Speaking for the filmmakers I know, we get tangled into the high-speed information dump all too easily. There are so many aspects to production that it’s easy for it to consume your life fairly quickly (and each category deep enough to immerse yourself in). Every once in a while, I force myself to tear away and discover. I went to the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market last weekend on one such venture to find a an explosion of color from around the globe to see what art meant through their eyes… just a few samples below (click on pictures for bigger versions).
These images, while not much of a document for the Folk Art Market, represent things that caught my eye while there.
It begins on the coast of California, finally ending on the East coast in Georgia.
2605 miles.
10 states.
Zach Crees is a burn tech and surgical assistant inspired by stories like Don’s and will ride his bike across the US to raise funding and awareness for burn survivors starting July 2011.
This video features Don Keller, a triumphant survivor of a fire that has found inspiration through cycling.
You can give to the Burn Unit by visiting this link
Shot on the Canon 5D Mark II with Technicolor’s Cinestyle picture profile.
Have you ever found yourself wishing your Canon DSLR had a few extra features on the video setting? Probably, video on DSLR is far from perfect. Now is your chance to voice your opinion and change the future of filmmaking with DSLRs as we know it, again.
There’s a quote in here that should put every single cinematographer that’s ever used a Canon HDSLR into immediate action:
“Customers who are interested in [digital cinematography] should be thinking about two things, 1) if they haven’t told [Canon] what they’re looking for, by all means let us know and 2) they should be aware that we are very responsive and we’re going to do our best to make sure they’re happy.”
-Chuck Westfall, at 4:18 on http://vimeo.com/22594205
Holy. Cow. Canon wants to make us cinematographers happy. Doesn’t your heart beat a little faster?
Visit Canon’s 5D support page to send an email with your feature requests. They will automatically route your email to the “appropriate party” from there. Email them, they’re listening.
*Update: Thanks to Pablo from HD Cam Team for letting me know that you can email your feature requests directly to canon at carecenter@cits.canon.com
This isn’t the first call to action! In fact, remember back about a year ago when the Canon 5D DIDN’T have 24p? People had to use the Magic Lantern firmware to get 24. The online community spoke up. Names like Vincent Laforet posted blogs with droves of people requesting 24p. Sure enough, Canon listened and 24p arrived. Not only on the 5Dmk2, but the 7D, 1Dsmk4, T2i, 60D, and now the T3i.
The downside is that we may not hear anything on the 5D mk3 until Q4 2011 or LATER. However, this is our opportunity, the online filmmaking community, to send our requests in to Canon by the thousands.
No doubt they’ve received many emails already. We finally arrive at the title of this post: why the 5D Mark III could revolutionize everything again. This is my biggest feature request:
Clean Video Out, 10 bit 4:2:2 or better.
Add a $2000 AJA KiPro Mini to a 5D Mark III with clean video out and you’ve got an unbelievable setup. Especially if you combine the new technicolor preset into the equation. The KiPro is broadcast quality. It records readily-editable prores AND has XLR in with great preamps. Your audio is synced and you’re instantly ready to edit (on the incredibly new fast FCP X). For me, that makes the whole system: 1080p log 10 bit 4:2:2 Prores WITH great audio with a full frame sensor. SAY WHAT??!!! That easily encroaches on the F3 which costs north of $20k (no glass).
The revolution is self-explanatory. The DSLR video market already exists, so those of us with working setups would only have a small transition. PLUS, the 5D mark ii (or other) still makes a great B cam with perfectly matching picture profiles. How’s that for a win-win?
It’s 2011. We’re all well acquainted with the ever-growing content on the web. Anyone can learn more technical information on the internet in a week than I did when I was in film school for 4 years (though the hands on doesn’t factor in). Best of all, content creators are often accesible to start a dialog about their work. We can learn. We can connect. We can watch…
Find Your Unique Angle
So… the internet is a gigantic vortex sucking us in, taking over lives, making the organic mechanical and the mechanical digital. I find myself making conscious notes about how the things I shoot relate to things “online”. Overnight, the world of video shrunk. There isn’t an angle, location, or character undiscovered. Depressing. But we’ve been here before. The invention of the printing press resulted in an explosion of authors ultimately leading scholars to conclude that there are only 3, 7, 20, 36 plots available to be explored. Writers didn’t stop writing. The amount of authors has only since increased. Finding a truly memorable book is a more challenging prospect in the noise of the marketplace, but money still changes hands and books rise to the best-seller list.
I digress. Forget about books, this is about filmmaking. There really isn’t much new out there. Resolutions increase and color gets more depth. As we’ve seen, ”Everything is a Remix“. How do we find inspiration in that? What prompts the filmmaker to pick up the camera once again to film the same garbage over and over?
The answer I’m coming to is environment. You, the video/film/media maker, must carefully choose your surroundings. That means the people you know, the professional environment, the weather, everything. All of these things wrap into your frame of view into the world, which seeps into your footage creating something that HASN’T been discovered… you’re unique voice. Because despite having a limited number of plots, locations, characters, etc, your perspective is your own. Sure, it may and will be similar to those around you. So choose your environment carefully. Christopher Nolan doesn’t use the internet. There’s a lot to be said in that.
People are more impressionable than they would like to admit.
Our original goal with this documentary was to give a voice to the Haitian mothers who don’t have a very loud political voice but have stories that need to be heard.
Watch a short portion of the upcoming documentary:
However, in light of the recent and tragic earthquake in Haiti, Nate and I have shifted our focus towards capturing the evolving developments.
Back in November, we spent 2 days at For His Glory Orphanage. For His Glory is called a kresh, meaning all of the children already have parents waiting for them in the US. The process to adopt these children takes a lengthy 2 or 3 years, so the children stay in Haiti until all of paperwork has been completed. Nate’s family is adopting two little Haitian girls from this orphanage, which we got to meet and hang out with back in November.
After the earthquake, the orphanage was stranded with no food and water for 5 days. The orphanage put a sign on their roof so the many helicopters flying overhead would notice. The sign said something along the lines of, “We are an orphanage and need help”. This led to news coverage from fox news.
During this time, Nate’s family has been constantly worried about the children because contact with the orphanage after the earthquake has been rare. So rare in fact, that they learned that they were evacuating the children from the orphanage from watching Fox News. After a string of developments, the children from the orphanage were granted humanitarian evacuations to come to the US to their expectant US families. This is great news for the adopting families!
The battle isn’t over yet. Adopting families now face their newest obstacle: paperwork. The children were supposed to be in the US Friday, which didn’t happen because of immigration problems. Haitian paperwork has always been notorious for having problems, and to compound the issue, much of that paperwork is now gone after the earthquake. So the children sat in the airport.
Hours later, the red tape was cleared and 32 children were on their way to the Orlando, FL on a donated United flight. Nate was able to find out that children would be landing in Denver near midnight on Saturday January 23. Both of us were ecstatic to have first hand news, so we called up our Haitian friend Neil, who speaks Creole, and made our way to DIA.
Upon arriving at DIA, we were informed that the flight had again been delayed and wasn’t expected to arrive until 4am. We waited around for a while, and by 12:30am, the flight hadn’t left Orlando. It was silently understood that the flight wasn’t coming for a while.
We went home discouraged, more for the kids than for our video coverage. Early the next morning, I received a phone call from Nate informing me that the children were landing at DIA around noon on the 24th.
A Haitian girl takes her first steps in cold Colorado Air.
Wrapped in a blanket, a young Haitian girl walks towards her adoptive US family in the nearby terminal
The three of us, Neil, Nate, and I, hustled over to DIA to find 4 news teams, the Denver post, and some other media affiliates. Things seemed to be going the right direction. After managing to convince the Denver Police Department that our lack of “news” credentials wasn’t a security issue, we were able to get onto the landing strip. Minutes later, the plane landed, and slowly but surely, Haitian children, some bundled in blankets, were taken off of the plane.
Five children were immediately rushed to the hospital, though we didn’t get any details on what their conditions were. Many of the other children came off of the plane smiling, some waving, walking towards their new life in America. Unfortunately for us, the media was restricted to the landing strip, so we didn’t get any footage of the kids reuniting with their US parents.
After more than a week of trauma, a young Haitian is carried towards her adopting US parents
Freedom at last! Almost… Nate just informed me that the adopting parents and children have yet again been detained at the airport for failing to fulfill some paperwork obligation.
As the story continues to develop, we will do our best to follow it and understand it.
Our original goal for the documentary has been pushed to the background with all of these new elements to our story. Because we were in Haiti in November, before the earthquake, we are in a unique position. We captured the difficult life of Haitians before the earthquake. The last few decades have been extremely hard on the Haitian people. Political instability and nonexistent infrastructure prevent the country from escaping the notorious cycle of poverty. Haiti will be in the media spotlight for a while, but as with all disasters, the aide eventually decreases and the world “forgets”.
Once the media spotlight moves on and the aide begins to decrease, our hope is to take the footage from before the earthquake and reveal to the world how bad things were. Our message is simple, we don’t want to rebuild Haiti to what it was. This terrible earthquake is the ultimate chance for partners to stand with Haiti and see lasting, necessary change.
Denver Academy wanted interviews from their alumni to show the strength and success of their program. I was hired as camera operator to work on this project. The challenge with these videos was that all of them had to be in one location around the same time because of the time constraints of working with busy alumni, but they still all had to have some variation… We decided to shift around the room and use different artwork for each interview.
Shot on the HVX200a.
A short film about inspiration, momentary love, art. Harmony was developed over 3 weeks and shot in Wash Park, Denver. Overall, the production process was wonderfully simple. Planned camera movements were simple and subtle, only two actors were required, and the whole film took place in one location.
The biggest challenge was the timing. I wanted the project to take place during the transition of summer to fall, which is hard time to predict in Colorado. A sudden cold front can instantly change the scenery from green to dead with little or no transition of color. We got lucky when we had a moderate storm come in the week before production, enough to loosen a few leaves off of the trees. During a few shots (many of which didn’t make the final cut unfortunately) leaves were falling around the actors, a very cool effect.
This film was planned, shot, and edited in Denver Colorado. Shot on the Canon 5D Mark ii with a few Canon lenses, primarily the 100-400L.
