Eurofurence 18

Paw Pet Show “Pompeii” (SNEAK PREVIEW).
Stay tuned See here for the final version!

Last year’s Pawpet Show “Year of the Rat”: is here

Discussion in the EF Forum.
The scrips hosted by Eisfuchs: here.
Due to the lack of an official DVD I made the effort of doing a fan recording of the Paw Pet Show again.
If there ever is such a DVD, I’ll be the first to buy it and so should you!
Think backstage cam, at least one pawperteer seen wearing a GoPro, audio commentary, original video clips and leave out all the mistakes and limitations of this one… should be awesome.

Technical background:
What you see above is recorded from within the audience with reprogrammed photo cameras and no prior knowledge about the show. Some wide shots are out of focus and/or overexposed because I could neither notice nor change this as that camera was 2 seats away from where I was sitting. I’ll try to get a wide shot from other people who recorded the same show to replace the worst parts.
I was handing the camera for the closeups and had a hard time manually adjusting exposure as it constantly tried to overexpose white fur against a dark background and adjusting focus as the lens would not keep the focus point while zooming. Also due do being in the audience I was limited to a monopod with a cheap video head instead of a heavy and steady tripod. Thus a lot of tracking in post-production is needed to reduce the effect of the monopod swinging back and forth whenever I needed to touch the camera.
The layout and distances of the stage and chair-layout where scouted out during the opening ceremony. With a 1.86x crop factor 25mm was slightly too wide for a wide shot of the stage, 40mm was okay for the projectors and 100-175mm worked very well for closeups. Like in previous years many scenes where very dark. f1.4 worked well but the closeups where limited to f4.5, so I had to push ISO above 1600 introducing clearly visible noise.
Ragear volunteered to take one of my cameras and record the projection screens. At 1/25s of a second I had the least flickering but there was no setting that completely eleminated the flicker.
Dragon Emotion volunteered to take my audio recorder with 2 shotgun microphones to record an very dry sound track but the power supply failed despite fresh batteries and an external secondary power source.
So the sound was recorded by the wide-shot camera using an omnidirectional microphone.

Opening ceremony:

Basically recorded as a first and final “dress rehersal” for the equipment and to determine what sound, settings and focal lengthes would be used during the Paw Pet Show.

Photos
I made some