Inner Circle Blog - Beach Shoot

Here are some photos of the set up for YIPPEE - I'M CANCELLED.

I shot this at Point Mugu State Park. I picked this beach for its seclusion and its proximity to on-street parking for easy equipment access.

Here I am using a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, shooting ProRes HQ 4K.

The composition in the finished video is very odd. It's sort of a weird very flat medium shot with a lot of head room. As a result you get this uncanny effect where the background feels like a green screen, and then when the first wave hits, you are sort of surprised that it's actually really the ocean.

I like that this happened, but I would lying if I said it was intentional. I arrived at the beach with no real plan other than "This is a video where I'm at the beach."

My first thought was to shoot it looking down parallel to the beach so that you would get the nice cliffs in the background. But I tried both directions and didn't like either of them. The only option left was shoot with the ocean as the background.

This introduced the idea of the waves crashing into me from behind unexpectedly. I liked this a lot.

If you've ever been to the beach you know that the waves tend to crash on the beach in more or less the same place, and then 1 out of every 15 goes up much farther than the other ones and ruins all your stuff.

So the chair had to be close enough to the ocean where the timing of this happening would be funny.

Once the chair was in the right place, then the camera had to be in the right place. I mentioned the composition is very odd.

I used to have to shoot interviews with people all the time, which you may or may not know is called a "talking head." And the traditional way you shoot that is like this:

And actually the source of this image is a pretty good basic rundown of the rule of thirds if you are interested in that kind of thing.

But in this video, I am dead center in the frame, staring AT the camera, and the entire top fourth of the frame is empty headroom.

There's also a smudge on the lens. As a matter of fact the entire lens was coated with mist from the ocean.

Anyway, really the only reason I shot it like this consciously was because I wanted you to be able to see each wave crash and move up the shore in the background. This way, you are just as focused on the movement of the ocean as you are on me and what I'm saying.

When I look at this finished video, I like all of the visual things that ended up accidentally happening. Because the chair is basically ground height, so it's like I'm sitting on the ground, I had to move the camera very far back and punch in to get the waves/ocean in the background and not just the sand. As a result, the shot has no depth and is very flat. This creates the illusion that the background is a green screen, then when the first wave finally hits me it's sort of a funny reveal that it isn't. Then the perspective becomes even more confusing because it seems like the only way it could be visually possible is that I'm buried in the sand halfway up to my waist.

Then there's the color grading, which also inadvertently contributed to all of this.

Here's what it looked like as-shot:

Even this has a LUT on it, so there is some color correction being done in camera. But the lighting is horrible because I shot it in direct sunlight at high noon, the worst possible outdoor lighting situation. So half my face is in shadow.

The color grading was actually probably what I struggled with the most. I kept cancelling the YouTube upload and re-doing it because it wasn't right.

Unfortunately I didn't save the project I eventually uploaded, but I recreated basically what I did here so you can get the general idea:

I also cranked up the saturation and the vibrance and added a white vignette.

This is really not what you are supposed to do, and if you light the shot well, you shouldn't have to. But I did not light the shot well, so I had to compensate in grading.

Also, as an aside, I recommend doing something you are happy with on your monitor and then double checking how it looks on your phone and then maybe a TV (in general with video or sound editing you should check your work on whatever device you think most people will watch or listen to it).

So anyway, these weird color grading choices work in tandem with the weird shot composition choices to create the weird final product.

And let me be very clear: I hated all of this the entire time. My mental process was, I'm such an idiot, I fucked this up so bad, so now I have to fuck it up even more to fix the other way I fucked it up, and this sucks and I should kill myself.

And when I uploaded it, I had no idea how it would go, because it was out of my comfort zone and I was pushing myself. And it was only after seeing how people responded to it and seeing how the visual choices effected the viewer that I could look back on them like this and see how they all actually did make sense. At the time, they felt random and clueless and desperate, which they were. But I was acting instinctually, and I need to trust my instincts more, because in this case they led me to the right place.

I've talked many times about not feeling like I can be confident in my own work unless I get external validation for it. The mindset I've tried to have is, I don't want to give people more of want they already want to see, I want to figure out what they don't know they want because they've never seen it before. So it concerns me that I need the external validation to be happy with anything I make, because I fear I will never make anything truly good if my primary motivation is the opinions of other people.

At the same time, the reality is that especially on social media, you won't have any success at all if you don't get that external validation. But I think there is a difference between doing something you think people will like, and doing what they want.

Let me also say that I don't want anyone to interpret this as me not caring about what my audience wants. And I don't think anyone in here would, because I think the reason you're all here is because you appreciate the original and inspired perspective in a sea of social media content that is what you've already seen before chewed up and regurgitated back into your mouth.

At least that's what I appreciate when I see entertainment I enjoy. And I also think if you're reading this, that probably means we have that in common! along with many more things!

Anyway, this was supposed to just be a picture of a tripod and now it became all this self indulgent woo-woo nonsense. So enough is enough. GOODBYE!!!