Selamat Jalan, Indonesia 2010

Hi Folks!

I was quite busy lately, that's why it was rather quiet around here. When already spending a huge amount of time in front of a screen workwise, I always try to get away from it in my spare time. Lots of things were going on and future is looking good though I'm not 100% sure were it's heading :)

With this blog entry I want to present you guys a personal project I was working on the last few months. It took so long because I always had to do other stuff/work/travels inbetween. Yeah, I'm talking about our little Indonesia trip movie. Some of you remember that Luke and I spent two awesome months somewhere in Indonesia last summer. And this is our little baby. I cant wait to watch this stuff in 20 or 30 years! Haha! Or just showing it my grandchildren sometime...
Since this trip I traveled already to Puerto Rico, Australia & Portugal, just another reason why this took me some time ;)

Check it out:
As always I recommend downloading the source file directly from the Vimeo page for the best viewing pleasure (quality). For some reason it looks darker as it actually is on the Vimeo flash player. Unfortunately there is still some banding going on (due to compression process) on the h264 file too. Finding the perfect balance between size & quality with a 30min 720p file is not the easiest thing ;)

Selamat Jalan, Indonesia 2010 from Roman Königshofer | rawmeyn on Vimeo.

It's challenging to do all of the filming on your own on a surftrip. It's a constant battle between your two passions, surfing and shooting. And furthermore between shooting video and/or photo. Often I'd love to shoot both at the same time. But this isn't going to work out and you constantly have to decide for one side. It was definitely a learning experience. I missed to shoot some of the best waves I have seen in my life due to trying to build up the perfect setup (sadly I have that perfectionism in me when it comes to capturing pictures, so I brought a little slider to this journey which I used exactly two times in two months, haha!) or because I was just too busy surfing ;)
Putting your movie together at home is a long process too and can get overwhelming at times. And time is limited due to making money (aka work) and living on a life... And it takes even longer with travel movies like this were you don't know what you will get. So there was no script to follow just rough outlines of some ideas. I'm stoked on the outcome though - a great memory!

I just created a facebook page too, so if you liked the movie maybe like it too and get more information about upcoming projects.

Some tech info:
Everything was shot on two GoPro HD cameras and my tiny Panasonic GH-1 (traveling as light as possible). But the big bummer was that the firmware update for the GoPros wasn't released already. As a consequence we had to deal with lots of fog in the waterhousing all the time. A big amount of the footage was just not useable (we also had no Anti-Fog Inserts). An annoying thing which resulted in just letting the camera at home very often. GoPro added the One-Button-Mode with a firmware update in 2011, exactly what we would have needed in Indonesia. It keeps the running time at a minimum and prevents to produce heat inside the housing. The next thing was that we were limited to capture everything in 30/60fps NTSC, but the final movie output is 25fps PAL. This didn't make things easier. Also GoPro's LCD Bacpac wasn't released already, so I never saw anything I was shooting...
At this time, around June 2010, the GH-1 firmware hack was pretty fresh and I didn't trust it already. I was afraid blowing up my camera just right before we were leaving. So I didn't install it. Afterwards I wished I had! The quality of the footage of a GH-1[3] (a hacked GH-1) is just so much better. Anyway...
I brought the kit lens (a slow 14-140mm) and two fast primes (the Lumix 20mm f1.7 pancake & a Canon FD 50mm f1.4) but I guess I was shooting 80% with the pancake lens on land.

All the footage was converted to ProRes (LT). The rough edit was done in Final Cut Pro. Then I brought everything into After Effects and did some speed adjustments, masking and the color correction. You are so limited with the footage coming out of these cameras, but I tried my best to let it shine. I denoised some of the dark GoPro shots and did all the color adjustments and the whole render (as a *.tiff sequence) in 32bpc (linear color workflow).

What did I learn from this? I learned that I suck in voice overs! Ha... I bet you had a laugh too. And I have miles to learn in audio postproduction or just work together with an audio guru next time :)

Thanks for watching and reading till this stage, seems like you are really interested ;) I hope the movie arouse some wanderlust deep in you...

Feel free to share it if you liked it! Would be awesome to reach loads of people from all over the world!

High 5!
Roman