I actually shot this footage about a month ago, on Dec. 7, 2009. Unfortunately, one of the consequences of having four to six jobs at a time and a full course-load means there’s not much time for personal projects.
I was able to find the time to edit this piece together during the second half of Christmas break and posted it earlier this evening.
The inspiration came late one night after returning from an indoor soccer game to find our campus covered in a fresh layer of snow. I tried to capture the atmosphere of an evening on our snowy campus, freshman snowball fights included.
A word about the title–I suppose it’s not the first official snowfall of the winter here, but the first substantial for sure. Of course, it pales in comparison to this weekend’s storm.
Music credit goes to Kevin MacLeod at Incompetech.com. I highly recommend his talents if you have any similar personal projects with a need for royalty free music.
As for the technicals, I shot most of it in 60p, including the slow motion spots and time lapse of the campus gate. The rest is 24p, all exported at 29.97 in Sony Vegas. I employed my full set of lenses–the 18-55, 50 1.8, 70-200 and 300–to capture the various scenes from different perspectives. Most of the footage was shot wide open and between 400 and 3200 ISO, though for some areas of campus I had to push it to 5000. Still highly usable.
Ethan Magoc is a 20-year-old photographer, reporter and videographer attending Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa. He is interested in all aspects of sports media production and runs a blog on his Web site, http://www.ethanmagoc.com