If you browse Amazon Prime for some nice ambient videos, you’ll get a lot of copy that reads like this: “ “ You might’ve even rented The Wissahickon Creek after reading the ad copy my friend Chris Lombardi wrote for me. When you’re looking for something to help you relax, or stretch, or attune yourself to the center of your soul, that’s the stuff you look for. It’s flowery language, added to flowery imagery, and if you want the phrase “gilding the lily” explained to you, well, here’s a good starting point.
But with The Wissachickon Creek, gilding miles of trees, plants, water streams, and stone. We take the images, tweak them to make them look extra-gorgeous, and arrange them so they enhance each other. We add music to enhance the experience. By video proxy, we’re taking the Wissahickon Creek and refining it, attenuating it, reshaping it. It really isn’t too far from those lines in Shakespeare’s King John, about gilding gold and adding colors to the rainbow and generally being wasteful and ridiculously excessive. So why not add a big how-to, thoughts-of-the-artist essay to give it an extra gloss?
This essay is about the work involved in making the video. It’s not about composition and meaning and whether Velasquez was making fun of his subjects. It’s about the work of crushing pigments, mixing paints, cleaning brushes, the grade of canvas and how much food your assistants are costing you. Filmmaking is work, and we love to explain it. That’s what you’ll get if you read any further.
| My origin of this project was a promotional video I helped shoot and edit in 2011. It was a promo for Caitlin Kiernan’s brilliant dark fantasy novel The Drowning Girl, produced by Kyle Cassidy (with a lot of input from Caitlin), and we shot that up in Rhode Island’s beaches and forests and bathtubs. The camera I used was a consumer camcorder, the Panasonic TM-700, which offered three things: a full range of manual settings, a zoom lens of terrific range, and the ability to shoot hi-def video at 60 frames a second. This latter was probably the most important, because when you shoot flowing water at 60 fps, and run it at the normal 24-30 frames, it looks wonderfully graceful. Every so often, I’d steal away a quick pickup shot of a forest or waterfall or some other nature detail. (Caitlin later said that she’d spent the weekend being Werner Herzog, and I spent it being Terence Malick. The fact that still I remember that comment indicates how much I appreciated it.) | |
| Come to think of it, maybe the real origin of these videos is the 1973 film Soylent Green, which takes place in a future New York where the ecology’s collapsed beyond recovery. Towards the end, after we’ve spent an hour-twenty watching food riots and urban squalor and the death of nature, we also get to watch Edward G. Robinson pass away. He plays a man who remembers when the world was still verdant and healthy, and he goes into a suicide clinic. They lay him down in a clean, comfortable bed, and shoot him up with feelgood drugs. And as he slips away, they show him Cinerama footage of forests, rivers, oceans, seagulls, mountain ranges, and other magnificence, scored with Beethoven’s Pastorale. Even if you didn’t know this was Robinson’s last scene– he died shortly afterward– it has a hell of an impact. |
After The Drowning Girl, I had the vague idea of assembling my collection into some nice, long background thing I could play on my big screen while doing other work. Ambient videos are easy and cheap to make, and there’s clearly an audience for them. And rather than take flights to global beauty spots like Costa Rica or Angkor Wat or the Great Barrier Reef, my home town of Philadelphia offers to a wonderful little park accessible through the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, or SEPTA. So if I acquired a new camera, or lens, I’d hie myself out to Ye Olde Wisse-Hickonn and give’em a workout. (Which makes me wonder about those globetrotting ambient videos: how many of _those_ shots were taken from the edge of the hotel’s parking lot?)
Didn’t seem like it’d require much. Just take the shots, put’em on a timeline, slap on some music, and I’d have enhanced my work environment and maybe made a few bucks.
Okay, you try doing that. Trust me: you can’t just let those shots stand as they are. You’re going to start fixing things. Maybe the camera shook during a shot, so you edit around that. Maybe two shots just don’t match, color-wise, so you adjust the chroma curves or something. And maybe you start thinking that those shots of giant walls of stone don’t play well when the music’s bouncy and sprightly, so you move them under the “somber” or “dignified” music track, and keep the sprightly music under the shots of water flowing over stones in the shallows. And those big wide shots need to be scored with something slow and majestic. And maybe each music choice can have a “theme,” running with it….
… and by then, you’re on your way to making something that’s not just background comfort, but with an actual shape and intention and even a little, dare we say it, art?
Okay, art, very loosely defined. There’s Michelangelo, and there’s flower arranging, and they’re both art. But let’s not get stupid here.
Lemme circle back to that “slap on some music” comment I made earlier. When I decided to try to make this something I could present to the outside world– something beyond Brian’s Work-Enhancing Background Mixtape– I had to find music that I liked as much as the music I’d been using. Licensing music performed by the likes of Georg Solti or Brian Eno isn’t easy. Could I hire a composer? Well, yes, but I didn’t anticipate this thing making enough money to cover that cost. And what if I didn’t like wtat they came up with? (Which is why so many filmmakers, like Scorsese and Kubrick, use needle-drops and recorded music.) That left me with one, fantastic resource: music licensed under Creative Commons, that wonderful mechanism by which artists can let others share and use their work for mutual benefit– well, “exposure.”
There was some trudging through libraries, decoding the differences between such search terms as “trance,” “chill,” “techno,” and “ambient.” “Trance” would, as often as not, have a heavy oonce-oonce beat. “Ambient” might include humming machinery with strange, echoey announcements, as though you’re working in a far-future replicant factory.
But it didn’t take long to find Chris Zabriskie’s work. Some of it probably sounds familiar: a lot of videographers and podcasters have discovered and used Chris’s music. (One of my favorites is You Must Remember This, a wonderful podcast about 20th century Hollywood scandals.) I was using a lot of his work for a commercial product, so insteda of relying on the CC license I asked him directly about it, and he gave me a greenlight, so Yay!
And that adds another level of editing, because now I want these pieces of Chris’s to work with each other in sequence. Which piece works as the intro? The finale? How do I pace changes from music that’s low and slow, to something brighter? (I ended up being a little mechanical; if you notice, the music pieces follow a slow-slow-faster pattern.)
And that nagging desire to give this a shape? I had hundreds of video snippets. I started arranging them in rough categories. Trees, Groves, Stones, Rapids, Streams, Slow Water. Then there were the overlaps: Stones in Water, Stones in the Forest, Trees and Water. So, if I scored the Water Rapids stuff with “Air Hockey Saloon,” and then I switched to the Big Stones scored with “—,” I’d want a shot or two in between that sort of had both water rapids and big stones. It was mainly to ease the transition, but it wound up giving more of a shape to the whole.
Pacing was important as well. I had lots of lovely shots, so I wanted to use as many as possible. But… well, lemme get techy here. If I shot something, I usually shot it for about 45 seconds to one minute, at 60 frames a second. Slowing that to 24 fps made it longer by two and a half times– so my shots could last at least two minutes. And even though this is an ambient video, nobody wants to look at the same gorgeous image for two minutes, even if it’s moving slightly. I watched a few other ambient videos and films, and figured that a good average shot length was about twenty seconds. So I took my clips and trimmed them to their best twenty seconds. This helped me fit a lot of shots into a limited timespan, and decide which ones deserved to stay in. (Obviously, I’d adjust them later on. A long panning shot would last longer, and sometimes, I wanted to hold on something special a bit longer than usual. And there are a few times when I did the cuts alongside of the music’s beats or chord changes.)
After all of that adventure, the days of hiking and shooting, the months of editing and constant second-guessing, I had a video that felt more or less complete. A little extra work would put it into DVD and Blu-Ray containers, ready to be manufactured and sold. (Not much work went into the droopy title, Wissahickon Moods.) But manufacturing the discs was expensive, and I’d have to stockpile them, promote them, sell them, ship them, and…
… this ws now a time to leran about online video distribution. The most direct option was an Amazon on-demand program that let people upload and video files (or disk inage files). If someone ordered one, Amazon’d manufacture the disc on demand. This was limited to DVD, so the quality was not terrific, but it was something. I aso found some companies that worked as indie film distribution systems– you provide high-quality video, make sure it meets pro standards, add in a lot of data and material necessary for pro markets, and they’d try to sell the video to other outlets and companies and services. I, of course, would get a few coins tossed my way.
Compared to a lot of indie film projects, I had it easy. A year or so later, I worked on a video of Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler, for my friends Kyle Cassidy and Jennifer Summerfield. They were interested in online distribution. But their project, like most indie films, would require things like closed-caption tracks, careful sound-balancing, and a lot of licensing documentation. Mine was just me and a lot of nature shots; even my closed-captions could just be the word “Music” throughout.
At the time, the two distributors I used were VHX and Kinonation. VHX was later swallowed by Vimeo. Kinonation, now Filmhub, actually placed it with Hulu, alongside actual TV shows and professionally-made movies. And one day they notified me that it got placed with Amazon Prime.
This was not a road to media riches. It didn’t get me meetings with the studios, and you won’t see me hanging with the good people who made Good Omens and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. But the fact that a video I made was being distributed alongside of actual industry product was pretty impressive. People could pop in their Roku sticks and stream it just as easily as Letterkenny. Somehow, it made me seem more professional. Not just to me, but to anyone I told about it. And I knew it was just a lot of stuff I shot with a prosumer camcorder and a lot of work in Premiere Pro.
That was maybe four or five years ago, and I’ve used my royalties to fulfill my mortgage and get that two-bedroom loft in the Third Arrondissement. If you find that hard to believe, well, “It paid for a perhaps two steak dinners at Outback,” is probably closer to the truth. Obviously, I didn’t hype the project very much, but I don’t know much about marketing. And in the interim, I did upgrade the camera equipment: now I was using the Panasonic GH cameras. They’re lightweight, surprisingly good, best of all cheap, and in the right hands you can get some shockingly wonderful results.
The latest GH series cameras shoot in 4K video, which is great, because a lot of people are buying gigantic, wall-sized, fake-window-scaled 4K TV screens, and they’re going to want stuff that looks great on those things. When the cameras could do 4K video at 60 frames a second, I started trekking up and down the Wissahickon again. And this time it was a cause, a mission of mercy, because Soylent Green took place in the far-future of 2022, and when the aging Baby Boomers settle into their own private Edward G. Robinson Cinerama deathbeds to watch their wall-sized TVs, they’re gonna wanna watch beautiful nature stuff to remind them of what the world was like before they cooked it to death. I had to help those poor Boomers die happy.
Okay, stop crying. You don’t have to watch it alongside of voluntary euthanasia. You can choose to live after it ends.
Even though I was shooting a lot of the same stuff I’d shot before. I could try a little harder. Truth be told, nearly all of the first Wisshickon Moods was shot close to the area’s main path, Forbidden Drive, and I never went further north than the Valley Green Inn. I’d also set myself a rule that I broke a lot: avoid showing people or the Works of Man. So I didn’t shoot video of some of the area’s man-made landmarks, like the “Tolerance” statue. This time, I started from the north end and worked my way south, so now I got the covered bridge and a waterfall or two, plus those wonderful shots of water dribbling through moss.
The calendar and weather became important considerations. The greenest times were in May and early June: after that, the colors seemed to bleach and fade in the summer sun. Speaking of which, the sun became my enemy, because direct sunlight made for a lot of glare and severe contrasts with the darker, shadowed areas of the forest. So I started looking for days that were cloudy or overcast, when the light was diffuse and gentle. The original Wissahickon Moods nabbed a moment when a wind would stir the treetops, so to capture its 4K equivalent, I started waiting for cloudy days on May when the winds would hit 15-20 m.p.h.– which, frustratingly, were also prime days for rain.
Which brings me to two special locations, the Wissahickon Memorial/Henry Avenue Bridge and Walnut Lane Bridge, which cross over the Wissahickon at treetop heights. They gave me spectacular views, all right, but it took several trips to get usable footage. Why? Because the first time I went out there, it was spitting, and a few tiny drops on my lens filters were clearly visible when I reviewed the footage later on. A second trip got some nice shots, but it had too much sunlight, the trees looked pale, and wind made the camera vibrate. I think it took me four trips before I got what I wanted.
Rain also gave me another headache. I’d gather my gear, jump on the train or bus, head over to the creek, only to find that the previous night’s rainfall had washed the area clean… and it all went into the creek, turning it the same opaque brown as the river in Willy Wonka’s factory. Those were days when I focused on trees and rocks.
On the other hand, I decided to try to create a new Autumn sequence that’d satisfy the leaf-chasers in the Philadelphia community. I got nearly all of that in one day in November 2018, when I took the train to the north end of the park and worked my way southward. You might notice that the video’s second sequence, of water trickles and spills, has a lot of yellow and red leaves laying around the place. (Come to think of it, autumn’s a great time to shoot the water, since you have these colorful things floating along for the ride.)
The Autumn colors and the GH cameras’ capabilities are good reasons to discuss the deeply nerdy matter of color correction. If you shoot this stuff with the standard color settings, it will look nice, because those settings boost the color saturation and make everything look nice and vibrant. And that’s fine– I’m sure there are one or two shots in The Wissahickon Creek that were shot in Standard mode. But I used Panasonic’s V-log color profile, which captures maybe an extra stop of brightness range, and gives me a more “film-like” control over the image. I could also use LUTs, look-up tables, which are sort of digital palettes that remap colors with a lot of control. These help cinematographers apply a good overall “look” to film footage. (One great use of these is in the film Mr. Turner, about the great British painter J.M.W. Turner. The filmmakers assembled a LUT consisting of the colors Turner used in his paintings, and applied it to the film in post-production. So it was colored in Turner’s yellows, greens, and occasional blues. The result was a film that looked like Turner’s paintings.)
For a long time, I used a LUT that seemed calibrated for rich greens, and that looked great most of the time, as I was concentrating on the forest canopies and the moss on the rocks. But when I shot the rotting tree trunks, or started shooting in Autumn, the reds and yellows were looking mutued and pale. So I went back to the standard LUT that Panasonic provides to make the V-log stuff look, well, normal. Bam– the red and yellows were back.
I know what you’re thinking: what about winter? Why not try to capture the splendor of the Wissahickon Creek in hibernation? The quiet barrenness of the cold, quiet woods? Miles to go before I sleep, and alla that? I can give you three really excellent reasons. One, this wasn’t meant to capture the Creek so much as help the viewer relax. Two, a forest without leaves, and lots of grey stalks reaching skyward, just isn’t as pretty (or as relaxing) as deep, leafy greenery. Three, I’d have loved to shoot some snowfalls in the area… but snowfalls are growing rarer and rarer these days, Philadelphia’s known for its snow forecasts failing to deliver, and it melts too quickly to capture properly. I’d love to do it, maybe someday. Butt I’d have to camp out there the night before, with an iron guarantee of getting enough snow.
What about the animals? Didn’t we grow up on those David Attenborough documentaries where polar bears teach their cubs to swim, and manta rays leap up from the ocean depths? (Or, for my generation, didn’t we see those Disney True-Life Adventures like Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar?) Doesn’t the Wissahickon have animal life? What about the ducks, the geese, the squirrels, the birds, the possums, maybe even a raccoon?
Maybe I could have captured more of that, if I camped out in a lean-to and waited. I got lucky once or twice. A hawk settled on a branch for a good twenty-minute stretch, and some snowy-white ducks (or geese) cleaned their wings for a while, and I did spend some time with the ducks that hang around the Valley Green. But generally, that stuff’s tough. You really have to lie in wait, or be ready to zero in on the woodpecker sounds. Many’s the time I’d be walking along when a pair of geese came flying down the creek… far too quickly for me to get my camera set up. I just couldn’t do the animals justice.
This second time around, I decided try adding a second audio track– a soundtrack of just nature sounds, to give viewers an option other than Chris’s music. (One of my Amazon reviewers complained about this, and it’s not a bad point, but the one-star review was a bit much. Couldn’t you say you liked the pictures, at least?) But that became another job, because I couldn’t use the less-than-perfect audio that my cameras captured. Sometimes, I’d talk to someone who was passing by, so the audio has me yabbering about lenses, bokeh and f-stops. And the Wissahickon Creek is right near some heavily used roads. During most of the day, you can hear the hum of cars going by. Those opening shots of the waterfall and stone train bridge? The high shots from the bridges? Those are right next to heavy traffic roads, so their original soundtracks sound like NASCAR’s Diesel Bus Rally division. And far too often, airplanes could be heard over the birds and traffic.
I could go through my camera tracks and isolate useful sections, and maybe use those, but camera mikes are crummy and the quality was never great. And I didn’t want to simply license some nature sounds and slap’em in. It didn’t seem honest, and there was always the chance that some ornithology hobbyist would post a one-star review announcing that the bird chirps I’d licensed were actually from a species native to Montana, and the discrepancy took them right out of their morning yoga.
| So one day I went up there with a Zoom recorder and tried to record nature sounds for two-minute stretches. (I also brought the camera in case I found something new.) I figured that midday on a weekday might work well, as the traffic wouldn’t be as heavy as during rush our or on the weekends, and the hiker population’d be lower… but someone in the nearby Highland suburb had a squadron of lawn mowers keeping his ancestral castle’s grounds nice and level.
Water trickles were easy. Waterfalls, easier, because they drowned out everything. Still forests… well, most of those were recorded in one grove, far away from Lincoln Drive and Henry Avenue. And I really hoped to capture the rustles of wind-thrown trees without too much hassle. I could add in particular bird sounds I’d caught and isolated. Waterfalls had to be reduced– a gigantic roar isn’t conducive to meditation, so I kept those levels low. In other words, the “natural soundtrack” would have a lot of fakery going on. (As of this writing, I still I haven’t made that soundtrack. Streaming videos don’t allow for multiple soundtracks very often. Maybe there’s a Blu-ray, a 4K disc, or maybe a separate relax-a-thon video that’s just the scenery and sounds.) |
No, it was NOT like this, even though it’s the same location. |
And on that last day, when I’d hiked the full length of the place, I was done with the Wissahickon. I’d shot enough. Recorded enough. I’d already had a full and complete draft and, after adding one or two really nice shots I found on that last day, I could start posting it to the video distribution systems and (*snicker*) watch the cash roll in. I needed to create the graphics, ad copy, and other stuff for the distributors. There was also a lot of stuff that was demanding my attention, like rebuilding parts of my house, taking care of a housemate and two dogs, hunting a nice administrative job to keep the bills paid, and maybe finding another video project.
And when the suicide-parlor industry launches, and the Boomers start lining up, I’ll be in at the ground floor.