Fnkydesign Video Production BLOG

Hey one and all,

Kinda a departure from the usual posts this time but here goes!

I dunno about everyone else but I have my nice shiny macbook pro. And the most annoying thing is when you use it for ages, you feel your neck and back start to complain. I wont patronize you by going into why this happens but if you dont know jus look up “laptop ergonomics” on google. Well i did the usual thing looking round ebay and all i could find was either very expensive clear acrylic stands or cheap n nasty molded plastic ones! So I thort to hell with this, i’ll make my own.

I managed to find a bit of acrilic as an off cut so that was free, i think the sheets cost around £30 so id find somewhere that does offcuts and you might be lucky on ebay…

This section is about 7 inches wide. We then cut it to the desired length ready for the next step. Cut using a fine bladed tenon saw or a nice hack saw to get the best cut. I cut it so it was 14 inches in length giving a decent sized contact area for the wood to be added.

Now it needs to be bent, here I messed up slightly cos the acrilic will flex when the laptop is added to it, for my macbook i wanted it at an angle of 32 degrees (to raise the screen up to eye level) so I should have made it to 37 or thereabouts.

Heat the acrylic along the line you want to bend from both top and bottom, I used a home blowtorch on a low setting. When it reaches the right temperature it will begin to sag. Then, over a straight edge bend it to the correct angle. and hold it there until the bend has cooled (about 1-2 mins)

I havent gone into detail about cutting the wood out, I jus took the foot print of my laptop and cut 2 of these out of some nice 8mm plywood. I would also suggest varnishing this so it can take a knock or two.

So you have your pieces ready for assembly:

So now to fix them together, I liked how clean it all looked so I used “no more nails” a really strong slow drying adhesive but i think countersunk bolts would work just as well.

If you use an adhesive, scratch the acrylic where you are sticking the wood to give better contact. If I was to do this again i might even drill shallow holes into the acrylic to make the bond even better.

Leave over night to dry and there you have it! Your own funky (or should I say FNKY) laptop stand!

I havebeen using mine for a week now and my neck already feels better!

ADDITIONS / IMPROVEMENTS

I might add a support at the front of the stand to prevent the laptop sliding off, this will just be either some small acrilic pegs or a shim of wood.

Questions and comments welcomed! Digg me please!

hey hey folks

FNKY has jus finished a very quick edit to be given to VANS for their all girl contest to become a pro snowboarder. FNKY was drafted in by one of the hopefuls to take a 2 min video of her in action. Niki Forecast did a fantastic job and we had it in the can in less than 2 hours!

If niki progresses watch this space (subscribe to our rss feed) and we might well be doing some more filming soon.

PS do u have a laptop, use it all the time? Get back pain from crouching over it?? (i do!) the next post will be a tutorial on a stylish DIY laptop stand.

Keep watching the skys people

FNKY did a shoot for a faculty within Anglia-Ruskin University. This is for a patron of one of their new courses in Entrepreneurship to walk on to the website, talk about the course content and walk off.

It all went well, we transformed their confrence room into a studio with a full greenscreen in just 1 hour. We had the project in the can within 3 hours, pretty good going!

To see an example of this working (but for us) go onto the main FNKY website and click on the welcome video button.

Ok, so here is the long awaited tutorial on how to use a Dslr, an intervalometer and quicktime pro to make effective time lapse video shots, hope this is useful.

Any questions drop me an email to craig@fnkydesign.com

Just thought i’d update you on a cool thing I just found on the net.

As I do a fair amount of image searching for one thing or another, I was amazed when I stumbled upon this site for truely free stock images.

http://www.pdphoto.org/

I hav had a look around and there seems to be a great source for images for both personal and commerical use (licenced under the creative commons licence).

Ok granted its no istockphoto , but as a free service i think its pretty darn good

Brightens my day when people see a need for a service to be free and do something about it!

I will be contributing!

In a little sleepy town in the cotswolds, we set-up a new timelapse test, it worked pretty well the cloud movement is perfect, I think the next subject will be inner city. I will be posting up a tutorial on the site how to do the timelapse so keep checking back!

Hey Folks!

I have just been playing with some new timelapse techniques using our DSLR and an intervalometer (google it).

I might well post a full tutorial on this but for now Ill tell you that you can import an image seq. into quicktime pro and create video files from it. If you take photos using the correct settings on the slr (keeping it static) you can capture timelapses easily and without having to capture hours of DV tape.

I hope you enjoy this, we will be making more of these very soon. Thanks to Mell for helping out on the shoot!

Craig

Fnky (Will Rea & Craig Hellen) Have just arrived back in the UK from Austria after covering the all women’s Roxy Chicken Jam snowboard competition last weekend. FNKY filmed the Qualifiers on Friday and had the Video uploaded to Whitelines Saturday, the Finals of the Roxy Chicken jam where to be held that day but due to bad weather conditions -41 and extremely high winds the Comp was moved down the hill to a more sheltered park to start on the Sunday morning.

Sunday was perfect for the riders and the Media crew’s, Sun was shinning wind was non-existent, conditions of the park could not be better for a day of Jamming ahead. Although the Riders only had one hour to check out the course get used to the jumps and prepare themselves for a day of pop’s, grinds and spins.

Here is the finished product (let it buffer our server seems to be playing up, its worth it )

If its not streaming well, here is a
Download link

(right click>save as)

Post it up on your sites with the proviso that you link back to this page

The winners where announced and the standing was as follows.

1st: Cheryl Maas (NED) - Went huge and got the 900 down but her winning run decided by the judges was f/s 3 to b/s 3 to clean f/s 7
Second place:
2nd. Jamie Anderson (USA) - Cab 7 revert to b/s 3
3rd. Claudia Fliri (AUT) - Backside boardslide to cab 5
4th. Jenny Jones (GBR) - b/s 180 to cab 5, to f/s 5(!)
5th. Kjersti Buaas (NOR) - f/s 3 to f/s 7
6th. Meri Peltonen (FIN)
7th. Ursina Haller (SUI)
8th. Lisa Filzmoser (AUT)
9th. Sina Candrian (SUI)
10th. Heidi Paumola (FIN)

Best Trick (Most Stylish):

Kjersti Buaas(NOR) - Frontside 360 Stalefish

We had a blast out there and were stunned by how accepting the snowboard community was.

A great thanks to TTR, Roxy, Whitelines and Boomerang Media for helping us out and we hope to be back on another mountain very soon!

Hello!

Here is some footage from a rig we made for a DIY depth of field adapter.

More footage and pics of the adapter to follow, this is early in the testing stages!

Here is a piece of motion gfx we did for the intro to a series of short videos we are shooting in austria for whitelines magazine.

Keep coming back to the blog as we will upload the final files as and when we edit them. Enjoy people!