Tired, but it was soooo much fun

Finally I’m done – exhausted, but the last couple of months have been amazing!  Not only have I moved ShutterClass into its new home at Lightdrop Studios, but I’ve also just finished working on 3 different short film projects!!  Even better, I filled very different roles on each one:

  • Tropfest project – Director of Photography, responsible for all primary camera work as well as solving some of the more interesting lighting challenges 
  • Tropfest project – Gaffer, with quite a bit of 1st/2nd AC and Grip assistant work.  This was a great project, we even got to work on location in Melbourne CBD, closing down half a laneway to get the outdoor shots we needed
  • Footage for SFX project – I worked closely with a good friend who’s turned into an amazing SFX editor, and together we pulled together some very cool footage that he’s turned into a simply amazing little 3 minute short.

I wish I could say more about all of these projects, but they are being entered into competitions (Tropfest Australia for two of them) and I’m not permitted to say much.  Don’t worry though, as soon as they are announced to the world, I’ll be updating here!

I had the best time on all 3 projects, and I would work with all of them again in future without hesitation!  But in the meantime, I need to prepare for the Intro DSLR Filmmaking workshop that I’m hosting on Saturday, it’s booked out and should be a fun crowd.

It’s 2013!! And Summer Film School

It’s been over 6 months since my last post, clearly it has been a tiny bit busy! Sooo much has happened, I’m not even going to try and encapsulate everything in this one little post! In an effort to avoid another long rambling post, here’s the quick summary:

Read More»

Motion Pictures and dSLRs, some thoughts…

I had a video sent to me, by a motorbike fan friend of mine – the movie is called “Joy Ride“, by Sandro. It’s an interesting little movie because I’m a rider (just sans bike atm, had to sell it and haven’t replaced it yet…) and a photographer interested in film (but not actively shooting film).

Read More»

Head ‘splode, BRB…

My head just exploded, and it wasn’t because of something coming from Chase for a change!!  Just so you all know, I also follow a bunch of other amazing photographers and videographers – they tend to say less, and simply speak with their work!!  One of those amazing people is Vincent Laforet.  You may recall he was the first to record 1080p on a DSLR with his short film Reverie (which is a great watch if you’ve never seen it!).

Read More»

Optics, Filmmaking and Triggers

There’s been quite a bit of news lately on various things relating to photography (although, nothing really new or exciting from Canon, apart from more confusion over 5D Mk III film vs still and the inevitable 1Ds Mk IV non-existent camera (*yawn*). But I digress, Gizmodo ran an article on high quality optics with a title I love – “Cameras are for Christmas, lenses are for life” – Amen to that!!

What really surprised me was that the lenses I lusted after are actually the cheapest cine lenses you can buy!! Who would have thought 7 Zeiss compact primes costing $US 21,000 for the set would be called “cheap”!! Still, $C 25,000 for a single Leica Summilux does make the full Zeiss set look like a bargain!!

The article highlights the same advice I give to all photographers who ask me what they should buy – lenses last a lifetime, save your pennies and buy the best glass you can tolerably afford!! It will serve you far longer than any digital body ever will!!

On other things, my camera axe first tests resulted in a note from a reader who mentioned a project on Kickstarter called TriggerTrap. It looks interesting, will be half the price of the Camera Axe, and should have most of the features. I think the one thing that surprised me was that the laser light sensor and a basic piezo microphone are on board – that was the one thing that annoyed me about my old trigger, I had to keep the unit itself close to the action!! Although the ready-built “pro” version is intended to be water resistent, I’ve learnt from bitter experience that the best place for your trigger device is as far away from the action as you can get it!!

On the plus side, the TriggerTrap has a USB interface so that other funky things can be done!! I’m a bit of a tinkerer, so I liked that idea and wish my Camera Axe had the same!

Check out the Kickstarter page and get your hands on one on the cheaps (it closes in a couple of days!)

Crying tears of Red

Those that have been following my site (yes, both of you) will recall my drooling over Red cameras across the last few years (August 2010, June 2010, October 2009). To bring the rest of you up to speed, Red is the mad creation of Jim Jannard, founder of Oakley sunglasses and all round complete camera nutter! Jim had a simple idea – no camera existed that did exactly what he wanted, so he decided to create one! From scratch…

That was back around 2005. I heard about Red in late 2006, with their plan to build and release the Red One, a digital cinema camera. I didn’t get REALLY interested until some of the possible specs for the Scarlet FF35 were released end of 2008 (now on the Wayback Machine, Red has removed the original pages from their website!). The Scarlet FF35 was going to be MINE, and the planned prices looked almost tolerable (if you took a really deep breath, and reminded yourself you only live once!).

Read More»

Even video light painting…

On one hand I can’t believe it, and on the other I am completely unsurprised – it is now officially possible to largely automate the complexity of lightpainting in video.

For me, much of the “wow” factor of light painted videos is the knowledge that the poor suckers amazing artists actually produced 24 frames per second to deliver the final results (usually only a couple of minutes long). It was hard, painstaking work, and the results were hit and miss a lot of the time but you had to be impressed with the effort.

Read More»

Be still, my beating heart

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

I like all things tech – no point denying it really!! If you know me, you know I have a pretty good grasp of the geeky things that surround us!! But this video takes the cake – combining the iPad, some great stop-motion photography, a bit of tech in the software design, and wrap it all up in a video – I think I had palpitations!!

Watch the video, marvel at how art, science and technology can create beautiful things together!!

Pinhole awesome

There’s something seriously cool about pinhole photography – it takes skills to set up, but also has quite a large unknown element to it, since the results really aren’t predictable, particularly on film! And it gets even more random for the extremely long exposures being attempted.

Read More»

Last roll of Kodachrome

Yet another milestone reached in the slow but sure demise of film as a mainstream medium – the last roll of Kodachrome has been produced and used! According to this article in the Wichita Eagle:

Kodak announced last year that it would retire Kodachrome, a brand name of color reversal film it had manufactured since 1935. McCurry, well-known for his 1984 photograph of Sharbat Gula, or the “Afghan Girl,” published on the cover of National Geographic magazine, requested from Kodak to shoot the last roll of 36 frames it manufactured.

It’s a great article and well worth the read – but also sad in a way, as yet another icon bids farewell.

Copyright © Dandelion by Pexeto