Remake, Remodel

Sagra

Last November, I directed this piece for Austin chef and restaurateur, Gabriel Pellegrini, and his restaurant Sagra.  Once we got through the holidays, I picked up the edit again and finished it up this week.  Here's the final product:

 

Memphis - A Photo Travelogue

Got hired to direct a piece in Memphis for a large corporate client of mine, so on Tuesday, I packed up all my gear and drove to TN with Paul Toohey and Chris Walker.  It's about 9 hours from Austin to Memphis, longer if you stop off for breakfast, lunch, gas, etc.  We decided to take it slow and stop off from time to time to take photos and eat at some cool places.  It made the drive go longer, but it was ultimately a lot more fun.

Paul sat up front with me and acted as a de-facto navigator, and Chris Walker sat in the back as our de-facto nap-taker.  Chris was very, very good at his job...he even brought his own pillow!

Once we got to Memphis, we unloaded the gear and checked into the hotel.  We had heard about a BBQ place called Rendezvous in downtown Memphis, so we grabbed our producer Mark (who flew in from Rhode Island) and headed down there for some ribs, brisket and a taste of downtown...it did not disappoint.

Day one started off with a lot of interviews but we got to head out in the afternoon to shoot some of the fun Memphis landmarks including Graceland, Beale Street and Stax Studios.  Our guide also took us by the Lorraine Motel, where MLK was shot (and is now the National Civil Rights Museum), which was really kind of eerie.  It's always so strange to stand in a place where something so horrible happened.

We decided to head out that night to Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken for dinner.  While the chicken was good, I'm not sure if it would hold up against a lot of other amazing fried chicken that's out there in the world.  We were gonna go shoot downtown Memphis that night, but a rainstorm came in and we decided to call it a night.

Day two was a mix of interviews and b-roll and was a fun day.  By the end of the shoot, we needed something that wasn't fried or slathered in BBQ sauce, so we ended up at Alchemy where we had a bunch of small plates and beer.  Good food, good beer and we were in bed by 10pm, ready for an early start the next day to drive back to Austin.

The drive back was good (we stopped off at In-N-Out in Dallas for lunch!), though by the end of it, I was pretty trashed.  It's always good to get home, unload the car and get into my own bed.

I'm currently transcoding the footage and it's looking really good.  We ended up shooting some GoPro stuff that's going to be fun and we managed to get a very cool close-up, slow motion shot of a guy dunking a basketball using my 8mm lens.  I'm really hoping it makes it in the final cut as it's pretty awesome,

Headed to Memphis, TN

Heading out to Memphis, TN early tomorrow morning for a directing job that should prove to be a lot of fun.  I'm taking Paul Toohey and Chris Walker with me as shooter and location sound respectively.  We'll be in Memphis for 4 days and it looks like we'll be making our way out to Graceland and stopping by Rendezvous for, what we hope will be, some amazing Memphis BBQ.

I'm taking my whole gear package for this one and I think we'll be using all of it before the week is over.  Between us, we'll have 3 Canon 7D's, 4 GoPro's (including my new HD Hero 2), some very nice L-Series lenses, a pretty sweet sound package (provided by Paul, Chris and GEAR here in Austin), my new light kit, shoulder mount, slider and all the other fun stuff.

Memphis looks like it's a fun city so I'm sure there will be some shenanigans, but more than anything, I'm hoping we get some really amazing footage.  I'll post up some photos while we're there.

Work

Been busy since the New Year, working on some projects that I'll be able to talk about soon.  In the meantime, here is some work that I did at the end of last year:

StrongBox was a 2-minute animated video that I worked on for Austin-based company, ProductionFor.  I was part of a larger team and did After Effects and Cinema 4D work.

 

Dell - Now is the Time was also done through ProductionFor.  I did character animation and compositing in After Effects for the "paperboy sequence".

 

New rig

I've been posting all my gear stuff over on the 12 Films blog, but once I post up the final recap (probably next week), my plan is to stop posting on that blog all together and let it just be an archive for the project.  So now, I'm going to start posting all my gear posts up on this blog...and here's the first one.

With all the projects that are popping up for 2012, I've decided to expand my camera gear to include a second 7D, more CF cards, batteries and a new handheld rig, all of which arrived today!  I'm shooting more and more documentary projects and buying a rig that lets me put the 7D on my shoulder and operate with my Jag35 D-Focus follow focus was key.  I had been using the D-Focus in conjunction with the D-Mount from Jag35, and while it does work, the D-Focus just works better when it's on rails.

I bought the Cavision Shoulder Pad Package from B&H that comes with rods, front handles, a swing arm in the back and a viewfinder which will help a lot with keeping things in focus.  Everything arrived this afternoon and I put the rig together:

The nice thing about this package is that it's really versitile.  You can take the swinging arm off the back and the handles off the front and mount the camera plate and rods to your tripod so you can use the follow focus (and a matte box, etc) on the tripod as well.  What this new rig will really help with is using longer lenses (like the 70-200 f2.8L) without any shake and keeping the camera from getting wobbly when I adjust the focus on handheld shots.  I'm hoping to break it in on a shoot next week.

The December Film - SB 81

Here's the final film in my 12 Films Project, SB 81, a documentary about the Cottage Food Laws here in Texas and the people who helped get them changed.

 

It's an amazing feeling to be finished with this project and, honestly, all I want to do is crawl in bed and sleep for a week, but I'm already working on next year's project and I'm hoping to announce it in the next couple weeks.  I'm also writing a recap of the 12 Films Project, that will have a little bit about each of the 12 Films, which should be up on the 12 Films Blog over the next week.

Festival News

I got a call last night from the Sedona International Film Festival letting me know that my documentary, Farm to Trailer, was accepted and will be screening at the end of February.  It's the first film from my 12 Films Project to get into a festival, and it's also my first documentary, so it really feels amazing.

Here's the doc in case you want to have a look:

 

A little hometown press...

LOCAL has been getting a lot of attention here in Austin, especially since this week is Eat Local Week, and a lot of area restaurants are featuring locally sourced specials on their menus.

Melanie Haupt (who wrote the Austin Chronicle article about the 12 Films Project) wrote an article for the Chronicle's food blog about LOCAL and just posted it up here.  Click on the link to read the entire article, but the part that really got me was this:

"In my other life, I teach a rhet/comp class at UT called The Rhetoric of Eating, which focuses on the different stories we tell about ourselves and our values through the way that we talk about eating and the choices we make about the food that we eat. I showed Local to my students on the last day of classes this semester and it was a breath of fresh air, a burst of inspiration and hope in the face of a feeling that we are trapped in a food system that effectively enslaves and poisons us in its drive for profits at any cost. Local is an example of the kinds of stories we should all aim to tell when it comes to talking about our food."

That feels pretty awesome...

 

LOCAL - My latest documentary

 

I couldn't be more proud of how this documentary came out.  I hope you enjoy it.

Short Indies - Monday Night!

My first short film, The Wine Bar, will be screening this upcoming Monday night (December 5th) as part of the Short Indies series here in Austin.  They'll usually get 4-5 films together, bring in the filmmakers, set up an open bar and let things go from there.  They show each film and do a Q&A with the filmmaker afterwards.  While I've never been to one, the reports are that they're a raucous good time.

 

If you're in Austin on Monday and have nothing to do that evening, come by and watch me struggle to answer questions about a film I made almost 6 years ago.