I love grips. You tell them what you need to do and then they fancy up some contraption that may look like “the ultimate in low-budget ghetto rigging” (as my key grip, Tom, described it) but totally works and gets the shot. This piece of work, pictured above, was a great solution for one shot we had to get over a conference table setup on the floor below. The ledge was really thick so we couldn’t just bring the sticks right up to it and lean it over, nor did we have a jib or whatnot. So Tom came up with this thing. A ladder, two full apples, a rolling cart, sandbags and some ratchet straps that suspended our camera and Ronin over the edge. We controlled the camera with the remote and there you have it! It was awesome. The rest of the shoot was wonderful as well. We got some great shots for an [name withheld for now] commercial. We shot most of it on a Red Epic Dragon with a couple of shots done with a GH4/Ronin rig and a Phantom 3 Professional drone. Here are some frame grabs from the dailies and some behind the scenes …
Driving, Driving, and More Driving
First off: I just want to say that, with this post, I have now exceeded my posting average of one per year for the last few years. It’s not that I haven’t been working — that’s for sure! When I started this blog, I had three little kids. I now have six… so I hope that explains a lot. Over the last two days, I was shooting a series of driver safety videos for AARP which consisted of mostly driving shots. As much as I wanted to shoot the driving scenes with a process trailer like the one pictured (photo courtesy of GripToyz), we had to keep it lower profile because we would be driving in various situations that prohibited it so we ended up shooting off the back of an insert car while towing the picture cars.
Litepanels Sola 4 Traveler Kit™ Review
This may not be the most ideal lighting kit for the airborne shooter, but the Litepanels Sola 4 Traveler Kit™Â definitely packs a healthy punch for its size, weight and power consumption.
Working on “Vacation”
My wife always says I go on “vacation” when I work. I know what she means. With four young kids and another on the way, parenting can be a challenge—especially when your spouse goes off to work for days or weeks at a time to places you only dream about. In this particular case, I was shooting at La Costa Resort & Spa, a fancy high-end resort in Carlsbad, CA for a series of online fitness coaching vignettes. It was a pretty sweet resort. So it doesn’t help when I post pictures like this on Facebook:
Litepanels Sola ENG™ Flight Kit Review
Looking for the ideal portable lighting kit? The Litepanels Sola ENG Flight Kit may be it. I’ve had the opportunity over the last few weeks to use the Litepanels Sola ENG Flight Kit on a few different projects: a series of interviews, a documentary in Alaska, a commercial spot, and a music video. These little lights were  designed as on-board camera lights, but this kit attempts to make them a little more than that. As such, I took them on a few shoots and used them as “conventional†lights, so keep that in mind as I review this kit.
Too Cinematic for an Infomercial?
Last week I had an opportunity to shoot an infomercial for a good friend of mine who I’d never been able to collaborate with before until now. We were shooting some scenes in a domestic environment where the product could be used. About halfway through the first day of the shoot he said to me, “Does this whole thing look too… cinematic?” I retorted, “Is that a problem?” (playful sarcasm runs deeply in our relationship). I suppose I could’ve made it look like an infomercial, but where’s the fun in that? We decided to keep going with it.
“Nobody EVER Comes Out Here”
Saturday, we were shooting on a road out in the boonies that the producer found where we could shoot a scene that was a bit more complicated than any other scene in the movie. He told us that “nobody EVER comes out here.” Well, maybe on any day except this one. Hahaha. It still makes me laugh as I’m writing this. To his defense, there’s no way he could’ve known—at least in the timetable we had to find a location and shoot. So after finally finding the location, we did a quick scout of the road. Three or four trucks drove by in our two minutes out on the road. As the rest of the crew showed up, we figured all would be well—a couple of passers by we could deal with. While we’re setting up the camera rig on the pickup truck, a couple of random cars came by into the parking lot we had setup as base camp (it was an old military camp cemetery). Okay, no big deal. We think, “Nobody ever comes out here, huh?”  Little chuckles.