Remake, Remodel

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.

Moving Rapidly

I got the iPhone 4S for my birthday and have been fooling around with the video camera more and more.  I'm in the process of making a documentary for the November film of my 12 Films Project and will be using it to shoot some timelapse tomorrow which is something I never thought I'd ever do. 

I've been looking into different ways to use this new full-HD camera and came across this on Vimeo.  It was shot, edited and graded on the iPhone 4S and they even did a VFX shot on the phone.  Pretty damn impressive:

 

I'm not in love with the film itself, but it looks amazing (the DOF shot with the grass waving in the wind totally sold me) and shows just how powerful this "phone" really is.  I'm doing another doc for the December film, and I'm planning on using it as an alternate camera for shooting some wide stuff.  We'll see how that turns out.

iPhone & Steve

Julie got me the new iPhone 4S for my birthday last week and I've been subtly amazed by it over and over again.  I graduated up from the 3GS, so the first thing I noticed was the screen.  The new (for me) Retina Display is miles ahead of the 3GS's display in every way.  Text is cleaner, images have more contrast and the overall experience is made so much better.  Reading an entire article on the web is so much easier on the eyes.

Speed was the next thing I noticed.  The 3GS was getting a little slow on iOS5, but the response time on the 4S is remarkable.  The interface is slicker and faster and app loading times are virtually nonexistant.  Also the weight and redesign have made it somehow lighter and more solid at the same time.

I haven't delved into the camera much, especially for video, but I'm looking forward to it.  I'm planning on doing some time lapse later on this week for a new doc I'm working on, and I'm going to mount the iPhone on a clamp as a 2nd time lapse camera.  We'll see how that works out.

Last weekend, Julie and I went to the Violet Crown to see Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview.  In 1996, there was a TV mini-series called Triumph of the Nerds, that interviewed all of the Silicon Valley luminaries (I remember watching some of it).  Steve Jobs had already left Apple and started NEXT and had a lot to say about his past, the current state of technology and the future of computing and the internet.  The majority of the interview was never seen, and thought lost by the producers, but someone found an old VHS tape of the entire interview which they enhanced for HD projection and edited together.

The interview is really something that anyone with a passing interest in computers, technology, design, etc. should see.  It's really special and captures a man who was notoriously shy of giving interviews in a very chatty mood.  His shaming of Bill Gates (for a lack of good taste) is scathing and yet kind of sweet and his forsight into what the internet (which was in its infancy) would eventually become, is prophetic.  It's a solid reminder of what a genius he was and how big of a loss his passing was.

The movie is playing in limited release and if you can catch it, go.  You won't regret it.