Backyard Leaves

On an early fall morning just over a year ago, I filmed a short video in my backyard. It was a simple, “Pixar Short” -esque story about a man climbing a tree in his backyard. Very little dialogue, just a sweet piece of a man seeing his backyard from a different point of view. My friend Dan Kennedy is a fantastic DP (Director of Photography), and he agreed to shoot it for me with his Canon 7D. My talented friend Adam McCune also kindly agreed to play the main character and climb a tree for my video. Dan had a wedding to shoot at noon, so we set to work at 7am, and finished in about 3 hours.

Once the shooting was completed, I began to transfer the footage to my hard drive while Dan packed up his equipment. But the transfer was taking forever. It was decided that Dan could not wait for the transfer, since he had the wedding to get to, and he would transfer the footage later on his own computer and send it to me.

I got the footage about a week and a half later, and began editing. After putting together an assembly cut, it became clear to me that something was missing. I had neglected to shoot the POV shots that were the climax of the story. Shit.

I tried playing around with it, to see if there was a way to rearrange it, make it work somehow. No luck. I took stock of the situation: Dan (and his camera) were incredibly busy, and there was little chance I’d be able to get him to do additional shooting within the next few weeks. And, really, it was already too late- the foliage was the crux of the film, and the leaves were continuously falling, leaving the trees significantly barer than the shots I already had. Hmm, what to do…

The decision I came to was to wait. Wait a year, for the next year’s foliage. There was no deadline for this project, so why not? So the video was put on hold until October 2011.

Fast-forward to a month ago. I now own my own Canon 7D, so there’s no need to bring Dan in for the additional shooting. The new issue though is location- my family has moved. The backyard where the video was shot is no longer an option. I considered all the backyards I might have access to, and decided that shooting from my parents’ new condo would be the best bet. Hopefully the foliage would match…

So let me know! Can you tell which shots are the newer ones?