Buffalo Grill

I recently shot a spot with French director Julien Rocher and production company Astrolab.  The commercial was for an American style French restaurant chain called Buffalo Grill, meant to run as a lead-in to programming (like the "Brought to you by" bumpers we see before and after TV shows).  The piece could only be 6 seconds long, so we needed to be fairly selective with our shots.

The idea of the piece was simple, just visuals of a few motorcyclists riding through the desert. The agency had already drafted up several boards before I was hired, so the look they were going for was fairly clear.

I took the obvious cues from the boards that the client wanted a flared out, extremely warm look for the piece.  The director was also set on shooting purely during magic hour, which was the first time I have had the luxury of planning our day strictly around the sunlight.  But since we only had to shoot for 6 shots, it made everything possible.

We shot on the RED Epic, with a timebase of 25fps for PAL.  In order to achieve the flared out look, we chose to shoot on Russian square-front Lomo Anamorphics from HD Planet Cameras.  These lenses are great because they are fairly affordable (as far as anamorphics are concerned) and give some really pronounced flares.  Aside from the normal drawbacks of shooting anamorphic, the downside to these lenses is that they are extremely soft, especially around the edges.  But their imperfections can make for a unique image.  Filtration was fairly clean aside from the usual ND's and a few ND Grads on the wider frames.  We also brought along a set of diopters for safety, since anamorphics in general have a fairly limited close focus.

One of the "lessons" I have been picking up on lately is how incredibly important it is to scout the location multiple times of the day to notice how the sun plays in the proposed scene/shot.  Coming from low budget film-making there is seldom time to scout the location more than once before a shoot, which is often just a tech scout going over the logistics of the day. With this project and a few in the past, we have had the luxury of making multiple visits to the location in order to pick the best time of day to shoot each scene.  Especially with this project, it was critical we achieved the final frame in which the motorcyclists ride "into the sunset".  Finding a road that aimed directly East/West as well as determining the exact time the sun went behind the mountains was crucial for this piece.  The director arrived from France and drove out several days early to conduct these scouts.  He shared his info with me in the form of Panascout iPhone photos:

The shoot was executed as planned, shooting the "sunset shot" at sunrise, and then moving on to the tracking shots.  We made it a point to shoot into the sun as much as possible to keep the flared look.  Once the sun was out of frame (10am) we took a 3-4hr break from filming.  We got back around 2pm and focused on shooting a few of the closeup insert shots (not every one made the cut).  Although the sun was still high, we minimized that with silks overhead and used shinyboards to give a hard side light and simulate the setting sun.  We also did our best to hide flares.  Below is a frame from one of those shots:

With a little help in DaVinci Resolve Lite, we balanced the various times of day and added warmth so that the piece retains a fairly cohesive look.  Here it is!

Black Eyed Peas in Paris

I found this post in my drafts from a while back, I guess I never got around to releasing it.  But almost a year later, still an experience for the books -

Earlier this summer I had the amazing privilege to film and photograph the Black Eyed Peas shows in Paris, France. They played three nights to a sold out crowd of STADEFRANCE. This experience was amazing for multiple reasons, but walking out from underneath the various tunnels and passageways into an eager crowd of 80,000 people was something you don't get to experience every day.

VH1 CCMA's

Recently I had the amazing opportunity of working with the worlds most favorite Muppets, Statler and Waldorf.

We shot a "live via satellite" feed that aired during the VH1 Critic's Choice Movie Awards.

It was certainly a pleasure working with these two.

In addition, we shot another piece featuring Paul Scheer and Rob Heubel interviewing the horse from War Horse. In this sketch, Michael Cera plays opposite of War Horse in a fictional jailbreak film.

Portraits of Inglewood

I shot a music video in Inglewood the other week.

Part of the video was to capture the local flavor of the neighborhood with portraits of the residents. Although a seemingly easy task, it was actually quite difficult at first to find anyone who would stop what they were doing to be filmed. Towards the end of the day, we came across a group of kids on their BMXs who were excited to be a part of the video. As we hung around longer with our cameras out, more and more of the neighborhood came out and soon we had our hands full trying to capture as much as we could before the sun went down. It ended up being a really fun afternoon interacting with these kids and families. I'm happy they were all kind enough to let us briefly into their lives, so I can now share these images with you!

Anjulie "Brand New Bitch"

New video out for Canadian artist Anjulie "Brand New Bitch", directed by Hannah Lux Davis.




This song has such a strong energy that Hannah and I really wanted to compliment the track with visually dynamic setups - as much flashing, pulsing, and moving lights as possible. I worked with Hannah quite a bit going over references and really honing in each lighting setup and choosing an overall color pallet for the video.

There are also some serious flares in this video! Several months ago I had been testing anamorphic lenses and I came across a zoom with some pretty unique characteristics. Hit with the right light, it would give a constellation of square and circular flares across the frame. Once on set, we found ourselves primarily using a gelled Source4 aimed directly at the lens to produce these flares. The Source4 iris attachment was also useful in varying the size and intensity of the light, which translated into clarity of the flare. Most often, a small ping of light gave us the most pronounced flare. In a pinch, the LED Flashlight also worked great for providing a quick flare (this can be seen in the Hallway and Mirror setups).



The lighting was featured more than usual with this video. Without budget or time for moving lights, we used a few "tricks" to get movement out of normal theatrical lights. For the primary Beauty Setup we used an old fan found on location to add some movement to the light. The Hallway Setup is backlit by a Source4 rigged with a Gobo Rotator. This was my first time using the gobo rotator, and it worked as expected! Ordering the gobos was a fairly simple process as well - Rosco's catalogue of steel gobos can be found here - we used the Radial Spokes gobo. With the quick cutting, you can just barely distinguish the rotation, but it adds that extra element to this setup. On top of that, having enough haze or atmosphere was important for these beams to be seen.



The final Dance Setup was the most important, highest energy setup of the video. It was our last setup of the day, so of course we were racing the clock and had the least amount of time to light it! Our approach to this setup depended heavily on the layout of the location, so during our tech scout we decided on utilizing metal track structures on the ceiling to mount kino tubes to. We used SuperBlue tubes (my first time using these) to help go along with our color scheme. The SuperBlues looked electric, which helped give some energy to the frame. The kinos were manually flickered at random, a flicker box was added to several fresnel backlights, and we wet the whole floor down to reflect back all that lighting. During color correction, the decision was made to overhaul this setup to give it a warm look. Although that was not the intention, the video benefits from having this variety and finishes even stronger!

Hooray For Earth "True Loves"

Hooray For Earth's "True Loves" has finally released after several months of VFX and heavy coloring, but it is getting some great reviews. Here it is for you all to enjoy!



Technical info and making of in the post below.

Shooting on the AF100

I just finished shooting a music video this past week for directors Alex Takacs and Joe Nankin aka Young Replicant The video is completely narrative, showing the journey of a man traveling his mindscape across all types of geographies. Location and costumes were all epic!

We had the choice of going with the 7D (which we were all familiar with) or trying out the new Panasonic AF100. We did some tests and decided to go with the AF100. Initially we considered the AF100 because we wanted to shoot 60fps at 1080p. Further down the line we realized the video was going to be a bit more run and gun on location, so having the conveniences of a conventional video camera (like built in ND filters) felt like a safer choice for this project.

For anyone unfamiliar with the AF100, you can spend a good deal of time sifting through Phillip Bloom's review, which does a pretty good job covering all the bases in good detail. However, I hadn't come across much feedback from narrative or music video DP's, so I forward to seeing more work and hearing more experiences surface in the next few months.

I think the easiest way to describe this camera is it being a hybrid between an HVX and DSLR. The menus and on-board controls on this camera are very similar to that of Panasonic's previous prosumer HD cameras. The scene files are all still there, white balance and gain selectors in the same place, and XLR inputs. Nothing too crazy or groundbreaking in that regard. What's new about this camera is that it offers HD-SDI and HDMI (and the HDMI doesn't deactivate the on-board LCD!). Certain menu options have changed for the better, like the ability to reformat cards in Record Mode (so you don't have to toggle to Playback when you insert a new card). But unlike the HVX or other cameras shooting on hard drive, the AF100 takes quite a bit longer to format than you would expect. I never clocked it, but formatting lasted several minutes.

The on-board monitor is set up slightly different than before. Possibly one of the biggest let downs is the focus check that used to be on the HVX, that little button that gives you a pixel-for-pixel display to make sure things are nice and sharp. The AF100 offers the EVF detail, which makes for a pretty ugly image, and a Focus Assist that can be programmed as one of the user keys (there are 3 user keys on the camera). The latter option is similar to the focus assist on the RED ONE; it goes off contrast and highlights the sharp areas in red over a B&W image. What's unfortunate about using this feature on the fly is that it can't really account for the motion blur of a moving object, so it's basically useless if you have to do any real focus pulling on your own. For this shoot we had a Marshall 7" that primarily served as a director's monitor, but certain shots it was definitely needed to pull focus off of.

I can say one of the best additions to this camera is the option to add frame guides. This video was shot in 2.35:1, so it was easy to add those guidelines via the Display Setup. So many times I've had to scotch tape the 7D off a framing chart, which is never as easy as it sounds...

The image sensor on this camera is 4/3", which I was pretty disappointed about when I first heard about the AF100. This camera is meant to compete with the DSLR's, but I think it also caters a bit to the live shooters and ENG style cameramen that don't have a perversion for shallow depth of field. This smaller chip size gives an even tighter crop factor than the 7D, which offered a little bit of confusion at first on choosing lenses for the camera. AbelCine has a really helpful tool that helps visualize the difference in sensor size here. So we had to account for crop factor and make we were covered for our wide lenses. We shot Zeiss Superspeeds with a custom PL Mount made to fit Panasonic's AF100 mount. Having the Superspeeds really helped us overcompensate and achieve a film-like DOF. We shot wide open mostly and in certain cases having the extra stop saved us from using too big of a lighting package or shooting later in the day. We shot 200iso and in some cases had to bump up to 400iso which gave us quite a bit more noise than I had hoped for. Unfortunately the AF100 doesn't seem to do too well in low light.

Photo by Tim Suglian

Photo by Julia Chase

I will be sure to post the video when it's released. Overall I think I will be very pleased with the final picture and feel that the AF100 held up to most expectations we had going into the shoot. Check back soon!