20 Minutes of Kite Flying Time Collapsed: San Diego Study #6

A note on the gray sky, these weather conditions are called June gloom by Californians. Throughout late spring, low altitude stratus clouds are produced over the ocean and brought inland, usually late at night, by prevailing winds. For people from more intense climates, these weather conditions are very mild but for many southern Californians it’s like deep winter and there’s an art to complaining about it. The clouds are a sign that our waters are cool, not warm like much of the east coast. The cool waters make it impossible for hurricanes to reach us and produce an incredibly stable climate, for now.
Tech notes, the video was shot on a BMCC camera in 2.5k RAW with an 80mm full frame lens and cut in After Effects. The kite separations were done with a combination of the Luma Key, key framed masks and the Soft Matte effect to clean up the edges. The most difficult tech problem was finding the right shutter angle to balance strobing and motion blur. For this particular kite speed we found a shutter angle of 72 degrees at 24fps worked best. In the near future, you will be able to make a video like this with computer vision. You’ll just tell the computer to separate the red kite while you eat a sandwich. If I were you, I would wait till then to make one cause they take forever my way.

20 Minutes of Kite Flying Time Collapsed: San Diego Study #6 from Cy Kuckenbaker on Vimeo.