Animated Extracts 03: Elia Cmiral Podcast (2014)

For the background material in my latest podcast with composer Elia Cmiral (see end for YouTube links), I opted for textures rather than feedback, partially for a change, and because the music extracts within the podcast are large-scale orchestral works, making analogue feedback inappropriate.

Keeping things abstract, I used a handful of clips shot in HD with a small Canon SX220HS camera, and treated them within Adobe Premiere, doing some basic layering and applying a mix of effects including brightness / contrast, blur, colour boost, speed variations, and image rotation.

The end results are illustrated in the following before / after snapshots, showing the final / original source materials.

Intro:

Midsection:

Finale:

This footage was originally shot for a short in which the park location isn’t camouflaged through effects, whereas for the podcast’s background textures, there’s no need to identify the source, since the goal was to extract flowing textures created by light and physical camera movement.

I’ve used similar footage before to create flowing textures, partly because of the variations in light as filtered through wind-blown leaves, and some quirks unique to specific cameras. With the Canon, when light is filtered through a series of slits, its auto exposure and stabilization goes a little haywire, causing images to warp and jitter.

Lastly, I think the textures work, simply because with slight placement adjustments of whole or chopped-up / layered segments, one can match the movement and colour within the footage to a music cue’s instrumentation, orchestration, and tempo. Even if a piece was performed by solo piano, there are details from the performance which can ‘click’ with certain textures.

As I said in the Editor’s Blog at KQEK.com, Elia Cmiral is one of Hollywood’s hardest working and skilled composers, and a talent whose work film fans may have heard (especially in his horror scores), but isn’t as well known as Christopher Young. It’s worth checking out the podcast interview where Cmiral discusses scoring Atlas Shrugged Part 3: Who is John Galt?, the horror film Cam2Cam, and being the subject of a documentary (Elia Cmiral: Part 1) by fellow Czech director Petr Kanka.

Podcast on YouTube:

Podcast Textures:

On Vimeo

On YouTube

Cheers,

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
Big Head Amusements