Botanical gardens

The Brisbane Botanic Gardens are my sanctuary from the dimly lit, windowless room I have at work. The gardens are especially glorious at the moment. I try and go for walk through them most lunch times.
I thought I would try out the Konova 'slider' I bought last year. It's a great bit of kit, a real joy to operate.
Oh, and the music is from the sublime Sheila Chandra, Beautiful, haunting track.

History Alive

I've posted before about the History Alive weekend that takes place out at Fort Lytton during winter. This time I took the 550d along to try my hand at getting some cool action shots. Man it was hard. You couldn't really get close enough to the action and my 18 - 135 lens just wasn't long enough.So a fair bit of it is a bit shake-arama...

Still I had fun editing and grading it.

GSE 2011

GSE2011 from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.

I recently had the privilege of redesigning the look and feel of one of the local television programs we produce here called 'The Great South East'.

The previous look to the show had a very graphical '2D' look. I wanted to try and get away from that and devote more time to the images and textures that are actually out there in our local area. I also wanted the talent to look as good and as larger-than-life as they could.

It was an interesting experiment to pull back the graphics content and just let the images do all the work. While I certainly don't think its perfect, I'm quite proud of this new take on a long running show.

It's funny, some have reacted really positively to it while others have been a little bit shocked by what is a reasonably radical departure from had been done before.

This is one of those rare times when something I have worked on really has engendered a wide variety of responses.

The music on this clip isn't used on the actual weekly show. GSE has its own original scored track. This music is taken from the opening titles to an absolutely brilliant show called 'Boardwalk Empire'. That series title sequence was the original inspiration for me.

Valley Rattler

Valley Rattler from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.
Out and about with the Canon 550D again. This time our family took a trip on an old steam train that traverses  the hills and valleys surrounding the country town of Gympie. I was impressed by the sheer 'bulk' of the engine. It really had quite a presence.
I think I've mentioned before that I really need some sort of camera stabilisation for the Canon. They don't call  it the 'Valley Rattler' for nothing.
I gave the whole thing a bit of a grade in After Affects.

550D

Sydney-Canon 550d 18-135 lens from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.

 A little sequence I cut together from a recent trip to Sydney with my Darling Wife. We decided to purchase the Canon 550D after reading so many positive reviews about it on the net. Darling Wife  wanted to do more photography and I wanted a camera that could shoot HD. Sure, if we had more cash, it would have been great to get the 7D or hey...the 5D, but after reading up on the specs for the 550d (T2i in the US) it really did seem like great value for money.

I think it is obvious that an investment in a camera stabilizer will be next. Still,  the camera makes even low rent amateur cinematographers like me look almost good. I didn't perform any grading or software stabilization on this footage.