Family Video Portraits

[Kent Frost]

Here's something I and my girlfriend decided to venture into this year with our photo business. Family Video Portraits.

We've only done a couple of them so far, but I'm hoping the demand goes up. They're really fun to do.
We direct our clients who are interested in doing this to a few sites we use who provide catalogs of licensed music so that we can legitimately get our songs that our clients love and use them in their videos. Then we consult with them to get a general idea of the types of shots they want to get or to see if they have any specific they want to do, and then we'll spend a few hours with them during the shoot. The shooting, the music, the editing, and the final disc production are all included in the bill.

Here are the results we've been able to get so far. Enjoy.

[momoffduty]

Very nice work! Good that you have your girlfriend as a business partner. Are you both taking video or does one do the photos? The second video looked like there was a time delay effect with the boy running? The video had a dreamy quality. I'm always looking for new ideas on how to shoot video of my grand daughter. Thanks for the ideas.

[Kent Frost]

That was actually a frame rate issue, and part of the reason I want a higher-res camera that shoots a higher frame rate. The slo-mo clips are just smoother. In the Bodine video, I shot mostly all 1080p/24fps, so doing any slo-mo on those clips created less smooth results....so I used the frame blending (called "resampling" in Vegas), which makes for the more dreamy effect that I assume you're referring to. In the Musselman video, I shot all in 720p/60fps so I could get better slo-mo.

The reason I want higher resolution at that 60fps frame rate, though, isn't so I can have the bigger picture to work with, but 720p has this weird moire effect on fine details that I notice almost immediately. It's caused by the fact that the pixels being used on the sensor are so spaced out when shooting 720p. It's an 18 megapixel sensor (as you know) that you're pulling a 0.9 megapixel video image out of, but because it's using the full size of the sensor to do it, it has to ignore a majority of the pixels as you shoot. It's still there with 1080p, as it shoots at a 2.07 megapixel equivalent, but it's much less noticeable to me.

[Kent Frost]

Oh, and to answer the question about my girlfriend, she and I both do photos together, but she pretty much leaves all the video stuff to me.

[Dave McElderry]

Almost a stop motion effect. Maybe it was serendipity, but it worked to your advantage. Who comes up with all the ideas like the bed and the oversized balloons?

[Kent Frost]

Who comes up with all the ideas like the bed and the oversized balloons?

The credit for those ideas go to the mother of that family. She's who hired me for that video, and is actually an old schoolmate from my childhood on up through high school.
She makes a living from doing DIY designs and things like that, and her blog can be found at www.scoutandnimble.com.

[Steve Grisetti]

More terrific work, Kent! I love your stuff!