Who would’ve thought moving home and starting a new job would eat so much time? Finally the time has been found to sit down and spend some quality time with a shuttle wheel. Here’s the third Cosplay Cascade video featuring cosplayers out and about the Keele University campus at AmeCon 2012! Due to the building works and general faff it’s not got the amazing scenery and variety I had planned but hey, at the end of the day it’s about people in brightly coloured costumes throwing things at each other. I think.

More lessons learned, and the steadicam had gained a loose screw which went mostly undetected but now has been found and severely punished, hopefully I won’t have the same troubles next time!

As an offshoot there’s a quickish video made entirely out of Avatar cosplay footage, that’s just how big the groups were over the weekend!  That can be found on YouTube here.

Second CMV! This is  a much more relaxed attempt, it’s not the fast-paced sequel to the first video that I was aiming for due to lack of time, crowding and the outside area being absent most of the con, and me messing up a lot :P    So that will have to wait for AmeCon.

Instead I picked a different track and made the best I could – I still enjoyed making it in the end, there are some great moments I’m glad to have caught!

Expo is a different kettle of fish to a more close-knit con like Kita, and with the rather packed crowd it’s difficult to explain what you’re trying to capture and some pretty awkward video comes out of it – as a result the default is usually resorted to, as it’s hard to misunderstand the instruction: TWIRLING PEOPLE IN DRESSES EVERYWHERE, so there’s a somewhat large amount of that.  If you are allergic to twirling dresses I would have to offer the medical advice of giving this video a miss.

Thanks to all who got involved and hope to film plenty more of you at AmeCon!

The sprocketed lemon slice rotates once more!

It’s been a long time, my jog/shuttle wheel hasn’t seen this much exercise in many years but it’s time I got back in the editing seat and got some movement up in my visual media deliverings!

In other words: A cosplay music video has been made! Except CMV doesn’t sound all that cool so I’m going with the far cheesier Cosplay Cascade! (I reserve the right to retract this name if the world and its dog hates it) Thanks to all the wonderful cosplayers of KitaCon 4 for putting up with me not just snapping photos but also making them spin like tops, jump about, and generally flail around like loons. This is your payoff! All 130ish of you! Apologies to anyone I filmed who didn’t make it in, there aren’t many and most are my fault at the camera end!

All weekend I was trying out my amateur steadicam and running semicircles around people in order to get that magical floating-camera effect that’s popular these days, with the aim of setting it to music and making something cool. I had a lot of fun with this and it was great to see so many people getting involved.

“But hang on“, I imagine you saying, “aren’t you ripping off CosplayFever with making music videos?”

• Not at all! I started out in music video stuffs, albeit not with cosplayers, nor with any clue what I was doing, nor were they any good, but NEVERMIND!
• I did – since we’re on good terms anyway – check I wouldn’t be stepping on toes by making one, so I think we cool. Hopefully.
• I’m ripping off acksonl, get it right! Jeez. I am half expecting a knock on the door and opening it to get the back end of a steadicam to the face for this, but I figure no one else this side of the pond is making them so..

So yes, music, cosplayers, swishy steadicam, and much silliness. As a disclaimer – beyond not owning rights the music in any way, shape or form – I’m not a pro at this. The steadicam rig is cheap, flaky, customised and abused muchly; this is only my second outing doing any filming with it and my first on this scale; my editing skills haven’t been flexed since like 2006; etc etc excuses excuses. Basically: it isn’t all sharp, perfectly focused, smoothly panned, ungrainy footage and I can’t even promise I kept peoples’ heads in view the whole time. I’ll get better!

For obvious reasons, I’ll take criticisms on the filming, the grading, the editing, music choice, what have you, but keep negative comments on individual cosplayers to yourselves – they’re out of my control XD and a lot of them are good friends of mine.

Hope you enjoy, share the love, etc. Anyone interested in taking up similar projects or donating footage to the cause of Nert Makes More Videos, I’ll be making posts about the steadicam and its trials/tribulations soonish.

What to say, really? Three years of University life over, and with it the student lifestyle. Ahead lies a cold, bleak future of work and blehness. Or does it? Warning, this is an absolute sappy cheesefest.

This video is as a final goodbye to the life we once shared, as a house of monkeys. This was also my first attempt at something a little more artistic. I’d already tried the slow and emotional approach with Clarie’s Africa video, but this one was to mean a lot more, to be a lot more emotional and powerful. It mixes slow motion video clips from all throughout our times together, along with a plethora of photos from our combined collections

Unlike the others this video had the time to be polished before unveiling. It is missing the subtitle karaoke I had originally intended on having, and there is a glitch with image masks I still haven’t fixed, but that’s highly unnoticable unless you know where to look. I experimented a lot with simple effects and I like to think they came out very well with the style of the music. The basic theory being that the less you can see of an image before recognising it, the more powerful it’s effect will be. Balancing that with not excluding people who haven’t revised up on their 42h Theory lately is quite difficult but I think this video has a lot of both sides in.

This was unveiled at my shared birthday party in 2003, at the same time ManyLemons.co.uk was presented to me actually :D Tissues had to be handed out, and I was told I was a very bad person for making my friends cry.

It was a dark time.. University as we know it was coming to an end. The time had flown so quick, and now the pressure was on. Three years of lectures, and monkeying, all leading up to a final climax.. Would we pass the final exams? Well, yes. We’re not stupid enough to waste our time at University, we work as hard as we play. Still the pressure gets pretty harsh when it comes down to it.. Taking it from the perspective of a movie though..

The End is coming..

..but we have gained experience with plastic weapons

Much had happened in the past 3 years. Allan got his treasured Ninja suit, there’d been an organised stealth flourbomb attack on the university student panel, Allan got beaten about the living room (a lot), but most importantly we were to leave our home and our friends..

Flourbombed sabbaticals

We gained more plastic weapons

We got Allan a Ninja Suit (Why God, why?)

We had far too many Kinder Disappointments

Revise or Die celebrates the epic struggle and adventure of a small renegade band of students against the grade..

The video is in the style of a movie trailer, but don’t be fooled by the “Coming Soon” at the end. It’s just to compliment the trailer atmosphere.

We liked the song, I strung a video along to it. That’s about as deep a story as there is.

Largely it involves Allan recieving beatings and humiliation, we have no problem with this.

It’s what appears to be a random collection of bits and peices salvaged from the depths of my camcorder archives and mixed together into a strange digitial video synced to theme music from an anime series and generally representing a year’s worth of living with the person we know as Allan.

The footage itself comes from a failed attempt at making our own spoof movie, amongst other things. A few scribbled ideas in the back of a drawing pad during a particularly boring recap lecture formed themselves into a wonderful idea in our weak little minds, and we decided to do it.

Without storyboards or anything

Without any dialogue planned.

It was painful.

At any rate the garbage we did randomly collect on my stack of 8mm camcorder tapes piled up, and we ended up capturing it all to a buggy MPEG4v3 codec (this was before DivX ;-) was around) which made things pink and green at random times and the noisy analogue tapes really made it look awful.. Colours bled all over the place. Even so we stuck it on some cdrs and tried to forget it ever happened.

Random boredom struck and 7 Hours later, with breaks, Allangelion was complete, beatmatched, synced and with some fancy transparent overlay effects. First premiered at a LAN party held by a friend of Allan’s, he’s both hated and treasured it since.

Later I tried to find the source files for it to recompile it as high a quality as I could, but found it’d been corrupted.. grr.. a huge MJPEG compiled copy was the best we had, so that’s what was used when remaking Allangelion with the all new rotoscoped shiny lightsaber effects. As a side effect, somehow scenes with lightsabers in seem blurry compared to the original, a major annoyance.. In the end I finally managed to get as best as I could by mixing the MJPEG copy with as much of the source as possible while overlaying the blurry version using a couple of filters to basically only overlay the bright areas (the lightsabers) so it kept the original sharpness. Now with a couple of extra touches it looks just that little bit better