Sascha Plagge

Now i know myself pretty well, and if i’m not going to write the first blog about the electric love production now, i’m not going to do it at all
So better get started! Since there’s not to much “real” production work to do for now…. i’ll let you have a look at my After Effects Comp!

If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the first teaser for electric love here.

As i mentioned in the post before, the trailer was created in Adobe After Effects. I started with cutting out all the DJs from the press material i got from the agencies. Every DJ has its own composition with the distortion effects for their revealing animation. I did the same thing for all the logos i got, added some graphical elements, and put everything together in one big main comp.

My two main comps, not including all the sub-compositions for DJs, Logos and backgrounds, have over 140 layers stacked together which means layer organisation was really important!

The whole thing took about 3,5 hours to render on a high end Macbook in 1080p25! An everage of 7 seconds per frame!
After the first trailer went online i started to create some more graphical elements we will need for future use in the production. That included a animated cornerlogo and a animated lower third.

All that stuff looks pretty cool when animated, but I’m afraid i can’t show you too much for now! So stay connected for the next few weeks!

The trailer also got a little sound mix i’ve made in Ableton Live. I know, its not the perfect software for the job but it was enough for some swooshes and beep sounds

Well i think that’s it for now… not too much crazy stuff but that’s all i have for you right now. I am already working on the teaser for Phase 2 which is going to be released on the 15th of february including some other stuff and some BIG names for the line up!

cheers, Sascha

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Here we are again… Time is flying. 2012 was a very great year full of new people and new expiriences.
And 2013 is going to be even bigger in terms of productions! After the great aftermovie of “Club Circus 2″ together with Jonathan Forsthuber, a talented videoproducer and friend, we will have another even bigger production for the event company “Revolution Event” this year. We are already planning for a complete coverage of a 3 day Electronic Music Festival in Salzburg Austria. Over 40 International DJs, 2 Stages, huge lightshows, more than 25.000 people and a lot of equipment together with a big video team…
And the preproduction has already started! I have already finished the fist of 3 or 4 LineUp teasers for the festival in July. Be sure to check it out:

I’m already working on “Phase 2″ of the lineup and its going to be huge! I also want to give some more insight view of our whole production right here on my blog in the next few weeks and months, so be sure to check back from time to time!

cheers, Sascha

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Have a look at another Eventclip I created together with Tom from squareeye pictures. This was shot 2 weeks ago at the “Brandboxx” in Salzburg.

We had quite a lot of fun shooting just about 2000 People and many DJ’s from around Europe! We mainly used 2 DSLR Cameras, 1 Canon 7D and a Canon 600D with different lenses including a 8mm Fisheye, a 35mm f/1.4 for the slowmos and my Tamron 17-50 f/2.8. Almost everything was shot of a Glidecam HD 2000 as we had 2 of them for both cameras. I also had my GoPro HD with me to get some cool shots right from the DJ-Booth, but almost all of the footage was not usable because of lowlight.

The greenscreenshots were shot only with very basic lighting. 2 Simple 250W Lights to illuminate the whole scene, 1 Softbox as Fill light and 1 as a backlight. Really nothing to fancy, but it worked out pretty well.

And of course not to forget: Some stills from the timelapses we shot in the beautiful city of Salzburg for the opening of the video! Again, nothing too fancy, but together with some GoPro timelapses of the stage and the preperations, everything is looking cool.

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There we are, still 2012, but already 2 months in. And this year is going to be BIG! I’ve got a lot of projects coming up in the next months! Music videos to shoot in austria and the UK, eventmovies in mallorca, ibiza and in croatia… plus a lot of smaller projects!
And since there will be alot of travelling in the next months i got myself a new camera bag to be super-mobile when shooting run and gun without an assistant!

I got (almost) everything i need to be mobile when shooting alone:

- My Canon 7D with a lens of choice
- LED headlight
- Flash with diffuser (for stills of course)
- Batterygrip
- LCDVF Viewfinder
- Zoom h4n audio recorder
- Rode shotgun mic + Headphones
- Go Pro camera with suction mount
…my 15″ MacBook Pro and a lot of accesories like CF cards, batteries, a firewire cardreader, vari-ND filter, cables and more.

Of course this is the maximum i can put in this bag i got at www.enjoyyourcamera.com it always depends on what you have to shoot and what things you will need
And still… when shooting alone i always need a second bag for some sticks and/or the glidecam.

And before i forget, here is a second eventmovie i shot for DJ Rudy MC at Temptation Festival a few weeks ago. Enjoy!

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There we are… it’s 2012… the year we all die. Lets just hope those Mayas are wrong!

Let’s start this year with something cool, for example with a new video! The following teaser was shot handheld on a Canon 7D and using a Glidecam HD-2000. You won’t be able to see alot of smooth shots from the glidecam in there because i had to edit it to the pretty fast and hard sounding track. But “Bruce and Lee” were not the only DJs at this years Temptation Festival in Austria where this was filmed. There will be 3 longer videos from this event in the next days. Watch the Teaser and stay tuned for more!

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… I’ve been adding some more Videos to the “my work” section. Including my first music-video(!) for Serenity & Speyer.  The whole clip was shot in late 2010 on a Canon 7D. I’m sorry i didn’t post anything about that earlier but at least you can now watch the final clip!

But that is of course not all that i’ve been working on in the past weeks. Together with Stefan Adelsberger i’ve been working on a few smaller projects including commercials, and openers for different clients such as “AKG” a company you might have heard about for making high quality sound equipment.

Besides that i am now planning to finally move to munich in the next months. Maybe some of you guys know that munich is one of the “media capitals” of germany, so for people like me its just the place i have to be.

I’ll keep you posted about upcoming projects!

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Well yeah it took my quite some time to find the motivation to post something new. I think I took something like a “summer-break” with the whole Blog and Twitter thing…
Enough excuses – Now I’m BACK! – but lets get to the part where I show you what I did in the last weeks!

First up the timelapse short I already posted in the “my work” section. Sadly its not really a big deal – Just a simple timelapse shot from my balcony for about 2 hours.
I used my 7D with THIS intervalometer taking a picture every 5 seconds. As you should know – always shoot in the highest possible resolution. Only then you can acchieve closeups without having to stop the timelapse and zoom or change anything on the camera itself! Everything can be done in post.

Now the second thing I was – and still am – working on is a series of videocasts for a local DJ. I am basically following him from show to show and covering his gigs with short videocasts. I also had to design a cool looking youtube channel from scratch – Take a look at the channel, and the first video HERE! More to come soon!

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Now. I want to make this as short as possible. Yesterday I got myself the Genus Products Fader ND Filter.

ND stands for neutral density and allows you to block out some of the light coming into your lens. This is especially important if you’re looking for a nice and shallow depth of field. Since you can’t change the shutter  – or at least you really shouldn’t – and you need to open up your aperture wide (which is necessary to get a nice shallow DoF) you need another way to control the exposure of a shot. That is where a ND Filter comes in handy. The thing that makes this filter so special is the fact that you no more need a collection of different dense filters. You just turn the little wheel on that one and the magic happens! But watch:

This is my first video blog, so don’t expect anything special. But please feel free to give my any feedback so that I can improve my skills on that stuff!

Ah yeah, and sorry for the weird british accent I think I got from watching BBCs Top Gear all the time

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It’s been a long time since the first blog post which actually wasn’t one anyway. But now after quite some time I finally updated most sections of my site and one big thing I was waiting for a long time finally arrived. My new Canon 7D!

I’ve already shot some stuff to see how the image looks – and its awesome! Even with the kit lens I got with it. It’s a Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM – pretty good for a kit lens!

However, I will get myself a “better” lens to achieve more of a film look in the future. For starters something like a 50mm f/1.8… …we’ll see

Another thing I now know is why you should have fast memory cards for DSLRs. I already knew that you should get yourself some 30mb/s or 60mb/s CFs but i didn’t really know why!

If your shooting something with a lot of motion, you are trying to get a lot of “information” captured to your memory card. This means it has to write very fast. – But if it doesn’t, you’ll get a little white bar showing you how much information isn’t written to the card yet. When the bar is filled up, the camera will stop shooting.

Anyway, I’ve already ordered 2 16gb 60mb/s CF Cards, so that I’ll be able to start shooting with this amazing little camera by the next week. The only thing I could do until now, was shooting timelapses with this little intervalometer I got on the same day as the camera itself. I already did some but I still didn’t got through all settings to get a perfect one of the sun setting… soooooo I just did a simple one during the day when I was in Innsbruck last week.

It’s not a big deal, and it is only one single shot, but I’ll promise I’ll do some more in the future.

It took me one hack of a time to remove airplanes and all the birds from about 80 of 1455 pictures which appeared as small black dots throughout the whole video… very annoying!!!

But well, that’s it for now. And I promise that I will update you more often from now on

Cheers, Sascha

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Well, this is the first blog entry for my own site. And at some point it is not. Actually I should tell something about myself and what I do for a living and blah blah blah… But in this post I only would like you, and my other first visitors, to know that this site isn’t finished. So please don’t wonder that all these pages up there in the navigation are blank. I will update everything in the next days so that everything should be ready in the first weeks of 2010.

When this is actually done I’m looking forward to post some more stuff about me and the projects I am working on. I’m going to write about the TV business, photography, movie production and postproduction. So if you are not interested in the TV, film or even the media business this page will be a waste of time.

For now I’d like to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year 2010!
Cheers, Sascha

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