This summer I studied abroad in Japan for one month. In total I took over 5,000 photos, and I'm still going through them. I went to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Nara, Uji, Himeji, and Osaka.
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So recently I came back from my summer vacation where I went to Montreal, Toronto and Cincinnati. The best part of the trip- photographically speaking- is when I went to the Cincinnati Zoo and took photos of the wonderful birds that were there. My personal favorite is the owl photo, especially its eye!
So recently I was able to take photos at an event for my college called, "Poetry Slam" and it was a lot of fun! The event itself was a competition between poets for who performed the best that night. The lighting was incredibly difficult to work with because they turned off all of the lights in the room and lit the performers with just blue spot lights. I am really proud on how these photos turned out and in the end it was a great experience!
So I am alive! I haven't updated this website for two main reasons: 1- The photos that I have taken are for clients so I can't really share them and 2- I haven't been able to take photos in a long time due to school work! I will update soon with more photos. Here are a few I took recently.
My roommate finished his edit of the video we shot together about a month and a half ago! Here is his cut of the video and I posted mine to compare our editing styles. We're very different editors but that's not necessarily a bad thing! His Edit: My Edit: So recently one of my friends for Halloween dressed up as Mary Poppins. She requested that I take photos of her for her family calendar, and I agreed, with the deal being that whatever photos I take and edit, I can use for my portfolio. So here they are! I love how much the red pops out, I desaturated the background in most of the photos so that way the maximum contrast is gained. I'm becoming more and more comfortable with model shots, in total this is my thrid model shot. My first one was around June this year for an actress, and the last one was my girlfriend. They all turned out really well and I hope you enjoy the photos!
So yesterday I received my new phone because my old phone died, and I decided to get Instagram on it! I've been hearing about this Instagram thing for months now and to be finally able to use it has been quite interesting. It's completely different to anything I'm used to in Photoshop. In Photoshop you have complete control over everything and can tweak pretty much everything until it is exactly how you want it. Comparatively Instagram is incredibly simple- offering up 20 or so pre-made filters- and is very user friendly. The outcome usually ends up looking like something taken by an old broken moldy camera. It's all really quick and easy and doesn't take nearly as long to produce an image compared to editing on photoshop. I am really enjoying it!
You can follow me on Instagram @marcdowningphotography. So now I am about two months into college, and so far it has been going really well! I'm doing well in all of my classes and I am learning more and more about filmmaking each day. A few things have been keeping me busy! First thing: Learning to mix audio Audio production has been very interesting for me, and when I say interesting, I mean difficult. The actual mixing of the audio I find very fun, but the difficult part to me is the recording of the audio. Background noise has been very difficult for me to control while I record, so I end up recording in a completely controlled environment and adding in the ambience later. Using Pro Tools has been very fun to learn, and I will never listen to music the same way again. Second thing: Friends My room has become the hang out room on our floor, everyone walks in with their laptops in their hands and proceed to set up shop. Minecraft is usually played, currently there my friends are in my room playing it together. This college dorm life has been a great experience for me. Everyone is not afraid to be themselves, and there is a lot of fun to be had because of it. I've met a lot of talented video makers, writers, photographers, and actors and it's only been two months! I have a few projects in the works in terms of film production and hopefully I will upload more photos soon!
FOR A HIGHER QUALITY VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/49097387 This is the first time I have ever used special effects in any of my videos. It was a very interesting process! First off, this video is meant to be more of a proof of concept video over an actual short film. There's a reason for this: I am starting a film production crew on my floor, the film floor. We will begin pre-production on our first actual short film most likely next week. But for now here is the story behind this film. I was talking to my RA and somehow the conversation got into making short films. We briefly talked about a short film that we could create but that involved a lot of special effects and I was unsure if I could do them. Later that day I got a few people together and my camera to make a effects test. I was the camera man and a co-director. My friend Sam was the other co-director and I made all the effects. We did a couple of rehearsals so we could get the action scene choreographed and so we could figure out the shots. We had no script, and we initially went into it expecting it to be just an effects test. However, a little narrative formed as a set up. The shoot took about an hour, including rehearsals and blocking the shots. We got all of it shot and I went straight into editing. I had two main effects to do in this video: the gunshot and the lightsabers. I did the lightsabers first because I thought they would be the most challenging, so I had my roommate show me how to do them and I key framed them in. My roommate was by far the biggest help in this video for showing me how to use After Effects. The masking was the most difficult part for me and by far the most time consuming. After that I did the gunshot, which is the effect I'm most proud of. No masking involved but I motion tracked the smoke when I panned the camera. After all the effects I exported it and uploaded it, and on my computer it is exported in HD but when I uploaded it to youtube it seems to only show up with a max resolution of 480. That's why I put the vimeo link as well, since it ended up being of higher quality.
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UpdatesMarc DowningA film maker and photographer based in Southern California. Archives
February 2016
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