements to hopefully eliminate or at least greatly reduce this.

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Super short video project based off the six words of the title "Waiting for footsteps that are gone". This is a little project I gave myself to try and get back to making more content. Simple idea, create a short title/story of six words then create a video based off that using only three shots.

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My entry for the Glasgow Film Festival short film competition "2020 in under twenty". The challenge was to create a short film of under 20 seconds that celebrates something positive you have take from this year. For me I choose to focus on the expanded plant presence that has formed in our flat over the last 12 months.

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Some design work I did for creating Dynamic Assessment UK’s logo. The brief was fairly light, they liked the colour orange, they would like an arrow or ladder to feature in the design and they wanted something simple and not too complicated. 

Idea 1 and 2 were my first attempts to get the ball rolling. They were quite happy with the Barlow font and the large DA but wanted a more active orange and something more dynamic than the ladder.

I sent on the 2 variations of the first idea and was pleasantly surprised when they decided to go for variation 2. It’s nice when the client finds an idea they love early on in the design process.

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Short social media advert I created for LOVE E-Learning going live. Again I was working with a fairly text heavy script so I tried to incorporate a lot of motion, shapes and colour into the video to try and grab the social media users attention.

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Here is a simple promotional poster I put together to advertise a digital filmmaking course on your smartphone. Simple clean design featuring a LOVE heart cut out of the companies logo in the centre over six other images.

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Here is a video I created for the LOVE Group’s to advertise the launch of their online HNC in Social Services Healthcare and Children & Young People. The main aim of this video was to highlight the advantages of studying your HNC online to potential students. Showing them that they would have the flexibility to continue with their work or home life while still being able to progress their studies at a schedule that worked for them.

With the script featuring a lot of text for a 1 minute video I wanted to focus on movement and motion to keep the energy of the video up and the viewer engaged while still giving them enough time to absorb the technical content.

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Here is a four page introductory brochure I created for the LOVE Group’s new Earth School Education programme. The project went through a couple variations, with the client striving to include a lot of information into the four pages while still keeping an easy to read flow. They wanted the content of the document to be worthwhile for a number of different target groups while not being too intimidating in length or terminology that people would be afraid of reading it.

Overall I’m happy with how the brochure turned out, there are always areas that could be improved upon but you also have to be realistic in the time constraints of your project. And always remember about the object of your design, 

-What do you want to communicate? 

-Who do you want to communicate to?

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Short video I created as a general introduction for the LOVE Group, describing what they do and their core values. The challenging part of this project was to try and find a way to summarise a diverse business and charity organisation working in education, care, environmental and recruitment into a short and simple video that touched on the key elements and communicated their core ethos.