My Experience with Slow Motion
The assignment I created this slow-motion footage for is my Moving Image and New Media class. Once again, I felt completely out of my depth when creating any kind of moving image or video footage, especially for something that felt as complicated as slow-motion footage.
Because the project felt so overwhelming, as most new things do, I started in the same place I always start new projects – using my pets as the subject. I thought about what aspect of pet life I could show that would benefit being in slow-motion, and came to the conclusion that eating peanut butter would be a good place to start. The audience gets to see a perspective that isn’t often showed, and I could experiment with slowing footage down.
In order to get the footage I was after, I set my camera on a tripod on video mode, with the frame rate as 50 frames per second (the highest my getting-older camera had available). By filming in 50 frames per second, the footage at normal speed appears sped up because there is more happening in each second. Once I moved the footage to Premiere Pro, I was able to set the playback speed as 25 frames per second. This slowed the footage down to “half speed” and suddenly I had slow motion footage.
The troubles began when I started to edit the footage. I wanted to cut to slow motion after Lupin, my dog, had started eating the peanut butter, have some of the action and sound in slow motion, and then cut back to regular speed. Unfortunately, as it was 50 frames per second, regular speed felt sped up, but if I slowed the footage down slightly, the sound would get distorted. The next issue, that took me far too long to realise, was that because the slow-motion footage was playing at 25fps compared to the ‘normal’ 50fps, the footage took twice as long to reach the same frame.
I felt foolish when I realised that something half speed would take double to time to reach the same frame. I put it down to being an absolute beginner and continued without many issues after that.
Overall, my experience with slow motion was quite fun, and showing the video to friends, family and strangers always leads to exclamations of awe at my dogs, laughing at their silly faces when they lick the peanut butter, and an intense visceral reaction to the slow motion sounds of licking and slurping.
