Behind The Playground

My Recent short film, “The Playground”, was created using a combination of camera hacks and heavy post processing.

Taking the Pictures:

With this video, I tried my best to document a wide variety of locations and subjects in my life, including family vacations and school events. The following is a complete list of all the shooting locations in order of appearance.

The entire video was made up of small, individual photographs resulting in a folders of pictures totaling over 25GB. Natively, my Canon Powershot S5 IS is unable to take pictures quickly and indefinitely, so I got a little help from a custom firmware known as  CHDK.

CHDK is a simple firmware you can install on top of your current Canon firmware that allows you to go beyond the built in features. Specifically, for “The Playground”, I used a script called fast intervalometer that took a picture approximately every half second.

Besides CHDK, this video would not be possible without the help of my full size tripod and gorillapod.

Processing the Pictures:

Every single frame that you see in this video was processed in Photoshop. That’s right. All 7,600 frames.

To generate the tilt-shift effect, I batched processed all the frames in Photoshop using a gradient on a quick mask layer and then using the lens blur effect. Each frame that was processed was then moved into a separate folder.

Check this out if you want more specific instructions.

Creating a Video

After I had created a folder with all of the frames processed, each scene was imported as a sequence into After Effects and rendered into a 30 frame per second video clip. Each of the scenes were then imported into Adobe Premiere, where I did my final touch-ups, ordering, and time manipulation.

Feel free to contact me if you have any more questions!

Tags | camera, photography, video