Nifty visual tool for converting light color accurately

This chart (it's a pdf) is a visual tool for converting light precisely by using mired units. The left side is for using gels and the right side is for using camera filters to acheive the same effect. It's brilliant. Especially if you're the kind of person who wonders how to convert high pressure sodium light to match cool white fluorescents. Yes, we do exist.

French Maid TV

This hot off the presses of the LA Times, a story about webisodes and an accompanying photo gallery showing "Behind the Scenes" on a French Maid TV webisode shoot.



The internets, the new frontier, the future of entertainment. On the positive side, they've cut out virtually all the dialogue on this show.

The only thing that always pops in my brain when I hear the word webisode, is the time when I heard a development executive enthuse about how cheap they were to produce and that you could get "kids who live at home to work for $50/day." I still have not heard one sustainable financial model (besides Google/YouTube or aggregators) for the webisode as an alternative model to just streaming TV over the web with commercials. If anyone has, please contact me.

Linear, Log & Exposure Explained

I highly recommend Stu Maschwitz's blog Pro Lost. This is one of the clearest explanations of the difference between log and linear and how it relates to exposure.

Stu is the creator of the Magic Bullet products and one of the co-founders of The Orphanage (check out his IMDb). His posts are clearly written and usually quite interesting. He also advocates for low-budget filmmaking (especially when the alternative is not filmmaking).

Death and Restoration

The computer with my film data files died today. Hopefully nothing happened that fried the hard drives because my original files and backup were on separate drives (lesson 1: always keep a back up in a separate location) on the same computer. Here's the thing I ordered that'll hopefully get me out of this mess:

It connects to any internal hard drive (outside of the computer), gives it power and converts it to a USB 2.0 interface. It's a good tool for a filmmaker to have anyway. Internal drives are really inexpensive and you can use them for project file archives, rather than using more expensive drives in enclosures. Just plug them in, fill them up and stick them somewhere (ok, two places) safe.

With any luck at all, I should be able to hook this mess up to either of the drives and transfer the data to my new data drive. If not, I've lost all of my film files. Ack.

Recent film work

I've been pretty busy lately. A couple of weeks ago I was Director of Photography on a short film shot up in Oakland called "Ticket to Change."


The quality of the photography can largely be attributed to the heroic efforts of Karen Abad and Michael Baca. The whole film can be seen here.

Last week I shot a spec commercial for a director with whom I enjoy working a great deal, so it was a pretty pleasurable experience. It was also a funny concept. I'll post a link when it's completed.

I am also doing pre-production on a documentary that I hope to start shooting in September. It will hopefully be one in a series that I have planned. There will be much more about that in the coming days....

L.A.'s Loss

If you're lucky, when you're in school you get a teacher who helps you pull together concepts far beyond the boundaries of the class. I had that experience with Deron Overpeck while taking survey Documentary and Narrative film classes at LACC. So I had mixed feelings when I heard that he was leaving California for a tenure track position at Auburn University. Happy because he absolutely deserves to be on the tenure track at a major university. But also disappointed because people like Deron really add to the discussion about what film is and it just seemed right to me that he was in Los Angeles.

Besides teaching an excellent overview of the development of cinema as an art form, he also managed to clearly address the structural market issues and how they helped drive that development. He always treated student comments with respect, no matter how distant they seemed from the subject at hand, and always tried to find some truth from their input that was applicable to the topic.

My advice to cinema students at Auburn: study hard and bring extra pencils, erasers and blue books. You'll get as much as you put into his classes.

Hollywood Joke

O.K. I heard this from a person who has an IMDb listing that's a full page long.


In Hollywood, what's the difference between your friends and enemies?

Your friends stab you in the chest.



Do I look like Mother Theresa?