Pick up a copy or try to get one for free!

I’ll post some more in detail on the actual processes I’ve been going through for self distribution, because I’ve had to learn a lot about DVD duplication vs. replication, order fulfillment services, international shipping, PayPal, sales tax, and other random stuff.

And with that extended project finally behind me, I’ve begun work on a new documentary (and moving in the process). I’ll write soon on what that is, and all the new stuff I have to learn that Film School didn’t cover.

All of these are in the good category, and they’re listed in order of usefulness.

Cinematography

If you only read one book, read this one. Cinematography covers all the basics in an easy to understand yet thorough way. You’ve got shot design, lighting, color temperature, film stock and everything else that falls into the science and art of cinematography. This was the book that finally made everything click for me.

The Five C’s of Cinematography

This is another must-read classic. Five C’s focuses on how to tell a story through Camera Angles, Continuity, Cutting, Close-Ups, and Composition (more like Four C’s and an A). It has hundreds of pictures (from the classic 50s) to get all the points across.

The Camera Assistant’s Manual

If you want to have anything to do with the camera team then this is a must read. Directors and Producers should read this too just to understand everything that goes into the proper running and maintenance of an efficient camera and the accompanying team. It covers everything from checking gates to changing film to tips on how to always be alert to actors, directors, cinematographers and always on top of your game.

Set Lighting Technician’s Handbook

This is one of those books where half of it is very useful chapters on lighting and color temperature and cine-stuff, and the other half is a reference for just about any light or light shaping device ever created. It’s a must have for planning how to light a set and a great reference book to have around.

Film Directing Shot by Shot

This is a great workshop type book that walks you through how you would cover a scene with different shots and all the tools available to a director (and cinematographer) to use the camera as a story telling tool. There’s also a follow up book, Film Directing: Cinematic Motion, that has fewer examples but goes much more in-depth.

Reflections

Each chapter is by a different, famous cinematographer who walks you through the lighting of a scene, with an emphasis on a different cinematographic technique in each scene. It’s a great read that focuses on real-world applications of all this lighting theory.

Image Control

This covers just about every filter available with color photos of its affects.

ASC Manual

The ASC Manual always sounded really cool and a must have book, but I’ve never found it to have anything that you couldn’t just look up online and print with a little forethought. It’s got tons of charts and reference diagrams, but for the price it never attracted me, especially since it has ads in it as well. I felt obligated to list it, but for me it falls in the borderline sucky category.

Just about all the links take you to the book’s Amazon listing, but check out the ASC site for some bundled deals.

All of these books and more can be found in the Coffee and Celluloid Amazon Store

This past week I’ve been in New York, catching up with a bunch of long, lost Film School peeps and making the rounds to the museums, hitting up the Model as Muse exhibit at the Met, Richard Avedon’s Fashion Photography at ICP, and the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition for the 50th Anniversary at the Guggenheim (they’re all great).

And while I’ve been having tons of fun, the reason that prompted this trip is I have some photos from Haiti displayed at Figment, an art festival. It’s a free festival on Governor’s Island (that takes a free ferry to get to). It runs this weekend, so if you’re in New York and want something to do, you should check it out. There’s a bunch of other cool, interactive art projects including a mini golf course (and the free ferry gives you a great view of downtown Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty).

By far the place that interested me the most when I went to Haiti was Desdra. Desdra is a remote village right on the shore, surrounded by mountains and lush trees.

The village was described as something you’d find in National Geographic, and it wasn’t too far off. It takes a rough jeep ride to get out there, on a road that’s flooded for part of the year, cutting the village off from receiving supplies.

While the locale is beautiful, trash litters the beach. The people are willing to work, the only problem is there is no work.

One man hand builds fishing boats, designed for short range sailing. However many of them will be used in attempts to make it to South Florida.

There are also canoes hand carved out of logs. When we visited, the children took them out into the water, sailing around, splashing each other, and having a good time.

That was one thing I noticed around Haiti – no matter how bad the situation, the children were always smiling and having fun.

More Photos

In the last post I mentioned all the exciting hubub about Typewriter taking off, and how I was (incorrectly) quoted and mentioned in The Observer (part of The Guardian).

Well originally I thought the article was for one of their little online only blogs, some sort of ‘hot thing of the day’ to fill up web space.

No. It was actually in print, in the hard copy of the weekly Observer distributed internationally.

While that’s very exciting and surprising, it kind of makes me sad. I’m a big fan of newspapers, and of course their future is a big mystery, one that isn’t looking too bright. Will they survive or will the speed and free access of blogs be their end? Blogs are criticized for being too subjective and lack the time and budget to do hard, investigative journalism.

Well, this time, the newspaper is the one that got it wrong. All the blogs that wrote about Typewriter and the history behind it got the quote attribution correct while the international newspaper, the one that’s supposed to have all the facts straight and checked, was wrong.

I know the piece was tiny and shoved on the back page, but in a time when newspapers future’s are on the line, they can’t afford to get it wrong. They need to be more detailed, more thourough, and more in-depth than ever before to differentiate themselves from the instant but shallow news source of blogs.

The weather hasn’t been too friendly. Friday we were shut down due to lightning (because, you know, with a 30 foot pole you kind of turn into a lightning rod), so we packed everything up, hung out under cover as the storm skated by without a drop falling on a field, and then went back out and resumed. About a half hour later I hear rain falling. I turn and see a wall of rain heading towards me, like something from a cartoon. It came, drenched us, then passed. Only in Florida.

In between the rain trying to make up its mind, I thought I was safe from the sun with the cloudy, moody weather.

Wrong. I got destroyed. I am so, so burnt. My shirt on Saturday was a little shorter than the one from Friday, so you could clearly see the line where I go from mild white to golden crispy. I lost count of all lame jokes I got, mainly from referees. However, the joke was on them when they came out to the field and one says, “Oh shoot, we forgot the balls.”

Plus the crazy, screaming coaches and fathers are bringing back suppressed memories from my embarrassing sports attempts in childhood. While the most they’ve done is yell at each other, filming a fight like this from an aerial view would mix things up a bit.

So while I’m here, baking and trying to get vegetarian lunches, a project from my documentary has gone viral. It’s a Typewriter program. Basically I came across an interesting quote from Will Self on how he liked the restrictions of a typewriter and the fear of knowing there was no going back – if you wanted to make a change you’d have to rewrite the whole thing.

So I had someone make a simple text editor that couldn’t delete or copy and paste.

Well, it only takes one mention from a big site to get things going, and that came from Lifehacker. It’s very exciting when something catches on and the idea of the program seems to have resonated with a lot of people, which is very cool.

And tonight I just saw I got a mention in The Guardian, however they wrongly attributed Will Self’s quote to me. While I do remember playing with my mom’s typewriter at work, I never used it for any real writing. Plus her’s actually had a backspace.

Next thing I’m hoping to go viral is an interview I did with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. Here it is, please pass it on:

I like collecting old cameras. I mainly get them at antique stores. I have only three requirements: they have to be under $10, they have to look cool, and they have to work.

Most cameras I come across do work. If you think about it there isn’t much to go wrong. A little lever pushes a spring which pops open a shutter. No complicated gizmos or electronics to break. Just light hitting a negative; photography at its most basic. And that’s what I love about old cameras.

So about a month ago I found a really cool looking Kodak Brownie Super 27 that takes 127 film. This is the smaller version of roll film, though still larger than 35mm. I had a few rolls lying around that I’d gotten as a gift years ago. Turns out they were three years expired, but I figured what the hell.

I walked around campus, photographing some of the architectural attempts at 60s modern design. I had two choices for aperture – big hole or little hole. 12 frames, that’s it. It’s nice to have restrictions.

Possibly more exciting than shooting on film again was going back in the darkroom. Through my friend Ali I managed to crash the campus darkroom for free, and develop the negatives. I hadn’t been in a darkroom for a few years, though I have my own enlarger and everything and vow to one day live in a place that has a closet for a darkroom. The smell of developer was wonderful.

I scanned the negatives using just a regular flatbed scanner, inverted them, and then adjusted the levels to get a decent print. That’s the only Photoshop work done. Everything else is all from a 40 year old camera and some expired film.

View more from the roll on Flickr

So I’m starting a Coffee and Celluloid Podcast series. Well, hopefully it’ll turn into a series. The catalyst for starting this is I recorded a few of the question and answer sessions from Full Frame, and I figured the best way to share that with you is through a podcast. So the first few episodes will just be Q&As from different films. In the longer term (but no promises) I hope to turn it into an interview series with interviews of filmmakers, photographers, and other cool people.

Episode 1 – Objectified

This first episode is from Objectified, directed by Gary Hustwit. You can download the episode from the link above. I’ll get this listed on iTunes soon.

The music is by El Ten Eleven.

This podcast episode has a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Basically you can share and reuse this episode however you like, but all I ask is that in return you also share it and you either credit me, Joey Daoud, or Coffee and Celluloid by linking back to this page.

The latest cover of Esquire that’s coming out, featuring Megan Fox, wasn’t shot with a still camera but with the RED ONE, the super inexpensive, super high-def movie camera.

Basically Megan acted for 10 minutes, which they filmed on the RED, and then pulled out the best frames. My first thought was doesn’t that defeat the purpose of capturing a moment and photography, and won’t this lead to lazy photography because basically you’re shooting 24 pictures a second, so you know you’ve got something. Plus, at 24 frames per second that’s over 14,000 photos to edit!

I first read about this on Chase Jarvis’ blog. Then this morning it was on A Photo Editor, so I decided to look more into it and it’s actually way cooler than it originally sounded and has some unique potential. First, the photographer behind the cover is Greg Williams, whom I later remembered did one of my favorite photo series ever in the book Bond On Set, which has great set photography from Casino Royale.

Secondly, this wasn’t just a shoot with the end goal of getting a cover photo. The 10 minutes they shot was on sets with a loose narrative, which they’re editing down to 4 minutes and putting on Esquire’s site next month.

But lastly, which I think is the coolest, is you get these really cool, Harry Potter-esque moving photos, or Motos, as Williams is calling them. While this may be the first cover to be shot on RED, Williams has been playing with this technique since Quantum of Solace.

Here’s Megan Fox’s Esquire Moto from Williams’ site:

Pretty awesome, right? Movie posters, National Geographic, photojournalism – there’s all kinds of applications for this, to have a little expanded slice of life. Now we just need digital paper to slap this stuff anywhere.

I realize the moviccino adventures in the production of UnderCover has sort of died down. I have a few cool videos that I still need to post, but it’s mainly been an extremely sloooow editing process that’s been requiring a huge build up to a more exciting post. But this post isn’t it. This is just an update.

Here’s where things stand. Iman (the director) and I have been editing off and on since January. It’s kind of comical. One week I’ll be out of town, then I’ll come back and Iman will be gone. This project is definitely not a 4 month edit job, but it just kind of ended up that way because, you know, work expands to fill the allotted of time.

So we’ve been editing, working some magic, but now we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve done all the magic we can and the verdict is out on what works and what doesn’t. For all the things that don’t, we’re going back on set next week to do pick-ups – basically re-filming scenes that don’t work or filming new or rewritten scenes to clarify story and plot points that aren’t making sense (including going back to the pig farm).

This week, though, we showed a cut to the Associate Dean and basically he put into actions things that had been bothering me but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Bottom line was things weren’t working and they just needed to be cut. And by taking out some mediocre jokes it makes the better jokes even more better and stand out more.

So yesterday, the day after he saw the cut (which was the first time I had seen it in a few weeks), I went in armed with a hatchet and showed no mercy. The film was 21 minutes when I came in. 4 hours later it was down to 18 – and this is after we’ve been working on it since January. As Faulkner would say, you’ve got to “kill all your darlings.”