I have returned to New York City and as the dust settles I am finally climbing out of decompression. Playa dust covered luggage still remains in my hallways as a constant reminder of Black Rock City, home away from home.  I was hesitant to bring my shiny new RED 1781 out into what I consider some of the harshest conditions anyone can shoot in but then when I thought how much I would regret not bringing and I had already made my mind.  These are the tools of my trade, my art, my passion and would not be a filmmaker if I was not willing to take some risk.

Black Rock City is more then just a city, its a way of life and every year thousands gather from all over the world to share this approach in life together.  It is not a cult or a drug and sex festival that outsiders who dont know (or afraid to find out) like to peg Burning Man as.  Simply put, it is a huge celebration of life and this year it was my job gain to capture just that. I was one of two RED DPs on a documentary produced titled “As the Dust Settles”.  The Film is currently in post production and I talked to the producer Mike hedge last night and he expressed his goal to have it cut and ready in 4 months, good luck Mike!

I plan share some of my own experiences so stay tuned as I will be posting images, frame grabs, and footage of the 1st RED camera on the playa, Burning Man 2008, “The American Dream”… what I consider the real life of Black Rock City.

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.

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.

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.