Ovi Balc
Filmmaker/Editor.
Anatomy of a Scene
Dec 5th
In this series from the NY Times, directors discuss ideas and techniques behind scenes in their films.
There’s some really cool stuff there from small(er) to big budget movies. I’m sure you will find a movie scene that you always wondered how they shot it and you’ll find it here
The Third & The Seventh – Full CG animated video
Dec 3rd
Video of the week
I’ve watched this video months ago. If you haven’t seen it yet….do it now! It’s a great piece of art.
A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.
Directed by Alex Roman
Done with 3dsmax, Vray, AfterEffects and Premiere.
Earth:Time Lapse View from Space
Nov 15th
Be ready to be blown away by this timelapse. This is the first timelapse of this kind I’ve seen and it’s awesome. What I mean is that we’ve all seen time lapses of the night sky shot from earth but not the reverse.
Enjoy and like:
Do it Yourself “DIY” Dslr camera slider
Oct 26th
I’ve been working on a DIY slider for DSLR’s, so I decided to post some pics and a video from the process of putting it together. In the pictures and video it’s only 80% done.
Here is a timelapse of the building process:
I’ll post a video soon with some footage we shot with it.
“Christian Atheist” lake video
Oct 15th
This was a fun video shoot to do, we wanted to capture that “golden” moment at sunrise over the lake, but that didn’t quite happen.
After waking up at 3:30AM I drive to the office to pick up the row boat that is in a flat bad truck than drive to the location to help Sam (the jib operator) setup. I get there and I was thinking all the crew will be there…well no. We have a few complications, because any good video shoot has a few….by the time we figure everything out it’s getting really close to sunrise.
We get all the equipment in it’s place and we’re ready to shoot. We do one take, which goes really good, but now the sun is starting to hit he boat and the talent so we kinda have to scrap the first take since it’s not gonna match the rest of the footage plus we don’t have any b-roll shoot at this point.
We ended up doing 4 – 5 takes plus the b-roll, but it was all worth it and I got to use the wet suite I rented for the day to shoot some footage with the under water cam.
All in all a good shoot, I’m exited to see how it all comes together.
We did it at Lake Pleasant in Peoria, Arizona and we had 4 crew (Ovi, Gordo, Sam and Kylie) and the talent (Bob). We used 2 Canon 7D’s with the 14mm 2.8 L and the 70-200 2.8 L, 1 Sony EX3, 1 Contour Cam with under water casing, 1 Jimmy Jib with 30ft exensions, audio field recorder and mixer plus all the required accessories that are necessary.
Tascam DR-680 digital field recorder
Sep 24th
We just got a Tascam DR-680 in today and I took some pictures I wanted to share. I used my phone so the quality sucks.
We’re going to use this mostly for our Canon 7D shoots, since the audio that comes out of the DSLR’s sucks. The other option we looked at was the Zoom H4N that a lot of people are using, but we wanted a field recorder that had more inputs.
On the other side the Zoom H4N is more compact and easier to mount on the DSLR or a rig. We almost always have multiple persons on a video shoot, so we’re going to have an “audio guy” at all times monitoring and running the recorder.
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- Tascam DR 680 Box
2009 – 2010 Editing, Dp, Demo Reel
Sep 7th
2009-2010 Demo Reel – Ovi Balc from Ovi Balc on Vimeo.
I’ve put together this demo reel using some clips from some of the work I’ve done over the past year, 2009 to 2010 (August). I’ve run the camera on most of the clips you see and edited and color graded all of them. I also acted as the DP on some.
The equipment and software used to record the clips is:
Canon 7D, Sony EX1, Sony EX3, Bogen Tripods, Final Cut Pro, Magic Bullet Looks, Apple Color.
Making of “Vimeo Festival + Awards” video.
Aug 29th
Making of “Vimeo Festival + Awards” by Ovi Balc from Ovi Balc on Vimeo.
I was apart of the Vimeo – “Vimeo Weekend Project” group for a while and I was waiting for the right time to enter a video. A few months went by and they anounced they’ll have a weekend project for the Vimeo Festival + Awards so since the stakes were higher than normal I decided to enter the contest.
After thinking for a day I had this idea of making a stop motion video using the festival’s logo. Actually putting it together, almost like a puzzle using “small people”. What i mean by that is shooting someone on the green screen and shrinking him down to make it look like a miniature person.
The next day I shared my idea with my friend Gordo and after bouncing ideas back and forth we come up with the concept you see in the final video. It was a lot more doable since we only had 1 day to shoot and edit.
We shot it in about 2 hours because we didn’t have all the props we had in mind and took as a little bit to improvise. Total footage shot was about 30 min. I edited it in about 6 hours. I had some sight issues with the chroma key so being the perfectionist that I am, I took my time to make sure the key is somewhat decent.
Enough with the history behind the video. Here are the technical details:
We printed out the “Vimeo Festival + Awards” logo, the one with the black background and cut out the letters. The black toner kept coming off the paper and it actually gave it a nice textured look in the final edit. We than cut the logo in 5 parts and than we animated them using some string in front of the green screen.
Me and Matias Gordo Flores were the construction workers and all the scenes were shot on the green screen. 90 percent of the video wes shot on the green screen, except the spray paint at the end. For that we actually used a white sheet of paper and a green spray paint. Than I keyed out the white.
Software and equipment used:
Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro for the stock sounds, DV Matte Pro(plugin) for the chrma key, 1 Sony Ex 1, 1 Bogen tripod.
We actually only had 1 hard hat so we had to be creative with the way we shot, so we had to film twice the part where we carry the “festival awards” sign. Once me with the hard had and once where Gordo had it on.
It was fun doing this project and was also nice that I won the challenge. Thanks Gordo for helping out with the stencils, filming and the music.
Thanks and let me know if you have any questions.
Ovi.