This post is simply a way to keep charcoal and pencil drawings from the summer all in one place. Have a look at what I've been making!
Building a Shoulder Rig
Over the last few weeks I've been working on a prototype for an Ergocine-type shoulder rig for my a7s. Here's where I am with it at the moment:
It was a long process in researching the best mounting options, cheapest rails and clamps, and figuring out a good form for the wooden counterweight. I'm still not quite there yet. I will continue to fine-tune the shape of the wood until it is comfortable and practical. I plan on creating a space for an external battery within the wood form. Here's a photo from one of the intermediate steps:
I've used the mount on a few jobs so far and It has served me well. It even provoked conversation from subjects about the nature of the rig, allowing them to feel more comfortable and natural in front of the camera. Once I finalize the form of the rig I'll create a new one with nicer wood. Since I'm already taking more than a few notes from Ergocine, I'll probably end up using some sort of walnut.
Photographs from Camp Khakipants
Tuesday saw the actualization of an incredible event. I wanted to share a few photos from the show with all of you. Most don't actually show the performers, just friends having a good time in a great spot:
A Short Story on the Outskirts of London
I was staring at a pair of dogs behind the fence of a used car lot across the street. The criss-crossing highways moaned above my head and the exhaust fumes left me dizzy. I sat on the street corner at the exit to Road One, the highway to bring me straight north to Scotland. I had walked my way out of London's city center all the way to the edge of this turnoff, I didn't know what else to do. The sun had long passed below the horizon. Britain was playing in the World Cup while I walked, I could hear families cheering from passing houses. I had met a girl in London, my mind was still wrapped around her. I had walked quietly, feeling the air.
My first night walking endlessly around London I damaged my feet. I tried sleeping that morning in Hyde park but the runners and horse riders kept me awake and somewhat embarrassed. After three days of rest in a cheap hostel they were good to go again. The footwear I brought with me was too constricting, didn't fit. I bought a 2£ pair of flip flops downtown so that I could air my feet out. I walked to the outskirts of London in those flipflops.
51.5720778,-0.23045
I sat on the curb of the exit for a while. Sodium vapor lamps dimly lit my corner. It had been three says since I thumbed my last ride into the Keflavik airport. To begin hitching after a pause, long or short, always feel strange. To stick that thumb up and look into each approaching car is an extroverted sort of activity. In that moment I sometimes feel the need to separate myself from my body, to look down on myself as a puppet, so I can lift up that arm and begin. I sat on that curb waiting for the courage to raise my arm.
Before the thumb even revealed itself from my pocket, a taxi driver stopped in front of me and offered a ride out of town.
Taking this ride was the least safe thing I've done while hitching. It's generally a bad idea to accept an unsolicited invitation to get in a car, especially at night. Even so, I got in. It was a real London taxi, smooth, curved black exterior, roomy backseat. The driver and I had pleasant conversation as we headed toward his small town through the night. I broke two widely held rules of hitchhiking and nothing bad happened. Not to say it won't happen. I got in the car believing that, with few exceptions, stranger-to-stranger relationships that begin with openness, positivity, and confidence on both sides lead to more positivity, openness, and confidence. I was rewarded with beautiful humanity, always a humbling experience.
A Short But Interesting Look at Urgent Message: A Vignette
I wanted to share some examples of small VFX touches used in Urgent Message: A Vignette. First, the video itself:
The wide shot of the room needed to feel flat in order to feel similar to the storybook styles of Wes Anderson. I corrected the perspective of the different elements in the room to give the "straight-on" feeling of perspective after shooting the scene slightly to the left of center to frame the shot correctly.
The "out-the-window" shot was filmed from a different room in the house and originally had a complete view of the exterior before the zoom. To help tie the shot in with the rest of the sequence, I took the wall frame from the wide shot of the room and placed it into the window shot.
Those were the only shots in the spot that needed any VFX love! This was a fun little video to make, hope people enjoy it.
Working with Able VFX
Over the last six months I've had the pleasure of working with Able VFX on several of their recent projects. Here are some of the now completed works.
For the LG/Independence Day spot I was tasked with replacing skies from a mid-day shoot in Joshua Tree on a bland, lightly clouded day. The process involved first selecting imagery for or creating myself the new skies appearing in the spot, tracking camera shake, then rotoscoping or keying out the original skies to place in new sunsets. I also graded all of the footage to fit more with the sunset/dusk theme and carried out most of the final compositing. The main sunset was actually partially taken from a photograph I took in Ibiza:
The three spots below were part of a group of seven advertising Bridgestone's new amateur tour ball. I carried out color grading and matching between the different shirts worn by the golfers as well as the golfers' skin tones. Matching became complicated as some of the shirt colors were a light salmon and some skin was much too pale to advertise the golf balls during the summer. Detailed masking was necessary to pull of the correct color, requiring extensive, lengthy and sometimes painfully tedious roto. Other members of the team, particularly Jason Porter, pulled off the beautiful and incredible 3D animation in the spots.
I was tasked with editing three sizzle reels for Able's different areas of expertise. With guidance from Able's director, David Johnson, and using their immense catalog of beautiful imagery, I was able to create three distinct feels for the three categories. They are visible on their website here as well as below:
Three Videos From L.A.
Went out to Los Angeles for a week last month, helped out some friends on a few videos. Here's the bit of content we shot:
A Short Story from an Unknown Location South of Orleans
It was dusk. The sounds of European forest in the height of summer filled my ears. Great verdant green surrounded me, impenetrable foliage with stretching vine and obscured secrets. The air drifted in a whispering breeze, warm, vibrating. The road was straight both ways, to the left, from where I had come, and to my right, where I was going. I knew little else apart from that.
My compass pointed me Southeast but I had no map and spoke no French. One day earlier a borrowed cell phone had been my navigator but it now lay forgotten under the passenger seat of a seventy-year-old Frenchman from the North, never to be seen again. In a spasm of frantic energy I had taken a few trains the wrong way and wound up in a city far, far away from where I expected, though I can't say I knew what to expect anyway. The compass pointed me to the Southeast corner of the city where I thumbed rides using the simple description of my destination "Sud-est." A large number of local pickups brought me further and further out into the countryside. I was headed Southeast for certain, I could tell that, but was otherwise clueless about my location.
Few cars traveled down the road as the light began to fade. I stuck my thumb out for each one, my face turned up in a hopeful smile, my baggy hiking zip offs dirty from the road, my green longsleeved undershirt ripped at the hem where it brushed against my belt-buckle. Cars passed and I remained.
Every car appears in view with infinite potential, hope for a ride, hope for new friends, hope for a restoration of confidence in humanity, until they pass, suddenly the vessel of a cold, heartless troll.
A stroke of luck. A purple BMW Z3 slowed down and pulled off the road. I ran over, reggae music growing louder as I reached the window. I looked inside. A small middle-aged French woman turned down the music and looked up at me. She asked me something in French, I gave my customary first response to anything a driver might ask me, "Sud-est," she gave some sort of positive response and smiled. I put my pack in the car and we shot down the road.
As she spoke little English and I spoke no French, nothing but the rush of wind through the open windows filled the space. The Frenchwoman returned the music to its original volume and sped on at ninety miles per hour. There was no one else to see it, that little purple convertible blaring reggae, shooting down an empty road running straight and narrow between the green blur of the forest, but I will hold that little memory as a sacred beauty that makes me smile.
Working on P-Dash's The Format / A Short A7s Review
I recently completed a music video for Bryant Robbins a.k.a. P-Dash. The pre-production for the project began more than a year ago so I'm excited for it to finally be complete. Working with the A7s on The Format really allowed me to learn its limits, its strengths and weaknesses. Before going further, here's the final video:
From the beginning it was clear that there would be a fair amount of vfx and compositing. By the end of the project there were over forty shots that included some kind of effects work. I was excited by the variety of vfx to be present in the video and the chance to hone the skills I had learned while working with Able VFX. The project included background replacement, loads of roto, both manual and with rotobrush, plate cleanup, green screen compositing, motion blur and handheld shake addition, particle simulation, multi-take blending, tracking, the creation of an otherworldly portal, and some time remapping here and there. There's probably some other bits and pieces I've forgotten about but that's the gist. I've never had the chance to do so much in one project so while I knew it would be difficult I was excited to take on the challenge.
This video taught me a lot about the A7s. I shot the whole thing in S-log 2 as I have with other projects. While I loved the dynamic range of the profile and the detail has a really pleasing feel straight out of camera (at the -7 level), I hadn't really gotten a hang of the color yet. It's tough to work with, tough to get each color to find its way out of the grayish green mess that is S-log 2. I worked for a while trying different approaches in resolve. It wasn't until I tried out Filmconvert's A7s profiles that I found what I was looking for. They're really good. It pulls out the colors I don't yet understand how to pull out in Resolve, plus its not a LUT-type-preset so it holds on to the dynamic range of the camera very well. It even has two different profiles for normally exposed S-log 2 and overexposed to account for green/magenta shift. It may be hard to see what I'm writing about, but Filmconvert seemed to get rid of all the small strange polarities of green and magenta all over the image. If you look closely at the simple grade and Filmconvert grade I have provided here, there's some evidence of such, especially in the purple on his shirt, the whites of his eyes, and the edge of his nose. Filmconvert's profiles feel natural and are easy to use.
I also learned from this project how the APSC crop mode and digital zoom do not offer the same image quality. I had originally just used the Clear Image Zoom function to crop in 1.5x instead of going into the menus and selecting Crop Mode, saving time. I soon realized with this and other projects that the camera really needs to go into crop mode so that it can resample the sensor in a way optimized for the crop. Using Clear Image Zoom in Full Frame mode does nothing more than simply zoom in on the (very sharp) 1080p of that mode. There is no extra detail when zooming in, only when switching to crop mode is that achieved.
As most A7s users will agree, using the camera takes too many trips to the full menus. In my own experience I delve into the menus most often to change:
1. Viewfinder to monitor and back. The auto switch doesn't switch fast enough and the proximity sensor is too sensitive, so I almost always switch manually. Wish I could assign a custom button to this.
2. Full Frame to APSC mode. Again, many have complained about this. Should be assignable.
3. Record Setting. It's reasonable that this exists in the full menu but when the previously mentioned settings are so far away in the menus it takes time to navigate all the way over to Record Setting to choose a different framerate.
I used the A7s for some green screen shots on this project. I was worried the codec might be too thin for such work, and when I first began compositing the footage there were certainly compression problems, but a simple noise reduction pass from the mediocre proprietary AE NR was enough to smooth things out. I used the noice reduced footage as an alpha matte for the original footage to preserve the original detail and composited from there, no problems. Is it perfect? No, the matte is not very precise. Did it work for the size/budget of the project? Yep.
I'm really happy with the camera's output. You have to expose correctly, but when you do, you get amazing results. And shouldn't getting the perfect exposure be a basic imperative anyway? I do feel like I used to be able to get a fair amount of detail back in the shadows from the T2i after NR. It doesn't seem to work as well here, color information disappears after maybe 30% gray or higher. Expose well, though, and that area of the shadows will get dark and inky while the rest of the image shines.
On Involvement with Scenario Collective
Over the past few months I have become a part of an exciting new artist collective in Columbia, SC. The group began a few years ago as a record label and has since expanded to involve all forms of art. Upon returning to SC, I've been able to work with the group on video, music, and art projects. My main contributions to the collective have been video coverage for live events, displayed below:
Through the collective I have been able to expand my music horizons as well, even playing a song in two shows. I appreciate the opportunities that the collective has been giving me to grow and hope to offer those same experiences to others who wish to involve themselves in the visual arts. With luck we will be able to hold painting and photography workshops for the group and, with time, for the public.
To stay updated about Scenario take a look at the collective's website or its social media: