Submerged - UWOL 30 - Vegard Paulsen

[Vegard Paulsen]

This is my entry to the challenge. Feel free to ask any question, or make any comments about it!
We are all here to get better making movies, and feedback really helps!

Submerged - UWOL 30 - By Vegard Paulsen on Vimeo

Filmed most underwater shots during a dive on Søsterøyene in Fredrikstad / Norway the first weekend of june,
The wreck in the video is whats left of "Albatros" and almost deserves its own video.
It was the amunition carrying ship that followed a large warship "Blûcher" into the Oslofjord during the world war 2.
"Blûcher" got shot down by the Norwegian army and rests on about 70-90 meters depth near Drøbak, but "Albatros" ran away and stayed near the Sisterislands for some time before it sank there. Its resting from 35-45 meters depth and is shown in the video.
two of the other shots where filmed during dives two weeks ago in Drøbak and Fagerstrand.
Visibility under water is really poor this time of year in Norway so unfortunately that was the best i could get during the time-constraints of the challenge.

The over water shots where filmed in Drøbak, Gylte divestore during a rainy friday evening with alot of seagulls around!
In the behind the scenes i am complaining about seagulls making noise interrupting the interview all the time in the end of the video.

[Vegard Paulsen]

Here is some additional behind the scenes footage shot from Tronds camera during our dive on the sisterislands along with some interview shots.

in the diving clips you can see me doing some underwater shots with my uwcamera.
Visibility is clearly not at its best :)

Submerged - UWOL 30 entry - Additional behind the scenes footage - YouTube

[Trond Saetre]

Hei Vegard,

You have an interesting story and the images to back it up. I see why you enjoy diving.
Nice to see some of "your world". Too bad with the poor visibility under water, but still you had some amazingly clear shots of the life below the surface. Ex. the shots from 1:22.

Well done!

[Mike Sims]

Hi, Vegard. You made a very interesting film. We don’t get so many under water films here and your production values are impressive. I think many of us would like to hear more about your equipment and techniques. For example, how much color correction was required? I didn’t find the lack of visibility distracting. I think it actually added to some of the shots. You show a great assortment of organisms and it left me scrambling for my reference books to identify some of them! I like the way you wove the behind-the-scenes of Trond into the story but I would have liked to see a couple of more of you as well. (Thanks for the additional behind-the scenes, too.) One thing I was left wondering is how you record the under water audio. Very nice work and I hope we get to see more again soon. Well done.

[Vegard Paulsen]

Trond: thank you.

Mike: Thanks, regarding more people, im not sure what you mean.
I filmed and edited everthing, Trond had a buddy that held the behind the scenes camera for the interview situation,
other than that and Fredrikstad divingclub that we went out with to the sisterislands in a fishing boat with, there was no additional crew.

equiptment
Over water shots:
I used a Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun mic inside a rycote zeppeliner on a microphone stand angled 45 degrees onto the voice of the subject to record the audio (can be seen in the behind the scenes) as well as a Sony PMW-F55 with a Carl Zeiss CP2 35mm PL lens. No artificial light. I did bring a 120cm reflector in case the sun showed up but i didnt use it as the grey skies provides perfect ambient light and natures own diffusion filter. I had to correct the exposure alot during the interview beccause of skies, coming and going and i also pushed the colors alot in post.prod.

I always shoot a tiny bit underexposed when in doubt and colorgrade it lighter to get the result I want, but that requires some colorgrading in the editing process. Especially when shooting high dynamic enviroments like outside during sun with skies coming and going. Nobody wants overexposed heaven or skies. Some photographers prefer to shoot it perfect straight away, so it really comes down to how much you trust your exposure decicions when your out in the field shooting.

I did shot everything both in 4K Raw with the R5 recorder and on Mpeg 422 50mbit on the SxS cards with a S-log Lookup table on the camera at the same time, but time constraints as well as software problems when trying to roundtrip the F55 shots from Adobe Premiere to Davinci Resolve to grade the RAW footage made me stick with the proxyfiles in the final project.
I also learned during the way that Vimeo didnt support 4K either, left me with the HD proxyfiles to the end of the project and i think it turned out pretty well.

Underwater shots:
Sony HDR-CX550 handycam inside a Light & Motion underwaterhousing with a L&M Sola 1200 videolight.
No glassfilters, only alot of colorgrading in post.prod.

Regarding underwater audio the audio is directly from the onboard microphone on the camera, i just eqed a bit as well as did some final mastering on the audio on all tracks in Premiere.
I did use alot of compressor on the over water interview audio to even it out (even did some loudness metering) did a eq bass cut to loose some of the passing boatsounds under the vocal, and I tried to blend the underwater audio along with the shots to make the viewers have a feel of how it feels to breathe underwater. I tried my best not to make the music to loud so it would intefer with the vocals but its really hard to find the perfect sweetspot when laying down music tracks behind a vocal and make it blend nicely.

Regarding my divinggear i always dive with a double 12 liter bottles on my back and we did dive with separate 7 liter stage bottle with 40% oxygen each in case we went into deco, as the first part of the dive was a bit deep (40m). The dive ended up at about 82 minutes and everything went fine.

Regarding editing i had a really though time when i started editing the interview as the first rough cut of the interview ended up at about 12 minutes. So i had do make alot of hard decicions and edited out alot of interesting stuff to focus the remaining part about how it is to dive, and get a feel for photographing underwater.

As soon as i had the interview bit sorted out, i had to really take more hard decicions regarding the underwater shots from the last three dives i had footage from and try to make it stand out. Colorgrading is essential! Nothing comes easy when filming underwater but that might be subject for another UWOL entry, i dont know :)

[Vegard Paulsen]

There are some behind the scenes pictures here, that the guy that owns the divingshop took when we did the interview.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...9015294&type=1

[Mike Sims]

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Vegard. That’s very helpful. Sorry about the misunderstanding. I just meant more shots of you in action- not of more other people!

[Vegard Paulsen]

Ahh, no worrys, there wasnt enough time left for any shots of anything else unfortunately. I really wished for time to talk a bit about filming under water and all that but that would have to come another time :)

[Mick Jenner]

Hi Vergard,

Great film,loved watching. People who scuba dive for a hobby have access to a world that not many of us get to see and therefore rely on people like yourself to bring this wonderful world into our living rooms. You have certainly achieved that.

I have never dived, but for a number of years I worked day in and day out with a colleague who was a diving fanatic, what I don't know about demand valves and decompression times etc is not worth knowing (lol) and therefore well aware of the skills required not only to dive but also to be able to film at the same time.

Your film shows passion for the sport as well as great filming skills. it flows very well with a good mixture with both topside and underwater footage well cut together, telling a very good story that explains how you manage to film underwater and the equipment you used. Well done

Mick

[Marj Atkins]

Very well done Vegard.

Underwater photography and filming is a huge challenge and this came across well in your film – the type of equipment needed, training required, weight of equipment and consequent logistics, keeping body movement under water under control, COLD (I would not survive!).


Your underwater work is excellent particularly under the circumstances - you obviously know what you are doing! Stunning images of underwater creatures with beautiful colours.

I am not so sure about the lighting for the interview – I would have used the reflector to get rid of the dark shadows below the eyes and chin of your interviewee and to give it a bit of punch.

Trond came across very well having a good command of the English language. Just one shot I thought was too close (2:22). I felt uncomfortable – I would reserve such shots for uncomfortable and tense situations rather than a straight forward interview.

Looks like you had your hands full behind the scenes with everything you had to contend with!

Really enjoyed watching this.

[Paul Wood]

Hi Vegard,

I also very much enjoyed your film - Trond comes across as being very enthusiastic about his hobby, and the mix of interview and underwater is compelling - I have to admit to have never dived, but am a fan of underwater footage, and take my hat off to you for surmounting the addition difficulties it must bring.

Well done!

[Vegard Paulsen]

Thank you.

When looking back at the interview i will definitely use the reflector next time.

I want to comment on how i usually do things in editing.

When i edit underwater video i always do a rough cut on the ins and outs of the decent clips and insert them with the . button directly into a roughcut sequence. This goes pretty fast and i can finish up a roughcut in an hour or two from a dive. I then copy-paste out the best clips i want into a new sequence when i start building a project.

As it takes a crazy amount of time to edit underwater video in a good way, then sourcing some non-copyrighted music, and re-edit the clips to the music, color-grade and finishing up, i tend to never get any normal divingvideos finished, as the amount of diving-videomaterial increases fast when you dive often.
The hazzle is usually bigger than the reward.

This is a bad thing, as divingvideos is quite popular for fellow divers who want to see how the divesite looks like online before actually visiting it, or just want to enjoy some divingvideos.

From now on i think i will publish most dive-videos, rough-cut without music (its pretty boring) on youtube because youtube tends to change licencing models on copyrighted music often, and videos might be removed or blocked.

Here is the roughcut (not color-graded) version of the first dive used in the video, for those of you that want to see more of Søndre Søsterøyene / South Sister Islands in Norway underwater. Its about 16 minutes video from a dive that lasted 82 minutes.

Scubadiving june 2014 Sister islands - Norway - YouTube

[Trond Saetre]

Originally Posted by Vegard Paulsen

youtube tends to change licencing models on copyrighted music often, and videos might be removed or blocked.

I have noticed this as well. Youtube have blocked the audio on several of my videos there, due to "copyright issues" even though I only use legally royalty-free Smartsound music.
Really inconvenient to have to argue and send proof of right to use your music almost everytime I upload anything. It has been like this for almost 2 years.
(I have notified Smartsound about the issue).

[Paul Wood]

One thing I have tried on YouTube recently is to add a Music © Smartsound tag into the metadata attached to the clip - it doesn't work 100% of the time, but has certainly cut down on my copyright issues.

[Trond Saetre]

I always do that. Never any such issues with Vimeo. It is only youtube.
Well, hope they sort it out soon.

Vegard, congratulations again with the winning film!