Greetings Gotham City…

In five days I head to LA to meet up with Mike Hedge and prepare for our jouney into Black Rock City.  Mike Hedge is producing a docuemartary out at Burning Man this year called “As the dust settles” and asked me to be one of the DPs.  I will admit I was very reluctant at 1st to bring a RED camera to the Playa, the Black Rock desert can be a very agressive environment… at times 70mph plus winds, huge sand storms, hotter the hell in the day time and freezing at night, why on earth would I take a RED there?  I don’t know…maybe cause so many things went wrong with last years film expedition that I am trying to prove to myself I can do this.  The Playa gives and the Playa takes, you must be ready for anything and open to any outcome in order to find a comfort zone to work in out there.  I learned much from last years “Green Man” (my least favorite year at burning man) and I look forward to doing the time warp again!

I am building a configuartion that is rock solid for run and gun dessert shooting, my goal is saftey of the gear 1st,  design a comfortable set up and try and keep a low profile so not to take away from others expeirence.  I really did not think I was going to be working this year but times are hard and I dont have much a choice…the road ahead is not going to be easy, but then again when do filmmakers ever do things the easy way?

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Been a while since I have reached out into the blogosphere and I have much to share in the world of indie cinema but unfortunaltley I have been dealing with some maintenance issues and now that I have most of it all sorted out I can get back to posting.  I have been staying busy in the field, RED 1781 stays hired and I tend to go where she goes.  I used this downtime to gather notes, stils and frame grabs from many of the projects I have worked and will be prepping to post.

UPDATE: Ok remind me not to mess with the inards of the blog brain, every time I tinker around I end up paralyzing one side of Gotham.  Good news is we are updated, better, faster and stronger then before.

Cheers!

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UPDATED with some notes from the field:

Late night shoot…I am cashed.  1781 went for a ride today,  it was my 1st chance to put the RED through its paces with lots car mounting on the EXT of some old Sh%^y trucks.  Of course I opted for compact flash cards in this scenario as the solid state memory tends to be shock proof (although I have never stress tested to find out just how shock proof) but fortunately we did not drop any frames.  The down side is you have only 4 minutes 30 seconds at 4k on the CF cards (that is until RED starts delivering the 16GB cards).  The RED RAID drives (which hold up to 3 hours at 4k) is really not suitable for complicated shots where shock is involved unless your configuration is designed to absorb the shock.  Leave it to Element Technica to solve this with their new shock absorbent drive mount coming out one of these days.

Coal is making progress, we are working over 16 hour days due to some complications with our picture cars not working so the crew, myself included are operating on fumes and I don’t know that I will be able to do my daily updates as promised but I will cap the production with some field notes as soon as I can.

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Second shoot day… “Coal” production continues.  Did I say I was a Red Tech on this shoot?  No, I meant to say I was acting in it…cause apparently thats what the director had in mind when he casted me for “Bruce”…the shady drunken boyfriend character.  Granted Bruce’s character is a very small and minimal role (3 lines), I really panicked when the decision was made cause I had to jump into character and do so fast…fortunately director David Rosefeld knows what he wants and he helped me slip into the mode within a moments notice.  Good thing we were running on the RED drive cause there would be no DIT (me) available to manage 8GB compact flash cards during every other take, those 16GB could not come sooner RED!

The 1st half of the day was brilliant, we shot in the middle of shopping mall right out of the 80s and the local business (chains) were nice enough to give us the location for FREE!  You never know what locations you can pull off so it never hurts to ask.  I cant say the rest of the day was a breeze, in fact things started to fall apart at the seams after the mall and aside some continuity issues which are causing a re-shoot of one scenes, we are going to make up for it.  Got to be able to adapt to Sh@& happening all the time and from my experience, team players help make the world go round on indie films.

Before I crash to bed…good news, the new Zeiss ZF lenses modded and upgraded by Peter Sensor arrived Fedex today and all I can say is wow…thank you Pater!  Review and pics to follow.

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I was picked up in this van pictured to the left here only 24 hours ago and from the looks of it I was not quite sure if I was going to wake in a bathtub full of ice. As it turns out director David Rosfeld is actually the real deal, not on the black market for organ donors. The screenplay “Coal” written by the director is simply good…always refreshing to work on some original content in the (very challenging) short form. Low budget? Of course. Constant changes being made to schedule? You know it. Looks like a million dollars? Yes.

We are shooting with Ziess Superspeeds and the images coming down the pipe are pleasing everyone, I will share some frames as soon as I get authorization.  I plan to make these daily updates from the POV of a Red tech since that is what I am doing here.  One thing I wish I did better before the shoot started was really anticipating how much drive space will be needed for backing up on location.  We are shooting 4 to 8 takes of each shot and after a pretty full day I have used already over 70gigs. A 500GB drive should cover a short film (15min to 20min) no problem but remember you need two of them for making a protection copy. I recently found this footage calculator, very useful (which I am sure will be released in a iphone app format soon) thanks to the creators.

RED experiment of the week will concern the Nikon user, I plan to do some side by side comparisons with the Zeiss Superspeeds vs Ziess ZFs which I recently had modded for cinema use by Peter Sensor of www.rplens.com, those puppies should arrive tomorrow via fedex…pretty excited.

Stay tuned, more to come as I attempt a daily update of the 6 day production…consider this day numero uno.

Cheers.

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Gotham Guide: Installing the Nikon mount on a RED ONE from CLayton Haskell on Vimeo.
Many people ask me about the Nikon mount installation so I thought I would throw this together until RED releases the offical “how to” video. This video documents our installation of the Nikon mount that we got from RED. It can be done in less then 5 minutes but I like to take my time.

This is not an official method, its simply how I do it…if you don’t have steady hands you may want to take more precautions into covering the sensor while you work, not a bad idea.

Hope this clears things up, I have been beating up on the mount for a while now and so far so good. Some users report that that is a little play in lens so RED is delivering some parts to solve this. I will share some Nikon + RED results soon.

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Click HERE to watch the Gotham City RED ONE time lapse test

Last night of the “Musicbox” short film thesis production I decided to take advantage of the incredible view and had the opportunity to set up the RED to test one of features I have been meaning to get to, time lapse. Most pros will tell you a high end professional digital SLR will yield the best time lapse results since you have more control over exposure times, larger sensor etc but after doing this test I know now for sure RED can handle the task of time lapse. Sorry for the watermarks, got to protect your investment as I plan to sell this as stock footage.

Hit the jump for more info on this test. Read more

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Gotham Guerrilla is is a new indie filmmakers blog, correct…but what is a film makers blog without proper film reviews. I have been currently seeking a new Film critic for the Gotham Guerrilla to makes things a tad bit more official around here. Looking for, male/female…who likes to go to movies, who speaks the truth. What are the perks to being a movie critic for Gotham Guerrilla you may ask? Tickets on the house and maybe even a pass to the early bird press screenings! About time Gotham Guerrilla staffs up bit.

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Pretty disappointing, was the screening put together in 48 hours as well? I don’t know the exact numbers but over 50 teams from New York city competed in last weekends 48 hour film competition and while I was expecting to see some good/bad films, I did not expect such a sloppy screening. Show starts almost an hour late, riddled with technical problems, audio out of sync 90% of the time, restarting films, and over all lack in preparation by the NYC 48 film organization was pretty inexcusable and not fair to all the teams who worked so hard to fill seats (10 bucks a head) last during Wednesday and Thursday screenings at the Sunshine Cinema. Is 48 hour a big profit machine?

Ranting aside, we set out to make a movie in 48 hours for a full house at the Sunshine Cinema and that we did…I believe Mr. P Sarni updated IMDB last night. Thanks to friends and family again for coming out to support. Will I do it again? Who knows…in the meantime I must keep writing.

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