Frame-grabs from Shaking It to New Orleans Bounce on NYTimes.com

Using a DSLR, specifically the 5D Mark II, was essential in creating this piece for The New York Times Magazine on bounce music in New Orleans. The light in these clubs was low, often just a single bulb or a blacklight. A traditional camera would have never been able to pick up enough light to show what was happening.

Another advantage to shooting with the 5D on this story was that I could customize my rig to work in each situation. In the clubs I often had very little room to work, so I mounted my camera on some short 15mm rods and handles. When working outside, I mounted the shoulder pad back on to my rig for more stability. I love this camera more and more each time I go out to shoot. I’m feeling really comfortable now that I’ve got a rig that I’m somewhat happy with and I can customize to the situation.

NYTimes After Effects Demo Reel 2009 from Zach Wise on Vimeo.

The use of motiongraphics/animation is still pretty new at The New York Times. We’re still figuring things out, but I thought it might be useful for some people to see what our work flow is like.

Have a Conversation:

Our work flow generally starts with a conversation. The conversation addresses the following questions.

• Do we need motiongraphics?
• Is the concept we’re trying to communicate visually complex?
• Can we tell or illustrate this part of the story just as well with video or photography?
• Do we have time to do it?

Storyboard:

Audio Track:

After we’ve firmed up the narration script, we will either quickly record a scratch narration track or piece together a final narration track. It is essential to have this before starting an After Effects project because we need to know what our timing and pace needs to be for the animation.

We’ve had to come up with some interesting solutions for working with audio in After Effects though. It’s hard to do real time playback of audio in After Effects which makes it hard to hit the marks to have animation and narration weave together seamlessly. Our solution was to add a “beep track”.

“Beep” track example in Soundtrack Pro Large version..

“Beep” track example in After Effects Large version..

Rough Draft:

Depending on the project, it can take a long time to render in After Effects. Generally we output a “rough draft” version of the piece near completion to drop into Final Cut Pro, so we can see how it looks in context with the rest of the story. Once we make the final tweaks we output a full resolution final version to replace the draft in Final Cut Pro.

Example:

Here’s an example of the rendered final output from After Effects with the “beep” track for Flipped: How Private Equity Dealmakers Can Win While Their Companies Lose .

Here’s how the final piece looked.

This is basically our workflow. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either.

Got some tips, or questions? Let me know in the comments.

Frame-grab from the Toxic Waters: From Air to Water Waste on NYTimes.com

For the Toxic Waters: From Air to Water Waste piece I worked on I decided to use the Canon 5D Mark II again. The camera just produces beautiful images for video and I had the time on this piece to deal with the transcoding and audio sync routine since I knew the piece would run later in the Toxic Waters series

Trailers for Toxic Waters:

Vows:

Misc:

Frame-grab from the “Fan Memories” a Michael Jackson memorial video on NYTimes.com – full size frame-grab (1920×1080)

For the Michael Jackson Memorial piece I worked on, we decided before I left for L.A. that we would use the Canon 5D Mark II to try and push the look of the piece, and to try something new. The first thing I did, is call up a freelancer, Patrick Burke, to run sound. Patrick used to be an AC (Assistant Camera) in L.A. so he came with all the right tools, including a film slate that we used to sync audio from a Marantz PMD660 to the video footage of the 5D.

I explain how to sync the audio to the 5DMKII footage after the jump.

We interviewed about 50 people for the piece but could only use a fraction of them in the end for several reasons. Once we synced up the audio to the footage in Final Cut, you really have to transcode to start editing, because every cut you make, you run the risk of de-syncing the audio, plus h264 is not very nice for native editing.

I had a deadline of 5pm EST the next day which meant 2pm PST. Just enough time to slam out an edit… BUT the transcoding was going to take 16hrs!! I had to ditch most of the footage, and pick a couple people to transcode in order to get the piece up.

Also, the piece that is up was compressed for transmission and then re-encoded in NYC for the NYTimes website. I assure you the original footage looks amazing.

How to sync audio with 5D Mark II footage

Got some advice on syncing audio up with the 5D Mark II? Share the love in the comments.

Screen-shot of the LENS Homepage

A few people have been asking me how the LENS Blog on The New York Times site came to be and what software it was built on. I thought I’d shed a little light on the development process and answer some of these questions.

Why does it scroll sideways?

When we started this project many months ago, The Big Picture was obviously one of the successful models for a photo blog, not just in terms of traffic but also in terms of presenting photographs in my favorite way. BIG.

When you go as big as The Big Picture, you can run into big problems. Depending on your monitor, the photos can’t fit on your screen. Scrolling through many large photos causes you to have scrolling precision and dexterity for an optimal viewing experience. Slide-shows on the other hand are easy to view. The scroll position remains the same and the photos scroll. We started to think of the LENS blog as a slide-show, and slide-shows within slide-shows. We fell in love with the idea of being able to stay on one page and have a mass consumption of images.

Obviously this is a quick overview of how LENS came together and how it works. If you have specific questions, hit me up in the comments and I’ll try and answer them as best I can.

After many long months, we’ve launched it! I’ll write a little more about it once the dust settles.

The New York Times introduces Lens, a photojournalism blog that intends to present some of the most interesting visual and multimedia reporting: in photographs, videos, audio slide shows and any other medium that fits — our format.

Lens will be a showcase for the work of Times photographers, but it will also highlight the best images from other newspapers, magazines, news organizations and picture agencies, and from around the Web. It will point readers in the direction of important books, galleries and museum exhibitions. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.

Some test footage from my new 5D MKII taken near Columbus Circle.

Download 720p

20090103_NYMinute_clips_1.mp4

Some test footage from my new 5D MKII taken near Columbus Circle.

Download 720p

20090103_NYMinute_clips_2.mp4

The Thirst in the Mojave piece is my attempt at making video interactive and contextualizing its content. Video on the web is great but it lacks many web-centric features or enhancements.

The advantage of web video over traditional video has typically revolved around the ability to share with friends and time-shift watching content. Thirst in the Mojave tries to bring a little more web mentality to video but still utilize the linear narrative strengths that make video such a great storytelling tool.

I completed the project before I left the Las Vegas Sun back in August and for reasons I’m not sure of, it finally launched.

Features of Mojave

Transparency is a great tool of truth.

Another use of the more info box in this project was transparency. An example of this is a scene in part 3 where Pat Mulroy is talking about the pipeline project on Face to Face with Jon Ralston. In the narrative you see several clips from the program but in the more info box you can watch the entire Face to Face show that those clips came from. Any viewers who might be skeptical that those clips were taken out of context can watch the program and see that the clips were selected appropriately.

All together, about 20 hours of footage were shot and edited down to 22 minutes for the main narrative.

The main narrative video content is divided into 5 parts for the web. The piece was also edited for TV by cutting it into 4 parts for commercial breaks with a total run time of 22 minutes.

Interactive Water Use Map

We thought this topic was strong enough to go even further. We built a database of water usage from public water records for over 1/2 a million single family homes in the valley. We then built a “water use app” to allows viewers to search a map of the Las Vegas Valley to find out how much water they’ve used in the last year. They can then compare their usage to their neighbors. On top of the search functionality we also visualized water usage density and swimming pool density on the map. Approximately 70% of the water problem falls on outdoor residential water use, I think this app is a real asset towards understanding that problem and hopefully doing something about it.

Christmas 2008 from Zach Wise on Vimeo

I just got the new Canon 5D MKII in my hands before I left for Ohio to spend Christmas with my family.

Not much to report about the camera that hasn’t been said before except I miss 24fps, 30fps doesn’t agree with me. Also, the IS lenses work great for stabilizing video, as long as you don’t use the on-board audio (you can hear the IS motor).

My Flickr stream Cooliris