archived-videos Four Pauls: Bring the Hat Back!

ItDonnedOnMe

ItDonnedOnMe

This is my competitive film team's latest project - a short documentary on a local hat shop. The shop has been around for over 90 years, and it's currently being run by four young women who are maintaining the traditional techniques of making men's hats by hand:

http://vimeo.com/20799569

We made it for the International Documentary Challenge - an annual competition in which teams make short docs in just five days from start to finish. I literally showed up at the hat shop on a Thursday night and we shipped out the finished film on Monday! We were a finalist in the competition and brought home awards for best cinematography and best use of the historical genre, and premiered with the other finalists at Hot Docs in Toronto.

Enjoy - and if you do enjoy it, help bring the hat back by sharing it with your friends!
 
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This is a great documentary!

In terms of colors this is one of the best works in DSLR I've seen. How did you obtain that very light sepia look?

The camera movements are very smooth. I don't know what a zazaslider is but it sure works great.

The content is also very interesting. The historical perspective is insightful. I learned a lot about hats.

Very impressive work! Wow!
 
Thanks!

Theodebernacius said:
In terms of colors this is one of the best works in DSLR I've seen. How did you obtain that very light sepia look?
Click to expand...

Accidentally! Seems to happen to me all the time, make a mistake and it turns out better in the end. I had installed an app on my laptop that reduces the color temp of your display at night, based on the theory that too much blue light at night tends to make it difficult to fall asleep. Can't say I noticed much difference with sleep, and I basically forgot it was installed. A couple weeks later we made the film, and I did all the color correction on the last night of the competition. After everything was rendered out and we were getting ready to send it in I realized that I still had the color app running - once I turned it off the entire movie had a blue cast to it. There wasn't time to go back and redo everything, so I just threw a CC filter on the final master to fix the blue tint. As I was tweaking it I hit a point where I took just a little too much of the blue out and it gave the nice light sepia look, which felt appropriate for the film - so we went with it.

The camera movements are very smooth. I don't know what a zazaslider is but it sure works great.
Click to expand...

Zazaslider is the brand name for sliders made by the guy who basically started the whole slider craze by adapting industrial machinery tracks for use with cameras. They're fairly inexpensive (< $300) and he also provides all the information if you want to just order the parts yourself and build one for even less. The tracks come from a company called Igus who now sells them on Amazon pre-drilled for camera mounts.
 
That was really good!
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