Shot on RED One, Canon 5D Mark II, Panasonic Varicam, Panasonic HVX-200 (some with Letus 35mm Extreme), and Panasonic DVX-100.

Music: “Maps” by The Fray

My wife really wanted to participate in a local 24-hour filmmaking marathon competition last weekend so, naturally, she wanted me to shoot and edit for her. From 10am Friday morning until 10am Saturday morning, 30 teams of (up to) five members each made 3-minute films with the following criteria: The theme of the movie had to be “anniversary” and there had to be a cake, and the line of dialogue “I really wanted to…” in the film. ”Another Year” is what we were able to create in that time.

With planning and buying the props we needed, we didn’t start shooting until about 4:30pm and wrapped at about 11pm. The shoot was pretty simple but was complicated a bit on my end with the type of lights we were using and the two bokeh-forming-words effect we wanted to do.

We were using some Day-Flo light units (which are essentially KinoFlo-type lights) that my friend let me borrow. They are daylight-balanced units and don’t have very much or any control to them. They have these silver-reflector barndoors that seem to spread light rather than cut them. But they put out a surprising amount of light—which came in handy for the bokeh-forming-words shots. Being so uncontrollable and not having any grip equipment to help shape the light, I used the lights sparingly. The shoot went fairly quick, given a slow start. But there weren’t very many shots to get so that made it easier.

The two scenes where we had words forming out of the points of light was directly inspired by a video I saw on Vimeo called Light Works. You really should check it out. What they don’t tell you in the behind-the-scenes video is—and this is totally obvious in retrospect—that when you put the vinyl letters in front of the lens, it cuts out a ridiculous amount of light… something like 5 or 6 stops! Working night exteriors and low light interiors makes a factor like that a bit challenging. In order to even get a decent exposure I had to shoot wide open (f/2.8)with an ISO setting of 6400 and slow down my shutter speed to 1/20 sec. The image, was expectedly noisy, and if you don’t use the right lens length, you get unacceptable vignetting. Anyway, the image quality may not have been what I was hoping for, but it served it’s purpose for the video (and if you watch it small enough, you don’t even notice the noise! ;)

Once we wrapped, it took about 8 hours to transcode, edit, sound mix, add score (music courtesy of the great Russ Whitelock), and export the 3 minute piece. We got the film in just before 10am and judging happened a week later at a screening of all 30 submission films. We received and Honorable Mention award for it.

The Last Play at Shea premiered on Showtime last November and this is the trailer they put together. I think it’s a lot better than the official trailer… simply because it features more of my work.  Enjoy!

Music video for Nik Day’s “Sadder”

www.nikday.com

Produced by The Corner Media
www.meetusatthecorner.com

Director: Tucker T. Dansie
Original Format/Camera: HD 24p/Canon 5D MkII

I was intending to shoot this project on my 5D but it got damaged earlier in the week so I had to send it to get repaired. There was zero budget so renting another 5D was out of the question. Michael did have a T2i, though, so we shot it on that instead. I was a bit saddened by that because I love the images I get from my 5D and the idea of shooting it on a Rebel was a bit disheartening.  BUT, after slapping my 24-70mm L-series lens on it, we didn’t fare so badly. In fact, I am really happy with what we got.

The premise of the short called for a look similar to that of SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER.  I had planned on doing my best to get that look without anything but the camera and a small 3-light kit—knowing, though, that I would never get close to what I wanted without a fog machine. I happened to say at the beginning of the day something to the effect of, “Too bad we don’t have a fog machine to really get the look we want.”  Then Michael quickly replied with the fact that Katie, the actor who’s apartment we were shooting it, might have one left over from Halloween! She did, and we used it. I was so stoked!

Here are a few screen grabs from the footage after a quick and dirty first-pass color grade along with some notes…

Camera Notes: 50mm, f2.8, 400 ISO, 3200K
Lighting Notes: 1K outside window, 300W bounced off wall in corner (frame right). The day was dark and overcast so the daylight coming in was very minimal which allowed me to balance for tungsten light.

Camera Notes: 35mm, f2.8, 200 ISO, 3200K
Lighting Notes: 1K outside window directly hitting male actor, barndoored down, the curtain on the window acted as a perfect diffusion and net to knock down female actor’s exposure, 300W unit outside doorway of kitchen spotted all the way down at male actor’s back in order to get enough punch to light up the fog and add an edge light.

Camera Notes: 50mm, f2.8, 400 ISO, 3200K
Lighting Notes: 1K outside window spotted down to create light shaft and hitting only the lower part of the background. 300W off of frame left to create sunlight on the actors, spotted down and focused on a white paper set on the table to bounce light onto their faces, spill on actors barndoored to cut off across chest. Just to the right of the camera, there is a 650W unit with a XS Chimera bank fitted with a 40° soft eggcrate for fill, mostly for the boy.

Notes: Same exact lighting setup as above. Camera repositioned and shot with lens at 70mm.

Camera Notes: 24mm, f2.8, 400 ISO, 3200K
Lighting Notes: 1K outside window spotted down about halfway to create light shaft. White reflector disc off camera left for fill.

Camera Notes: 70mm, f2.8, 400 ISO, 3200K
Lighting Notes: 1K outside window, flooded to create light pattern on back wall from vertical blinds. 300W unit spotted down on toy table (white) to bounce light into actor’s face. There is also a 650W unit far off camera left to create a light shaft for the wider 2-shot; in this shot it is creating that light edge light on the actor’s face.

Camera Notes: 70mm, f4, 100 ISO, 5600K, ND9
Lighting Notes: Shot in the shade of a tree, white reflector disc placed just out of frame below actor’s face, favoring his left side for fill.

Final note, we shot with the full HD 16×9 aspect ratio with regrets that we “couldn’t” shoot for 2.35:1 because we didn’t have a wide enough lens to get the shots we wanted in such a cramped space and with the cropped sensor of the T2i compared to the 5D.  But after doing the first-pass color grade, I thought I’d try putting the 2.35:1 crop on it anyway to see if we could pull it off.  With some reframing, most of the shots worked perfectly! So, I think we should go with it.  The director doesn’t know about this yet.  I’m thinking he’ll be sold (I hope!).

As with many of my projects recently, we shot it with the Canon 5D Mark II.  It was a very overcast day so we didn’t have much light coming from the windows, nor are the gallery lights very bright.  We brought in a small light kit to supplement the exposure a little, but I found myself having to have to use a higher ISO than I wanted.  At 1250 ISO, the images were a bit noisy, but not too bad.  For some shots that didn’t require much movement, I went down to 640 ISO and dragged my shutter a bit down to 1/30th of a sec.

We used a MicroDolly without tracks for any shots with camera movement since the floor was so smooth.  In fact, on one dolly shot I did, we didn’t even use the dolly at all!  I just dragged the tripod across the floor about two feet and it worked great!

Here is a short time-lapse video we shot while we were working:

A Chicago-centric version of an industrial video for Preferred Freezer’s Chicago II facility.

I’m currently in Philadelphia working on a documentary project where Rembrandt’s work holds an important role in the storyline. We thought it would be a good idea to move a little away from how we’ve been normally shooting talking-head interviews and try to go for a more… Rembrandt feel. Now, “Rembrandt lighting” is a pretty standard and classic lighting approach when it comes to lighting people but I tend to always light from the opposite side of the face that the camera is favoring.

An early self-portrait of Rembrandt

As I studied Rembrandt’s portraits more closely, I noticed that he almost always lights his subjects from the same side as the viewer (er… camera?). So it was a bit of a change for me, but that’s what is called for.  I also tend to use a varying amount of back light or edge light on my interviews, but again, Rembrandt almost always has a lack of this.  His backgrounds are also very often a nondescript texture rather than a specific location or domestic backdrop.  His paintings tend to lean towards the warm side of the palette as well.

Taking all that into consideration, this is how I’ve been aiming to light our interviews.  Below is a screen grab of b-camera’s shot that I was rolling on when I was adjusting a light.  I didn’t take a still for setup illustration.  For the key light, I’ve got a 650W Arri fresnel with an extra small Chimera light bank fitted with a soft 30-degree eggcrate to control spill. It is placed high and steep enough to create that signature nose-shadow pattern, at least when the subject is looking at the right spot (the interviewer). I needed just a kiss of fill light so I aimed our 1K Arri openface unit into the ceiling about 15 feet behind camera and that provided just a touch of fill so it wasn’t so jet black in the shadows. For the background, we used a Botero collapsible brown and gold backdrop and I used a 300W Arri fresnel with some 216 diffusion and some Blackwrap for control.

Pretty simple, pretty decent… right?

Shot on two Canon 5D MkII cameras. “A” cam on sticks with a 70-200mm lens. “B” cam on a Microdolly and the 24-70mm lens. Both cameras set to 3500K to add the warmth expected from a Rembrandt painting and I used a picture profile that was modified from “Standard” to decrease sharpness, contrast, and saturation a bit with a slight color tone shift to taste. :)

A couple of weeks ago I got to shoot a music video for a super talented up-and-coming artist, Nik Day.  My friend, Tucker Dansie, directed.  I had agreed (insisted) to shoot the video for him and then looked up Nik Day online and became an instant fan of his music. I became really excited to work with them on this project after that.

Photo credit: Megan Brooke

We shot the video in two Saturdays.  Both days were only a few hours each.  The first day, we shot the performance shots of Nik at the piano. We shot on the 5D MkII mostly with the 70-200mm and also the 24-70mm on a slider.  We did one shot with the 7D but didn’t end up using it because it didn’t match the quality of the rest of the shots very well (it was a throw-away shot, anyway, so no big loss).  For lighting, we used no more than two small lights at a time… if I remember correctly (this is why I’m supposed to write these blogs soon after the shoot).  They were tungsten units corrected with full CTB—which I haven’t done in a while, oddly. P.S. I hate Lowell lights and always have, but since my gaffer, Chris Peck, was dealing with them, I didn’t mind so much… I guess. The following Saturday we shot the story elements with an actress for a couple hours in the city using available light and a reflector or two.

On the first Saturday, there was an on-set photographer, Megan Brooke (click here to see her blog post and photos), and my wife came along and took some photos with her Hipstamatic app on her iPhone. It was a simple, fun shoot and I got to work with great people!  I think it turned out pretty well.  What do you think?