On Monday I had a shoot for a really cool industrial video.  I’m pretty excited about it because it is a really cool concept (which I can’t talk about yet, of course).  The director had seen a documentary piece I had done on WeAreNotWaiting.com and really wanted me to replicate the look and feel of the interviews I had done.  He showed me my own work and said (paraphrased), “I want that—exactly that. Can you do that again?”  The client’s company colors are blue and black so these images were a perfect match to what he wanted for this project.  These are some of the images he was talking about:

Now that The Last Play at Shea has been released in theaters and is now on DVD, I can talk about some of my experiences while working on the project. It’s been almost three years since I started on the film. I was brought on board in May of 2008, although production on the documentary had already started a few weeks prior to that. The director wanted to bring me onto the film from the beginning but I was already shooting another documentary for him in California. He mysteriously disappeared from that shoot and kept “directing” over the phone. We were a bit perplexed until that shoot ended and he brought me onto the Billy Joel doc. I quickly understood his situation and was grateful to have been invited to shoot the rest of the film. The production continued until June of 2009.Read More

Earlier in the year, I wrote two posts about my experience shooting the latest installment of Liken—the children’s live-action musical series—titled, Jonah and the Great Fish (see Challenge on Stage and Challenge on Stage: Afterthoughts).  In a nutshell, if you don’t feel like reading those posts, it was an extremely limiting production—from budget, to resources, to space, to time, to crew, to… well, everything.  We did our absolute best given all the circumstances & resources and I think we did a really good job, all things considered.  Sometimes scenes/shots turned out really nice and other times, well… we did what we could.

One of the biggest challenges was the fact that our backdrop only consisted of a white screen directly behind the actors along with sparse props.  It worked well for the stage show (that was being performed in the evenings of the days we were shooting), but it was a HUGE challenge for the filmed version we were doing.  The plan was to do our best because any visual effects was not in the budget.  So that’s what we did, knowing that what we saw on our monitors was pretty much what the home viewer would be seeing.  We accepted that.Read More

So you know how Google Maps has that cool 360º street view feature?  YellowBird has implemented that concept with full-motion video where you control which direction the camera.  You gotta check this out.  The only think I don’t like about this is that I don’t know what I’m missing!  It’s pretty amazing…

Click here to experience a music video shot with this technology.

I just saw this video on the Fstoppers site and had to share it.  I am obviously a huge fan of beautiful cinematography, but I am also an huge fan of amazing visual effects and computer graphics.  The original post stated that this video was completely computer generated.  I watched it and thought, “Surely, they are mistaken.”  Then I watched the accompanying video that shows how the images were rendered.  I was pretty speechless and immediately began writing this blog entry.  Watch The Third & The Seventh below by Alex Roman and then watch the second video which shows you that I’m not lying.  Do yourself and Alex Roman a favor: watch it fullscreen and in HD.  I am completely blown away.

Check out this video to see how some of the shots were constructed:
Compositing Breakdown (T&S) from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Back in August, I was in New York and Philadelphia working on a short documentary related to the feature documentary, WAITING FOR “SUPERMAN.”  You can read my post about the shoot here.  Currently, it can be seen as the featured video on the WeAreNotWaiting.com website.  You can watch it there, or here:

I just found out that THE LAST PLAY AT SHEA is having a limited theatrical release for one night only this Thursday, October 21st.  I have a shoot that day and hope to make it.  I bought tickets for it just now and the theater was virtually sold out—albeit, it looks like the smallest theater in the house at the Arclight Hollywood.  Unfortunate.  Maybe they’ll extend it a day.  Go see it if you can!  Click here for a list of theaters by city.

The official trailer is above.

I’m in New York right now shooting a documentary vignette to be used in relation to the upcoming documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN.  It is the first time the director and I have committed to shooting exclusively on the 5D MkII.  A few months ago, we rented it to shoot some beauty shots for an industrial freezer gig and ended up shooting the whole thing on it.

We realized quickly that the recording of quality sound was a problem.  The director, Greg, found a blog entry from Stretch Photography that stated his recipe for getting good sound (and stability) in the documentary world.  I had the camera and lens, but nothing else.  So we arrived in New York late last night and we went to electronics wonderland B&H Photo/Video this morning to buy what we needed for today’s shoot based on Stretch’s recommendations.Read More