There are many tools that can help you to create great stop motion and timelapse movies and iStopMotion by Boinx Software is one of them. iStopMotion is one of the most popular Mac programs for stop motion animation and timelapse capture. The company just released the newest version of its product and now it includes a Screen Capture feature allowing you to easily capture frames from the screen to create your movies by pairing the software with illustration programs such as Photoshop or InDesign, or any other app. Then you can export your movies in Apple ProRes format and import directly into Final Cut Pro X for further editing, so no transcoding is required. What's also cool is that there's an iPad version also available (you can get it here for $9.99). But let's focus on the Mac version. The software is available for the price of $49.99 and it requires OS X 10.7.4 Lion or newer, and here's a nice example of stop motion video (it looks almost like the "Blues Brothers" movie;)):
 

It is worth adding, that previously the tool was available in three versions and the Pro one you needed to pay $499.99. Anyway the 3.1 includes all the Pro features, and here are the main highlights (via Boinx) of the new release:

• Stop motion animation is the easiest way to tell a story in a movie
• Screen Capture allows users to create stop motion animations or timelapse movies using screen content in programs such as Photoshop
• Export to Apple ProRes video format if codec is installed, allowing for direct import in Final Cut Pro X without the need to transcode
• Bug fixes continue to improve overall functionality

If you want to get it, head over to Mac App Store (here).

Source: http://www.boinx.com

Who doesn't like burgers? They're tasty, healthy... oh, wait a minute... some might disagree with that last statement;). Anyway we're not here to write about burgers, but as the Blackmagic Cinema Camera was used to shoot the new Friendly's “Build Your Own Burger” campaign and the company posted some behind the scenes info, we had to share this news with you. What's more, the four spots were also colored using Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve. The spots are quite simple and each one features a talking head explaining what goes into building their favorite Friendly’s burger. You can see two of these clips below. The team only had two days to get through 87 shots, which is where the Blackmagic Cinema Camera proved extremely useful. The spots were directed and shot by Justin Meredith who said that the intuitiveness, functionality and no nonsense approach to acquiring the image was huge.
 

“It was my job to get the best images possible, and I couldn’t believe what the camera delivered in such an affordable and easy workflow,” he said. “We turned it on, popped in an SSD and were recording. The camera was connected to a laptop running Blackmagic’s UltraScope software so we could monitor the image to ensure nothing was clipping. Then using Resolve’s delivery tools, I took the RAW files, exported out to ProRes for the edit, brought back the EDL and was color grading in no time. It was such a seamless workflow.”

Justin also did the color correction and because the spots mainly feature talking heads, Justin needed to make the actors’ eyes pop to create a connection with the viewers, so he used the Resolve’s 3D tracker. According to Justin, the client was really pleased with the quality of the footage, sadly the clips available on YouTube are in 720p only.

Source: http://www.blackmagicdesign.com

J.J. Abrams is a multi-taltented artist - he's an American film and television producer, screenwriter, director, actor and composer. Quite an impressive list! Jeffrey Jacob directed several sci-fi and action movies, such as Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness and two Mission Impossible movies. But his biggest achievement is probably yet to come - J.J. will direct the new Star Wars trilogy! It is always great to listen to professional filmmakers sharing their thoughts and experience, and this time we have a video with - you guessed it - J.J. Abrams who will fill you in on balancing intimacy with hyperreality, explain why TV leaves room for surprises and give you the best advice he's ever been given himself. Enjoy!
 

And here's some more on J.J. (via IMDB):

"Abrams's first job in the movie business started when he was 16 when he wrote music for Don Dohler's film Nightbeast. During his senior year at college, he teamed with Jill Mazursky to write a feature film treatment. Purchased by Touchstone Pictures, the treatment was the basis for Taking Care of Business, Abrams's first produced film, which starred Charles Grodin and Jim Belushi. He followed that up with Regarding Henry, starring Harrison Ford, and Forever Young, starring Mel Gibson.

Abrams collaborated with producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay on the 1998 film, Armageddon. That same year, he made his first foray into television with Felicity, which ran for four seasons on The WB Network, serving as the show's co-creator (with Matt Reeves) and executive producer. He also composed its opening theme music.

Under his production company Bad Robot, which he founded with Bryan Burk in 2001, Abrams created and executive-produced ABC's Alias and is co-creator (with Damon Lindelof) and executive producer of Lost. He later co-wrote the teleplay for Losts third season premiere "A Tale of Two Cities". As with Felicity, Abrams also composed the opening theme music for Alias and Lost."

You can read the full bio here.

Source: http://www.youtube.com

Creative approach to filmmaking and editing can provide really simple solutions. Imagine you had three days to prepare for, shoot and edit a scene. In his How I would film it: dialogue scene by waterfall Luke Neumann presents a number of tricks to deal with some issues that can be foreseeable and some that cannot. Watch the step-by-step tutorial for setup, audio recording, lighting and editing.

Neumann suggests that working with limited time, resources and crew filmmaking will bring challenges no matter what you are doing:
"I think this is a setup a lot us have. As in the  filmmakers we don’t have big crews. Problem solving is something that I think we all deal with from time to time and maybe seeing the way I went about solving some of these problems will help you out down the line in a certain sticky situation you might get into."

And just for the record - Neumann’s gear list:
Canon 5D Mark III
Panasonic Lumix Gh2 (Behind the Scenes)
Juiced Link Box
Rode NTG-3

Source:
http://www.neumannfilms.net/

Matthew Allard knows how to shoot great videos to tell amazing stories and here's one of them. This time, in his short movie called "Taking The Reins", he features 34-years-old Takashi Iwama, who is a horse logger living in Japan, and his horse Samurai King. There were hundreds of horse loggers out there, but now there are only six left in the country, so this video is somewhat special. What's more the shooting conditions were very difficult - it was a very cold and overcast day, so the light was very flat and this was a bit of challenge for Matthew because he needed to approach the way he captures images differently. In his article publishet at News Shooter, he shares some thoughts on shooting in such light conditions.
 

"You can’t rely on the light to give you depth and contrast. Flat light and snow are a difficult combination. What I try to do is to use textures and foreground. What I mean by this is that I try to compose shots that have either foreground or varying depths of colours in the background. I find this helps give some three-dimensionality; otherwise, your images will look completely flat and uninteresting.

(...)

The other thing I have learnt over the years is that when dealing with animals it is important to give them space. If the animal doesn’t know you it will not behave in its natural way if you have a camera up close to it. It is also very hard to set up shots and get an animal, in this case a horse, to do things more than once."

For most of the shots Matthew used zooms - the Nikon 80-200mm f2.8 and 300mm f2.8, because he wanted to keep his distance. He believes this allowed him to capture the special bond between Takashi and his horse. The interviews on the other hand were shot using the Zeiss 35mm f1.4 wide open. For audio he used a Lectrosonic radio mic and he also used the Sony F3 in S-log recording to a Sound Devices PIX240 in 4444 12bit Pro Res.

For more info make sure to read the full article (here).

Source: http://www.newsshooter.com