Some of my film school comrades, The Dandy Dwarves, produced this spot directed by Mike Goubeaux for the Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” commercial competition. They made it to the top 5 and the voting begins. Tomorrow, during the Super Bowl the winning spot will be revealed at the game for millions to admire. They did a stand up job and I think they have a solid chance at winning, what do you think? Best of luck fellows.

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Director:Lucas Krost
Director of Photography: Clayton Haskell
Producer: Stephen Harris
Editor: Matt West
Writer: Clay McLeod Chapman

Lucas Krost of “The Branching” down in Richmond VA decided to submit a short for film for the Project Direct Sundance competition in association with YouTube. The catch was we only had 72 hours to crank this film out with no budget so it was quite a run and gun affair, true guerrilla film making. I only had a couple tungsten 500s and 2x 1200 watt HMIs for lighting but was fortunate to have support from the local Richmond crew over at Studio 108. It was one hell of a showdown. I used a RED in a lightweight configuration with Zeiss ZFs. The project was cut in 48 hours and delivered. Last I heard we would were almost finalist but were unfortunately disqualified for profanity. I guess someone overlooked the guidelines? It was still worth it in the end and most everyone was pleased considering our time limitations.

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On a quest for a smaller hand held rig that was capable of producing the kind of phenomenal images that I have been accustom to seeing from RED, I stumbled on these guys. A couple of swedish filmmakers founded a company called ikonoskop and recently announced their latest creation at IBC. The A-cam dii carries a 16mm sized 2/3 CCD sensor (from Kodak) that is can crank out 1920 x 1080 uncompressed RAW DNG files up to 60 frames per second with an interchangeable mount all packed into this uniquely designed hand held unit…this could be exactly what I am looking for.

The Si-2k from silicon imaging looks appealing as well but after following Anthony Dod Mantle and Danny Boyle’s workflow on Slumdog Millionaire it seams to be too complex for my resources available. They used the tools they had available at the time to the best of there ability and it certainly paid off but I need a rig that operates out of the box with a workflow I can manage without being tethered to a laptop packed in 45 pounds of dry ice a day! Lots more to follow.

• http://www.ikonoskop.com/dii/
• (Ikonoskop website and info)
  
• http://www.macvideo.tv/camera-technology/features/index.cfm?articleid=104645
• (video Interview with Ikonoskop a-cam debut at IBC)
  
• http://freshdv.dreamhosters.com/audio/interview/freshdv_ikonoskop_acamdii_interview.mp3
• (podcast spot light with Daniel Jonsäter, co founder of Ikonoskop)
• http://www.retrothing.com/2008/09/ikonoskop-a-cam.html
• (Retor Thing tech article)

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Greetings Gotham Guerrilla and congratulations to president Barack Obama for ringing in the new year. My respect and gratitude goes out to all those who are responsible for this change. Although these are incredibly exciting times, I can not help but feel the clouds are only parting briefly just before the storm rolls in. What’s that great Harvey Dent quote from Batman? “The night is darkest before the dawn of the day”. Read more

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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.

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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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