The commercial is for Blair Underwood who is introducing a new line of menswear suits.

Here’s a link to check it out in action as well as more detail.
http://www.gripnerd.com/1-step-Laddercam/

Who knew Dwight could be so good on camera!?

2011-07-17 So far, so good.  The first cut is done, now time to evaluate.  I’m using Premiere as mostly a straight cuts system so, as can be expected, it’s working just fine. No crashing, it’s fairly easy to get around and, uh, yes, I chose to do it on Premiere.  While I’m still tempted on using FCP7, I’m reminded of something I heard on a recent podcast by the RC’s Mike Seymour about why he switched from Aperture to Lightroom.  He commented on the continuity of software made by a software company (Adobe) versus a hardware manufacturer (Apple).  I love Apple and their products but long term consistency and stability are winning out.

Magic Bullet Suite 11 is also working out very well.  Loving how fast things render.  I’ve used almost everything in the suite except for Denoiser – it’s been doing unexpected things so I’m going to research that tonight.  Cosmo, the plugin that softens faces, is fantastic.  Not trying to make anyone look younger, just need to take the edge off of some wrinkles.  Works great, easy and the results aren’t distracting.  Colorista II is as good as ever.  Looks has been well redesigned.  The only, only, thing I feel it’s missing in Looks is that when you make an oval vignette, there isn’t any way of rotating the oval.  It’s a little thing that makes a huge difference on vignettes.

Should be done tonight.  More later…

UPDATE: It seems that with Cosmo, when you leave the “Show Skin Overlay” on, it renders it into the video.  Opps.  Still a great plugin though.

UPDATE 2: So my narrative demo reel is done.  (click here to view)  Next, update my commercial and music video reels.  The whole thing was done with Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection.  In all, I used Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop.  The verdict?  Well, in oh so many ways I much prefer FCS – better the devil I know, perhaps.  If Adobe continues, as they’ve said they would, to support and improve these video applications, then yes, I’ll likely stay here using Adobe products.  I’m not an editor, I don’t need do to this everyday and so for what I do need, it’s more than enough.  It’s fast, worked with all the wacky formats I needed to drop into the sequence and most of what I need above and beyond the Adobe suite I can find in Magic Bullet’s Suite 11.  Speaking of MBS11, I love it, period.  My only gripe and I’ve already voice this to Red Giant (the folks who sell Magic Bullet) is that I can’t rotate the vignette.  I’m not the only person to complain about this so I hope our voices will be heard and the minor improvement will be done soon.  Other than that, for the level of color grading I do this combo is perfect.  I will miss many of the plugin I have in FCS but it not as if I can’t still use it and will likely when the need arises.

I was in a rush so it could have been better but good enough for my purposes.  Still you can tell what a good job it’s done where one photo overlaps another.  Mostly very clean.  Useful when having crew members review a location they couldn’t visit.  Very handy little free tool.  Kudos to Microsoft.  Now if you can do something about your Office suite…

Click here to go to Mike Most’s blog.

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THE CAMERA, GRIP AND ELECTRIC TEAM:
(top) Dean F. (1st AC) and Ryan L. (2nd AC) hustling to get our next shot.
(middle) Daniel S. (Key Grip) and Gord H. (BB Grip) helping us get in as many great dolly shots as we can fit in.
(bottom) Rob T. (Chief Lighting Tech) with yet another bright idea.
(Missing photos of: John S. and Adrian H. – I’ll get shots of you two soon enough.)

(above) Hood mount.
(below) Our longest dolly shot yet.

During our previous day off, I had a chance to go to Edmonton and there I found a fantastic store called Mountain Equipment Coop (MEC).  In the US, it’s like REI.  It’s an outdoor activities stores that I could spend hours in and walk out spending too much money (it’s my Costco of sporting goods).  I did manage to find a couple of gems to get.  First and foremost, cold weather shoes.  I got lucky to get some Sorel boots at end of the season discount.  But the biggest find is a pouch to replace my long shredded sidekick.  Those folks who’ve worked with me for many years, have know me to have a pouch by my side with my director’s finder, point-and-shoot, pens, compass, etc.  Sadly, my trusty pouch with many years of faithful service gave up the ghost late last year.  After searching far and wide, I couldn’t find a match much less a better match.  Then about a week ago, I notice our gaffer wearing that familiar pouch I so longed for.  That’s how I was introduced to MEC.  It’s exactly like my old pouch only made of far better material.  I was so glad with my find that I bought two.  One for the day-to-day work and another for commercial jobs where dressing up is necessary.  With membership in hand, I suspect I’ll be buying many more things from them.

With two weeks of shooting done, we’ve gone through most of the lens gamut of our package.  The verdict… very happy with the performance of all the lenses.  The workhorse is definitely the 18-80mm (4.4:1) Arri Fuji Alura.  Sharp as a tack, fast at T2.6, manageably large in size and weight, and a useful range.  The primes are a beautiful piece of glass but do miss the lens flare of older glass.  There’s fast at T1.9 and light for handheld work.  We’ve had a few opportunities to break out the torpedo 45-250mm (5.6:1, T2.6 and also an Alura lens).  I love the characteristics of long lens photography and wish we could bring it out more often. But as limited as its use has been, the times it has come out have made all the difference photographically.  It offers all the wonderful characteristics of the short zoom we have but with an amazing range.

(above) the Alura 45-250mm(below)  the 35mm uniQoptics lens

(above) Dawn over Provost.  I love Canadian skies on a clear dawn or dusk.  While beautiful sunsets can be found in many places, there is something quite unique and special about the morning and night skies in the Canadian prairies.  Something about low sun, clean air and atmospheric moisture content that causes the scattering of the sun’s rays in such a way that enhances the violets and enriches the pink, reds, oranges and pale yellows in a way like no other.  The colors are rich and at times, offer tones of pastels and as the skies stretches across the flat landscape, somewhat solemn.  This and the people are what I miss when I go back home.

With childlike awe, I’m always amazed by the speed with which the weather changes from blue skies to snow showers to fog with trees powered with horror frost.  Each stage beautiful in its own way.  Not so fun for a production that needs some consistency but a joy to see personally.

Big night at the Community Center set.  My scribblings of camera placement, lenses, and screen direction.

One last thing of note, we had a chance to shot a scene at the Provost News building and there I had the good fortune to see up close a Mergenthaler Linotype Model 8.  (Warning: geek moment coming.)  This machines lineage made it possible for newspaper publishers to expand their coverage with more pages than were possible before when done by hand.  The devices workings are amazing for its simplicity and yet also for its complexity.  The name derives from the fact that it produces a “line-of-type” in what is termed “line casting”.  Here’s Wikipedia’s simple description of what the machine works:

The Linotype machine operator enters text on a 90-character keyboard. The machine assembles matrices, which are molds for the letter forms, in a line. The assembled line is then cast as a single piece, called a slug, of type metal in a process known as “hot metal” typesetting. The matrices are then returned to the type magazine from which they came. This allows much faster typesetting and composition than original hand composition in which operators place down one pre-cast metal letter, punctuation mark or space at a time.

I believe the one we saw was acquired in 1929 and has survived two fires!  I would have loved to have seen it working in its heyday.

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2011-03-06: Day Three is done.  Damn groundhogs got it all wrong!  Corbin shot scouting photos from last March with not even an ice cube on the ground.  Instead we got…

Our Red One MX with full winter gear.  Who are we wearing?  Well, we have four tukes (or “beanie” for those of you south of the boarder – northern boarder that is).  These lovely tukes are from Field’s Dollar Store. We have them wrapped on each battery and the onboard monitor with sporty black duct tape accented with chemical hand warmers to fend off that frigid prairie cold.  To compliment this sporty look, the view finder is swaddled in fashion forward, hipster inspired terry cloth arm bands where conveniently stashed underneath are yet more hand warmers.  Draped over her lovely Red One body is a custom made, safari inspired fleece one-piece with hideaway pockets for more chemical hand warmers.  Designed and sewn by our fine co-producer, Kelleigh M.  It’s sure to turn heads wherever it’s seen!  Oh, and yes, it’s f-ing cold.

I love walking away with a great tip.  Our 1st AC Dean F. brought this wonderfully useful kludge.  It is as the name says, a shooter’s ridge.  The dove plate fits very snuggly into the “v” and wait, there’s more.  Under the ridge is business end of a Lazy Susan.  We shot several shots off this rig, worked wonderfully!  Kudos to Dean who in turn was inspired by the Camera SaddlS. Fantastic!

2011-03-04:

Day one is done.  It was sketchy at first – sun, then clouds, then sun again.  Got what we needed while the sun was out.  Then, just to make things interesting, the prairie cold ripped its way in and just tore into everyone’s bones with temperature plummeting as night came.  And finally, the calm.  We reviewed some footage.  Went over the next days shots.  Called it a night.

We’re playing with some new toys this go around.  The camera vendor is hooking us up with Arri Fujinon Alura zoom lenses  - the 18-80 (4.4:1) T2.6 and the 45-250 (5.6:1) T2.6.  Beautiful glass, lighter weight than the Angenieux glass we used last time and smaller to boot (well by a wee bit anyways).  We’re also getting a reasonably new set of uniQoptics (T1.9) primes.  I never hear of them but have heard of the lens designer Kenji Suematsu.  On reduser.net, they’ve been compared with the Red Pro Primes and I’d have to agree.  Sharp as a tack with very little flare.  That last point is a bit of a disappointment to find true.  I love, love, love flare (on the lens that is).  We had a car driving at night coming straight toward lens and didn’t so much as give us the courtesy of buzzing the lens one iota.  Do kinda wish we had gotten the old school Zeiss Super Speeds but with budgets and logistics and the chance to try some new equipment we are where we are.  I suspect I won’t regret it.  I’ll certainly have more to say on the matter tomorrow when I get my dailies.

Amazing crew, great performances and we actually ended the day ahead by knocking off a few additional shots.  All-in-all, a good day.

UPDATE: 2011 Jan 12: I was sent a survey by Gamma and Density about using 3cP and it gave me a chance to tool around the new version of the software.  Thoughts so far are that it just keeps getting better.  Backed up and verified Red MX, P2, and Canon 5D footage flawlessly and love having the ability to checksum in either MD5 or SHA1 with Red footage.  Love the grading reports the software generates, producing dallies is easy and the optional ability to add slate information at the head of each dailies clip is well thought out.  On the survey I add a about a half dozen idea for improvement but overall I think it does a great job.  Look forward to using it on a regular basis for a feature film I’m shooting in March.

↑ Footage from a video I shot of my wife making her famous and award winning Truffle Bacon Popcorn.  Mmmm… bacon!

Here’s an example of Curio at work from a recent project:  Epson

HotDoors CadTools:
When it comes to making lighting plans my first weapon of choice is Adobe Illustrator with the CadTools plugin .  I start by using Illustrator to create all my stencils of lighting and grip instruments.  Then I use CadTools within Illustrator to draw the set floor plan to scale, place the instruments in the space and add notes and dimension lines for where the light is aimed.  It also serves as a useful thought experiment apparatus.  Looking at the set on the screen, you can visualize in your head… should the light go here or here, how high, what will the quality of light be a particular time, etc.  I also use sunPATH to get sun rise/set data of a location and then place that information on the lighting plan.  See link above under the section “Notes” to see a lighting plan made with the above software.  I also have to say that I’m a fan of CadTools because it’s an Orange County company (It’s true, the OC was my stomping grounds).

For on set and some pre-production work, these are my iPhone app.  Enough has been written about them online so I won’t go into it.  Just wanted to share.

• Helios
• Keylight
• ASC Toland
• Pocket LD
• My Measures
• Intaglio

Since I’ve seen this on other website, I’ll include this note here that none of these software manufacturers paid or gave me anything for these kind words of praise (I wish someone had though – insert “wink”).  Still, I think these apps are great and I hope you find some utility  in using them like I have.

left: ninja configuration | center: nun configuration | right: monk configuration