filming travel _ vivacity 3

34 vivacity magazine • july 2011 www.vivacitymagazines.com 35july 2011 • vivacity magazine www.vivacitymagazines.com

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TRAVEL“Snapshots, videos, coctails and currency bartering for a bookmark placed among the travel tales…”

Filming travel is a journey within the journey. No more the forte of television crews, travelers create the best

of moments recording information and experiences with easy accessibility to digital technology.

arun Khanna

FILMINGModel: rashmita maharjanPhotographer: rajiv ShresthaMake up & Hair: SophieWardrobe: Pocket, city centre, 4011786

Vehicle Courtesy leon motors pvt ltdl 200 sportero Shantinagar, Baneshwor, Ktm, nepal4622485, 4622147, 4622074Shoe Courtesy third Pole trekkingsthamel, Ktm9849233595


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Location the airport hotel,

Sinamangal, 4112635

39july 2011 • vivacity magazine www.vivacitymagazines.com

the eye flits at ultra high speed, performing a saccade at 200 milliseconds - the fastest of movements that the human body is capable of - the thumb decisively pushes a button

and the screen blinks ‘record’ with thoughtful glee. As if looking for the right pieces of a jigsaw puzzle the LCD searches the crowd, the history, the silhouettes, the images, and the silence hidden in the cacophony among city spaces. Each recording, in anticipation of what the final story may want to say. Paradoxically, the traveler with camera-in-hand remains detached from the scene, oblivious to what else happens around, and yet attached as long as the ‘frame’ is alive with recording!

A story is nothing if not told, and a memory is nothing if not reclaimed - digital or cerebral.

Undoubtedly we all like to preserve stories where we or ‘ours’ are the main characters. Our travels are a series of such stories, autobiographical, formed with distinct individuality yet yearning to get shared.

Just as adventures are relished best when recounted, travel viewed in retrospect is a journey within the journey. Filming travel has layers of realities, the one that is seen, the one that is filmed and the one that is reviewed and talked about. As a starter the LCD screen on cameras gives this advantage, and has done for video what Polaroid did for still photography. The French novelist Robert Sole notes “Digital culture invades our behavior as much as our values, and modifies our relation with reality.” No doubt, the perception of a location changes a lot when filmed or a film on it viewed.

the Big & Small ScreenDedicated television networks all over the world sculpture travel, a perpetually changing shape of cultures, landscapes & people; often a tool for marketing destinations or even preserving cultures. Visual images are potently persuasive. It is said in the 1960 US presidential debate, Nixon won on radio but Kennedy won on television. There after everyone running for public office had to be video-correct to survive and win. And that is as true for authenticating and projecting travel locations in a world gorged with images. The right camera-angled perspectives, the right lights and sounds have too often won over travelers to destinations, bypassing

the ones which never got filmed. Pioneered by the 120 years old National Geographic Magazine, travel has dwelled largely on the factor of the hidden revealed and the spectacular authenticated by experience. Movies have done the same to the perception of destinations, pinning cinematic landmarks on the travel map of the world.

Movie maps have successfully campaigned for travel markets. ‘Visit Britain’ sponsored by Vauxhall in 1996, featured 200 film and TV locations around Britain from 60 years of British film history and rose to be Visit Britain’s most successful printed product.Its media popularity attracted attention both home and overseas, prompting people to discover different parts of Britain as they followed the screen stories and their characters. Many countries continue to use movie maps as a harbinger for travel.

Cinema since its inception made travelogues. The Lumiere Brothers with the invention of cinema at the turn of the twentieth century showed life in Paris, making travel the first genre of filming. Scenes of exotic locations were grouped together as fillers in the early days of matinee shows.

Very soon travel got its second major film genre – the documentary. Although the term was used by John Grierson in the 1950s, it designated the work of Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” an account about the life of an Innuit Eskimo, shot in 1922, followed by “Moana” depicting the daily life of a Polynesian tribe in Samoa.

PioneerS As motor travel became popular, travel filming gained impetus. Robert Fulton, the British adventurer, in his classic book “One Man Caravan” describes perhaps one of the most daring and original bike journeys in the annuals of travel. The 1932 journey on his Douglas motorcycle took him on an eighteen-month

a story is nothing if not told, and a memory is nothing if not reclaimed - digital or cerebral.

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odyssey through Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Sumatra, Malaysia, Siam, Indonesia, China, and Japan. En route he encountered gangs of robbers in Waziristan, had his camera confiscated in Afghanistan, was offered a tiger cub for two dollars in Malaysia, got locked up in jail on charges of being a smuggler in Indonesia, and was escorted across Japan by 33 motorcycles. Besides extra space for luggage and fuel his customized chopper carried a hidden point 32 revolver, and a movie camera with 40,000 feet of film! The journey resulted in an incredible vintage travel record shot on 35 mm nitrate film.

Advertisers thrust images to the hilt till the message is delivered. In 1958, three English housewives bought a Land Rover and drove it all the way from London to Zanskar in the Kargil district of india. Over five months Anne Davies, Eve Sims, and Antonia Deacock drove 16,000 miles before travelling another 300 miles on foot. The trip was sponsored by Ovaltine who supplied the women with a 16mm camera to shoot a TV advert, but the footage was deemed unusable lying lost, till photographer and filmmaker

Martin Salter in 2007 decided to make a documentary on the event.

People travel for novelty, knowledge, escape, and adventure - all of this makes for incredible filming. Ever since the DV camera entered the market in 1998, mini-DV tape playing camcorders became ubiquitous and telling travel stories a regular affair. And the camera sizes matched independent travel’s pocket.

Making films, short or long, amateur or professional, has undergone a transformation that is way beyond the predictions of media pioneers. Digital technology and film perception has proven even the best of predictors wrong. Back in 1927 H.M. Warner head of Warner Brothers Movie Studios asked “who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” While Bill Gates opined in 1981, “640 K ought to be enough (memory) for anybody”. We know the rest.

A traveler can be an auteur in his own right and shoot a distinct style of events and subjects

a humble handy-cam needs

no lessons from Syd Field,

or eisenstein or a Kurosawa,

everyday visual stories are

non-verbal communication

patterns. the camera could

do well to mimic the rule of

albert mehrabian’s verbal

and non-verbal communica-

tion breakup - the 7:38:55

ratio - which claims that

communication is 7 percent

verbal, 38 percent tone of

the voice and 55 percent

non verbal behavior as seen

from body language, and

therefore indicates the im-

portance of visual content in

communication.

having said that empathy is

perhaps the core emotion of

the moving image and gets

best interpreted by ‘trans-

ference of illusion’ caused by

positioning of the viewpoint

and the movement of the

gaze. in filming terms that

may be understood by the

shot pattern of the shoot -

the master shot or the wide

shot which establishes or

reestablishes the scene and

gives a realization of where

is it happening. the close up

shot, which give a sense of

proximity. the reverse-shot,

which counterbalances the

visual perception from both

sides of the scene. and the

‘inside-the-dramatic-circle-

of-action’ shots which are

taken from inside the physi-

cal spaces of the situation

being filmed and makes the

camera pan around to cap-

ture the closeness of the

experience. a combination of

these four shot pattern can

deliver enough variation to

filming and give any number

of edit points for a story.

crea

tin

gth

e Sh

ot

ever since the Dv camera entered

the market in 1998, mini-Dv tape playing camcorders became

ubiquitous and telling travel stories

a regular affair.

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with close to broadcast quality that were once the prerogative of professional film crews. Anchored travelogues are no longer the program format of just television networks. Handycamed video diaries can shoot and send the images streaming to hundreds of sites teethed with giga, terra & petabytes. Taxi diaries could be road journeys, and walking tours could be on-camera trekking tours. Travel tours can document – food, markets, monuments, public place, religion, festivals or people, and the list goes on.

the jargon oF techGordon Moore the co founder of Intel stated in the 1960s that the storage capacity and speed of a semi conductor chip would double every 12 to 18 months. Still going strong and today famously know as Moore’s Law, which besides other things, makes considering camera options a constant race against digital technology. Fortunately camera formats don’t change at the same speed as their chips. The DV holds its own even as manufacturers create transit options to newer formats.

Video cameras offer a range, from the household consumer DV & HDV format to the professional HDCAM, HDCAM SR, digital Beta-cam, and RED that uses Redcode Raw - for which Steven Soderbergh, director of Ocean’s Eleven said “Shooting with RED is like hearing The Beatles for the first time”. 2011 also showcases the NXCAM HD camcorder equipped with a Super-35mm equivalent sensor, a widely used film stock size in the film industry that is perfectly designed for capturing motion picture.

HDCAM, HDCAM SR & Digi-Beta, Red, and NXCAM cameras are the fare of professional TV crews and film makers, costing anywhere from 10,000 dollars to 150,000 dollars. All of them boast of super CCDs or CMOS circuitry, responsible for image quality, high resolutions and brilliant S/N Rations - above 55 dbs at least - which in simpler language means powerful signal strength that overcomes low quality shooting conditions caused by bad lighting, poor sound or other such interferences. As a final word before getting into the tech web of pixels and pictures it will suffice to add - the resolution of cameras are related with diffraction limits of the lens rather than just the pixel size on the chip.

For the purpose of a regular traveler’s filming interests a DV camera can be the easiest option. Its interface usage and file size is compatible with every desktop computer or laptop that has a fire wire or faster USB port. The next would be HDV, with more storage space requirments.

The first question for choosing a video camera will be its chip strength; this sets the quality of color and brightness within the picture. A 3 CCD camera is better then a 1 CCD one, and places even a regular handycam somewhere between the basic consumer camcorder and the next level professional one. Newer cameras now come based on CMOS chips,

a traveler can be an auteur in his own right

and shoot a distinct style of events and subjects with close

to broadcast quality that were once

the prerogative of professional film crews.

though, if you are considering to edit your HDV content – that needs a slightly faster computer. And since it needs more space, HDV will require extra large capacity playback discs such as Blu rays or the likes. Conventional DVDs do fine as long as the content does not go beyond their storage capacity.

Tapes and flash memory cards are not essentially different recording formats but different storage mediums. Before making a camera choice it is essential to understand, what recording medium does the camera favor and some of the utility features of different memory options. Hard drive or inbuilt memory - good for storing larger amount of data, no hassles of carrying separate cards or tapes, the disadvantage can be slightly slower recording speed compared to removable memory cards.

Memory comes in different storage capacity and formats, CF (Compact Flash) SD (Secure Digital) SDHC, SDXC cards, most are interchangeable with different camera brands. The popular one being the SD which can be anywhere from a couple of mbs to tens of GBs. SDHC & SDXC are the latest versions of the SD and can give a capacity of upto 2TBs, with faster speed. P2 and SxS cards too are flash memory cards but in market terms are made for compatibility with Panasonic and Sony cameras. SxS cards entered the market as a recording medium for Sony’s XDCAM camera. As a medium DVDs are an option easy to record and play back, while mini DV tapes are a better choice for those who want to edit and look for a more finished filming project.

On the audio front a consumer handycam comes with a single plug-in jack for the microphone, whereas the prosumer versions take sound to a better balanced level with XLR plugs.

Besides the tech it is good to invest in a few precautions as well. Unless you want the shaky

reality TV impression to your videos, it’s good to carry a tripod stand for the camera. And to save a video from careless doom, it is a safety to use headphones, else you may land up with a surrealistically silent non-starter.

tapes and flash memory cards are not essentially

different recording formats but different

storage mediums.

which is not a redundancy of CCDs but a choice of a different technology.

As for format choices, DV, DVCAM, HDV or the newer formats as the XDCAM, or the AVCHD, - which does not use tape but memory cards. The familiar tape mediums as the DV & DVCAM have a slight quality difference. DVCAM gives a better sync to the audio and video recording. And while DV gives sixty minutes of recording from a sixty minutes tape (cassette), the DVCAM mode gives a forty minutes recording from the same tape.

HDV is the high definition version of the DV. It has a better resolution and records on a wider screen-frame that is technically referred to as the 16:9 screen. Whereas a DV format usually has a more squarish screen. To avail the choice of recording either DV or HDV from the same camera, one needs to invest in an HDV camera as most of them combine the options of choosing between DV, DVCAM and HDV. As for alternately record DV and HDV onto the same tape, present cameras are not equipped, but very likely to happen soon. One thing to remember

44 vivacity magazine • july 2011 www.vivacitymagazines.com

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cameraSBesides the likes of specialized manufacturers of top of the line professinal camcorders as the Grass Valley and Red Digital Cinema Camera Company. The major players in the video camera industry are Sony, JVC, Panasonic and Canon. Among video cameras the FX1 is Sony’s prosumer level camera while the Z1, Z5 and Z7 are the professional entry levels for shooting in HDV.

The Z1 is the HDV equivalent to the DV based PD 170 camera that has been the work horse of videographers for almost a decade and a half. The XH G1 and the XH A1 are Canon’s prosumer models, while its XL H1 is the professional entry level. In equivalence Panasonic offers the AG-DVX100A and the AG-HVX200 .

For the regular traveler’s HDV versions of smaller handycams the choices could be – Sony’s HDR-HC1, Panasonics’s HDC-HS700, or Canon’s HV20.

Giving more zing to filming options are new entry consumer cameras as the HDR-TD10, Sony’s first 3D handycam; and the NEX-VG10, the first Handycam

Another festival, the Adventure Travel Film Festival which annually takes place in US, UK and Australia, offers two objectives to the filming traveler – to bring together the adventure travel community and to show that filming is not difficult to do.

Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival and Film South Asia, though not dedicated travel film festivals, are a good platform to submit films that could have to do with travel, since much documentary filming in Nepal is often staged on travel..

In the film world there are two types of production entities, independent and distributor affiliated. Whether an amateur, or a professional a film maker today can make the best of both. The cheapest of distributors is the internet. It spawns, and with it the convergences of media consumption platforms continues to proliferate. There are many travel sites such as the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree, Virtual Tourist, BootsnAll, Trip Advisor and newer ones such as Dopplr, Trip Wolf and Driftr besides being online platforms of information exchange many may also provide information on how to and where to share travel filming. Besides that YouTube still remains the best platform to reach millions of viewers although often at the cost of low resolution. And then there are recent sites like Vimeo which limits free uploads to 500 MB and one HD video a week but delivers better resolution of the images.

camcorder to accept interchangeable lenses compatible with Sony E-mount series of smaller, lighter lenses and Konica Minolta A-mount lenses.

Sharing travelFilming can today be shared at all levels of technical and story-telling categories, right from a living room audience to international film festivals. Besides the regular ones there are many festivals dedicated to travel filming. The recently concluded inaugural Nomading Film Festival in New York, interestingly summed the travel-filming perspective through its submission categories – ‘The trip I wish I was on - The trip I’m glad I wasn’t on - The nomads I want to travel with - The most enlightening trip - and The trip that makes me want to travel, now!’

filming travel _ vivacity 3

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