Last week I was working on a pilot for a television show and our location was a strip mine. The mine is still working, in fact they have plans to completely decapitate some of the large hills in the area. It’s gorgeous country and kind of sad to think it will all be leveled in a few years. But I wanted to get some shots of the huge machinery that is used for this kind of task, but I got to location a little later than I had hoped and only had time to get this one shot.
Blue Sky Mining
A Huge earth shredder rips into the hills and grinds them into sand.
I just cannot stop marveling over this camera. We recently shot this music video with 3- 5D’s and a variety of Canon L series lenses.
The video is for the title song of the documentary of the same name. See What I’m Saying, the Deaf Entertainers Documentary is just that: a film about 4 deaf entertainers and is the first of it’s kind as it is open captioned to be accessible to a hearing impaired audience. The music video is open captioned as well, and as far as I know, is also the first of it’s kind. The video was directed by Hilari Scarl and the music is written and performed by the Los Angeles based group Powder.
The video was shot using a total of 3-5D MkII cameras and a variety of support devices. Post production was done in Final Cut Pro and After Effects while the look was created in Color and using the Magic Bullet Looks Suite filters. The workflow included downloading CF cards to external hard drives on location and then transcoding the h.264 footage to Apple Pro Res 422 HQ for editing in Final Cut.
The Camera Crew
Jeff Gatesman – Director of Photography
Barry Berona – Additional Camera Operator
David Farkas – Addditional Camera Operator
Pedro Guimares – DIT and 1st camera assitant
Tiffany Aug – Additional 1st camera assitant
Alexander Brennan – 2nd Camera Assistant
Stories of what a film crew can do when left unsupervised, with several days off, on a distant location are legendary. This is not one of those stories. Recently I was working on a film in Shreveport, La., and with 4 days off due to circumstances beyond my control, got together with some of the other crew members and made a short film of our own.
I shot this film entirely with a canon 5D Mark II and grip and lighting equipment purchased from Home Depot. Our one prop was purchased at a swap meet for $7. Of course the film could not have been made without the great talents of our cast and crew, and a ready-made set.
The film was conceived and written by Nancy Breaux and myself, and we borrowed the strengths of our stunt coordinator, Gregory Brazzel, electric best boy, Ken Ballantine, key grip, Scott “Scooter” Hillman, set decorator, Mary Beth O’Connor, and location manager Kendrick Hudson. Our three actors were the stunt crew from the feature: Jennifer H. Cobb, Gregory Brazzel (stunt coordinator) and Tracy Thomas, who also wrote and recorded all the music for Full Contact Scrabble.
Sound for the film was recorded on the 5D using the built-in mic, which is less than desirable. Fortunately during post, 2-time Emmy-award winning sound designer Adam Johnston stepped in and trashed all of the location sound and replaced it with a mighty soundtrack complete with cicada’s, buzzing flies and the snapping gum that helps define Jennifer’s character.
If you liked the film, leave a comment for us. If you didn’t like it: what the heck is wrong with you?
It used to be a writers town and it’s always been a fighter’s town. For writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes, cat-bandit, baggage thieves, hallway headlockers on the prowl, baby photographers and stylish coneroos, this is the spot that is always most convenient, being centrally located, for settling ancestral grudges. Whether the power is in a .38, a typewriter ribbon or a pair of six-ouncers, the place has grown great on bone-deep grudges: of writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes.
—Nelson Algren
Chicago: City On The Make
On a blue moon New Years eve Night in Chicago I wanted to get some more images of my hometown, so before going to the year end celebrations I wandered around the downtown river front until it got too cold. And at 17 degrees, that was a very short time and made the long exposures seem much longer.
The thing I like most about making images in a city at night are the colors, and in Chicago that generally means a golden straw colored hue juxtaposed with cooler tones in the buildings and sky.
Click on the images to see a lightbox of larger images.
I’m told it’s a four-hour drive from Shreveport to Baton Rouge, but my recent run-in with Louisiana Highway Patrol has me setting the cruise control to keep me traveling at a safely under-the-radar ramble through the forests and over the bayou’s of this lovely state, and it actually takes me slightly closer to five hours to get to my destination, which is a lighting rental house where we will load a 40′ trailer with the the tools of our trade.
Baton Rouge is the state capitol of Louisiana, sits along the banks of the Mississippi River, and it is quite apparent that most of the activity here centers around the campus of the Louisiana State University, and, at least this week, that means football. It’s a big game weekend where the LSU Tigers are hosting their mortal enemy, the Florida Gators and the town seems just on the verge of going crazy. Frat houses are being completely wrapped with thick black plastic sheeting either to hold out, or hold in the enthusiastic revelers (I haven’t figured that one out yet), little tent villages are springing up on every available lawn, and there is a total ban on parking anywhere near the campus, so in my spare few minutes of time for exploring, I head toward the city center.
The former state Capitol building in downtown Baton Rouge
This beautiful building which resembles a castle, is the former state Capitol building and now functions as a History museum. Directly across the street from it is an old railroad terminal that also serves as a museum, and the Mississippi River. Mississippi River from Baton Rouge
No Swimming in Baton Rouge University Lake, Baton Rouge, LA
I had to stop and get one photo of University Lake, which sits on the eastern edge of the campus of LSU before heading back toward Shreveport. You can barely see the remnants of a double rainbow outside of Lafayette
For the three days we were in Baton Rouge it was very hot and humid with big billowy cumulus clouds hanging lazily in the sky, but as we crossed over the Mississippi River on our way back to Shreveport, the skies clouded over and we found ourselves in a driving rain with hellbent wind that kept tossing our car around the freeway. This went on for about 45 minutes until we stopped outside Lafayette for gas and the rain stopped and this gorgeous double rainbow appeared.
Pre-production for the latest feature film I am working on has begun in and around Shreveport, LA, a city built on oil money which seems to be fairly wet, with lush green landscapes and some of the prettiest sunsets I have seen in awhile. Hopefully I will find an interesting point of view of this place over the next 2 months and, through my lens, bring it to you.
Scott "Scooter" Hillman, Key Grip and former trapeze artist
A lot of the buildings seem to be crumbling well before their time in this part of the country, as if they get saturated with all the humidity and rain, and then the real storms come through and just tear open the already weakened structures.
The last curtain has fallen on this theaterKen Ballantine, Lighting Best Boy, and his mosquito protection
And then there are the mosquitos. This Pump Jack is deep in some woods near Oil City, LA and apparently the center of all things Mosquito. In this photo Ken Ballantine, our Best Boy, models the latest in personal Mosquito attire. They are so thick in this wood that they practically create a haze in the air, in fact they are so dense that you cannot eliminate their bites, you can only minimize them.
One of my favorite things to do is wander around a great city at night with my camera. One night last week I found some cool colors and textures in Chicago.
I got my new 5D Mark II a few days ago and I haven’t been as thrilled by new machinery as I have been about this in quite awhile. Without getting into all the really cool things that make this camera great (see any one of a million articles already published on the internet or in magazines), I have my own needs for this device and one of them is the ability to shoot 1080i HD video with my own compliment of Canon glass and get luscious, shallow DOF shots. Mostly I will be using the camera to shoot episodes of the firehouse cooking show Feeding The Fire, and the biggest concern for me has been sound, so I found a solution that works best for me.
The problems with sound on the 5D mark II is the tiny internal mic that picks up everything in a large radius around the camera, which is not good for recording dialogue, or anything else you want to use as a soundtrack for that matter, and the camera’s lack of control over audio recording, leaving the user with the less than desirable auto-gain only. The latter seems to be solved by a firmware update being offered by Magic Lantern. I say that is seems to be solved because the firmware is not quite ready for general release (see their wiki for more info), but it looks very hopeful as the option to give us audio control until Canon comes around to the idea, but if the history of the L1 sound issues are any indication, they will be in no hurry.
5D Mark II with Sound rig
The solution for me seemed simple enough: I have a short shotgun mic that has been working great for me for years, and so I got a hot-shoe mounted shock mount to hold the mic above the lens, but needed a power supply for it. I wanted to stay away from the manufactured adapter boxes by Beachtek and Juiced because I think they are pretty pricey and relatively noisy. So I went with a clean sounding PSC 48V phantom power supply and a balanced to stereo mini plug adapter made by the good folks at Coffee Sound in Los Angeles. This gave me the ability to record clean audio, but the physical setup was to have the 48V PH on my belt with cables going from mic, to belt and back to the camera. I immediately thought of the high repair bills as I imagined all the ways this setup could cause the little mini plug to be ripped from the camera, not to mention the sheer inconvenience of it all, especially shooting documentary style when speed is all important.
So I opened the 48V PH box to get a look at where the electronics where and where I could punch some holes. A couple of minutes with some drill bits, a 2″ 1/4-20 screw and a locking ring to keep it from falling out, some flat cork, and I had a way to attach it nicely to the bottom of my camera. One more hole and a 1/2″ screw and I had the quickplate for my tripod attached to the bottom of the box and I was ready to go.
I just shot an episode of Feeding The Fire in River Grove, IL and this setup worked great. The images are incredible: the shallow depth of field give it a rich texture and the sound is just perfect.
