Backyard Studio Blog

Nikon Festival

// December 8th, 2009 // Uncategorized

We have had the chance to make two videos for the Nikon Festival. For more information you can go to the official web site at www.nikonfestival.com. Nikon is holding this festival to celebrate the D5000 ability to take 720p HD video. That’s the same camera that we use, and we recommend it.

The theme is a day through your lens, so we took the “normal” day of Matthew Loberg, the “president” of Backyard Studio. You can watch that here. All camera work, music, and editing was also done by Matt.

There is a second one that we are waiting to get approved. It’s a pretty epic 140 second movie. Matt Loberg came up with the general story, then Dane Walter helped develop a little more.

I won’t tell you what happens, your just going to have to wait, but this was probably the most interesting and fun video Backyard has done to date.

In the first scene, Matt beat up Dane. We filmed it right outside of a Church located in a small town. A street that usually isn’t very busy runs right next to it. As we were filming, a car turned on to that road. Then as Matt started to beat up Dane, the car stopped! So we stopped the scene right there and then ran inside the church. It was pretty funny.

The next scene, is a low light scene, and we didn’t have really anything that gave us the amount of light we needed. So in order to get what we wanted, we put a rag over a light bulb. We were getting the camera, when we heard this pop and whoosh. We ran into the room, and the light bulb had exploded and started the rag on fire. Luckily there was a fire extinguisher right there and we got it put out almost right away. Did you know that a burnt light bulb smells really bad? Along with that, it set off the fire alarm… That sucked. So after we got all cleaned up, we had to change our plan, and had to compromise a little bit.

We started filming this Friday night at 3:30. Saturday morning at 1:20AM we finally got done. The majority of the movie was filmed outside. We are located in Central MN, and it was snowing. It was cold. We had to constantly take 10 minute breaks so the camera and crew could warm up. One thing I learned about cameras, is that they do not like to operate in the cold.

We were filming in a church’s parking lot. It had just the right amount of light we wanted. After taking a break, we went out and no lights were one. So we had to relocate to the back of the church where there was one or two flood lights on. It did not provide enough light, so Matthew Loberg being the DIY guy he is, found a par can, a partial piece of white cardboard, and a ton of extension cords, and rigged up some lighting. It worked out perfect. And a ton of thanks to the crew. It was the biggest crew we have ever had. (It’s usually just Matt)

The movie turned out awesome, so awesome in fact, that we are going to take the very basic plot of it and turn it into a feature film.

So watch for it here. We hope to have a “lite” version of it done by January 20th so we can submit it to the EgoFest in Brainerd, MN.