“This Thunderous Heart”, the always-brilliant Macnas Parade was held on Sunday 22nd July as part of the Galway Arts Festival 2012.
It was a horrible night, absolutely lashing down, but my girlfriend did a great job of holding our big umbrella up over the camera for the whole parade and even managed to keep it out of shot of my wide-angle lens (most of the time)!! I shot in 50fps and slowed everything down to 50% to get the nice slo-mo effect. The opening shot doesn’t have any effects whatsoever. It’s a guy walking down the street with a huge set of firecrackers going off over his head, but created the cool “man holding fire” effect when slowed down to 50%!!
Apart from some grueling editing, post-production was all about the colour-grading. It was dusk, lighting was terrible and no matter what I did with the camera, everything was coming out washed-out and dull. It needed an injection of colour and life, so I upped a lot of reds and some greens in the shadows, a bit less in the midtones and a small bit of reds only in the highlights. It was my first ever attempt at colour-grading and I think it turned out pretty well. Especially compared to the original footage! Thankfully, there wasn’t need for any difficult image stabilisation, as the slow-motion solved any slight jerkiness of the camera. I was using a tripod anyways.
The editing process took a while, but as soon as I found a piece of music that captured the atmosphere of the parade, it almost edited itself!! Except it didn’t… I did it.
Music:
“spring_thaw” by The Green Kingdom
“Nacht en gan Eden” by Szelrozsa
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