Model Railroad Blog

I’ve spent most of my model railroad free time working on another video and slowly (very slowly!)  I’m getting up to speed on the differences between motion and still photography.  For the latest video I wanted to have scanner chatter in the background.  Tracking it down has been a challenge but I’ve made some progress.  Scott Jordan was very generous in allowing me to use his YouTube audio of “Switching a Rail Yard”.  I know that many of my blog followers enjoy slow speed switching.  I think you’ll love Scott’s highly creative piece where he clips the camera to his vest as he goes about his job in the field.  You can see it HERE.  

I also appreciate the suggestion from my readers that I download a scanner app. that allows you to record audio.  To that end I’ve been experimenting with “Police Scanner 5-0 Radio Pro” which has a record feature that works well.  It’s sort of like hunting chipmunks though, you have to develop a knack for knowing when to hit the record button ahead of the transmission which can be tricky.

I’m having a lot of luck with using my iPhone as a camera.  The small sensor and physics of the camera give you a little more depth of field than traditional cameras.  Following the advice of the producers of a Sundance breakout film, I use the app FiLMic Pro to make the iPhone more user friendly.  The app has been an absolute godsend and gives you a tremendous amount of control.  You can set focus and exposure independently, have white balance control, and have a “wheel” to give infinite focus control.

A few posts back I wrote a post about producing for “An Audience of One”.  I’d never really thought about it but I do think it’s important to take a step back and consider the end game.  Who is this video for?  Does it serve a commercial or public service end?  Do we want to entertain our friends?  Are we sub-consciously looking for pats on the back (which is human nature for all of us I believe).   The point of the post was that for me personally, the videos are solely for my own enjoyment.  There is no commercial purpose whatsoever.  They aren’t produced to entertain the hobby as a whole.  At a few points in the production process I found myself drifting towards altering the content in a way that might appeal to a broader audience.  Doing so can be a slippery path where you end up with more people sorta liking it versus a smaller group really liking it.  Altering content to avoid negative feedback results in a more watered down, homogenized, “muzac” style production.   On a small scale it’s the Indie movie vs. Blockbuster situation.  The broader model railroad audience as a whole prefers the formulaic template of fast pace, fast cuts, flashing lights, and high angles.  I enjoy lower angles, longer clips, and more of a scale pace that is closer to what I’m used to seeing when I rail fan.  The reality is that’s human nature to have others enjoy what we’ve done but in this case it’s crazy to let that alter my course when in the end I’m the only one in the audience I’m trying to entertain.

 

 

Watching videos of the LAJ on YouTube I’ve noticed that one of the favorite shooting locations for rail fans is the South Soto Street crossing.  Here they catch trains leaving the team track and heading back to the yard.  Looming in the background of many of the shots is the Crystal Promotions structure.  It shows up so often it almost becomes iconic.  I thought it would fun to find a way to photograph the structure on my layout.

I mocked up a small extension shelf at the end of the bench work and clamped it to the fascia.  Next I made flat of the Crystal Promotions structure and laid it in place.  It was a really, really tight fit but I was able to shoehorn my iPhone into position to get the shot.  Some photo shopping with Helicon Focus, Knockout 2, and Adobe Elements and I was able to get the image at the top of the post.  I’ve uploaded a larger, higher resolution image on my Flickr account HERE.

Click HERE to see a video of the prototype at the Soto Street crossing (1:37 mark).

 

 

I know it’s a different take than most people have, but for me locomotives and freight cars are just one part among many as to what makes up the overall rail scene.  I don’t need to encounter a train in order to have a good day of, for lack of a better term, “rail fanning”.  I love taking in the architecture, the smell of creosote, and perhaps the sound of a train a mile away.  A rail image doesn’t have to have a train in it to catch my interest.

 

 

A case in point is the back of the structure at the intersection of Maywood Avenue and the Horn Lead.  The graceful decay, the palms, art deco architecture, it all adds up to the embodiment of all that is the Los Angeles Junction.  When I built the structure I made a point of fully detailing the back so that one day I’d be able to photograph it.

 

 

After a few months of ramping up on the learning curve, I finally felt I’d gotten to the point where I could actually produce something.   The first “short movie” out of the box is a helicopter flyover of my LAJ layout.  You can see the clip HERE.

Somebody that has been following this asked what my end game was with this whole short movie production thing.  Why was I doing it and what did I hope to get out of it?  Things become very easy when you can answer that question, which I think I can with a fair amount of confidence.  I really only do it for one reason, to produce something I personally enjoy watching, something tied solely to my unique tastes, unburdened by the need for broad commercial appeal or entertaining the hobby community at large.  As I mentioned previously, when you are targeting an audience of one, things become pretty easy!

When it comes to model railroad “film”, one major advantage is we have the ability to step out of “the model railroad way of doing things” and study what professionals have produced on the screen for t.v. and movies and then copy their ideas, techniques, and creative approaches.  All you have to do is turn on your television set or go to the movies and you’ll have a lot of templates and frameworks to look at for ideas.  I have no shame in being a copy cat.  I’m not sure what t.v. series it is, Law and Order or Blue Bloods I think, where they have a really cool helicopter perspective looking down on Manhattan as the lead into the show.  I wanted to do something similar for the layout.  This particular viewing angle also has the advantage that you can get away from the curse of model railroad videography, depth of field.

Following the advice of some of the excellent tutorials on line, the first step was to draft a brief “script” of what I wanted to do.  I didn’t just want to wing it. Once I had a sense for the composition I was shooting for it was a matter of pulling together the project assets; sound, still photos, personally shot footage, and purchased stock footage.  First up was the personally produced video.

One of the more difficult challenges was finding a way to control the path of the camera both horizontally and vertically.  Using a ladder and some trial and error with the camera I found that a height of 22 inches was needed to get the width of the layout in the shot.  It’s crucial when shooting video to have high-quality photographic lights, so much so that it’s not even worth bothering if you try to go with room fluorescents.  I lit the scene with 3200K photo floods.  Things were helped by the fact that I also have overhead 3200K LED strip lights over the layout.  With the track height established, I found I also needed a guide rail in back to guide the camera.  The clamps in the photo above are holding down an ad hoc rail made from a strip of plastic weatherstripping.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time researching cameras.  What’s best?Video? DSLR? Phones? Model railroads present unique photographic challenges and the end result of that research was that an iPhone was the best fit for what I wanted to do.  I’ll spare you the long technical diatribe as to why.  Suffice it to say that the cameras on these devices that we carry around all day and use to call our spouses about the grocery list are absolutely astounding in terms of the quality of output they can produce.

With the rail in place, I then turned the camera on and simply slid it down the rail as smoothly as I could (which wasn’t always as smoothly as I would have liked).  It’s important when you do this that you briefly hold the iPhone screen until the AE/AF “lock” icon appears.  If you don’t, the camera will always be “hunting” for the best focus and exposure creating flashiness and jumpy focus in the output.  It took a number of takes but I ended up with four or five usable clips.

I wanted this to be a “movie short” that captured the LA vibe.  One of the film making tutorials I read had the excellent idea of searching for “stock footage” to mix into your production.   Leaning heavily on internet searches, the sound library of Freesound.org, and the imagery at Shutterstock, I was able to find and purchase clips that really added to the look I was after.  The air to air helo footage is from Shutterstock.  It was pricey but added so much I ultimately bit the bullet and purchased it.  I wanted a hall of fame Los Angeles DJ as the audio lead in which lead me to the Bruce Vidal clip (sadly Bruce is no longer living).  The helo blade chop audio was easy to find on Freesound.org.

With all of my project assets in hand, I then spent a significant amount of time composing them into the final movie using Adobe Premiere Elements as the editor (screenshot above).  As I studied movie trailers it became apparent what a crucial role sound plays.  It’s sort of subliminal.  For model railroad productions, ambient sound is totally unusable.  In any clip I shoot of my layout, the first step is to unlink the audio and dump it.  There are plenty of sources for better sound tracks that you can dub in.  At that point, it was a matter of doing the post production grunt work to stitch things together.