So this weekend I have booked holiday away from my real job in order to help out at 'Tattonbury 2012'.
Tattonbury is an open-air music festival that showcases both established acts and fresh local talent from the north-west. The event will once again be held at Tatton Park in Knutsford, Cheshire England and tickets are exclusively available to Explorer Scouts and Scouts aged 13-18 (http://tattonbury.co.uk)
Only in its second year and really in its infancy when it comes to events, I am the official 'videographer' with the aim of capturing the whole event on film for the purpose of future advertising and publicity.
Working on the event last year, the organisers didn't really know what they wanted from a video and so decided they wanted to try and sell it in order to re-coup more money to help out the budget.
Armed with a Canon 5D and a FigRig, I set about on the saturday morning capturing as much as I could of the hustle and bustle of what was an atmosphere full of anticipation with what the day will hold.
The FigRig, made by Manfrotto and price at around £250 (http://snipurl.com/249rtwr), provides excellent versatility while also adding almost perfect stability to your shots. With its circular design, placing the camera in the middle it essentially makes yourself the tripod allowing you to pull off near perfect pans, tilts, tracks and even 90° rotations with excellent results. Its not quite as immaculate as a steadycam, but for low budget shoots with fast past movement and action i'd say its an almost essential piece of equipment. The only drawback for me at Tattonbury was having to deal with the constant repeated question 'why are you walking around with a steering wheel?'
The end result of the video was not my greatest piece of work, and stupidly I used copyrighted music so it can't be put up on this website, however if you go over to my vimeo account you can take a look or simply click here - vimeo.com/davehumphreys/tattonbury2011
This year I am taking 2 Canon 5D's as one of my biggest problems last year was with battery and memory (OH and having food poisoning at the time aswell, but thats a whole different matter). There came times when there was really good stuff happening, however I was having to recharge my batteries or I was copying all the footage over to my computer in order to clear out the memory card...hopefully 2 cameras will mean I can swap in and out and never miss the action.
I'm also taking one of my latest purchases, my GoPro hero. I aim to make several time lapses over the weekend not only for this project, but also for a continual side project I started a few months ago where I aim to collate a number of 'event' based time lapses and put them together into an awesome video.
Check back next week and if the weekend went well I may have more stories and some footage to show off from the weekend.
Cheers for reading
