Formats: Quicktime iPod | Apple TV | .flv | YouTube | Blip | Vimeo HD
I’ve been thinking a lot about clothing lately. I think there is a big potential for the whole clothing experience to be re-invented so we don’t have to hurt the environment and humanity so much. Instead of always using new fabric and shipping clothes made in sweat shops by little kids all over the world a very different approach can be taken. One major step in the right direction is what a friend of a friends clothing line is up to.
Mandate of Heaven makes their clothes from recycled fabric. And they distribute their clothes primarily locally which cuts down on shipping and packaging pollution. They’re also all very expressive clothes which gives the person wearing them a strong individuality and uniqueness which helps break out of the manufactured mindset of manufactured clothes.
I was invited to check out their show and decided to bring my camera. Then I couldn’t help myself and wanted to edit their show into a video with music by one of my favorite local bands Forest Fire who I’ve posted a performance by in the past.
Here is the complete list of lovely models: Paige Wood, Sophia Casanova, Montana Queler, Valerie Ponelli, John Lustig, Claudia Lopez, Rachel Antonoff, Sarah Moran, Noelle Lynch, Jessica Gallucci, Alexa Weir, Lisa Goodwin, Eugina Williams, Alia Shawkat, Maria Christina, Brissi, Ying Li, Sara Copeland, Carissa Ackerman. For more info about the models visit the Mandate of Heaven MySpace Profile.
There is also a flickr photo set from the show.
Technical Notes about making this video: I shot on the HVX-200 with all default settings in terms of gama and color manipulation. The recording setting was at 720 60p and the Scene setting was put to ‘film cam’ rather then what I normally shoot on which is ‘video cam’. Then while shooting I took into consideration everything getting slowed down and did some more radical camera work that I otherwise wouldn’t have done. I tried to run around a lot and get different angles.
Then I captured the footage into FCP using Log and transfer. Because I shot on ‘Film Cam’ the 60 frames per second that were recorded played back at 23.98 which is the beautiful slowmotion you see in the video. I then proceeded to slow the footage down even further to 50 percent and sometimes 25 percent. I did this by clicking the clip and then hitting “apple J” and then typing in the speed that I wanted it to be. Normally I avoid frame blending but in this case it gave it a nice dreamy blur that I like so I used it on almost every shot. Then I used WireTap Pro to record the forest fire song off their myspace profile. I set the software to record the computer audio at 48Khz with no compression and then brought that music into FCP. Then I downloaded some elements from my website like the earth and the pattern and dragged those from my desktop to the FCP timeline in order to have a background for my graphics. Then I color corrected by crushing the blacks, lowering the whites and boosting the mids. Also dragging the color temperature towards blue as needed for each shot. Then I used compressor to export to web and chose the iPod 640 by 480 preset and then uploaded to YouTube. Then I hopped over here and wrote the blog post in my wordpress blog and next will export the video in the Apple TV codec and then use tubemogul to post that across my various video services.
Question for Commenter’s: How else do you think the clothing experience can be re-invented?
