A year in review

2011 starts off slow (I'm taking it easy because I'm getting married in 6 days)

So, 2010 in review:

* Budapest

* A feature film I shot in the spring, "Director's Cut" is produced (and is currently at the Hollywood Reel Independent Festival and other festivals)


* "One Night Only: Barbra Streisand and Quintet Live at the Village Vanguard" (which I was a key camera operator) is released on DVD and Blu-ray (and DVD/CD combo) and subsequently goes platinum.


* I shot a number of great videos with Kinetic Fin for Gevalia Coffee.




* I shot a very nice tribute video for Ruth Messinger featuring a pretty awesome interview lineup, including Mia Farrow, former NYC Mayor David Dinkins, NY Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof and more.




* I shot second unit and b-cam material for a nice series of videos for Columbia Business School.



* I became a HDSLR convert (I'm not a an evangelical HDSLR shooter but I've discovered it's an amazing tool for a lot of things).

* Some fun industrial work for Nokia, Wunderman, PwC, BBCAmerica, and Kraft Foods.

* Gaffed and shot NY material for a feature doc, "Small Matters" (currently in post-production, eying a PBS run).

* I lit a commercial photo shoot... for video.  That was different.  For designer, Ippolito.

* A whole bunch of other little things...

...I learned a lot this year, as a cameraman and gaffer and filmmaker in general.  When I was assisting, my years tended to yield lessons on practice - new lighting principles, methods of operating, craft-based things like that.  As a working cameraman (and occasional gaffer for other D.P.'s), my years have brought about fewer and fewer new technical lessons.  This year was sponsored by... "Compromise."

• While working on the Ruth Messinger piece, for the higher profile interviews, the crew went in with the mentality that the subject could walk in any minute and demand to do the interview then.  Working faster that we'd have normally liked was the compromise for having access to these folks.
• On "Director's Cut" the production had much less time and money than ideal.  We compromised on setups to get the movie finished.
• For the BBCAmerica videos which took place in real, functioning focus group sessions, we had to have high production values in terms of lighting and camerawork, but at the same time, we, the crew could not infringe upon the participants' comfort levels.  Usually, what's out of frame doesn't matter (leading to forests of c-stands, messy rigging contraptions and stuff like that just out of the camera's view), but for this, it had to be pretty.  Even a clean-looking large Chimera overhead was too "movie-set" for the clients liking.  But they loved when we rigged a very large chinese lantern overhead (it felt "homey").  Meanwhile at the PwC industrial I gaffed maybe only a month or two prior, the client insisted we use the Chimera for it's "expensiveness."  In that situation, meanwhile, it would have been a LOT easier to rig than the large Chimera.  Compromise...

2010 was a great year and there's some pretty fun stuff on the horizon for 2011, not the least of which is getting married.  More on that (and the great video team I hired for the event) and other stuff in February, when I return...

Karma?

So in my last post I mentioned something on the horizon that would be very exciting.  That something was a trip to Sweden for the Gevalia work.  Well, unfortunately, that trip fell through about a month ago.  It's still happening but for a variety of reasons, the director has to now do it on his own.  So I was a little bummed for a bit.  Then, less than a month after Sweden went away, I got an opportunity to go to Budapest, Hungary for a shoot with a different client.  I was reminded of the "even steven" episode of Seinfeld - it all tends to work itself out.

So Budapest was last week and it was cool.  It was a very brief stay, arriving Wednesday afternoon and leaving for home very early Saturday morning.  Thursday and Friday were shoot days and we did a lot of shooting.  It was an industrial for an ad agency, Wunderman, involving one of their big clients, Nokia.  Same sort of idea as my Texas trip last November.  Anyway, all in all, it went well but it was definitely an eye opener.  Early Thursday, about 40 minutes before we were due to roll, some of the producer's gear began acting up - a wireless mic that was do be on a key player in this shoot.  Needless to say, this was a serious problem.  Luckily, we had a great P.A. on board (a local) and within minutes, she was on the phone to a rental house arranging to rent a replacement wireless system.  By the end of her conversation, we figured out the problem with the producer's gear and the P.A. arranged to have a replacement part also sent over.  Within 20 minutes, the gear was there and we were rolling.  The next day, we were presented with another issue - as it turned out, there would be two key players in that day's shoot (which was not the original plan).  Luckily our system was working again and we had the rental on hand so yet again, things worked themselves out.  Had we not had the unexpected and somewhat stressful mic failure occurred the day before, we wouldn't have had the second wireless system.

All in all, it was nice.  With the work schedule, I didn't get to do much touristy stuff but I had some fantastic local food every day, saw a great gypsy band and stayed in a very nice, historic hotel (the Hotel Gellart).

Anyway, the weekend before Budapest, shooting commenced on a feature film I'm working on, "Director's Cut."  It's a low-budget film with a rather small crew and the weekend was a great icebreaker.  My frequent cohort, Bret Scheinfeld, is aboard as sound mixer and I've got a pretty nice support crew.  Marcus, my gaffer, is cool, and I've got a couple of G&E-dedicated P.A.s that are really into it and very quick learners.  I think the Spring shoot will go pretty smoothly.

So the most important rule we've got to follow for this shoot is the K.I.S.S. principal ("keep it simple, stupid").  There's just so much to get done on such a short schedule, so the setups need to be versatile and quick to change.  So we're lighting things in broader strokes and keeping things relatively high key.  It's a comedy, anyway, and the director definitely wants a brighter feeling for most of the film.  Below is a still from one of our scenes.

A 4bank fluorescent for the key and a large diffused window for fill and ambiance.  Behind the actor, a small HMI for edge.


We're shooting on the director's camera, a Panasonic HMC150.  It's a prosumer model that shoots 1080/24p video to SDHC cards.  If time and money allowed, I'd shoot 35mm for this - or at the very least Super16 or RED.  But the budget is what it is and the schedule is tight so the best format available to us is what we've got so that's that.  Besides, I'm a pretty format-agnostic cameraman.  I really believe that with the right lighting, composition and settings (including digital tweaks and optical filtration), you can make great images no matter the format.

Coming up later this week is another shoot for Gevalia with director, Bradley Farrell (again with Bret on board for sound).  It's a tasting party for a new blend and apparently there will be some "celebrities" there.  3 camera shoot at Gevalia's corporate kitchen with a Canon 5D and two HVX200.  With the amount of coverage and the fact that at any one time a camera could be shooting in any direction, the lighting approach has to be pretty simple (and of course, good).  The available light is pretty nice there - high ceilings with warm fluorescents for an overall base level.  Accent lights under the cabinets and these small frosted pendant lights positioned over the granite islands.  I'm thinking I'm going to fly a couple of 250w fresnels (flooded) crossing as back/edge lights (they'll be attached to the drop ceiling).  I'm hoping that'll be enough but I'm prepared to bounce something into the ceiling from the front of the space if necessary.

So that's all for now.  Pictures from Gevalia to come.

Bye!