Shooting in the O.C.

Trying to shoot a narrative film on a Canon 7D requires overcoming a lot of compromises but once you get it all working right the results can be pretty impressive.

Honorable mentions for pic of the day (gotta make up for missing the last few days):

Palm trees and snow! I love California

The challenge of the zolly with an auto zoom lens

Umami Burger + Film Screening

So tonight I went to an outdoor screening of two short films, one of which happened to be the first public screening of “Middle of Nowhere” which I shot with director and old classmate Michael Carreño almost a year ago. And it happened to take place at Space 15 Twenty adjacent to Umami Burger right across from the good old L.A. Film School.

This was the tastiest burger I’ve ever eaten in my life, and that is saying a lot considering how many hamburgers I’ve eaten in my life (what can I say, burgers are my favorite food!) — I highly recommend it to all burger connoisseurs.

It was great to reconnect with all the actors and crew and also the space — I hadn’t actually been to Space 15 Twenty since it was just a bunch of old run down warehouses where we shot a lot of After Midnight. Back then it was dirty and full of homeless poo… now it’s full of hipsters, haha.

-Bryan

My friend (and talented key grip) Dwight Stone really loves In-N-Out and has taken on a little project to show his appreciation for the company. I joined him earlier tonight on one leg of his mission. Check it out:

I actually understand his love and ability to eat burgers day in and day out, and I joined him even though I ate at In-N-Out the night before, too. That’s because the cheeseburger is pretty much my favorite food in the world. But that’s a different post.

-Bryan

Before each company’s line hit the runway there was a short video clip introducing the company and its mission. I basically went around to all these companies and interviewed their founders and cut them together. Here are a couple of the clips I did:

With everything being all non-profit and pro-bono, resources were pretty limited so I shot everything on just a little Sony A1U with a basic tungsten fresnel lighting kit (ie. the stuff I could get for free from church, haha). I think I still managed to get pretty decent results though. The motion graphics were done by a dude named John Hwang who I never ended up meeting in person in the end.

The show itself seemed to be a great success, but I really don’t know much about the fashion world or fashion shows. Lots of people showed up, it was quite huge and the companies that were showcased got some pretty decent exposure. Hopefully the next one can be even bigger and better!

-Bryan

Bad news: I was working as an extra.

Good news: Extras get paid

Bad news: I really need the money this time, haha.

Back when I was still living in San Diego I answered a craigslist ad and ended up working as an extra on an episode of Veronica Mars which was shot there. At the time I was considering moving up to L.A. and going to film school, but I really had no idea if I really wanted to give up my life of leisure in San Diego to enter an industry I really didn’t know anything about. Working as an extra on a TV show seemed like a great way to be able to get on a real, professional set, without having to know anybody or know anything.

I spent my time there just observing the crew working and just trying to take in and understand as much about the process as I could with my limited understanding at the time. I was totally fascinated and ended up working on several episodes, and in the end I did end up deciding filmmaking was indeed for me and I left San Diego, went to school and the rest I guess is history.

But work has been pretty slow lately. I thought making some money would be nice. But how could I do that while leaving myself open for potential other gigs? The option of working as an extra again during slow times had crossed my mind a few years ago but last week I guess I was desperate motivated enough to actually lug myself down to Central Casting and get myself into their extras casting database.

Central Casting handles the extras casting for pretty much all of the big budget TV shows as well as a lot of features. You basically call in the night before you want to work and see if there is anything for you. If you get hired then you work the next day. Sometimes they’ll call you if you match a particular profile they’re looking for. If you land a real gig or you don’t want to work one day, just don’t call in. How much more flexible of a schedule can you get than that? In reality the process of getting hired is a little bit more tedious than what I described but I’m sure there some other blogs about life as a movie extra you can read to find out about all those kinds of things.

A few days later they ended up calling me because basically they were looking for asians with ’90s cars to work on an episode of Cold Case. It was great to be able to spy on the crew and get to see what gets done on some of the bigger lighting setups, most of which were well beyond the budget level of any project I’ve worked on before. And the best part is that this time around I actually know what the heck is going on!

Most extras are aspiring actors and are there with the primary purpose of trying to further their acting careers. I think a lot of them end up bothering a lot of busy people hopelessly trying to increase their screen time or get into better roles. I pretty much just try to stay out of the crew’s hair, do what I’m told, and use whatever filmmaking knowledge I have to just try to do my job as an extra better and make the crew’s life easier.

The pay is pretty bad but at least I get some free lighting experience just by observing what’s going on, getting a feel for how much power is needed for what types of setups and whatnot. If I did get to shoot something with some budget in the future, at least now I won’t be as completely lost as I would have been. Working on low budget indies has been fun and challenging for me so far but it was pretty eye opening to see what kind of conveniences you can afford when you have some real budget and studio facilities behind you!

Of course I’d prefer to be getting a ton of DP gigs but hey, in the downtime I got no problem with picking up a little extra cash while hopefully getting to observe a diverse array of big lighting setups being done so I can absorb as much technique from different people as I can in as little time as I can! Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself, haha.

-Bryan

And so here it is, now on Vimeo and available in HD!

-Bryan

The best way to get “film look” is to shoot on film. Of course, this is somethign that I (and many others) have been saying for a while now but last night I got quite a rude re-awakening on this.

Last night, “Returning“, a short film I produced and shot screened at the L.A. Shorts Festival. It was shot on a Panasonic DVX100 (provided by my friend Brian) with a Red Rock M2 35mm lens adapter and a set of Nikon prime lenses. Not exactly current state of the art equipment, I know, but it was what we could get.

At this particular festival, the allowed submission formats are 35mm film print and standard definition video on DigiBeta tape. “Returning” had the unfortunate honor of being the first film in its program to be projected in standard definition video after the first film was shot on 35mm and projected from a film print.

Yikes. The transition from film to standard definition video made my eyes hurt. But it was so much more than that. The depth and richness of color… the contrast… there’s so much more to the look of film than just the resolution, latitude and depth of field, and last night was quite a vivid reminder of that for me for sure.

-Bryan

Over the last few years I’ve heard a lot of hype surrounding the RED camera and so last week I finally got the chance to work with one of these things and what better opportunity could there be to get my hands on one and see what it could do than to work with one as a 1st AC for a few days?

My initial impression of the camera was that it seemed to be pretty solidly built, and at least on the surface, it seemed to be up to the rigors of a professional film production. I found it pretty intuitive to use, and not very much unlike working with a film camera. And my goodness, the pictures coming out of the thing just looked amazing.

However, the camera was not without its faults, and there are some aspects of it that definitely remind you that it is basically a computer inside. The thing takes a good 90 seconds to “boot up”. That can seem like an eternity if the entire crew is standing around ready to go for a take and you have to shut the camera down to replace the battery, or worse, the camera randomly reboots or shuts down (this never happened while the camera was rolling, however). But I came to realize that even though that boot up time seemed ridiculously long, especially considering most other professional digital cameras and especially film cameras start up instantly, it really wasn’t that bad compared to say, changing mags on a Panavision camera…

What I was maybe most impressed by, however, was the false color exposure meter mode. I feel that if someone were to make an external scope that would maybe sit next to a vector scope and waveform monitor, and it just did what this false color display on the RED camera does, they would probably sell it for at least $5,000 or $10,000! Basically it sends a real time, color-coded view of the image that tells you the exposure level of every part of the picture, like a souped up, high resolution, full color waveform monitor.

I think the false color view is a very quick,  intuitive and valuable tool for the digital cinematographer, possibly even a game changer. I think it could take the whole “painting with light” concept to a new level. This one feature alone almost makes the whole camera worth it. It also shows the potential advantages of having a camera that is basically a computer inside, especially since they are constantly improving the firmware and making the updates available to the public. They can just keep adding more features and it can just keep getting better! I also liked the ease with which you could access the more frequently-changed settings such as frame rate, shutter speed, ISO speed and white balance.

It is customary to have armed guards when changing lenses

One thing that I may never get over is the whole concept of erasing media you’ve previously shot on and reusing it. The first time I had to format a previously used CF card, I had to stop and announce to everyone, after verifying multiple times that we did indeed have backups, that I was erasing everything we had worked on earlier that morning. The whole idea of overwriting media that has already been used just seems so wrong to me! But hey, I guess this is the future!

The audio recording side of things was somewhat limited and dealing with the adapter for the mini-XLR jacks was kind of a pain as well. I’m not really sure we really need 4 channels of audio… maybe 2 channels with regular-sized XLR jacks would be better for most productions of the size that would record audio into the camera? And there was very little control over input levels, with the audio sections of the menus in general being somewhat non-intuitive. But I suppose these are the kinds of things that can be improved with firmware updates.

Overall I’d say that I was rather impressed by the camera and the pictures we got out of it and there’s definitely nothing out there better for the price. But for you amateurs out there, let me be quick to remind you that you will need to shell out a lot more than the cost of the camera just on decent, professional level lenses and accessories! Not to mention the fact that you need professional-level quality on every thing you put in front of the camera, as well!

And now, on to the pulling focus part of this story. As I mentioned earlier, I haven’t done any AC-ing in years and boy was I rusty. It didn’t help that the first shot of the first day was wide open on a 50mm. Needless to say, I did not deliver and we needed to switch to a wider lens to make it easier on me. But it didn’t take long for me to shake off the cobwebs and start pulling focus like a pro.

I am particularly proud of one shot in which needed the camera to pan 180° while rolling on the dolly. The camera operator and I intially tried dancing around the dolly but that proved too unstable and dangerous. I ended up sitting on the front of the dolly with the mattebox passing over my head as the camera made it’s 180° pan. I started out pulling focus on the wheel on the left side of the camera, then while continuously pulling focus, switched to the focus wheel on the right side of the camera with my other hand. I gotta say it felt pretty good to pull that off!

All in all I had a great time AC-ing… I was kind of closed to the idea of doing it before, but now I guess I’ll take whatever comes my way, haha.

– Bryan

What We Do Is Secret

What you’re looking at over there is for me a very historic ticket stub! Today was the first time I saw my name in the credits of a movie that I had worked on, playing on a regular day, in a regular theater, to a regular audience. Not a one-time festival date full of people who worked on the film. Not some made-for-publicity theatrical premiere for a direct-to-DVD release, but just a plain old regular movie in its second week of play! And I have to say that it feels pretty good. I finally feel like I have worked on a “real” movie.

I wasn’t even sure that I would be credited at all as I had only worked on it for a few days on what I was told were re-shoots, but when I got to the credits roll at the end, I found myself credited as grip under the “Additional Photography” section.

The movie itself, I am actually proud to say, was pretty mediocre. And actually it was a lot better than I was expecting. At any rate, having been paid to work on even a mediocre movie playing in theaters in multiple cities is an achievement that 10 years ago would have seemed like an impossible fantasy to my college-aged self.

What We Do Is Secret is a biopic in the form of a fake documentary… sort of… about the what I am told was groundbreaking late-1970′s Los Angeles punk band The Germs and their lead singer, Darby Crash. Having grown up in the suburbs, I had never heard of The Germs until I was working on the movie, and I didn’t know who Pat Smear was until someone leaned over and said, “Dude, you’re standing next to Pat Smear,” and I was like, “Who the hell is Pap Smear?”

When I found out that he was that mysterious fourth guy that appeared playing guitar with Nirvana on MTV’s Unplugged, then I was like, woah, that’s kinda cool. Me and Dwight and Rob, the other two guys in the grip crew, I think were the only people working on this movie that were not punk fans, haha. So yeah, I basically went into the movie as a complete punk music/scene/history layman. And so to me, like I said, it was pretty mediocre. It just seemed like a very generic drugs and rock and roll and drugs and sex movie, with all the expected elements.

I worked on the Darby-as-child flashback scenes, and on the recreation of the show at the Roosevelt Hotel with the band’s performance, the broken glass, and the crowd. I also worked on a little second unit thing where we shot all the crowd shots to match the previously shot band performances, changing the backgrounds and lighting to match. In the scene where the crowd is all in red light and the riot happens and there’s a white light moving back and forth hitting the backs of the audience’s heads… that’s me moving that light around, haha. Oh and the extreme closups of the heroin spoon action with the rippling swimming pool water effect in the background. Oh, and the “interview” with “Pat Smear” with the car in the background.

All that stuff actually ended up being a pretty big chunk of the whole movie, so I’m feeling pretty damned proud of myself this evening. What We Do Is Secret is currently playing in Los Angeles; Irvine; Philly; D.C.; N.Y.C.; Columbus, OH; S.F.; Berkeley, and other places I’ve forgotten. Check out their calendar to see if and when it’s coming to a theater near you. If you want to go to a theater and sit through the credits and say “hey I know that guy”, well this could be your chance, haha. It’s opening in San Diego on September 5 at the Ken!

-Bryan

P.S. Hey what the heck, WordPress? Why does your spell check say “Philly” is ok but “Los Angeles” gets red underlines? FUNK DAT!

!!

I don’t even know at this juncture if my name is even in the credits but I can’t wait to see the final product even if it was only deemed worthy of a direct to DVD release, haha. I was actually still in film school when I got this gig… so it seemed especially big time to me… hotel and even some gas money paid for, a huge grip truck with everything so no need to jury rig things when you always have the right tool for the job. But man it sure was hot out in the desert in June!

Anyways, it’s good to finally see that something I worked on is actually in a place were some people might actually see it!

-Bryan

UPDATE: I did indeed make it into the credits. Click for a bigger version:

I have included this screen shot to save you from watching the whole movie if you just wanted to see my name in there. Watching it was not exactly the most enjoyable experience of my life, haha.

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