What fan filmers do when they're taking care of the kids

I had my nephews over today and we had about an hour to kill before my sister was due to come pick them up. So I asked them if they wanted to make a short Spider-Man movie and (as you'd expect) they said yes. So we shot and edited this little clip in about an hour, and I played with it some more after they left. I thought it looked pretty cool for a couple of hours work, so I'm posting it here for people to see.

Spider-Boy (5.12mb, 41sec)

I wouldn't mind a bit of constructive critisism. Just keep in mind that the kid is 6 yrs old.

EDIT: And it isn't an FX test, just good old editing... stuff...

 

more angles or effects or.......just more


I wouldn't have put all the credits at the end, I would have split them between the "action" sequences

 

Better angles. Like a side angle or something. Hmmm good job? I guess.

 

I thought it was an entertaining minute of my life when I downloaded and watched it.

Here's my constructive criticism. I assume you did the text in the beginning in AE. Or a Photoshop image imported into AE. Whichever way, you should enable motion blur, both in the composition and for the layer. I'm not very fond of it tilting sideways, but I like how the text moves down. And the walking on the walls thing... two problems with that: 1. you see that he was walking on the ground that you held the camera above, and 2. it doesn't look like a wall, but rather the ground. Try getting a ground that could look like a wall. Or you could shoot it on a greenscreen and match it up by filming an actual wall for the background. I need to test that sometime. Also, not a bad choice of music for this little short.

Good job, overall.

And, hmm, the 15fps movie plays for me at either 14.69fps or 15.16 fps, it alternates between the two. If it plays at 15.16, why can't it do less work and play at 15? Hmm.

EDIT: I almost forgot. De-interlace it, too, next time.

 

When you shoot video, unless you change the settings, you're not shooting 30fps as you would think of it. You're shooting 60fps, but, you're not shooting a frame as you'd think of it. You're shooting stripes. So you're.....forget it. I'll let the pros explain.


Clickie.

 

Wow people actually watched it!

Crunchy, point taken. Next time I'll have the kids stay over an extra hour or two so I can shoot more and maybe even plan out what we're doing.

van, I had to cover up the fact that we were on a balcony with a rail in front of the kid (rather than there being a wall there), so my shots probably didn't look all that good. Thanks for the advice.

AWB, text (and everything in the entire clip) was done in Vegas. I have to admit that when I watched it on a TV screen, the title effects came out way too crisp and clean. I figured out a little later that text and other generated media in Vegas is done at 1,000fps, and it'll only let you drop it down to a minimum of 100fps. So next time I should probably try applying some blur to it. As for the wall crawling, yeah it looks cheesy, but again I was restricted to our backyard (so I shot him crawling along pavers). Plus there's nothing like the look on a 6 yr old's face when he sees himself as Spider-Man on a TV screen.

I guess it was sort of a "film-look" test as well. I need a lesson in deinterlacing; I know what it is... and that's about all I know.

Thanks for the comments.

 

What fan filmers do when they're taking care of the kids?

I will find that in 10 years or so.

 

I liked the music.