Longboard Blog

For my project I decided to do several things. I made a longboarding video, made several effects in adobe after effects, and helped take some of the staff photos for this year's yearbook. Out of these my main project was the longboarding video. For this video I chose a few different locations to longboard at and got my teammates and a few other friends that were interested in being in the video. I decided to film at a local residential area because they had nice smooth roads for riding and filming and it was a pretty atmosphere. To make the video I decided that using a camera would be hard on a skateboard and I didn’t have access to a go pro or a proper way to stabilize my heavy phone while riding. Instead I decided to film from my long board and followed behind the other riders. I was able to keep my camera pretty steady and the footage turned out very smooth. I was fortunate to have several high quality cameras on my phone so I took advantage of these to make the video leasing to watch. I shot in a high frame rate and resolution. Most of my shots were in 4k 60fps and others were in standard, but still high quality 1080p.

I recorded us riding throughout the development as the sun began setting. This was a great time to film because it provided us with golden lighting that made all the colors around us look very nice. It gave a warm feel to the video and helped to offer some contrast from the darker shots in the shade. While I was following them with my camera I made sure to get different angles so I would carve back and forth behind the, adjust the camera height, as well as get in front of them or next to them at times. Most of the time I was following while carving.

I made a point to film the surroundings in the lighting a few times. The most recognizable time was when we were on a sidewalk and the sun was shining through the trees. I decided to slow the video down when I panned from Declan(who was skating) to the sunlight that was coming through the trees. It looked very nice and was aesthetically pleasing and I thought I would show it to provide more video of the truly amazing surroundings and lighting we had. The rest of the clips I had were us longboarding around various parts of the development with different curves, hills, and terrain, and I also added in a clip at the end of another skater who was with us. He wanted a shot of him doing tricks so I decided to put it in at the end for enjoyment.

Lastly I had color filters and my audio. I decided to make some parts of the video in black and white and others a different color filter in order to contrast the clips or to try and coordinate with the song. These ended up working fairly nicely and helped provide some different color from the rest of the clips to separate theme a bit. Finally for my audio I chose to mute almost all the clips and I chose to put Surfin’ USA by the Beach Boys in the background of my video. It's a fun and happy song and I tried to relate the idea of skating everywhere in the development to surfing around USA. The song actually fit very well with the editing and the theme and I felt it was a good choice. I also added a few sound effects at the beginning, middle, and end. The beginning was for a cool intro, the middle was more for fun, and the end was for the outro. All of these components together went into making my final longboarding video and I believe it turned out very well.