Emma Panda at Z-Rant

I tried some new things with editing here. In my previous bartender profile videos, I tried my best to maintain some continuity to convey the story of crafting a single cocktail. for this video, I tried to see just how little continuity I could maintain while still producing a video that felt natural. The result is a bit bouncy and flirty.



Do you think it worked?

Whitney Pallend at Cuchi Cuchi

Whitney Pallend at Cuchi Cuchi from Joshua Guerci on Vimeo.

From now on, I'm going to swallow my pride and use auto focus in these tight situations where I am having trouble focusing. In these low light scenes, I have to open up all the way to get a descent exposure and often sacrifice some depth of field. It makes it hard to focus, escpecially when running off the flip out screen and not the eye piece.

I use the Sony NEX-VG10. I am not afraid to push the gain all the way up because the noise doesn't bother me so much. The important thing is to tell a story and I believe this video gives us a good feeling for Whitney's personality.

I could have gone for a little bit more ambiance shots.

Women Behind Bars

I shot this video series for Seattle Met called Women Behind Bars and meeting all the bartenders at the most trendy bars around town.



I wish I was a more confident shooter. I love shooting and I love watching my footage come together in the edit room but I think I could save a lot of time and avoid a lot of pain if I would just slow down and pace out my shots. Yes, there is a lot to look at but if you try to capture it all, you'll probably miss it all too.

For technical issues, I would discourage anybody from using the 5D for documentary style shoots. The image sensor is too big. Yes, everybody likes to see less depth of field but at the end of the day, you want a clean crisp image and you don't want to be scrambling around wasting time trying to get your subject in focus. Go for the 7D or 6DD. And slap on a fast lens.

In the video above, I asked Chelsea to make the same cocktail twice. If I was smart, I would have used the Zeiss 50mm prime lens (normal on a 5D) I had in my bag or a 80mm prime lens for the first time through where she gives a little narrative with the cocktail and I'd focus on her face. Second time through, I'd pull out a 90mm or longer for the closeups on the hands and the booze.

Editing this piece I learned something about editing interviews. Normally, you should avoid cutting audio of an interview with an image of a person that is not in sync with the audio. That is, if you see lips moving that fail to connect with the voice, it looks weird. Also, if the lips aren't moving, it still looks weird. But if you post an image where your eye is distracted by other movement in the frame, your brain doesn't seem to mind the disconnect. Do you see what I mean?



Personality profiles are great opportunities for video. You get so much more understanding about a person from a video that you can't get from a written article. Also, personality profiles are relatively timeless. If the bartender writes a blog, she can post a link or embed this video into her bio.