Cinematographer Notes

The Father Tom DVD is complete.  I was a little worried about it cause I worked with 720p which wouldn’t compress to MPEG4 properly but the DVD looks perfect.  I’ll be mailing out copies this week and applying to festivals soon.  The festival applications are really just a means to get the film listed on IMDB.  Hopefully though, some local NYC festivals will take it and the actors can come to a screening.

I’m screening Father Tom at a meetup event in the city tomorrow.  It’s at Planet Hollywood at Broadway and 45th.    It’s part of a series of work being shown by members of the group United Filmmakers & Actors.   I went to an event last year and pitched my feature script and that was interesting.  Now that I’m directing my own stuff, I’m excited to be going to this event.  It should be a lot of fun.

The best part about short films is that it’s easy to get people to look at them.  The commitment of time is much smaller.  So far the response to Father Tom has been great.    It’s not a clear cut story and there have been mixed interpretations and expectations from different viewers and that has also been interesting.  The general consensus is that the performances are great.   I’m very glad to hear that because it means, in turn that the writing is decent and that my work as a director was effective.   I’ve always said that you can’t blame the actors if the performances don’t seem genuine.  It’s the job of the director to get the right tone and balance across.    That learning process has been great so far.   I’m not worried about On the Couch.  We’re cast and shooting on July 2nd.   That’s going to be a breeze.   It’s Open Mic Night that is going to prove a challenge.  Especially since I plan on using a cast I haven’t met or worked with before.  This means casting which isn’t my favorite part.  It’s so much easier to write for people you know.  Still, I like working with new people and it’s been great so far.

My latest short is written and I’m casting now.  It’s called On the Couch.  I’m hoping to shoot the first week in July.  The script is barely 2 pages so it’s very short but I think it works.  I’m currently writing the fourth.  It’s called Open Mic Night.  It takes place in a cafe/bar where there is an open mic night happening.  I’m hoping to use a bar in Tarrytown.

OMN is much bigger than anything I’ve done so far on my own because it requires an audience of actors to engage with the performer who springs a round of truth or dare on the entire audience.   Despite the size of the cast, I’m thinking because of the nature of the location, once it’s lit, things will move fairly quickly.   Both scripts are 1 days shoots. OMN will not exceed 7 pages.  The truth or dare round would start to get boring if I push it too far.  Which means each bit has to be great.  So it may take a few weeks to write.

It may seem like I’m turning these out quickly but that’s because things are a little slow.  I wrapped up my last paid short Anika last week and it was a great experience with a wonderful production team but it is also the last film I’m shooting professionally with a skeleton crew and therefore, it may be the last DP job I get for a long time.  I’m reluctant to continue burning out 2 technicians when there should be 4 or 5.  Even though I keep the days short.  I know it’s asking too much.   I’m very grateful to everyone who’s worked with me in the past and I wish to continue working with them so I’m going to make sure there’s always enough hands on deck and that the rates are decent.  Hopefully, if my shorts are successful, I’ll be able to hire a crew on my own films.  That would really  be nice.

My latest short film is completed.  It’s called Father Tom.  It takes place inside an ambulance during a ride between a stroke patient and a priest.  Another short done with my everio Letus setup.

What surprised me this time around was how well the image held up when I actually lit everything.  I used 2 575’s on the Ambulance pumping through the windows and some homemade kino flos inside the rig.  All in all, I’m very happy with the look.  We tried passing shadows to help simulate movement but I found it too distracting.  I stayed on the Sigma Zoom the entire time and still got excellent selective focus.  Shot 1440×1080 in camera, transferred to DVCProHD720p60 and then using MPEG Streamclip, upscaled to 1080p 24p.  The look projected in HD shows a very organic textural filmlike image with no compression jaggies or any other artifacts.  I’m impressed with MPEG streamclip.  It’s a fantastic and free program.  I hired Mark Solomon to do the boom operating on this one and he did a great job.

Performances this time around were excellent by everyone including some first time actors.  I was a bit more nervous directing this time because there were other people around the set watching and listening and so I got a little self concious about the process.  On It’s Not You, I was literally alone with just the actors so this was my first real time directing in front of people.  I had no idea how awkward that would feel at first.   I guess I’m a little surprised but the anxiety quickly faded as we began and I found directing them to come very natural to me.  Although it was difficult at times describing some of the emotional beats I wanted them to hit on specific lines.

When you direct a film you dance around trying to explain how to deliver a line without actually doing it because you want the actor to find that on their own.  Asking them to imitate you is like turning them into a sock puppet so it’s considered bad form when you give a “line reading” to an actor.   You have to find other more creative means of articulating what you want.  Sometimes you don’t even know what you want but you know it’s not there yet.  So we ended up doing way more takes on this film.  I had about 10 mediums and 7 closeups from each of the actors.  A variety of tones, styles etc.   To have options later on.  I managed to cut a 6 minute film out of it and I’m looking forward to another round of screenings and hopefully festivals.  This film has a priest in it and a pro-missionary message so I’m hoping it finds a market somewhere.

What I’ve been waiting patiently for. . .

AJA has beaten cineform to the finish line with this.  This will record through HDcomponent or even HDMI into Pro Res 4:2:2 in 1080p or 720p.  Use any camera you want and bypass the various shitty codecs they come with.  AVCIntra, MPEG, even DVCProHD sucks compared to Pro-Res.

So now my shorts with the Everio don’t have to suffer through awful compression anymore.  Yay!    Sucks that I just shot my second short but for the next one, I may have this device.  I’m still looking into some new digital SLR’s with better imagers.    I’m psyched about this though because it means I can lose the adaptor, shoot with an SLR and Nikons and have a better compression scheme than DVCPro HD with no P2 cards, laptops or anything else.  Just this field recorder. It’s priced a little high at $3500 but still, compared to an HVX200 package, it’s a great deal.   It’ll be nice to shoot at a reasonable ASA again.  On my last short, Father I rated everything at 120.  Inside an ambulance.  Yeesh.  I had barely enough light for an image and I’m so done with that.

Got a new clip up for those Iphone users out there.  It’s a doc I’ve been working on with Suzanne Guacci, the director of Cycles.  You may be able to view the clip on your computer but it may take a second to load up.

It’s been a while since I reviewed anything on here but it’s also been a while since I’ve really been blown away by anything.

Click on the pictures to go to the site

This film was incredible and I don’t want to ruin it for anyone with a review but I felt like mentioning it.  Check out the site and then put it on the cue.

I’ve found something online here that looks pretty amazing.  I had to share it. Click on the pic below. . .

If there was ever a time that we needed this the most, now is definitely it.  Lately I’ve been feeling like our society hasn’t kept up with our own potential.  That’s the main focus of this project.  To bridge the gap.  To reinvent everything and go from a monetary based economy to a resource based economy.  To end “working for a living” type of slavery and free humans to basically live their lives without debt, money or servitude.  Work on movies if you want to but not because you need money to buy food.  I’ve always wondered what the world would be like if we didn’t need to work for a living.  What the Venus project is all about is planning exactly that type of society.

I’ve put up a link below  to the short for anyone to check out.  I’m putting together a site for myself that will be kind of like an online theater for the short films I make.  Right now this will just open up in a separate window as an MPEG4 file.  It’s optimized for an iphone so the link should work when you click on the picture.   It’ll also work on a computer but it opens in a blank page.  When I finish the design of the theater site, it’ll have a lot of bells & whistles to it.  I want to have web based viewing that offers the same sort of features and extras that DVD’s have including commentaries, behind the scenes, still galleries and viewer feedback.  It may take a while but it should be a fun project to work on.

I shot this feature Sneakers & Soul last year.  We wrapped in August and they are just about done with the final cut.  It’s got a little bit of tweaking.  I’ve seen it over this past weekend and I’m thrilled with how the film has come out.  It’s fantastic and I am really proud to have shot it.    The editing, acting, and overall structure of the film works beautifully.  I’m also happy with how the picture turned out.  I haven’t seen it projected yet which is the acid test for focus etc. but from what I could tell on a plasma screen, it’s a very healthy image.  Night scenes in the vectorscope peaked in the 20’s which means I can safely bring em into the low 30’s and degrain without issue.

So, between, Drawing With Chalk, Purgatory Comics and now Sneakers, I should have plenty of screenings this year.  I have excellent blu-ray copies of Drawing With Chalk and Purgatory Comics thanks to Todd Giglio and I’m going to try and get the S&S team to spring for a blu-ray master of Sneakers.

Drawing with Chalk was all but ignored by the top festivals and I fear the same for Sneakers unless the production team has ties to festival programmers or directors.  This is because it’s a drama with no names in the cast.  Despite edgy material and a very indie feel to it, without the commercial elements of a name cast member, festivals may be a little lukewarm.  I’m expecting that but I hope that it’s not the case.  Everyone on Sneakers worked really hard and they deserve some recognition for the effort that went into this film.  If this too is snubbed, I just may go postal on a festival somewhere.