Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Festivals


I've been pretty lucky the past year or so, as far as the people with whom I've been able to work.  A few of the films have made it to the major festivals.

The latest announcement was that Smut Capital of America will be screening at Tribeca this year.  Ben Leon and Michael Stabile did a really good job of creating a short film about a complicated subject.  Ben deserves a lot of credit for editing it visually in a more evocative rather than literal way.  I was the colorist on this film.

I did production work on The Union, which will open the Tribeca Festival.  It's an understatement to say that I was lucky to get to work on that.  And, I also did some production work on the third film, Troubadours, which screened at Sundance this year. 

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Upgrades and Soderbergh

OK,  I am going to be upgrading my website with new reels, photos, and other info, but wanted to share some of the good stuff that has been happening.

The color grading room:


I'm particularly proud of the fact that I made the dimmable D65 fixtures myself.

The screening room:



I can playback from the color grading room directly to the ten foot screen.  Schwing!

My friends know that I love Steven Soderbergh's explorations into film structure (here and here). Not to mention, here.  OK, I gotta stop or this is going to turn into a very long Soderbergh post.  Anyway, I was shocked to see this on Twitter.   It makes me sad that the sheer filmmaking joy in Schizopolis no longer burns within him.

A very serious filmmaker

What is Free?

OK.  This is the last product post for awhile.  The reason why I am including it is simple.  We, as media producers, are always yammering about how to actually make money off of our creations. Recent theory seemed to be: give it away now and then someday you'll be able to charge for it or get ad revenue...... now everyone is talking about social and using social to make money.  I still think that sometimes it's just better to make a good product and for people to PAY FOR IT.

Red Giant (and Stu Maschwitz) created a neat product awhile ago, Plastic Bullet, the first (that I know of) iPhone app for easily applying looks to your iPhone photos.  Totally worth paying for, yes?  Hmmm, then some other company came along and made a "free" product along the same lines, supported by annoying adds in the interface, promoted the heck out of it and got some VC money.  It's a fine product, and if you want to get tied into that company's social media experience (which they are no doubt working very hard at monetizing) go for it.  But do I really need a log in to play with some images I've taken with my phone and then wonder how yet another area of my life is being harvested electronically?

Personally, I just want to take pictures and use a clean interface to have fun with them.  And maybe send a couple to friends....and not have every aspect of my personal creativity/relationships commoditized.

Anyway, Plastic Bullet is on sale for a few days at the iTunes store for $.99.  I own it and, despite the recent spate of Red Giant posts, have no relationship with them.  Their products just keep crossing my path recently and I still like to root for the little guy because, well, I'm a little guy.


Also, I recently completed a substantive project using Colorista II.  A post will be coming soon about the good, the not so good and the just plain different of using it versus other color grading products.  I have sent a couple of emails to Stu asking about some technical questions I have about the product. My biggest concern is how it clamps video to make it what appears to broadcast safe.  Hopefully, I will hear back from him before I do the post.