I just finished watching the film “Rachel Getting Married”, an excellent and moving piece of cinema by Jonathan Demme.
As I often do when watching movies, I looked at how it was shot, thinking of questions like “how did they light that?”, “why did they shoot it like that?”, or “could I do that?”. (It’s sometimes a curse when watching tv or movies, but it keeps me occupied if it’s something bad, and usually on a good show I get sucked into the story after a bit, Read more…
I am writing because I am excited. I just booked my flights to attend/work at Blogs With Balls 2.0 in Las Vegas next month. My good friend Chris Lucas started Blogs With Balls (BWB), which is a conference for sports bloggers and people in new media, and they hosted their first conference in June in NYC. I offered to go to the event and do some filming for him; I figured it’d be a good time, and I wanted to help him out. It turned out to be an amazing event! They had a great turnout with over 300 people in a great venue, Read more…
I often get asked when applying for shooting gigs if I can shoot and light interviews, so I decided to put together a demo reel for this purpose. I have filmed literally hundreds of interviews, and it is an important skill for most shooters. All the samples here were shot with an EX-1 Read more…
I sometimes get asked when applying for a shooting gig if I know how to shoot and light interviews, so I decided to put together a little demo of interview samples just for this purpose. Filming interviews is a pretty essential skill for most shooters and I have done literally hundreds of them. I actually really enjoy shooting them, as it always offers a bit of a challenge. Every space is different and there are many looks you can go for, so there are a lot of options and challenges. The biggest challenge is usually the space, and the space is what can really make for a good looking shot a lot of the time. Read more…
Last week I took a day off from working and, well, worked.
My friend was working as production manager for documentary filmmaker Alla Kovgan on a film they were shooting this week in New London, CT. They brought in a DP from Armenia (Mko Malkhasyan) who Alla had worked with previously on her STUNNING dance-film Nora, which they shot in Africa. I am a huge techno-dweeb, especially when it comes to cameras, and they were shooting on the RED One, a new-ish camera that I had only worked with for a tiny bit before but am planning to use on an upcoming project, Read more…
I feel somewhat fortunate that I entered this business in 2000 when the cost of entry, as far as professional level equipment, was considerably lower than ever before. The DV (digital video) format had emerged in the 1990s and was seen as a viable professional acquisition format. Sony was at the forefront of creating small “prosumer” cameras (notably the VX1000) with the miniDV format and, for that time, were able to produce quite lovely pictures that certainly looked better than would be expected from a camera that was only a few thousand dollars. Certainly large Betacam and DigiBeta cameras (costing tens of thousands of dollars) Read more…
I was hired as DP on this job, produced by Bill Parker of Hindsight Media. We made a 10-minute video for URWA (the Upper Raritan Watershed Association) and this is a 90 second “teaser” that we cut for them. URWA’s mission is to ensure the protection of the natural resources of Read more…
Last fall, I shot a video for URWA, an organization that works to protect and preserve the Upper Raritan Watershed in New Jersey. I was hired by my friend Bill Parker (of Hindsight Media) to DP the project. We went down to NJ on two trips for 2-3 days a piece, shooting interviews and beauty shots of the area. (I was, in fact, blown away by how stunning this area was. Being from Boston, I thought that NJ was basically a big strip mall or gross industrial plant.) This was the kind of job that did not really feel like work; walking around with my camera in late summer/mid-fall getting beauty shots of landscapes, rivers, animals, etc. It felt more like a vacation (I guess I shouldn’t let the client hear that). Read more…
As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I did an interesting job last week with Charlie Burnham. While the content itself was not extremely compelling (it was a video to educate participants and practitioners in a medical research study on the effects of placebo), I enjoy working with Charlie, who always put’s an emphasis on high production values for his clients. I was brought on to shoot second camera and be on-set EX-1 guru, for the DP, Regis Becker, who Charlie has worked with on these jobs for years. I actually really enjoy working with people like Regis who have been in the business for at least a couple decades, as there is always something for me to learn. Read more…
Being freelance forces me to constantly look for networking opportunities or smaller jobs that may lead to bigger jobs. Last summer I got a call from a friend of mine who works at Rule Broadcast (now Rule/Boston Camera), a fabulously staffed and equipped company where I have bought and rented a lot of gear. He said he had recommended me to a production manager who was looking for someone with expertise on the Sony XDCAM EX-1, a camera I had bought from Rule earlier that year. Shortly after we talked I got a call from the production manager who said they were doing a three-day shoot near Cape Cod of some historical re-enactment scenes for a documentary. Read more…