The feature I shot – formerly known as “Box of Shadows” – has been sold to Spotlight Pictures and remained “The Ghostmaker”. Awesome.
“The Ghostmaker” gets foreign sales
New Cracked.com short…
I’m shooting another project with comedian Rachel Bloom. We’re doing a project for Cracked.com and while I wish I could say more, it’ll be out soon enough in time for the Holidays. Till then here’s the previous project we worked together on, if you’re interested.
Now on sale…
Key Grip and friend Dwight Stone has made available an awesome piece of cinema tech. If you’ve ever had to mount a hi-hat to a ladder you know it can take some time, often need more than one person and a fair amount of gear. He designed a clamping system that does it all very easily and won’t stymie the operator with clamps, c-stand arms and the like. After several jobs using the prototype it’s great seeing the market version now ready for sale. Congrats Dwight!
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!?
It’s that time of year again…
…DORITOS SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL CONTEST TIME! I’ve shot my first. Can’t wait to post it or link it. Miles Crawford – whom I’ve worked with on music videos – directed this funny spot. I’ll post a link once it’s up and you’ll have a chance to vote a million times for it to help us for the win. Thanks in advance for doing that.
Side note: Miles is participating in Movember again this year. If you can donate to this worthy cause, please do. CLICK HERE.
Spot meter scope cover
I once had a Minolta Spot Meter with a flip open rifle scope cover to keep dust from collecting on the glass. With the press of a trigger, the cap flipped open and most times it would be the talk of the set for a brief moment. Then I sold the meter and that was that. Filmtools still sells the cover for Minolta spot meters but I’ve got a Sekonic now. Tired of cleaning the front element of my spot meter, I got my calipers (yes, I have calipers… actually I have two… small and large… ’cause you never know when you might need them) …and proceeded to measure the barrel. What did I find? My L758-Cine at the widest part of the barrel is 36.6 mm (1.44″) and L608-Cine is 36.8 mm (1.45″).
Then it’s off to Amazon after a visit to Butler Creek the manufacture of the rifle scope covers I like. They sell two that interested me, the one like I had before with a trick red trigger, the Butler Creek Flip-Open Scope Cover No. 5 and another called the Butler Creek Blizzard No. 3 Scope Cover
↓ The Blizzard. You can line up the sight before opening the cap. Good during rain, snow or sandy conditions. Might be a good idea to have one also over the eyepiece.
↓ The classic. So awesome to have it back on my meter.
If you have a different meter, you’ll want to visit the Butler Creek website to find a scope cover that works for you.
New music video…
A music video I shot for director Miles Crawford is up on YouTube and Vimeo. We shot this video using the 5D and a GoPro camera. It’s right up there as one of my favorites. Congrats to Miles and all involved. Hope you enjoy it and if so, please share with your friends.
This doesn’t happen every show…
Don’t think I’ve had so many data cards downloading at the same time. Nice. Several hours later it checked good.
New music video soon…
Have a new music video to share soon. I shot the video for director Miles Crawford (our second music video together). For this project we again used the Canon 5D as well as the GoPro for some fun POV shots. The video is for a fantastic song and for it we’ve shot a warm hearted story that I’m very proud of – looking forward to sharing the video as well as more details very soon.
“Box of Shadows” – feature
It’s finally almost done. ”Box of Shadows” is a feature length movie I shot, err…, let’s just say a little while back. It was worth the wait. The last time I saw the edit was roughly six months ago (maybe more). The quality jump since then has been huge. It’s tight, all the fat has been trimmed out and all the loose ends have been tied, in total, a very strong edit that only time can allow you to get. Add to that all the visual effects are finally in. Credit is due to the director Mauro Borrelli and producer Ed Polgardy who have worked quite some time on this labor of love (yes, I’m very aware they both have very Italian names). To get a taste, some of the footage is on my narrative reel.
I’m currently working on the final color grade. With luck, I’ll be done by this weekend in time for the cast, crew and agent’s screening this Monday night at Raleigh Studios. I cannot wait to see it on the big screen with an audience. Hopefully it’ll be available very soon for everyone to see. More after the showing.
2011 Narrative Demo Reel is done
Here it is (click here to go to my demo reel page or watch it below. As soon as I get a few projects back, I’ll update my commercial and music video reel. Till then, enjoy…
2011 Narrative Demo Reel from E Gustavo Petersen on Vimeo.
Narrative demo reel consisting of feature films and a web series.
Magic Bullet Suite 11 & Premiere Pro CS5.5
Just ordered the latest version of Magic Bullet Suite 11. Looking forward to using it as I update my demo reel this weekend, with hopes of having it done this week. In leu of recent developments with Final Cut Pro, I’m seriously considering editing my reel in Premiere 5.5. We shall see. Just finished selecting the music, tomorrow I’ll start editing and decide then. Can’t wait to see what’s new with Magic Bullet. More later…
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.
Well done Microsoft, well done
I’m not usually a fan of Microsoft but I can’t argue with something good. I did a location scout recently and needed photos of places we were considering for later evaluation and planning. Whipping out my trusty iPhone, I started up the Photosynth app. It generates a 360° panorama created from numerous stills. You aim, it shoots, you move the camera a little to the right, it shoots a little more and on and on till you’ve photographed the entire vista you need and then you can watch it back as if yo were still standing in that spot. Here are some photos that might better explain the process.
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…
New episode of “After Hours”
I totally forgot I can embed these episodes. Might be the best one yet. Enjoy.
Why Batman Is Secretly Terrible for Gotham — powered by Cracked.com
Annoying Orange pilot
Day five of five:
It seem the day has arrived when I can speak of hushed things. Today we finished shooting the presentation pilot for the “Annoying Orange” television show. It went better than expected. Now it’s in the hand of post production. Here’s a bit of what I can talk about.
The stage (EVS in Glendale) was quite a sight with half painted blue and the other in green. The blue side had 5 in. worth of dirt to dub as exterior. The green side of the cyc had a set. Somehow we made it work. Why the “Let this be your last battlefield” paint job. (Star Trek, Season 3, Episode 14 – look it up.) It was a decision the VFX vendor (Mechnology) and I thought would work best for dealing with the objects, people and props combinations we would be working with. You’d be surprised how difficult blue screen is to get these days – apparently no one asks for it.
The Epic was… well… epic. Despite a handful of hiccups, which are to be expected on such a new camera, we never lost time or anything critical because of it. The size of the camera is small but still has some weight to it. By and large, the camera’s form factor give it all the joy of shooting with a HDSLR but all the great features of the Red One and more. It’s definitely a camera the show will be able to grow with. I look forward to the ability to shoot stills with the camera in an upcoming firmware update. That ability will make shooting plates so much easier and faster. I also love the wireless remote. So nice to not have order a specialty gadget to do that and it’s especially useful when shooting FX work where you don’t want to bump the camera while starting and stopping. Kudos to our DIT Eric Ulbrich who kept the workflow working and Danny at Digital Film Studios who put together our camera package. Thank you both.
As I said, the show is deep in post production. Hopefully I’ll be able to share the fruits of our labor in the coming months or better yet, maybe you’ll see it on television. When I can speak of these things, you shall know.
Last thing, I want to thank the amazing crew we had and not just Camera, Grip and Electric but also Art Department, Wardrobe, Make-up and Sound as well as the production staff who kept us going. Cheers.
Day one:
Wonderful day. Only two scenes behind but nearly 40 setups. Awesome crew. Funny, funny stuff. Great seeing the script come alive.
Red Epic behaved wonderfully. Did have a minor hiccup a few times and that was a “battery voltage spike” warning which forces you to reboot. Have heard of this in Red forums but not a big deal. Amazing startup time. I am so accustomed to minute long reboots with the Red One, now no real wait at all. Dare I say it’s almost a comfort starting or rebooting.
Took a while figuring out the Weaver Steadman – it’s been a while but did work like a charm.
Prepping for a television pilot
2011-06-11: 2311 hrs:
It’s official, we’re shooting with the Red Epic! It’s gonna be great. Can’t wait to report back.
2011-05-23: 1618 hrs:
For the past three months, I’ve been prepping for a pilot that shoots this June. My lips are sealed about it but I can say it’ll be fun for me, funny to some, and hopefully you’ll see the show later this year. As of now, here’s the a brief skinny on what’s the what. We’re shooting on the RED and there will be lots of traveling mattes on this one as well as a few miniatures sets and a guy in a squirrel suit (seriously!).
We recently did some pre-records of the show’s voice talent at Anarchy Post in Glendale. Those who graced the recording booth were such familiar names (if not voices) as Malcomn McDowell, Harland Williams, Tom Kenny (the voice of “SquarePants SpongeBob”) and Rob Paulsen (voice of Pinky from “Pinky and the Brain”) as well as Justine Ezarik of iJustine. It awesome putting them in front of a mic and letting them go. We should get the animatics later early next week with the official voices in. Again, wish I could share but… yeah for me! Looking forward to watching it all start to come together.
New Toy…
…well it’s an accessory. I bought a Manfrotto Elbow Bracket for the times when I shoot on a Panasonic HVX200, Sony EX camera, Canon 5D or similar and need to mount the camera on its side. Why would one need mount the camera laterally? Most of the time, it’s for shooting a full body on a chroma key so that you can maximize the use of the sensor. It’ll be great being able to pan and tilt as well as not have to build rigs for this. Next step is to try to center the camera nodally – just for fun.
Stuff I did is now online
Director David Green just put up a slew of projects he and I worked on together.
“Meltdown” (on Funny or Die & Vimeo)
Meltdown made it to the to front page of Digg.com and became a “Staff Pick” on Vimeo.com on the day David debuted it online. I’ve posted plenty of times the awards this project has received since we made it but I’m especially proud of the numerous Audience Choice awards it’s won here in the US and as far away as South Korea. Now, you too can finally see it in it’s entirety. This was our first project together and my first with the third member of our triumvirate, Producer Ryan Hendricks. In recent day’s it’s gotten a slew of press. Watch and enjoy.
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/fd62a2e666/meltdown
http://www.vimeo.com/23464277
“This Must Be The Place” (Cover) – music video for Miles Fisher
http://vimeo.com/19379399
Liquid Flow Commercial
http://vimeo.com/20691529
Trojan2Go – Sri Lanka
http://vimeo.com/20695069
2 Weeks, 3 Music Videos
No. 1: It’s been a fun, albeit difficult, two weeks. In that time, I had the opportunity to shoot three music videos, all very different and all with talented directors with whom it’s our first time working together. The series started with a video for the very funny Rachel Bloom. Her video for a song called “I Steal Pets” is about… well you figure it out. The video was directed by Paul Briganti. Can’t wait to share when it’s done.
UPDATE: It’s online and ready to be viewed. Enjoy it at CollegeHumor.com
No. 2: The second video is for a contest being held by Moby and Saatchi and Saatchi for the Hello, Future competition. The video is directed by Peter Johnston for the song “Be The One”. This one got done real quick in time for the competition deadline and you can see it on Vimeo now or here:
No. 3: The last one is for a band from New York called Tiny Animals. While in town playing a few shows, they hooked up with friend and the video’s director, Josh Garrell. I can say precious little about the concept except a beach, glow-in-the-dark rave sticks and a moonless night with awesome results. It was great working Josh again (I’ve worked with him in his other life as an Assistant Director) as well as the always fun to be with make-up artist, Jessica Hoffman. Also in the works and will show it for sure when it’s done.
On to the tech stuff. All the project were shot with a Canon 5D Mark II with the first two using my personal Picture Style profile and the last using the new Technicolor CineStyle profile (very nice). We used a host of lenses but mostly the Sigma 24-70mm lens (T2.8), Sigma 15-30mm (T3.5-4.5) and Canon 50mm macro (T2.5). My thoughts on the Technicolor profile? Best so far for maximizing the dynamic range of the camera’s HDSLR features.
Congrats to all the directors, it was a blast. On to the next one…
NAB 2011
After being sufficiently grumbled at on Facebook and elsewhere for not posting my thought on this year’s NAB, I took time away from my beautiful infant child to write a few impressions to ease the bellyaching lest the kvetching commence. (Besides, I understand. It’s not as if there aren’t 25,000 other site one could go to for such treasured thoughts. Although I have heard there’s this thing out there called the “internet”, hmmm…)
Like Justin Timberlake, Band Pro seems to have brought the sexy back. They showed off the Horseman TS Pro (below on the new Sony F3). It’s a shift/tilt system. I LOVED shift and tilt when it was all the rage in the first decade of the new millennium and I hope to make it fun again if I can just get a show that needs it. The unit below can be mounted on PL, Micro Four Thirds, Canon and Nikon and can accept a range of still photography lenses from various makers. Great for tabletop and architectural photographic needs where correcting for perspective skewing is a must as well as for just plan cool shots of stuff that’s out of focus. As a concept not really new, just awesome.
The ARRI Alexa with the Codex onboard data recorder. Compact and not too much of a rat’s nest of cables. Exciting workflow potential I’ve been spending too much time researching the past two months. Hopefully I can put that research to good use soon. Anybody wanna shoot? Generally, I have to agree with the overwhelming chorus of voices out there singing the praises for the Alexa image. But… (did you see it coming) I have to say that I’m still in agreement with RED that 4K is the way to go. While I will not shy away from using this camera, I welcome the day when I can also shoot 4K with it.
Mole Richardson showing off more LED product. I really like how bullet-proof this housing is. It definitely can take the abuse rental units get. DMX controllable, dimmable with no temperature shift, and 3200°K & 5600°K. Very nice design. I’ll take two.
Sony’s 4K camera the F65. It’s kinda ridiculously awesome and I look forward to hearing how very big shows will be using it. Shall we take a walk down Nerd Main Street? Let’s… 8K sensor, 8768×2324 single CMOS, PL mount, Super35 3-perf size churning 16-bit RAW output at 16:8:8 all with a very wide dynamic range and huge color gamut which based on specs is bigger than film. And if you read my last post, you see it came up again… the camera will support IIF ACES. Nice. The form factor is similar to previous designs, beefy but manageable in small doses. I image this will be the big Studio feature and television darling more than an indie fav.
GoPro cameras have seen quite a solid two years. Hell, I used one to document my wife’s delivery of our son. This little trick is impressive just on looks alone. Would love to see how it handles in the field. The footage they showed looks great (as show footage always does). While I don’t see it a viable option on a big screen feature (unless it’s a drone on the hunt), for commercials, television, and music videos its maneuverability and compact size would make for some very cool images.
It might be hard to see, but this is a jib that telescopes out like a shaving mirror. It was great seeing this in action right next to the Technocrane booth. I didn’t get to play with it as I was mesmerized new and slightly diminutive Technocrane that’s now available. Still many blogs and podcast have had good things to say about it. I’ll reserve judgement for now.
Sans pictures…
Thunderbolt is finally out! I’ve been waiting for this for more than five year. It’s twice as fast as USB 3.0 and 3 times faster than eSATA which is often the de facto transfer method for data wrangling (personally, I hate eSATA). It’ll be great to see onset transfer speeds boosted significantly but software makers are also expressing significant speed boosts with footage playing off of Thunderbolt drives. The cable will carry not just data but also has a dedicated line for display. My dream of only needing one type of cable to run any type of peripheral is slowing coming to fruition. Amen.
Also worth mentioning, the ARRI Alexa in all three flavors is impressive and now that it has the blessing of Deakins, suddenly it’s worthy of use by young filmmakers who might have otherwise dismissed the camera. Beautiful images without a doubt and amazing dynamic range but still a big boy toy. In the age of HDSLR, the camera is heavy. To quote Ferris Bueller, “It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”
Sony also recently unleashed the F3. It has a similar form factor to the EX series of cameras but sports a PL mount and the new EXMOR sensor that is the size of Super35. The new firmware upgrade will allow for S Log and RGB output via the duel link SDI spigots in the back. I can see this camera being the go to camera for low budget shows that can’t afford the RED but also see it making strong in roads into television as a B-camera.
After reviewing other people’s reviews of the show, by and large we all saw the same stuff and liked the same stuff. To be frank, this year I really only focused on gear that I could see being useful in my upcoming projects. The rest, I’ll dig into as projects require their use. It was a good show in that I saw more that I liked than not and can see more significant technological steps forward than not. One thing that became apparent at this show is that clearly the tide (pardon the pun) is turning toward tapeless acquisition and distribution. The recent tsunami in Japan left Sony’s tape manufacturing facility practical afloat on it’s way to California and brought many a sleepless night to post-supervisors wondering how they were going to deliver their shows to the networks. No consensus on a solutions but people are actively talking about it now. Also, the push to 4K and RAW is strong (as the folks at RED predicted – please gloat, you deserve it, but also please less whining and smugness). Still lacking, safe, reliable, and abundant in storage archival products specifically for the prosumer or independent markets. Recently, while running the math on the amount of storage needed for uncompressed HD, it’s not unlikely to be shooting 1TB an hours! On a feature that’s more than 25TB of footage of just raw footage. On top of that are duplicate copies, editorial versions, FX, sound files, etc. There are bloody few options of where to safely store all this data that isn’t going to break the bank much less idiot proof. LTO technology is fine for documents but, for me, always seems like it’s 5 years behind the current storage needs. It’s not as sexy as lenses and sensors but someone has to step up.
That’s what I got. If you find it useful, great – I know I did. If not, well there’s a host of folks who spent the week there doing this, getting paid and writing a whole lot more than me. The best part is seeing and spending time with old friends, hearing what they thing is a great find and getting those gems of information from the source. Till next year Las Vegas.