Tubing (Example)

Tubing from m.h. rubin on Vimeo.

STRUCTURE - This longish sketch (3 minutes) is a very good example of shooting out of order, and structure. To shoot a video like this, where I am tubing with my kids all day, I took advantage of the vagaries of moving up and down the hill; sometimes I was at the bottom waiting, sometimes I was at the top with them, etc. So I shot from a few key locations the same repetitive activity (going up and sliding down), which allowed me to make a video where I can cut between them sliding from a few angles. In true Hollywood style, I could stretch out the time sliding down the hill through a couple gentle edits, and make one "archetypal" journey. It has a very clear delineation of beginning (getting dressed at the car and heading in), middle (going up the hill), climax (sliding down the hill), and ending (extracting from the tubes and lugging them back to the start).

- Note: without applying this structure, I could have been shooting random moments throughout the day, sometimes them at the bottom, sometimes them at the top, sometimes them from far away... and even though it was in "shot order" it would feel random and jumbled. Consequently, I was able to get all the material for this in about 20 minutes of video shot over the course of an afternoon -- totally manageable and not-that-interrupting of the day with my family.

SOUND - This video was produced while playing with iMovie a few years ago -- i liked the video with the soft crunching of snow and mostly silence that I got with ambient sound cut in... and was always unsure which was the video I liked more - the one with production sound or the one with Cat Stevens... but after not having seen this for a couple years, and watching it with fresh eyes, the drop out of all the natural ambiance and the adding of music makes it feel much less documentary-like, and much more scrapbook-like. TO HEAR THE SAME VIDEO BUT WITH NO MUSIC, JUST PRODUCTION SOUND -- CLICK HERE: http://vimeo.com/2038727


[Here is the video on YouTube --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4VQ_cNrVs4]