Waffle In SXSW

Waffle a short horror film I shot directed by Rafael De Leon has be accepted into this years SXSW film festival in Austin Texas. Over 3,000 films were submitted and only 150 were chosen to play. Congrats to the whole crew who worked on the project.

February Happenings

Just wrapped day 1 on a music video for Tierney Boisvert directed by John Lopez. Great song with a nice story element treatment. We shot it in black and white noir style with the 7D and as set of Compact Primes (28mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm). I loved the CP2s, the big barrel, good markings and the ease for the assistant to pull focus is just such a nice luxury as opposed to using still photo lens that are not made for cinema use. Really glad how the footage came out looking for today. Tomorrow were just picking up some broll shots as 95% of the video is done.

Thanks to my first Chris Cafaro and my gaffer Matt Pecca.

This past Saturday I directed and DP'd a music video for one of my favorite hip hop artists Apathy. I've been working on doing something for him since I was a sophomore at SVA and after 2 and half years of keeping in touch we finally got to work with each other on a project. The track is amazing, one of the best hip hop songs I have heard in a long time. We shot with 2 7d's Anthony Sylvester was on B camera getting some awesome slow motion footage and I was on A camera getting the performance and story elements of the video. Was a pleasure to work with Apathy super nice guy and very professional. Thanks to everyone who helped out on that - Ap, Ben, Open Mic, Janina, and Tony Sly. The video so far is coming out awesome and hope to have it done by the end of the month.

AF100

Shot a small comedy sketch today for Landline Tv. The job was on the new panasonic AF100.

My thoughts - panasonic really has fallen behind. the HVX200 was a huge camera in the digital age. it allowed a small budget to capture 720p quality video at a affordable price plus with the use of a 35mm adaptor you could get a pretty image. Now with the canon dslrs, RED, and the PMW F3 I don't know where this camera stands. Bigger budgets will be F3, RED MX or ALEXA (if celluloid is not chosen) though I don't think the AF100 was looking at this market as the F3 which is the cheapest will be around 12k (without a lens). Where it competes is with the DSLR market. And truthfully it doesn't look as good as footage from 1, 5 or 7D.

For starters it is 4/3 cropped, the 7D cropping has always bothered me well the 4/3 is worse. Example to get the same field of view as a 50mm lens on 35mm film you need a 35mm lens on the AF100. ABEL has a great calculator that compares all the formats. AF100 doesn't look much different than HVX images a old school REDROCK or Letus 35mm adaptor looks more filmic.

Now I will say we shot in 720p and the glass was a Olympus zoom so I was not working in the highest resolution or with the best glass. I would like to try a nice Nikon prime at 1080.

The plus to the camera is focus! You can actually get decent focus a issue many of us have been burned on with the dslrs. Another plus is workflow, with having to transcode through mpeg streamclip for dslrs or REDCine for RED I forgot about the beauty of log and transfer. RED can log and transfer now too but the image is imported very contrasty compared to doing a prores export through REDCine. In terms of latitude its in the middle. I shot with a 400ISO which was pretty noiseless and had decent highlight/shadow information for a prosumer camera. Is it much better than a dslr, No.

It seems like I am bashing this camera. It was perfect for the job today and gave me a nice image. But is it the death of the DSLR? No. Just wish some film could come my way. I am getting tired of having to rely on waveforms and histograms all the time. I just want to be able to read my key light and go. No digital camera yet that I've worked with comes close to the organic feeling of film. The closest has been the Alexa and thats because of the DR it has.

Storm

So this past weekend I shot my girlfriends short film "Storm." She is a advertising major and was picked for this special scholarship class called the Project Class. Its taught by Bob Giraldi who directed Michael Jackson "Beat It" and over 2,000 commercials. He has helped me with work as I have camera pa'd on a commercial of his over the summer and meant a lot of good contacts.

We shot on the RED and it was a stressful shoot. All locations were paid for and locked but the first day the super lost his mind and kicked us out only to 15mins later let us back in and shoot. But the real killer was a scene on a roof looking into another apartment. We had rented out a place across the street and a stunt man was brought in to make the actress look like she was hung.

Were about ready to roll and we get kicked off the roof. That is the most important scene of the movie and we are rescheduling that. Prob going be doing a 1D type deal with some 1x1's so we move fast and don't look like a huge production.

Thanks to my great crew Dave, Chris, Matt, Foti, Julian, Flash, Spencer and Sewarb.