The Roadtrip
Finn Beales
Lesson Info
21. The Roadtrip
Lessons
Series Introduction
01:30 2Introducing Finn Beales
01:34 3Q&A Coffee With Finn & Alex
09:48 4Welcome to the workshop
02:31 5Gear
06:56 6What is a story?
03:50Essence: Location
05:19 8Essence: Character
03:52 9Essence: Events
04:51 10Photography as a Medium
02:27 11Recap
00:44 12The Importance of Shot Type
08:53 13Prepare for Success
00:59 14Asking The Right Questions
05:18 15Identifying Your Locations
03:27 16Developing Treatments & Mood Boards
07:19 17Creating a Call Sheet & Shot List
04:59 18Meeting Your Subjects
04:19 19The Board Room
10:12 20Location Recce
05:24 21The Roadtrip
06:13 22Surf Day
06:14 23Shooting Technique 1: 50 & Stitch
07:13 24Shooting Technique 2: Tracking Shot
05:36 25Alex Shoot Day
13:36 26Introduction to Editing
03:21 27Making Selects
08:52 28Grading in Lightroom
09:15 29Analog Film Elements Using the Exposure Plugin
09:58 30Building the Story
10:59 31Using Squarespace to Display Your Work
08:55 32Q&A: Q&A: Editing
25:44 33Q&A: Pricing Your Work
22:36 34Q&A: Shooting
33:20 35Q&A: Photography Today
24:17 36Stuff That Alex is Curious About
14:38 37Alex
02:09 38Finn
01:12 39What Alex Learned
02:12 40Bonus: Finishing Touches in Photoshop
13:04Lesson Info
The Roadtrip
So I'm gonna shoot some interior shots to put my audience in the car with Dan. I don't wanna be too far off just following. I wanna get a little more intimate now. So I'm gonna switch to the 35 mill lens. Jump inside, capture some medium, medium-close shots. But before I do I just wanna clear up our stage in the front. I noticed there are some water bottles, some gaffer tape. I want to clear those off. So the focus is on Dan. It's on the car. It's on the road in front of us. Okay, mate. I got that. (indecipherable muttering on the walkie-talkie) So now we're in the car. We're just gonna roll down the road. I'm just gonna shoot Dan driving, basically. He doesn't need much direction. He's gonna have to concentrate on the road. So I'll just capture some stuff. We feel a nice, some natural, authentic, nice scenes that we can drop into the bigger landscape shots, illustrate that transition, that movement. (car driving) Just gonna grab a couple of shots of him reflected in the mirror. Nice. ...
(road noise) Keep reviewing your shots as you're going. Just check you're on boss. I love the looks you get in this truck. Like everyone's like, oh my God. It's bumpy. It's still good. Good sense of movement. I've just asked Dan to stop here because there's a nice, straight stretch of road. So we're gonna have him, like, travel up it some speed so we can get all that dust coming out from behind the car. (walking on gravel) Apologies for the sound inside the truck. If you couldn't hear what I was saying there was a lot of noise, a lot of metal around us, but hopefully you got the gist. We asked Dan to stop here because this is a great road running off into the distance loads of dust. As you can see coming off from the back of a car I wanna capture that sense of movement. Also the journey going down the coast. I've switched to a 50 millimeter lens. I might stitch this so I'll shoot rapid fire as he travels up the road, and then once he's gone outta frame, I'll move right, I'll move left and stitch them all together. It'll just bring the whole scene closer to me. It's gonna meet up. Just wide. So just barrel up the road. Yeah. Dead center. Fair bit of speed. So we can kick that dust up. Okay. And when you like tip out of sight, just turn around and come back. Use these guys as an opportunity. It gets in the way of the final shot that we wanna make but use them to test your settings. Okay. He's coming back. (camera shutter clicking) Lovely. That's what we want. Look good. Look good. Yeah. It looks dope. It looks amazing. Happy days. Yeah, this looks good. So we've been to a few beaches on the way down the coast. Way too busy. So we took a trip bit further down the coast. A little coastal road led us through a forest. It was actually beautiful on the way down. Came to a dead end and we found our final location, which is a huge relief. So now we have our end point. The light is still a bit hot. So we have probably like an hour before sunset. So now we've secured this final location. We're gonna take the truck back up the road that we've come down through, shoot some wide aerials using a drone. So I'll send Dan down the road. I've got a walkie-talkie here. He's got one in his truck. Keep him traveling really slow. Maybe like 10 miles an hour so I can follow him. The drone's not as fast as one of these vehicles. Okay. Dan, let's go. Okay. Just tracking around, chase him fast. I'm just swinging the drone round. So the sun's hitting the car on the side in the back. We were facing the sun and that was we were exposing the car so well. Yeah. Can you spin the truck round and come back? Same speed. That was absolutely great. Yeah. We'll turn over and go back. Perfect. See you shortly. So your ISO 100, shot of speed is 1800. We've got aperture five and then a bit of compensation of bringing it down by 0.7, all the white balances. Okay. So he's on his way back now. So we had an hour between finding our location and sun setting. So we came up to the top of the hill, used that time efficiently shooting the drone with the car, tracking through this landscape, cutaway stuff we can use to transition between more up close details and our end scene, which is gonna happen on the ocean. Now the light is getting good. We're gonna head back down to the beach and shoot our final scene. I'm stoked to shoot this cause this is where Dan gets to do his stuff. Shred it on those waves. (piano tone)
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
Brent Morris
Fantastic My thoughts on the storytelling workshop. The short is; it’s fantastic. The long is I loved all the details covered, from shot types and the ideas behind them to the call sheets and shot lists, and the whole process. I felt like I had a better understanding of how to schedule a professional shoot and I really felt like I had a much better grasp on many ideas and concepts, and I believe I’ve been able to improve my photography with them, so thank you and Finn. It really is fantastic.
Oswaldo Martinez
A path to better stories Very happy I got this workshop. Finn and Alex do a great job at teaching highly useful methods and specific advice to help you improve your own work, and more importantly, tell better stories that are meaningful to you.
Tommaso Selleri
Simply the best This is simply the best workshop out there on photography and storytelling. Finn is awe inspiring and so real and authentic. A pleasure to watch, a joy to learn from such master. I really hope a volume 2 is coming soon! Thank you for this one!