Visit the Website

Focus.nu is my photography portfolio.

Once a month, the museum hosts a late night event and is open until midnight. Over the last few months, this has begun to expand across the entire Arts District. I brought my camera out and did some shots with some friends in front of the fountain. Footage was all shot on the 5D mk ii on a monopod and edited in Final Cut. I am continually surprised at how well this camera does in low light. I used two Nikon lenses – a 105mm 2.5 and a 28mm 2.8. The ISO was kept between 1600 and 3200 to avoid too much grain and worked quite well. My shutter speed was between 1/30 and 1/60 and the apertures were obviously kept pretty wide. Special thanks to Neil and Amy (who hates me filming her, but was a good sport).

First attempt at a timelapse… footage is a bit short, but all taken in an hour at sunset after an overcast day. I shot the footage on a Nikon D40 using Sofortbild (set to take a photograph every 5 seconds), made the image sequence with Quicktime and exported at 60fps. I then manipulated the time using Motion and Final Cut Pro for a 24p output.

I made this piece for my friends Jeff and Kate at their wedding…

Credits:

Produced for: Dallas Museum of Art
Filming, Editing and Music: Ted Forbes
Assistant, Audio: Neil Sreenan
Interview: Laura Bruck

source

Behind the Scenes

Olafur Eliasson is a major name in the art world combining scientific phenomenon, conceptual thinking and a wonderful sense of light to his sculptural works. He’s best known for the Weather Project at Tate Modern and the Waterfalls in Brooklyn, NY.

In November of 2008 the Dallas Museum of Art hosted his traveling exhibition, Take Your Time. As a promo for this exhibit I got the wonderful oppertunity to do several video pieces with Olafur and his assistant Felix Hallwachs from Studio Olafur in Berlin. Olafur was in the midst of a pretty hectic schedule as he was only in town a short time and working on several projects in addition to giving a public talk. As I recall, we had about an hour to film the entire interview. Neil Sreenan was running audio and Laura Bruck was coming off maternity leave to do the interview.

As it turned out, the gallery representing Eliasson took him to Arlington to view the new Dallas Cowboy Stadium which Olafur had been commissioned a piece for. Arlington is quite a drive and I’m not sure the time was accounted for. Olafur didn’t arrive until 45 min into our time slot. This left us with 15 min to get the film produced. On top of that, no one had fed the poor guy (it was about 3:00 at this point), and he felt our interview was too close to material covered in the exhibition catalogue.

At this point with almost no time left, we decided to kill several birds with one stone. The Museum has a cafe – so the best we could do at this point was to go get some food, setup the cameras and have a casual conversation and get it recorded.

The whole thing was done in the remaining 10 minutes before Olafur was taken off to do a TV spot at KERA. The interview ended up being perfect for what we were putting together. I think this is a reminder that sometimes you can be over prepared. There is a ton of preparation that goes into doing video work. You have to have your location, lighting and sound all prepared and ready so the people you’re shooting can be relaxed and laid back. In this case, we had to completely toss everything and improvise. The cafe has a huge atrium window and the light happened to be just right. It was crowded (the King Tut exhibit was underway), but we did find some space that worked well.

Sometimes accidents don’t turn out so bad.

Credits:

Produced for: Dallas Museum of Art
Filming, Editing and Music: Ted Forbes
Assistant, Audio: Neil Sreenan
Interview: Laura Bruck

David Lazono
Actor/Director – Dallas, TX

source

This is an excerpt from a documentary I produced for the Dallas Museum of Art to go with the performance exhibit, All the World’s a Stage.

David Lazono is a talented actor who specializes in cultural works. He sits down to discuss his roots and how performing has impacted his life.

A short film I made at happy hour on Friday. Used the Canon 5d mk ii for the footage and edited in Final Cut.