production blog

If you haven’t seen it on someone else’s blog or on YouTube, here it is. I love industry humor. Enjoy.

…or at least I’m fairly sure I didn’t pay for it!

I got a package from UPS today. I thought it was some filters for my still camera and so I didn’t bother to open it until later in the evening. When I did, I was surprised to find inside the box was another box labeled Polaroid. It made sense that a photo dealer might be recycling boxes but the box seemed a bit large and heavy for a couple of filters. I opened the Polaroid box only to find a Pogo. It’s a small, portable printer that can print photos directly from a phone or computer via bluetooth or you can hook it up via USB from a camera. That’s it. Yeah me!

I remember filling out a “sign up and win” form on the Polaroid website not long ago after reading about the product on some website, most likely Gizmodo. I figured, why not. If I get junk mail, it’ll go to my gmail account.

See Polaroid isn’t dead. The Pogo is not great, but it’s not awful either. I can totally see taking it on vacation and leaving photographs behind for friends I visit. To be sure, it doesn’t have the charm of a Polaroid picture as I remember it. I miss the shake, the placing of the photo under the armpit, and the joy of seeing the photo reveal itself like a slow wake from a heavy sleep. Let’s see if it grows on me.

I love to read but hate reading books. I don’t like holding them, forcing each half to stay open and flat, turning pages and needing to have the lights on, etc. When I got my iPhone, while excited to have eBooks available I wasn’t sure I would be able to read on a small screen (I was hoping to someday get a Kiddle or something). But I gave it a try and loved it. I’ve read one book so far, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. With that book done, it’s time to move on to another classic - or rather an emerging classic… “Zombie Survival Guide”!

So far it’s a great book. My friend and director Clay Delauney suggested it to me. It’ll be a great resource the next time I shoot a zombie film. I love how “as a matter a fact” it is. I’ve read enough military and survival manual to appreciate how appropriately it’s presented. It’s not written “tongue-in-cheek” rather there’s a seriousness if not sincere quality that give it authenticity. Like a good movie, you’re easily able to become immersed in the book.

I was also surprised to find out that the writer is the son of Mel Brooks. He is also a high school classmate of my wife. Small world.

So remember…

I just got news that the music video I shot for Jonathan Bowen and the band Rockchild screened at The Other Venice Film Festival. Nice! Congrats to Jonathan and thank you young Will Wallace for the heads-up!

Found this image online and I had to share. While I didn’t shoot it, I wish I had.

(From Apartment Therapy via Unplgged)

I love this program. VelaClock for the iPhone just came out with a update that now includes sunrise, sunset and twilight times as well as the azimuth data of where the sun and moon will rise and set. It’s a great addition since it’s one of the most frequently asked questions on set. You can only get data for the current date, but their iTunes product pages states that soon they’ll be offering the ability to choose a date in the future. That’ll be a welcomed addition. The only thing that would make this program just about perfect is data for where the sun or moon will be in the sky at any time of the day as well as data about the length of the shadows. That would be very welcomed indeed. If you’ve got an iPhone it’s a great program at a very reasonable price.

A political ad I did the motion graphics on (for Jeff Cole Production) has been mentioned on the political blog, “Flashpoint”.

click here : to view the ad on the website OR…

you can simply watch it here.

Well, not really a park, more like a cemetery. Hollywood Forever holds screenings during the summer - it’s the seventh year I think. We live right around the corner so, the wife and I decide it was time to get out of the house and visit. So far we’ve seen “Blue Velvet” and “Valley Girl” - it’s like an episode of “I love the 80’s”!

A little something the wife threw together… some grilled salmon, some truffled mac & cheese, mashed sweet potatoes, steak and chicken with sautéed onions. Nice!

Aaron bringing the “Heineken? F#¢k that shit! PABST BLUE RIBBON!”

After some sparkling wine, it was time for the wife’s raspberry margarita with a little nectar of the gods - St. Germain (elderberry liqueur).

The view at the end of the night.

On a hot summer night it’s worth a visit. This weekend: “A Clockwork Orange” and “Get Carter”.
www.cinespia.org for more information.

Part of my nightly routine is to check out the want ads just to see what’s going on in the world and hopefully find that “diamond in the rough” project I might like to apply to. Tonight I came across this ad in Mandy and had to giggle. I’m sure they mean “swing” position - one who works in multiple departments. Yeah, that’s it, I’m sure… I should have check to see if it was shooting in the Valley!

You know the story. It’s CineGear

↑ My “best in show” goes to MIC’s DMX lighting control hub and accessories. It’s so much more than a flickerbox. One of my favorite features is you can have an actor turn on a light on a practical light on set and a series of preset lights will turn on as well. No more missed cues. Or a sensor that you can aim at a light source, say a candle, and when the candle is blown out the sensor activates lights to come on or off.

→The other big winner is Leader’s new onboard monitor. The monitor offers the usual testing screens like a waveform and vectorscope, but it also offers what they’re calling “false colors” for determining exposure of a shot. The way it works is that

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↑ Rosco is expanding its product line of light pannels.
→ Not it’s not a new Pokemon.

↑ Silver Lake’s hope for competing in the speed camera arena.
→ Here’s an idea whose time has come. Rosco recently introduced a polarized camera filter/window gel combo that allows you to control the amount of

↑ LTM’s new disc brake for large head light and it can also be retrofit on older lamps. It’s very easy to engage and release and holds super tight. A great idea.

↑ Beebee is introducing a mini.

With the temperature well over 100°, when we weren’t in the air conditioned tent this was my other best friend. Thank you Mole Richardson.

↓ I’ll write more tomorrow but for now, click on the image to see the collection of Red One cameras present at this year’s CineGear Expo. Can you find yours?!

My wife knows how I do love gadgets, especially those having to do with photography. She found this bottlecap camera mount online. It’s a 1/4′-20 thread with an adjustable (15°) swivel head and a rubberized base that fits snugly on a plastic water bottle cap. I love this thing.

dynomighty.com

And yes, the bottled water I get comes shaped like a flask.

Well if you’re seeing this blog entry from my website and not the blog directly, you’ve already noticed the change to the site. It was time. I needed a method that made the site easy to update and give it a level of continuity. So here it is. I had written most of the code for my site by hand but opted instead this time to find a program to do most of the work. In this case I used RapidWeaver. The way it works is a bit limiting but I can live with that for the convenience. I still have a few changes to make but you get the idea.

For what it’s worth, it’s optimized a screen that’s bigger than 900×600 on Safari and Firefox 3, but as far as I can see, it works with all browsers. Let me know if you find any typos. Enjoy.

All things must end. After nearly ten years of having it around, I tossed my first and only camera assistant toolbox in to the recycle bin. I keep the belt and ditty bag but the box must go. Still trying to figure out what to do with the changing bag (could make a nice tent for a small dog!). Goodbye old friend - may you be recycled into some useful piece of gadget.

All quite on the Nevada front. With Apple and Avid no-shows at NAB, attendance seemed significantly smaller this year. But it wasn’t without some good things to see. Here’s a short list of the products I saw worth writing about.

Red, Red, Red. Yes, let’s start there. I had a chance to see more footage from the Red. The folks at Red showcased footage provided by owners of the camera and two teasers for upcoming movies by Steven Soderbergh, “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla”. Not gonna lie, the stuff looks great - it was projected from a Sony SXRD 4K projector. They announced two new cameras which you can read all about on their website. Promising future indeed. Looks like I might have a short film next month with the Red - I look forward to shooting it and writing about my experience.

↑ The new Panasonic VariCam 3700. It offers 1920×1080 image capture at 4:2:2 in AVC-intra 100 recording to five P2 slots. It can also output 4:4:4 via duel-link. Nice, but perhaps too little, too late.
→ Fuji is hoping to introduce a 64GB P2 card this fall. At 720/24pN that’s 160 minutes. Very useful.

↑ & → Angénieux’s new Red ready lenses, the Optimo DP: 30-80mm T2.8 Less expensive then their regular cinema lenses but they claim that they’re significantly better than the Red lenses. We’ll see how that claim stand up when they’re released later this year. On the left is the 17-80mm T2.2 Optimo WA.

↑ While most are hankering for the Red, I’m psyched to see the new Aaton Penelope. It’s a 3- and 2-perf camera that with a little training can be switched in the field in a matter of minutes.
→ P+S Technik 3D rig. The photo shows the rig with SI-2K Mini cameras also offered from P+S. What’s cool about the rig is that it’ll accommodate different camera makers and can be adjusted for SteadiCam and handheld shooting.

↑ Direct-to-print has been a buzz word for some time in Europe and now might see the light of day in the US. It means taking your project and film recording directly to you print. It’s great for, say, printing one copy of you film for a festival release. But its uses shouldn’t be considered so limited. The Cinevator by the Norwegian company Cinevation can print in real time - a 120 minute film will take 120 minutes. That’s a far cry from when it would take overnight to print a film. Technicolor in Burbank purchased two and this one pictured is heading for Tunnel Post in Santa Monica after the show. I’m trying to arrange a test with several different cameras.
→ Green continues to be the thing. The fluorescent globes are from Photoflex. The CoolStar150 CFL is a 150w fluorescent fixture which they claim produces about the equivalent of a 450w tungsten globe. The color temp is roughly 5500K and they’re using a Mogul E39 base. I’ve noticed that the Mogal base is becoming quite common with lighting manufacturers. They also offer adaptors to go from Edison E26 globe (household standard in America) to the Mogal as well as a bi-pin G9.5 to Mogul.

So that’s the tech stuff now for some useless stuff. Ever see a 24 oz. steak dinner.

That is one big slab of meat. Surprisingly tasty for only $24 (Whiskey Pete’s in Primm). You might be wondering if I finished it? No, not even close. Made for a good breakfast though.

It’s been a while since I had something for our little moment of Zen… but I found something.

I did all I could to not slap him and ask, “Why?! This isn’t Comic-Con”. In case you can’t see it, it’s a kitty.

The show “Dailies” (Reelz Channel) visited the set of “Dead Air” to do a spot about actors who turn to directing. A little of the behind-the-scene from “Dead Air” can be seen on the spot. Here’s a link to view it: Reelz Channel

If you blink, you’ll miss me!

↑↑ Listening attentively during our safety meeting for our helicopter shot atop a building in downtown.
L>R: Josh (2nd AD) / Chris (Producer) / Justin (B-Camera Op) / Chris (Sound Mixer) / Corbin (Director) / me / Patricia (actor)

With Hollywood is still quiet from the strike (even though it’s over) and the fear of investing in films still persists, my wife and I bugged out of town and traveled back to New York to visit her parents while they stay there. If you’re interested, visit the “more…” section below.

(more…)

Recently my friend (and director) Clay purchased a Letus35 Extreme for his commercial and music video projects but also for a short film we’re shooting next month. The Letus is an adapter for using 35mm lenses on non-35mm cameras. He brought the adaptor up and a Panasonic HVX200 for a little test and fun. So what did we learn?

Well, for his camera at least, our settings were 73 on the zoom, 50 on the focus, and the iris on the camera is set to wide open, which is approximately ƒ/2. First we wanted to see what the Lensbaby would look like. The movie below is with the Lensbaby and no iris ring (ƒ/2). If you notice the vignette on the left side. That’s the adaptor’s ground glass. We know that we’re seeing it because we didn’t zoom in enough but what we don’t know is why it’s not centered. If we were to zoom in into the ground glass to clear the left edge of the ground glass, we end up with lots of room on the right that would go unused. Research time. The Lensbaby was manipulated by hand.

Watch the test…

Here we shot with a Nikon 50mm prime lens. It was at end of the day with the clouds in the sky after a day of rain. We poured water on the ground and shot the falling water at 60 f.p.s., preset the white balance to 3200K, 12dB gain, shutter at 1/250 (35.6° 35mm equivalent*) and the taking lens set at ƒ/1.4.

Watch the other test…

Letus claims that their lens adapter has a 1/2-stop loss of light and by our estimation, based on how we set up the camera the camera, we rated his camera set-up at 200 E.I.

Conversion formula:
Shutter speed to shutter angle: 24 x 360 / inverse of the video shutter speed = shutter angle equivalent => For example, 1/250 would be: 24 x 360 / 250 = 34.56 shutter angle equivalent
Shutter angle to shutter speed: 24 x 360 / shutter angle = n where , 1/n is the shutter speed equivalent => For example 180° would be: 24 x 360 / 180 = 1/48
FYI, the 24 x 360 = 8640

In my continued pursuit of photography aimed at shooting food shots for my wife’s upcoming book, I got a new toy to make very sexy shots. It’s a photographing tent made of a shiny, translucent plastic. Very shui. It’s great for any kind of small item, table top work.

It’s similar to a tabletop, seamless photo cube I purchased late last year for photographing a sample of my father-in-law’s tastevin collection. A tastevin is a small, very shallow silver cup or saucer traditionally used by winemakers and sommeliers when judging the maturity and taste of a wine. After cleaning up the images and composing them in Photoshop and Apple Aperture, the final pages were brought into a program called BookMaker and then uploaded to MyPublisher.com. They then printed the book which we gave to my father-in-law as a Christmas present. As nice as the pages look on the computer it’s amazing how great it looks when it’s on the printed page. It’s real, it’s physical, it looks wonderfully professional. All this stuff is especially fun right now that there isn’t much work in town. It helps keep “my technical chops” up to snuff.

I hesitated for a very long time to purchase this software. SunPath is a software that generates a report detailing the time and location of the sun’s path in the sky over a day, week or month. Typically, I’ve used a couple of pieces of software and the internet to do what this software does instantly. Doing the research worked for me and it’s was fun creating these reports even though it was time consuming. But now time is a bit more precious thus the need for the software. I have to say it doesn’t disappoint. The reports are clear, concise and very useful. Everything I would have included.

Here’s a report I printed out as a PDF for an upcoming project.

Well it’s year number five of this blog. Where does the time go?! To all my friends and family, I bid you a joyous and prosperous new year.

Despite all gloom and doom in the headlines, I have to say that I’m hopeful and excited for the new year. (Come back in a week and see if I’m still optimistic.)

“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” ~ Bill Vaughn