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Here’s how to shoot a four hour video in under a minute

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Normally, this wouldn’t really make it past my first internal filter. It’s a silly idea and a silly video, but given who’s actually made it, I found it pretty funny. You see, David F. Sandberg, otherwise known as Ponysmasher, is the director of the rather hilarious Shazam. Yes, that Shazam. A few videos ago, David mentioned that as he’s not a “professional YouTuber” he doesn’t need to care about analytics and subscribers and that he’ll post what he wants when he wants.

He joked about a video flipping off the viewer for four hours. The problem with making threats like that on YouTube, though is that you often have to follow through. So, he did. And he made a behind the scenes showing how he shot the whole thing in just 53 seconds. Because who’s really going to stand there in front of a camera flipping it off for four hours?

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How to shoot and edit time bending slow shutter video with Premiere Pro

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This is an effect that seems to be becoming popular lately, particularly with music videos. I’ve seen it in movies before, often to suggest some kind of mental haze the protagonist in the story might be feeling at any given time. It’s an interesting effect, and the principle is quite simple, although it can take some practice to pull it off effectively.

Essentially, it’s a timelapse, but with the camera moving in a way you’d expect it to move for video. Not along a slider or something. In this video, Justin Odisho explains the basics of how to shoot this kind of footage, and then how to edit it in Premiere Pro with a few ways to integrate it into your realtime footage.

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Adobe After Effects now has content-aware fill which lets you remove objects from videos

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Adobe has announced today a groundbreaking addition to After Effects: content-aware fill for video. The feature is powered by Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI platform which helps to remove various visual elements automatically. This feature has been available in Photoshop, and it makes it much easier for photographers to remove unwanted objects from images. But now, the same feature is coming to After Effects, making life easier for video editors, too.

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Five tips for making green screen shots more realistic

Green screen shots can look stunning, or they can be hilariously bad. I’m sure you want to create the former ones, and Ryan Connolly of Film Riot will help you with that. In this video, he shares five essential tips that will make green screen shots more realistic and believable.

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This surreal video turns Iceland into another dimension

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When I look at photos and videos of Iceland, they often remind me of another planet. In his short film Anomaly, German filmmaker Jacco Kliesch made Iceland look like another dimension. While this beautiful country sure looks incredible in photos and videos, this video brought it to a whole new level.

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Watch BBC demonstrate the beginnings of CGI in 1982

Computer generated graphics has been in our lives for quite a while now. We can’t accurately predict what it will bring in 35 years, but we can go that far into the past and see where it all began.

This video from BBC’s show Tomorrow’s World demonstrates the beginnings of CGI in 1982. The witty presenter Michael Rodd explains and illustrates what it looks like to transform a 2D image into a 3D model on the television screen. And it’s pretty impressive to watch the very beginning of what’s so common nowadays.

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How To Use the Invisible Split Screen Effect To Add Drama To Your Films

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Timing is a huge component of successful filmmaking.  So is framing.  And director David Fincher has a good handle on both.

There are a variety of reasons to use invisible split-screen composites in filmmaking, from honing the timing of shots to multiplying your actors on small-budget projects.  When properly applied, this technique can be used as a tool to craft a dynamically powerful scene and is a trick that Fincher admits to implementing countless times throughout each of his films.

In this tutorial, Ben Gill gives us a breakdown of the technique, how masters like Fincher apply it, and how you can create it yourself.

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Recreating The Aurora Borealis With A Piece Of Fabric

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So, what if you have to create an Aurora Borealis right the middle of anywhere but the North Pole? Usually it means that you’re done (unless you actually go to the north pole). But Joey Shanks really needed some Borealis for his movie production – SPECTRUM.

What he did was quite clever, he used pieces of colored fabric and pieces of lit fabric dancing in the wind as a base and then he composed them into the final movie.

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