THOUGHT: On being Perfect or having something perfect

I just saw this billboard, translated it says “You’re not Gisele Bündchen. You’re not Kate Moss. You’re perfect.”

Makes me wonder what is perfect and can you actually achieve it? I guess perfect is a subjective definition, but is it really reachable?

I believe man will never reach perfection itself, because we always strive for more. We always see something that we think is “better”. Or in the worst case greed will turn us evil.

Therefore it could be hard to be happy and to reach perfection. The hunger for more will taint the thought or state of perfection.

So I guess you better be grateful for everything you have and for who you are right now. That’s probably what makes you perfect.

QUESTION ANSWERED: DVL

I recently got an email concerning the DVL Project. I thought it might be interesting to post an excerpt of the email and my reply.

“So, I noticed you said you film your interviews yourself. I’m actually planning a ‘similar’ project.

So since I’ll be more or less filming and editing the interviews myself (even though as of right now i have NO idea how to edit) I was wondering if you could offer me a little guidance!

1. What lighting did you use for your interviews?
2. how many cameras did you use?
3. How’d you capture the audio?
4. I know this one may not make much sense, but, how hard is it to edit these interviews? The style you use is EXACTLY what I want mine to look like.“

Click the link, to read my reply…

And here the excerpt of my reply:

“Ok let me start with answering your questions point by point:

1) I am using a three point lighting set. Actually those lights are the modeling lights on my three Bowens studio flashes. I “misuse” those flashes as studio video lights, because they give me the ability to use the bowens lightmodifiers like the bowens Beauty Dish or softboxes. To be exact I use the Beauty Dish as a main light with a fill card just below the interviewee, a strip light as a rimlight and the third light is for the background.

2) I use two cameras. I own the Nikon D5000 and the second camera is just any camera I can borrow at the moment. For the last six interviews I had a Panasonic HD Handy Cam available. For the next interviews I will borrow a Canon 550d. One reason for using two cameras was of course being able to edit, but another reason was the limited recordingtimes of the DSLR cameras. The Nikon only allows a recording time of 5 minutes and the Canon will give you 12 minutes. So you need to look out when one camera runs out, so that you don’t end up with a part where no camera is rolling.

3) I capture the audio seperately with the M-Audio Microtrack 2 and a Sennheiser Shotgun Mic that a friend kindly borrowed me. The M-Audio isn’t certainly the best, but it was the most affordable without sacrificing to much usability. I sync audio and both cameras in the editing programm.

4) Well, the question itself is unfortunately hard to answer. Editing is my job, and of course it became a second nature of me, but I wouldn’t dare to say that editing is easy because there is always a lot to learn and a lot you can do wrong. Especially with interviews it can be quite difficult, because you are actually editing the words and emotions of someone else. Ok, I just realized that that wasn’t exactly your question. Technically speaking: Getting the material into the editing programm, editing and then output to web became quite easy nowadays, but there are a lot of things you can get wrong.

Sorry the last answer probably didn’t help you that much, but I will try to answer your future question as good as possible

Greets from Germany.
Bo”