Hi, my name is Dave. I'll be your [insert title here] today...

If you've been reading this blog, you'll have read "my clients this" and "my clients that."  Every business around is about providing a service to a client, whether that service is a design or website or even a tall non-fat chai latte.  Fast food customers are clients just as much as a brand is to an ad agency.  Sometimes, however, the whole client relationship can get a bit confusing.  Take my role as a freelance cameraman, for instance.  My clients are usually the producers.  Most of the time, the producers have clients as well.  So that would be the client of my client.  Sometimes there's even one more layer of clients... So who the heck are we serving?  In the most ideal situation, my client, the producer, has his/her client's best interest in mind, so everything is in line.  I'm lucky enough that all of the people I deal with are good enough at their jobs that there is no confusion.  But, oh, I've heard horror stories...

For a freelancer in a crew position (cameraman, sound, gaffer, etc.) most of the time the client relationship is very simple.  You're there to do something you're good at (that's why you were hired) and you really only have to do that job.  When you're the producer on a shoot, though, everything is different.  For the longest time, though, us crew folk never had to worry about the extras.  Things, however, are rapidly changing in the industry.

About a year ago I was in Florida on a shoot.  The sound guy was hired locally, so during a break, I casually asked how the industry was down there... boy, should I just have kept that curiosity to myself.  It's rough, I was told.  Less and less work for sound mixers with cameramen being expected to pull double duty.  Even the camera guys are starting to struggle now that producers are learning how to shoot.  One day soon, the editors will be struggling, after they coach the producers how to cut...  Basically, it's getting to the point where if you want to survive in this industry in this market, you're going to soon have to know how to do EVERYTHING.  Great...

Before you go and think me lazy, I'll remind you (in case you haven't read the "about me" section), I have a very well-rounded formal training in filmmaking.  In addition to cinematography, I studied the ins and outs of editing, sound, producing, writing, and all of that.  I spent a lot of time doing all of that stuff in and out of school.  My B.F.A. was all about becoming a good all around filmmaker.  I know how to record and edit sound and I know how to cut on all major digital editing systems, and even on an analog 16mm flatbed system.  After college, though, one of the biggest accomplishments I was working towards (and was proud to achieve) was becoming a specialist.  It was a sign of professionalism, I thought, to be just a great cameraman.  Avoid that whole jack of all trades stigma...  I shoot for a living, I told people.  I didn't mention the editing or writing or anything like that.  It avoided a lot of eyerolls that I saw my colleagues do when encountering excited interns who were "cinematographers and directors and editors and writers and..." - you get the point.

I think a lot of what has changed as of late  is the accessibility of it all and the economics.  Video cameras and editing systems are easier to use than ever before, so many producers of corporate and industrial video shoot and edit for themselves.  Often, they do very good jobs at it and, being able to do it all, they can keep their costs low and price their services more competitively.  However, for the freelance cameramen (and women) who do a lot of corporate work, this means fewer gigs in that world.  So the specialists, if they want to keep working, need to open up a bit.

So where does one draw the line in defining themselves professionally?  For me, it's been (until recently) easy to keep my experience in one department.  My IMDb page has credits as cameraman, director of photography, camera operator and gaffer throughout.  All of those, you can argue, are within the realm of image acquisition, and in a lot of ways, they all support each other.  The gaffer work illustrates that I've got a command of lighting, which is certainly a boost when I'm being considered for a DP gig.  The operating credits say that I understand composition (also good to think about in other types of work).  I've even recently done a number of days as Technical Director on a multi-cam talkshow (too recent to appear on my IMDb just yet), which encompasses a lot of the skills I use in other crew roles; being able to communicate with the show's Lighting Director and the camera operators and handling the engineering aspects of the job (which I'm comfortable with having spent so much time on the other side of the headset as an operator on multi-cam things).  That's pretty consistent in terms of branding my skillset as a camera & lighting professional.  But wait, there's more...

One of my better clients a few years ago was a startup marketing/ad/consulting company that was still defining itself.  A very big part of their work was video storytelling, so they had a producer, director and editors on staff.  For the smaller things, the producer or director would grab a camera and shoot.  For the larger, more complex stuff, they hired a DP (me).  It was a very comfortable relationship and very much within my advertised skillset.  A couple of years into this particular client-vendor relationship, however, the company took a shift to the somewhat more cerebral stuff.  They began to spend more time in design and less in the conventional marketing elements.  Shooting jobs with them all but dried up for almost a year.  In that time, there was some internal restructuring there and the staff video guys moved on to other things.  As luck would have it, about a year ago, one of the design gigs morphed for them.  A very large client of this company needed a video and, as I understand it, knew of the quality and style they turned out back when video was big for them.  Suddenly, I was in a meeting, discussing the project as - get this - a producer.  You see, having shifted their staff around, there was no longer any full-timers to handle the producing and editing, so knowing the quality I had always delivered as a shooter, they approached me first to discuss a new relationship.  Eager to rekindle the fire with a company that was, at one time, an excellent client of mine, I obliged and sat down to meet.  It was a very successful get-together and a gentleman's agreement was made at the end of it.  Going forward, I would be their go-to video vendor.  They'd give me the budgets and the directives and I'd make it happen.  Now I can add bona fide producer to my list of credits...  It's been a trip taking on this new roll.  I'm still shooting (yes, now I'm one of those producers who also shoots), although I hire very very competent 2nd shooters for all of the shoots that call for it.  I try to hire a sound mixer whenever budget allows, although sometimes I do have to mic up the interviewees and worry about sound all by myself (so yes, now I'm one of those shooters that does their own sound).  I also usually edit these videos, because it makes the most sense with the budgets I'm getting (sigh, a producer/shooter who edits).

Yep... I did it...  I'm that guy, the one who does it all.

In my defense, this new role only takes up a small portion of my workload.  For the most part, I'm still a camera/lighting specialist, but the variety does keep life interesting.   I mean, hell, isn't that why I chose to freelance in the first place?

And Many Happy Returns...

Over the last few months, I've been shooting a piece for Philip Dolin of Particle Productions for former Manhattan Borough President and humanitarian, Ruth Messinger's 70th birthday.  The video was commissioned by the organization she currently runs, AJWS (American Jewish World Service).  Though there is some nice archival material throughout, the piece rests solidly on interviews with an impressive roster of names including Mia Farrow, Elie Wiesel, former NYC Mayor David Dinkins, and NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

I shot all of the interviews (except for the Bill Clinton one, which was provided by his own office's media people).  The A-cam (close coverage) was a Sony EX-1 and the B-cam (locked-off wide) was my trusty 550D.  Just to note - the last interview was shot last Monday and the piece was completed and screened to an audience of around 1000 people on Thursday night.  It's already a great piece, but even moreso considering the rapid turnaround.  Take a look...

Produced, Directed, & edited by Philip Dolin & Molly Bernstein
Cameraman: Me
Sound recordist: Bret Scheinfeld
Production Assistant: Alex McBean
Production Company: Particle Productions




For the lighting geeks... for most of these interviews, we were very limited in terms of time and space, so our setups and gear needed to be versatile but compact and quick.  My lighting package for this whole piece consisted of my trusty 4bank fluorescent, 2 Lowel Pro Lights (250w), a 5-in-1 reflector, my faithful unbleached muslin reflector, and a small soft gold/white flexfill.  Philip and I decided that the look was to be naturalistic but not boring.  Whether motivated or not, every key was an inside key.  If there was a window in the right spot, I could force in an edge.  Without motivation, I would try to sneak one past if I needed the separation.  This package was the perfect compromise of versatility and compactness.

On the camera end, the 550D was almost always fitted with my 28-50mm Contax/Yashica Zoom.  In general, I (and many others) find it to be good practice to have zooms on hand in most doc situations (though on a recent Gevalia shoot, I shot for a solid hour on just a 50mm prime).  Especially when time is so tight, being able to nudge a few mm tighter or wider is so valuable.  In the Joy Levitt interview, however, I decided to go with my 24mm Pentax, because I wanted a wider field of view than the C/Y could give me.

One of the more difficult things about this shoot was crippling the DSLR to match the EX as best as possible.  The standard picture styles and some of my favorite non-standard ones are incredibly beautiful in how they handle contrast and skin tones.  However, the A-cam EX1 has a much flatter image.  I didn't have the prep time to go in and match everything as well as I'd have liked.  It would have required days of testing as the settings are vastly different.  The EX has gamma and knee adjustments as well as a dozen other things that make a difference, while in-camera, the DSLR has contrast, saturation, sharpness and a couple of others.  On most of these shoots, I opted for a more flat setup on the 550D to match the lower contrast EX but it's funny - even held back like that, I much prefer how the DSLR shots look.  With a reasonable amount of time, Particle Productions could have matched the two perfectly but to be honest, I'm glad the finish was so quick - it's really nice to see the two cams side-by-side in the same lighting environments.

Here are some of my setups.  In some situations, I used everything I brought and in some I didn't.  Mia Farrow's interview, for instance, was shot using just the flexfills.

The only time I used a diff frame.  Joy Levitt's interview.

Sound guy Bret sitting in for Elie Wiesel.

Setup for Dr. Sakeena Yacoobi.

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!

2010, huh?

This year has some potential...

Spent more time with director, Bradley Farrell of Kinetic Fin on a follow-up to December's Gevalia shoot.  There will definitely be more stuff to come with Gevalia (including one very exciting bit that I don't want to jinx so I won't say any more).  You can check out the previous spots here.  I was D.P. for the product shots (with  Bradley operating) and some pretty great guys shot the rest of the piece (the party, interviews and such).  I can see some pretty cool stuff in the future with Kinetic Fin - will keep you posted.

I've done some more cool stuff with Philip Dolin of Particle Productions recently.  He's the chap I went to Dallas with and have done some other pretty cool things with.  One recent piece with him was a video on author, Barry Lynn, discussing his new book Cornered.  Most recently, we shot author and professor, Bill Duggan of the Columbia [University] Business School.  It was a follow-up to a class he had given (that we also covered), titled Strategic Intuition.  Over the years, Philip has produced a number of videos for the Business School and I've had the pleasure of working on all of them.  It's been very informative as we've essentially audited all of these great programs for free - the client has even joked occasionally about giving us honorary degrees.  Anyway, just further reinforces my appreciate for the wide variety of things I get to learn working in documentary.

And totally opposite that, it is now confirmed that in the Spring I'll be shooting an independent feature film, "Director's Cut."  There are some pretty great talents signed on and the crew is shaping up to be very nice (including my frequent collaborator, sound recordist, Bret Scheinfeld).  There are two days in late February and then the bulk of principal photography resumes in May.

That's about all there is worth reporting for now.  Future stuff may include my own feature, festival follow-up stuff for "Johnny B" and hopefully a lot more.

Until then...

Confidence (monitor)

The 3-day Lon Blais ended up being only 1. Early that morning, the s#*t hit the fan for Lon. Within hours, Lon found out that his dear puppy Aggie was sick and then Lon's escort from NY to North Carolina - 1/3 of the trip - had a medical/family emergency and would not be able to do it after all. On the ferry trip over from CT to Orient Point, NY, Lon decided he should ride as much as he can and when he's tired, just get driven home. He figured he'd be in a better space for the ass-hauling he'd need to do to rally emergency support for the next leg. So we set off to ride as far west as possible.

I hate shooting from cars with handheld cameras. Full-size shoulder cams are fine, but small guys, like the DVX100 cams we're using for this piece, are a bitch to keep steady in a moving vehicle. The DVX is probably the best-looking non-HD camera around (in the hands of a capable cameraman), but it's small size meant I was really insecure about shooting from the chase car. I brought along whatever I had that would help me keep it together. One thing was my saddlebag, which is one of my favorite tools. It allowed be to lean up on the windowframe or dashboard and really keep things together. Another thing I had was my trusty monopod. Extended fully, I was able to shoot out of the sunroof with the stick firmly pressed against whatever was nearby. So we rode and shot and rode and shot and got whatever we can. I cussed a number of times when I thought things weren't working quite well and wasn't feeling it most of the time. The stuff at the stops when were were out of the car and shooting more traditionally was good - really good. There just wasn't enough of it. One of the better moments was Lon's day-early arrival home. Lon's wife, Joanna, and of course Aggie, were thrilled to see him again after 2 weeks. Jo was concerned and supportive of the problems Lon now faced. It was dramatic, warm, and I think really nice stuff.

After we wrapped for the day, Bret (my sound guy and amazing pace car driver), went to my place and plugged into my trusty Ikegami CRT monitor just to see how things really looked. My on-camera LCD isn't exactly spot-on and it wasn't easy to tell how smooth things were when I was being tossed around in the car. But on a carefully calibrated and extremely accurate monitor... wow... We done good.

Today was uneventful - no shooting. Tomorrow, a NY1 crew will be filming a story about Lon for a nighttime broadcast. Bret and I are covering that and will shoot a little with Lon after the news crew leaves. Sunday, Lon's taking off at dawn no matter what. With an escort if possible or just by himself with the only bare essentials on his back. Elana will be taping the goodbyes and Lon riding off on what will probably be the most challenging part of his journey - and the part which happens to have no video support either :(

Monday, I'm shooting a modern art installation in the morning for producer Philip Dolin, and then at night, shooting some footage for a spec doc with director, Scott Floyd Lochmus.

Talks are continuing on the possible feature film. More on that and anything else soon...