Anglezarke - In Video
With the recent reopening of the Heapey Embankment at Anglezarke, I've made a number of visits to the woods around Anglezarke and also walked the 4(ish) mile route around its shores several times, something that's not been possible for nigh on two years due to the closure of the road running over the embankment during the works.
It was during one of these walks that I had the idea this might make a good subject for a moorland walking video. It's only 4(ish) miles and relatively flat, a walk even I can complete in under two hours, so making a video on the subject wouldn't be too hard and is surely something I could wrap up in a single day? How wrong can you be?
Now, in fairness, I've made walking videos in a single day on much tougher walks, my videos hiking to Thunacar Knott and Great Gable are perhaps two good examples. Both included steep climbs (over several thousand feet) and much longer routes (probably both in the region of 8 miles), but that was all pre pandemic when I wasn't on heart medication, but I figured this was half the distance and practically zero ascent, so even in my much more unfit current state I could still rattle through this in one go.
Four visits later and it was all done. Four!
The first day I was out for about four hours and managed to shoot the first mile of the walk. I'm unsure where all that time went, I did get talking to a number of hikers who passed me and asked what I was doing, so that probably accounts for an hour of it, but the rest was just following a relatively simple path that I know very well, plopping the camera down when I reach an interesting looking location, framing it up and then walking past the camera, then walking back again to pick it up. There was of course the dreaded speaking to camera.
After the last couple of videos just being ambient soundtracks, I'd decided early on this was going to have some dialogue in it. As usual, rather than writing a script, I just did some research to confirm what I already knew about the place and bolster it with a few extra details that I didn't know, then attempted to wing it on the day. The problem with that approach is, I'm not an adlibber. I really don't think on my feet when speaking, so every take I'd start out with some rough idea what I was going to say and then stumble over my lines, stutter and often completely forget what I was saying or even trying to say.
There's a scene where I'm sat on a bench, talking about the water sources that feed the reservoir and forgot the name of Alance Bridge, this made me pause and then, when I'd remembered, completely forget the specific point I was going to mention next. In the original footage, I freeze like a broken robot, stare into space while trying to remember before excitingly splurting out the name. Naturally I cut all of this out in the edit and masked the cut with Davinci Resolve's "Smooth Edit" transition, which works a treat, but while all this was going on, the clouds were drifting by, so the effect is that, for a few frames either side of the splice, the clouds appear to speed up because I'd paused for so long.
So, at the end of day one, I admitted defeat and returned home, planning to continue the walk another day. At least the first mile was in the can. Wasn't it?
However, when reviewing the footage, all of my initial woodland scenes were really dark. I'd shot it all in 10 bit NLog on the Z6iii using waveforms and view assist to judge the exposure and exposed to preserve the highlights, which is what I do with photography. This left me with severely crushed dark and shadow tones no matter what I tried to do to recover them, they weren't coming back.
So on day two, I decided to reshoot the intro. I wasn't happy with some of what I'd said, so a different approach was needed. This time I went down to where the woods meets the shore and filmed a new intro there, being careful to set the exposure so it looked correct. The later scenes from day one had been okay, so I blitzed through that part of the walk and managed to get as far as the halfway mark before running out of steam. By this point I'd been on my feet for 4.5 hours and still had a 2 mile walk to get back to the car. There's a scene immediately as I leave the Knowsley Embankment and begin walking across a field towards the camera, which was the last scene shot that day and my face looks incredibly miserable as I was completely exhausted.
Checking the footage after that day I still had somewhat underexposed woodland scenes. Not as bad as the first day, but still lacking detail in the shadows. As I've shot log footage before on several other cameras and not had these kind of problems, I decided to do a bit of online research plus a bit of testing. My own tests at home involved covering the lens with the cap and seeing where black lies on the waveforms. It turns out, it's not at the bottom of the gauge as you might expect, but midway between the bottom of the gauge and the lower 1/3rd line which is really, really stupid and totally misleading. So I'd been exposing thinking I had bags of latitude in my shadows, only to be clipping them. I also ended up turning off view assist and exposing using the log view instead as a correctly exposed scene that preserves shadows looks severely overexposed with view assist turned on. Finally I also turned on highlight zebras. It turns out that NLog on the Z6iii apportions a significant part of its dynamic range to preserving the highlights, so the best way to ensure you aren't clipping the highlights or at least aren't bothered about which bits you are clipping is to use zebras.
With all of these changes to the settings I set out for day 3. I didn't fancy walking 2 miles before starting shooting again, so I ended up driving to the Knowsley Embankment (which is the opposite end of the reservoir from where I started) and starting from there. This turned into another four hour shoot and only got me a mile further along the route before deciding I'd had enough. Still, I only had another mile to go which could be done on another day.
Day four saw me setting off from the original start location, but walking in the reverse direction along what would be the last mile of the original walk before starting to film myself on the way back to the end/start point. Unfortunately the weather, which had remained calm, warm and sunny for the previous three shooting days had changed considerably and it was now very windy. This didn't deter me though as I was determined to get the thing finished, although in the finished video it perhaps looks a little odd how the wind suddenly picks up after I've passed the Charnock Embankment. This last section included another part of dark woodland and I'm pleased to say that my new exposure regime seems to have worked here and everything looks correctly exposed.
So, in total, this video took four shooting days, with a total time in the field of 17:30 creating about 450GB of footage. Editing time is anyone's guess, probably about three days in total and further complicated by the fact that, for the first two days of shooting I was referring to the embankments as dams, which is technically incorrect, although might be valid for the Knowsley embankment as it crosses the original path of the Yarrow. Worse still, I had the names of the Knowsley Embankment and Charnock Embankment mixed up (I was calling Charnock Knowsley and calling Knowsley Yarrow for some reason), so I had to re-record the dialogue for those phrases in a number of styles and then dub them into the appropriate places in the hope no one noticed the sudden change in cadence.
Still, I'm quite pleased with the end result. It's perhaps not the most exciting video (fat middle aged bloke walks around a reservoir for 35 minutes) but it looks and sounds pretty good despite what other flaws it might have, but if you want to get a more in depth view of some of the countryside in this area it might be worth settling down with a brew for half an hour and giving it a go.
Hopefully normal service will be resumed next week (weather permitting), although I have had another idea for a video...
P.S. sorry for the really long post, hopefully some of the technical details will be of interest or useful to others, particularly anyone shooting video with a Z6iii.
Link below for anyone who wants to watch it.
Link to video
