This blog is actually an extension of my main website,which has just recently been revamped. Check it out and let me know what you think!
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Unfortunately cannot share the majority of what we’ve been working on the last few months,but as commercials start to air and projects are announced by some of our clients a few more things should pop up here. In the mean time here is a spot I shot on spec recently. We originally planed this as a Chevy spec ad,bringing the audience through multiple different stages as the couple danced. A bar,a ranch,a downtown alley and a more suburban setting. Each location detailing a different scene that different Chevy owners could identify with,all tied together with a hip-country track. Anyway,after shooting the second location our producer submitted to a KYGO contest and we won,so now you can look for the spot on November 10th during the CMA’s. It’s different than the original plan,but i think the commercial fits in well with their brand and anytime something get’s onto TV,it is fun. This is also a spot shot for a competition. This should be Colorado only,but will be airing sometime in the future!  Thanks to RedRock Micro for their 35mm adaptor and Zeiss for their amazing optics in both of these spots! Permalink
Friday night,about six hours before call time,I had butterflies. Up until a couple months ago,with our Ford project,I hadn’t been nervous for a shoot in a long time. What changed starting with Ford? The overwhelming possibility of failure. We’d started to get pretty comfortable with all our shoots. Commercials,short films,industrials,interviews what have you,and the products were pretty decent. Nothing amazing and ground-breaking,but well produced pieces of work well worth their place on television and the internet. Well I’d had enough. I started learning some new software and hardware. Met new people,asked a lot of questions,broke a few pieces of equipment,and read a lot of discussions on some of this new stuff. Ford was the first chance to implement these new skills in a “being paid for what you’re good at”setting. Since then we’ve shot four commercials a short film and this web series. For example we shot a black and white PSA with a special filter that in effect ruined the footage,but if it worked it would look different,beautiful and striking. Thankfully it worked,and with all the tests we shot and time we took to make the final decision to use,wasn’t much of a surprise,but regardless a very scary experience. I think nerves are a healthy reminder that we’re pushing ourselves and our company into new and dangerous territory,and with a commitment to practice,camera tests and careful planning there is a way to not endanger your clients with this practice but reward them for choosing to go with a progressive company,not afraid of the dark. Two weeks ago Glimpse was hired to post a three minute short film showcasing the Ford Fiesta for a massive online marketing push Ford was making for the vehicle. We had a week to complete the spot. We shot on Monday and had until the following weekend to deliver the uncompressed MOV for theatrical distribution processing (which,by the way,was a massive 50gig file)! Working with a team used to 24 and 48 hour deadlines,things went smoothly. This is one of those situations where taking an hour or so at the very beginning of post to map out a schedule of deadlines is crucial. The week was quickly structured into deadlines for rough cuts,graphics passes,foley recording,pick up shots,music auditioning,picture lock,sound lock and render times. The two superstars of the project were definitely After Effects CS4 and Mocha. We had 5 major fx shots in the film and no time to work on them. Mocha is a great program that computes planar tracking,and once you figure out how to use it properly it creates rock solid tracks. I am sold. These are imported to AE where the compositing took place. Apple’s Shake was originally planned for the majority of the compositing shots,but time ran out and AE was doing far better than expected. Magic Bullet Looks was the final step to further stylize the footage and also to match our two cameras. The ‘A’cam was an ex1 with a Letus Elite on it. We shot on a 45 degree shutter and some older nikon glass. The second camera was an ex1 with a wide angle lens. Obviously some major discrepancies between how the two interpreted light! MBL helped to trash up the ex1 image quite a bit and match the color saturation between the two as well. Also we applied a pretty heavy grade on the footage to give it an ultra stylized feel. There are plenty of things I’d love to have fixed for the film,but we were on a deadline and the little problems are sort of the fun of doing things rapid pace. The thing to remember is you are always on some deadline. If not,you need to make one up. Strangely enough loose time commitments and infinite funding is usually the death to any project no matter the skill level of the people involved. You can always make something better,but you are of no use to anyone else until you know when to call it quits. Below is the final video. I have a crude video with some thoughts written down up on vimeo now. I still feel like a newcomer to the system,so i am putting off a greater review until I get some more footage with it and hopefully with the nanoFlash as well in the next few weeks. As I have a few commercial gigs with this system and the letus system I am spending the majority of my free time right now learning how not to break the thing while on location! I already had a few focus problems days one as I point out on the vimeo site. There are a couple hundred great 35mm adaptor review/how to videos out there already so in the next month I’m going to try and cater a video to the dp side of the equation and look at how it is to really use this thing on bigger shoots.
Whether you write,produce,shoot,compose,direct or act your job description really boils down to one thing:give your editor something to work with. Whatever it is you are doing it all comes down to the edit. The last line,the final destination for footage before it is cast out onto the world cased inside cold canisters and broadcast signals. You generally are not very good at your job until you understand this. Did you deliver a great performance? Good for you. Did you cross over your co-perfomers lines on a take? Miss an important mark? Sip your drink at the wrong point in the conversation? Improvise? Any of these things could put that one good take in the trash and force your editor to cut around usable footage rather than good performances. You like to run around with a camera and call yourself a dp? Great. Can you shoot a walking dialogue scene over two days outside and match lighting between your coverage? Can you shoot a five way conversation and only cross the line in a way that keeps the geometry of the scene intact? Producers just starting out suffer the most from this unknown. I’ve sat in many an edit bay with young or naive producers struggling to get the slightest cohesion out of days and days of shooting. How do we transition out of this scene? Is there an introduction to this scene by the host? Where is ___ cutaway? People often ask me (especially when I mention working on a reality show) how often I cut interviews and interactions to bring a false meaning out of them. The truth is I do it with every interview I’ve ever edited. A good producer/journalist will give me short concise thoughts from people = good. But most of what I get is forty minutes of “uh’s”and “um’s”that I need to turn around into one sentence that not only sounds and looks like a real sentence but actually carries the feel and emotion of the hour of footage I started with. Your editor is not your enemy looking for reasons to make you look bad. They are your artist. Merely collecting the few colors you struggled to capture while shooting and hoping for enough color to create a memorable portrait. When it comes to that last part of the process the energy on the set that day means nothing,the difficulty of achieving that focus pull is forgotten and the writers excitement upon writing that perfect final line is meaningless. What is essential is the greater performances achieved by that high-energy set,the narrative timing of that focus pull and the emotional content of that final line (that may or may not still be at the end of the film). Film is the most collaborative art form ever realized,just keep in mind that many of your collaborators are not in the room with you while you do your part. The more you can seamlessly do your part in that process the better.  Hokes BBQ With every pro-bono,student,spec,freebie,reel (call it what you will) shoot I work on I set one standard before we start pre-production. If we want to learn anything,we need to treat it like a full-blown professional shoot. We may not have an AD department to report to,a producer to keep happy or a studio budget to stay within,but if we screw around the whole day/week we might as well be sitting around at home. Just as a sharpshooter wouldn’t benefit much from a day sitting in a hammock on his back porch firing off a potato gun and downing a few beers,a bunch of amateurs hanging out on a set to feel good about themselves is just wasting time. We do our best when working on smaller projects to put a lot of effort into making the business side of the project as important as the finished product. If you land a deal with Spielberg tomorrow and start production on your $200 million feature next week who is your casting director going to be? Who is your first AD? How many weeks will you fight to have for pre-production? What are your views on storyboards and art directors? I can think of a thousand more questions the ill-prepared would need to answer and have absolutely no idea what to say, Your goal is to make films,which happen to be huge collaborative and expensive undertakings. Even with a support team of line producers and assistant directors you will still be up a creek without a knowledge of how to manage it all. A pro director knows how to handle shooting out of sequence. A good pro understands why a director may need 2 days for certain seemingly simple setups on the page. A pro writer knows how to structure dialogue and action to make a film-able sequence of events. None of these traits are learned by goofing around. Know what you want to do and structure your shoot as close as possible to how that would feel if you were doing it ‘for real’. Do this and when your break comes you may actually be ready for it. Heck you might even learn something in the process.
This picture was taken in 1930 by famous photographer Edward Weston. It’s titled Pepper no. 30 because it took him 30 tries to get it right. He settled on a tin bowl a six second exposure and a pepper that took him until his adult life to find. Truly creative and beautiful pieces of art are really a representation of the work it took to get there. I have a coffee table book with the greatest Nat Geo pictures ever taken in it. It boasts a couple hundred pictures. National Geographic started in 1888 and has published 12 magazines a year since then. 1452 publications over 121 years all over the globe employing the best photographers of their time and even as I look through the book I must skim over 75% of the photos. There are maybe 3-4 photos in the book that are easily recognized by most people and the rest can be categorized as pretty. And the other countless number of photos taken by that magazine in it’s 121 years? Well I guess we just forget about them. So when you tell me you’ve written a couple short stories and have a screenplay in the works,am I to assume they are good? The fact is that they are probably not good enough to belong in the category of forgotten natgeo photographs. Sorry. It doesn’t mean they are bad. Every photo taken for the majority of magazines since their existence has been taken by a level of professional and forced that person to spend a certain amount of time learning their craft to the point where they could make a publishable photograph. Their all good,just not good enough. You spent time on your stories and your characters. You might have even spent time refining your skill before approaching that certain story,but so far it is negligible. Try again. Because you are working in a medium that does not publish 12 issues a tear with 10-20 stories an issue. If infinitely successful you may expect to write,direct,or shoot 10 films over the course of your entire career. “I got inspired and wrote this through the night last night. I am really tired but it is my best work.”“I’ve spent a whole month researching this topic.”“This is my fourth screenplay.”All start to sound shortsighted when you take your entire career into perspective. If you are after a career instead of a break,you need to focus on sucking less than you do on getting lucky. Truly gifted artists can look at their work with perspective –forget the last 4 hours/days/months working on it –and compare it to great works of their generation. Then they can go back and keep working on it. A month spent working on an outline may seem like a lot to the amateur,but if you want to be writing for the rest of your life and have this story be a staple in your career? How many times do you go back to the same tree sitting next to a stream before you get that great photograph worth sharing with the world? Amateurs will continue to get a lucky break and wave it in front of your face,but if you truly want to make a lifetime out of your passion get some perspective,accept your total lack of ability to make something important and then get back to work on it!
I’ve come to notice two types of freelancers exist in my little world. There are those who really work for a single big company 30 or so hours a week,free to fill in the rest of their time with better paying gigs. And there are those,like me,who may have a few clients they work for a number of times a year,but really are totally dependent on anything they can drudge up. Stability may depend upon the former,but I really believe that you are also getting the shorter end of the stick. Working 40 hours a week for a local television station was great for me at the time. I’d never directed a live show before,I’d never used a proper shoulder-mount camera,I’d never worked within a large corporate system before,I’d also never really been held up to that level of professionalism alongside a need to finish everything asap. I learned a lot,but after a certain amount of time you get really good at doing the same thing. Clients and shows may change over time,but working in a large machine like that forces you to approach every project with the same rubric;running the motions over and over again,no matter how tedious it may be,watching the better options sit on the sidelines never to be explored. Now,working with a new crew every time you step out the door forces your hand to rely on a certain structure of work to avoid the chaos of twenty strangers in a room,but the fun comes in the other 90% of the work. You may be learning how to shoot a cooking show in three days in a house,or how to shoot a cooking show in a studio in a week. I’ve been able to watch the best live concert people in the world work. I’ve watched the worst short film producers stand by as their production swirled down the porcelain bowl. I’ve seen some of the best light interviews and shoot interesting things like flower seeds! To be fair,there are a talented few who have that 30 hour a week job,but also fill another 20-30 hours working with a variety of people. If I knew how to pull this off I’d be there in a second! I guess it depends on what you see yourself doing in the future,but I thrive in an environment that is constantly changing and requiring my brain to think in different ways,more than I do in a place designed to work you at one single job over and over again the whole year round. Good below-the-line people are probably best trained in repetition,but creative leaders need to be versatile and well rounded. After a few months of tossing around the idea to get into the local music scene Glimpse has finally produced our first music video. Aloft in the Sundry played a CD release party at the BlueBird downtown. This video is a compilation of the entire night set to their first single “Mr. Misanthrope.” Click the icon in the lower right of video for full screen playback. Aloft in the Sundry has a similar work ethic and approach to their industry as Glimpse so we hope to continue to make beautiful media together in the future. Video shot on a Sony Ex1. Lighting courtesy BlueBird Theatre. | |||||
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Last weekend we wrapped production on the first three episodes of “The Organization.”Everything went great,footage is hilarious and all the pieces are in place to edit what will hopefully become the ice breakers for a long running series.
I think the answer for both of us may have to be yes. I’d even venture to guess that Darabont,Adams and Updike would also answer in the affirmative. You know why? Creativity is hard,and it is so hard that people inherently suck at it.