“That’s just crazy..!”

       The Making Of Hose.

ACQUISITION

I’d shot and edited some small short film ideas before and had learnt a lot from those experiences. The first animated piece I shot, I shot on a single chip Sony video camera using the still frame feature. I was fortunate in that an editor who I happened to mention the project too advised me to shoot using this system. The advantage of it was that it captured progressive frames, but the disadvantage was enormous – it layed down 7 seconds of still frame on the miniDV tape. The result was that I had to manually extract each single frame. At the time I was using Final Cut 1 on an iMac and I really struggled with this system. I realized that it was possible, but needed an alternative capture and editing method.

So I started experimenting with digital still cameras. At the time I had a 2 megapixel Canon Sureshot that produced great images and to my surprise were much larger than the frame in NTSC, resulting in a scaling down of the image, producing a great looking shot. That in itself was a huge leap forward. However, these little Point-And-Shoot cameras are fine, but the lenses are small and they perform poorly in low light. This was most evident in an early test that I did in an interior.

Once we had decided to press ahead and shoot Hose, DSC was a natural choice for me, especially as by that stage you could buy affordable SLR cameras with interchangeable lenses.