"Rain Delay" Tilt Shift

Rain Delay from Jesse Tarnoff on Vimeo.

Nikon just closed it's online digital filmmaking contest and we got our film in a few hours before the deadline. The prompt was to make a film about "a day in the life." We had a few ideas, but decided we would take the opportunity to experiment with tilt shift photography. The idea behind video tilt shifting is to make objects appear like miniatures. This is done by immitating the depth of field of a macro shot on an object that is life size. When the brain accounts for the different depths, it assumes that what you are looking at is very small.

In order to get the look of a miniature, we also had to make the motion look more like stop motion footage. To give it this look I put a strobe on the footage and ramped it up pretty fast. This gives it the feel of it being animated, like someone playing with little toy people and cars.

The Waldo idea was to throw another element into the tilt shift mix. We know that the story isn't complex, or even a story at all. However, we took the chance to make more of an experimental type film that is more art than storytelling.

On this shoot I got to work with Nathan Visconti, a filmmaker from Berkeley, as well as a long time friend Cameron Clark who did the composting on the one shot of the book with the footage moving inside of it. I also made some other new friends in the Berkeley filmmaking crowd which is always, always, always a fun crew to shoot with.

You can see the submission to Nikon here.