This was really done as practice using two new packages I recently acquired, Magic Bullet Suite and Boris FX. Every single shot was touched by one of these packages in some way. Some effects were very severe, others were as basic as color grading and adding a vignette.

Both of these packages work well within Premier Pro CS3, but I still have issues trying to output finished movies. With this one, I had to output each frame as a one frame TIFF image, then import those into a new project. The upside to this is that you'll have everything right up to where the render failed. You can then render again, picking up where the previous one finished. It's a pain, but sometimes it's the only way.

Shot at the Silver Cascade in Crawford Notch.

Watch for the "Forrest Gump" moment at the end.

After a long, snowy winter, spring couldn't come quickly enough. Once I saw the first signs of new green on the trees and plants I went out and started shooting.

Nearly every shot is slowed to 50% with many down to 25%. It exposes the subtleties of water's movement that is often impossible to see living life in real time.

I'm still experimenting with presets and most shots use PANALOOK but there's one shot that's pretty easy to pick out using VIVIDRGB.

I was surprised when I viewed the footage to find that I picked up a bug caught in a spider web as I was pulling focus in to a branch in the foreground. I never even noticed it in the viewfinder.

I shot, edited and narrated a short documentary of my travels down the famous Kancamagus Highway (route 112) in New Hampshire.

With record snowfall in the area this winter, I wanted to see how much snow remained. I also wanted to see how high the lakes, streams and rivers were.

I hiked into Sabaday Falls with my Sony PMW-EX1 fitted with a Letus Extreme 35mm film lens adapter, a Vinten Vision 3 tripod, my homemade dolly system and my bag of lenses.


The waterfall was spectacular. The water was very high. I did not bump into another soul while I was shooting. I had to make two trips in with all my gear, leaving the dolly track near the falls while I snowshoed back to the car to pick up the more expensive gear.

The weather was overcast most of the morning and dry, but around 11am while I was at Sabaday Falls, the rain began to fall.

I was slipping and siding all over the place trying to lay dolly track in the rising waters of the very cold stream. I decided, after almost dropping my EX1 in the drink, to head out and shoot another day.

I got enough footage to write a story around and I edited it on my Mac Book Pro in my car while the rain blasted the windshield.

I edited the short using Final Cut Pro. I used the three way color corrector to add some saturation. I graded the color in each shot using Magic Bullet Looks.

Please go to my website, tomguilmette.com for my blog on the trip and production stills from behind the scenes.

Blog Link: tomguilmette.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/4/28_Spring_on_the_Kancamagus_-_Production_Stills.html

TRT: 6 minutes and 30 seconds.

This is the last of the "Snow In New Hampshire" series. Sequentially, it's out of order and really belongs after "First Snow" since it was shot during the second decent storm of the season, and boy did we have a few this year.

The whole thing is rendered at 50% speed, which created a problem. Rendering to the Adobe Media Encoder directly from the Premier Pro CS3 timeline yielded 15fps. So I had to render the timeline out to a lossless codec, import the resulting clip into a new project, then render that to AME. It worked but it was one whale of a time sink.

As I upload this, there's still patches and piles of snow on the ground, but it's 79 degrees F. There was a lot of snow this year.

Hope you enjoy it. Comments, thoughts and suggestions are always welcome.