Montage to Planet Earth
This is probably the best video I’ve played with. Amazing stuff and extraordinary content. I’m talking about “Planet Earth” series. It’s among the best I’ve seen from BBC. “Space” is the other series that I liked. I’m currently watching “Long way round”, “Cosmos”, Adam Curtis’ collection (which includes “The Century of the Self” and “The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear”). I wish I had even more time. Talk about greed. I am addicted to the documentary mini-series because it is more comprehensive. And one of the addictions which I don’t mind. I can strongly say that documentaries are less time consuming than books, journals and wiki together but more ‘precise’, it’s the best informative source. You get to know different things from ‘Evolution of Universe’ to ‘roots of Consumerism’.
First, I had thoughts of making a fan video for the whole documentary Series. But I ended up with an idea of making an individual sneak-peak/preview/extended trailer(can’t decide what to call it) for every episode. Here is the first one called “From pole to pole”. It’s amazing with two biggest highlights of the whole series. New Guinea’s Bird of paradise, the Swimming elephant and the whole 300,000 Baikal teal flock (thats their whole population). It also had a large shark catching a Seal with a spectacular dive. The lightning speed of the dive was slowed down some 40 times. Interesting angles from which they shot the bird of paradise and that particular making-out from the male (reminded me of male hormonal instincts of homo-sapiens).
Here comes the trademark “Nature is dying” rhetoric. Do I really care about it? Actually No. I belong to the larger movement called conspicuous consumption. This video is one such display. It’s quite ironic how “we” destroy ecosystems but still admire our nature. I can’t help but admire people dedicated to it like Sir David Attenborough (another big inspiration) . I assume everyone admires the beauty of our planet. Thats the least this ‘product’ could do and to me, thats all it does. And I wish I could resign my coolie stint and become a naturalist like David.
The sub-plots in the first episode were great, The long wait of the Penguin to hatch their eggs. The long journey of the Elephants. The long hibernation of the polar bears coming to an end. Wolves hunting the Caribou. The calculated pursuit from the forest dog and desperate escape of the Impala.
Before I talk about editing, let me give you an idea of its ‘making’. I couldn’t drop Xvid files to Sony Vegas. So I got Adobe Premier studio Pro. It sucked even more. It burned up my processor and it was fucking slow. If that wasn’t pissing off, it crashed when I tried to import media. The worst part was, it didn’t recognize the file after I imported. I thought about converting the file to mpeg or wmv and then editing it. But It would have been a big pain-in-the-ass and I couldn’t afford to do that every time. So I browsed different forums for hours. And some of them were misleading. It was pretty simple in the end(like always). I had to change the FourCC code of the file to ‘DivX’. For some reason, Vegas (or even Adobe) couldn’t read Xvid files and it supports codecs to read DivX files. There is not much of a difference between Xvid and divX as they are both MPEG-4. Sony hasn’t looked up in this issue. I have the latest 7.0d and even that couldn’t do it. It’s a glitch.
Finally, I dragged the video to the timeline. Editing was pure fun and I felt ecstatic doing it. Then came the ’speed-breaker’ in form of soundtrack Mixing (or placing). This whole ‘drag-dropping’ different soundtracks to the timeline was bloody tiresome. To get the best match from 10GB of such stuff was fuckin’ hard and I was loosing my concentration already. I couldn’t afford to care about the spare stuff in my CD-collections. Come to think of it, the afro-music which could have actually added acoustical imbalance to the normal soothing sound. No energy to search for dvds and copythem to HD, then find the match again. Of that 10GB, bottlenecked to about 10 reasonably good matches. Then finally ended up with three as they would match with the images in tandem rather than just fill up the space, I felt these tracks invokes the mood. Although the synch could have been better, it was difficult to chop off the wonderful soundtrack.
Juxtapositioning the video and music together is interesting, you should do that sometime. Mixed feelings from ‘tearing your hair out’ to ‘breaking the monitor’. Even if you love the music. You will feel like throwing up while watching and listening innumerable times. Then comes the cross fading and final touch. Nevertheless, the final soundtracks deserves an equal applause and admiration. It was from my all-time favorite composer, Ennio morricone and another contemporary great in Hans Zimmer. It’s easy to guess the tracks once you hear it. Let’s see how many know it. As I said before, the synchronization could have been better. It could have been more crisp but I avoided overlaps in the transitions (from one track to another). But I couldn’t wait to see the final product. Had to settle with the ‘momentary best-fit’ which would be half-satisfactory for a perfectionist. I am not one..So, no complaints, really. I ended up with a final-cut of 11 minutes. Which is not bad at all! I couldn’t decide where to cut and what to leave. “Decision” factor ate the whole afternoon. The final video took almost a day. By the end of it all, I realize how difficult it would be to Edit a movie. I bow to all the best editors out there. Even the worst ones around, Patience is one thing that can’t be cultivated. I don’t have any of it. Okay, very little if at all.
When I saw the final mash-up. I was taken aback. I missed out Amur leopards. But anyway, got the best of all the interesting shots which I can’t imagine how they took it. I believe It took years. Some of the long breathtaking heli-gimbal shots and tracking shots were mind-blowing to say the least. Yeah, they needed to be unobtrusive and it was highly professional considering the patience with which they must have shot this over seasons and climatic changes in extremities. Lets just say, its flawless and impeccable. This one is probably the best out there. “Life of mammals” and “Life of birds” are other great ones out there. “Life on Earth” is in the pipeline too. I gave this series, a perfect 10/10 in IMdb and it fully deserved it.
Planet Earth Pole to Pole Preview on Vimeo
Note: You would be surprised to know this. I had the US version from Sigourney Weaver. I would anyday recommend the original David narrated version.
And having David’s narration in this video is a far cry. For it to make sense and have clarity, you should merely have the replica of the whole series. Continuity is a must. In that case, it would be longer even if I work my socks out. And I don’t find it exciting either. Along with David’s voice, I had to sacrifice the natural “sound” and the original soundtrack of the series. The soundtrack I chose is a lot better. I hope it’s good.
Vimeo is lot better than youtube. It doesn’t reduce the clarity and there is no 10 minute/ 100MB threshold bullshit.
Tags: Audio, Documentary, English - Other, Television, Video
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Amazing ^:)^^:)^
Could have edited a little more. Little too long. Make sure you don’t cross 5 minutes. The soundtracks were brilliant but could have synchronized a bit. But hey, no complaints. Will order the dvd in Amazon..Thanks and keep it coming..
you also should check out:
1) Life in the Undergrowth
2) The Blue Planet
And brilliance of Planet Earth was that it was made in HD and they had some cool gadgets. Also I liked the Diary bit where they showed how they went about shooting.
Thilak – very nice job! I loved the 2nd song – can you tell me what it is? I have haerd it before and have been trying to find it!
A couple of suggestions:
1. Make it shorter – it is almost too long
2. I think it would be great if you mix some faster music and faster cuts. Right now, all the music and all the cuts are slow. You could a series of 1-2 second shots and cover a lot of images in a short time with some faster music too. I think that would change up the pacing a little.
I think this is good training, so keep it coming! And thanks for sharing it with us
@Nanda,
Thanks mate.
@Honhaar Goonda,
Thanks, LITU and BP are both in the pipeline already. Should get my hands on the diary bit soon
@Shripriya,
The final track : Hans Zimmer’s “Now we are free” from Gladiator OST.
Thanks a lot for the suggestions
Yes covering a lot of images with faster tracks would make it more interesting.
Nah, I disagree with Shripriya. I thought the music was apt for this video. Check it out again and see.. the music goes a bit faster when the flowers blossom. although, it was a bit inconsistent. next time also edit clips of a song/track that captures the scene.
HG – I am not saying the music was inappropriate for the visuals. It was fine. I am just saying that every shot and every cut in the entire video was very slow. All the shots were slow and all the shots were multiple seconds long. So it made the whole pace very languid. Which is fine if that’s what you wanted.
But my personal preference would have been to include some fast cuts – a cheetah killing prey, a non-slow motiono of the shark, a jump from a branch to a brach by an insect – whatever. But you could have a section where the shots and the music were fast. That would change the pace of the whole thing and provided some variety and excitement too, I think.
Thilak – thanks for the info on the music!