Posts from — April 2008

Today we had a commercial shoot for a political spot that will be bugging those of you still not smart enough to own a TiVo yet . . . We were asked to do a commercial for a politician running for an office in the state and he wanted an Owl to be in it.  Ok . . . So we called around and found Burt – a freakin awesome Eurasian Eagle Owl who lives in L.A.  He and his trainer, Glenn, made the trip up and we spent about 4 hours shooting some pretty cool owl footage.  I was the DMT (Digital Media Technician) for the day.  The RED camera’s shoot to either hard drive or Compact Flash and the data needs to be managed properly and backed up.  I don’t need to tell you how bad it would suck to shoot for 4 hours and then loose your entire shoot because someone erased the footage.  Here’s what my workstation looked like.  For those of you who care, I used a 2TB G-Tech G-Speed eS configured in a RAID 10 to backup and store the footage on.  The RED CF Cards come in 8GB and I used a FireWire 800 Reader to transfer the footage from the card to the G-Speed.  Took about 2 1/2 minutes to offload a single 8GB card.  Not bad.

So the politician already had some shots of him in a field but needed the owl so we decided to shoot the owl in front of a green screen and would then insert the same scene from the previous shot.  We had someone build a a mock barbed wire fence for the owl to land on.  

The owl was pretty good but got tired after about an hour or so and needed a break.  The trainer said they weigh him constantly to ensure that he’s not too hungry and not too full.  Too hungry and he gets crabby, too full and he wont pay attention to the trainer.  He did pretty good considering there was a camera in his face all day.  I’m not exactly sure when the spot is going to start airing but I’ll post it when it’s finished.  I’m interested to see how the key comes out and how things look.  Erik Espera produced the spot and Brian Hamm was DP.  Great combo so it should turn out great.  

One last shot of the crew.  From Left to Right, the trainer Glenn, Erik Espera, Brian Hamm, me and Ryan Todd.  Brian and Ryan worked on the feature “Sensored” we took part in.

TB

A couple of weeks ago we had the chance to hang out with some guys from Gizmodo, one of our favorite tech blogs.  They get like 2 million hits a day and pretty much every geek on the planet reads it daily.  One of their editors, Brian Lam set the event up and there was a pretty good showing.   Nokia gave out some cool stuff, so did Smith . . . our good friends at Microsoft (not quite) even gave out some Zunes.  It was a great day to shoot and we got some great shots.  We haven’t had a chance to assemble any of it yet but I’ll post some when we do.  

Here’s a shot of Torrey setting up for some time lapse stuff (which turned out really cool by the way).  Our good friend Erik Maddox had the other RED cam and got some great time lapse too.

Here is a shot of me with the RED camera.

Oh – and speaking of RED, probably would have been a good idea to grab some sunscreen . . .  Do I have a Beanie line???  

Even though I got fried I had a great time and they invited us back next year.  

TB

A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity to go to ILM, or Industrial Light & Magic to give a demo on the RED cameras we have.  ILM is the visual effects division of Lucas Films.  It was not easy to get in – as you can imagine that place is locked down pretty tight!  We performed the demos on their Mocap Stage – we were limited on the photos we could take due to the technology and some material for upcoming products that could not be released yet but I got a few.  It was very impressive to say the least!  The room has 40 high speed cameras stationed all over for motion tracking and visual effects.  If you click on the picture you will get a larger version and be able to see some of the high speed cameras I was talking about.  They are mounted on the wall by the two ladders – there are 5 visible in this photo.  We had a good crowd at the demo, including all the VFX supervisors.  After the demo and Q&A on the Cameras, we got to the fun stuff.  They wanted tosee the cameras in action so we shot various items and styles.  In this one, one of our good friends Brian Hamm is playing the model role for some facial reconstruction tests.  Notice the Blue and Green screens in the background.  Those are for key work, essentially if you place a subject in front of a solid screen, a computer can be used to replace the screen behind the subject and insert another background image.  ILM also wanted to do some Stereoscopic (3D) testing with the RED cameras.  This is done using 2 cameras at a specific intraocular distance to achieve right eye, left eye images.  Here’s another shot of Brian, this time setting up for the 3D tests.

All in all, I’d say it was a pretty good day!  They gave us a tour of the facility, an outstanding lunch and showed us how they accomplish some of the great effects you see in their awesome movies.  We have to give a special thanks to one of their R&D Engineers, Arkell Rasiah, without whom, none of this would have been possible. Here’s one last shot of our two RED cameras, #20 Calvin and #21 Hobbes.  =)

TB