Jesse Rosten

The thought of dying scares me to death. So I made this video hoping to convince myself it won’t be that bad. Turn it up, watch it full screen.

Building Houses by Wesley Jensen (from Battles EP)
Directed/Edited by Jesse Rosten

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A Few Details:
It’s hard to remember where I met Wes. We’re both from the same small town where everyone seems to know everybody. I remember seeing Wes in concert a few years ago and they played “Building Houses” as an encore. A shower of confetti accompanied the song. It was very moving. I suppose that’s where the confetti idea came from. I came up with the rest of the concept a little while later and, after about a year and a half, finally had the time and resources to get this one done.

I’m indebted to Rick Barram who was my goto guy for everything Civil War. Rick, along with the 72 New York Volunteer Infantry reenactors are the reason this video looks period correct. Thank you so much guys for helping make this. Also, huge thanks to Trevor Meier who flew down from Vancouver to be my right hand man during the shoot. He was an “Epic” help. Big ups to Tyler Faires, Lyn Rosten, Raul Gonzo, Anna Brown, and Josh Fulton, too. And, can’t forget my dad, who helped me make the confetti cannons we used during the battle scene.

Wouldn’t be a proper post without some goofy behind-the-scenes clips. This is probably less about the camera and lighting and more of a string of one-liners from my crew. They seriously crack me up.

I was watching TV one sleepless night and stumbled upon an infomercial for some beauty product. The commercial showed before and after portraits, that to my eye, looked like the same photo just photoshopped. I laughed to myself. Then I made this video.

This commercial isn’t real, and neither are society’s standards of beauty.

Click here to watch the behind the scenes vid!

Featuring:
Willow Brook
Carrie Salmon
Ashley Hermsmeier

Awesome Possums:
Script Consultant – Kallie Markle
3D Renders – Paul Conigliaro
Make Up – Anna Brown, Michelle Gallagher
Hair – Joanna Shea
Production Coordinator – Lyn Rosten
1st Cam – Tyler Faires
Gear Guru – Derek Sine
Voice Artist – Molly Jenson

Here’s what 2011 looked like from my iPhone.

A few easter eggs to watch for.
An orangutan
Richard Simmons
The Canadian Rockies
Texas litter
Tangerine Wheat
My Fair Ladybug
Baberaham Lincoln
Me at age 6
And of course, lots and lots of Stella. If you’ve met her, you know why.

Thank you friends old and new for making this a year to remember. Let’s make 2012 just as magical!

Love,
Yours Truly

It’s Sunday night and I’m leaving in the morning for a month-long trek on my motorcycle. The plan is to roll back to Minnesota (from California) with my dad for his 50th high school reunion, then split off and solo up through the Canadian Rockies and back down the west coast. The thought of a month on a moto gets me a wee apprehensive until I remind myself that I’ll never be more than a few hundred miles away from a Starbucks or a Walmart (shudder).

No, this is not a gear sponsored trip. Nope, not planning on timelapsing all 5000+ miles. Not even sure I’m going to take a camera other than my iPhone. I want to truly experience this trip instead of frantically trying to capture every second with thin-sliced DoF and hasty slider moves. I think sometimes it’s OK to just live in the moment and not worry about visually mediating the moment to others.

It will be challenging, maybe even numbing at times, but I’m definitely expecting an adventure. If you want snapshots from the road or the occasional update sprinkled with snark, follow me on Twitter: @jesserosten

Trying out a fun little app on this trip called Instamapper. As long as I have cell service (which might not be too often thanks to AT&T) you should be able to see where I am on a map. Special prize if you’re able to catch a pic of my bike. Here’s a shot of the BumbleBeemer all packed up and ready to roll. Why, yes, those ARE pelican cases on the side. Thank you for noticing.

(It’s a BMW R1200 GS for all you oilhead boxer fans out there. Thanks Lyn for the help with the pic. )

Got some great projects coming up when I get back. Ciao for now!

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If you’re bored, here’s 20 minutes of me droning about some animation techniques.

I tell people I don’t really do motion graphics anymore, but After Effects, I can’t quit you! Awesome typography by Josh Markle.

A few months ago, I did a shoot with the Photron BC2 high speed camera. Wanted to share some thoughts on the whole process in case any of you are “hi-curious” about high frame rates. Here’s the full :60 “Director’s Cut”:

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Big ups to Derek Sine for shooting some behind-the-scenes footage.

The Creative
Win-River Casino was looking to launch a campaign that took them back to their roots to connect with their core audience, the gamers. Now, if you’ve seen a casino ad before, you know they typically feature people who look nothing like casino regulars. When was the last time you visited a casino on a Tuesday afternoon and saw a group of sexy models ordering drinks and blowing kisses on dice? We wanted to play off of this glossy stereotype a bit and decided to create a spot showing ordinary people in extraordinary moments. Enter the high speed.

The High Speed Effect
Everyone looks cool in slow motion. Even your grandma would look like a badass if you filmed her in slow motion walking away from an exploding retirement home. There’s just something intrinsically dramatic about slow mo. I had a conversation with Greg, one of the grips on the shoot, about this topic. Greg’s theory is that when people watch something in slow motion, it engages the part of the brain that processes important, life-or-death information. You know when something dramatic or traumatic happens people say, “I felt like it was happening in slow motion”? Same thing. I have no scientific evidence for this theory, but it seems like a good hunch. At any rate, I was looking to use high speed to elevate the drama of these scenes and create a surreal perspective of the “jackpot” moment.

First Impressions
Ok, onto the technical stuff. The goto cam for this kind of work is usually the Phantom HD or, now, the Phantom Flex. I really, really wanted to use the Flex for this project since its native ISO 1000 would have been handy in the dimly lit casino. But, I just didn’t have the budget for that cam. I decided to go with the Photron BC2 at less than half the cost of the Flex. In a perfect world, budget wouldn’t matter, alas, you know the rest.

Here’s my overall impression of the Photron. It is a pretty capable cam, providing that you feed it enough light and don’t dink around too deep in the poorly designed and confusing software. We shot with Redpro Primes wide open and I was pleased with the sharpness of the 1080p uncompressed tiffs. It was sharp without looking “sharpened.”

Framerates
The camera shoots 1080p at up to 2000fps. Plenty fast for my purposes. As the resolution is decreased, the frame rates go up, all the way to 86,400fps at a postage stamp sized 256 x 32. Sidenote: filming 30 seconds at 86,000fps would give you 32 HOURS of 24p footage!

There is such a thing as too slow. For people, moving at typical “people-speed,” I found anything above 250fps started to look a little languid. I think a good slow motion shot is a balance between slowing down the subject matter, while retaining enough motion that the shot is still dynamic. Some of the closeup stuff in the restaurant (the dough and stir fry) we shot at 1000fps. The wine pour I shot at 1500fps but ended up speeding it up in post. (Will post the full restaurant spot when it’s ready)

Shutter Speed and Lighting
When you turn the camera on it makes the sound, “Nom nom nom” as it gobbles up all the available light in the room and cries, “Feed me MOAR!” Well, that’s not exactly fair considering it’s not so much the camera but the shutter speeds that eat the light. All but a few clips were shot with a 180 degree shutter so shooting at 1000fps meant the shutter speed needed to be 1/2000 sec. That’s an additional five and a half stops of light. This would be the equivalent of lighting 24fps to an ISO setting of 15. Even though the BC2 is rated to about 640 ISO, we were still blowing breakers on a few of the wide shots.

Workflow
Like most high speed cams, the Photron has an internal RAM buffer that has to be downloaded between each take. Unlike the Phantom, which can offload its clips to a proprietary Cinemag in a matter of seconds, the Photron is tethered to a laptop and needs minutes, precious minutes to offload. Downloads on this shoot took between 4 and 8 minutes each. That may not seem like a long time, but when you’re on set with a crew, clients, and hot lights starting to melt furniture, 4 minutes seems like an eternity. With this cam, there’s no such thing as, “Oh lemme just get a quick shot of that.”
Each take lives in a folder on the lappy’s external drive as a sequence of uncompressed 16bit tiffs. Before editing, I pulled the image sequences into After Effects, did a light color pass, and then exported to ProRes444.

Interface
The BC2 was driven by Photron software running on a PC. I hated it. It was messy, convoluted, and not exactly stable. The software clearly reflects the camera’s industrial beginnings with sciency features that I can’t imagine any cinematographer needing. While it wasn’t exactly user-friendly, it didn’t take long too long to find the settings that I needed to regularly access like, white/black balance, color temp, frame rate and resolution. A redesign of the software could make the camera so much easier to use. As it is right now, it’s not a cam you can rent without a tech, or a crash course in the software (I had the latter). The PC was the weakest link in this whole cameracomputer chain. At one point, the production ground to a halt because the AC power connector on the laptop was loose and wouldn’t keep the computer charged. Stress.

Final Thoughts
Overall, I think the BC2 is a really affordable way to make great high-speed images. It’s not the fastest workflow and I probably wouldn’t rent it again for a time sensitive shoot (anything with a call sheet and schedule). But if you’ve got lots of time and lots of light, the BC2 is a great option. It’s not exactly a straight forward workflow, but it’s not daunting either. I tell you though, someone needs to make a self-contained, all-in-one, affordable high-speed cam. Oh, look! Fastec is doing just that with their new TS3 camera, 720fps at 720p. Hoping to get my grubby mits on that cam when it comes out.

And that’s all I have to say about that. I leave you with one of my favorite :30 “spin offs” from this shoot.

Let’s talk about HDR. If you don’t know what HDR is, congratulations. Clearly you live in the real world and don’t spend much time online. Bring yourself up to speed by doing a quick search for the tag “HDR” on Flickr; you’ll find thousands of examples. Some of them are good, a lot of them are not so good. HDR is like the Sarah Palin of photo techniques, you either love it, or you hate it. Either way, it’s possible that your passion is misplaced. You see, HDR is not the culprit, it’s what you do with the HDR that creates the love-it-hate-it images.

First let’s define some terms. HDR means “high dynamic range.” That’s all it means. In the purest sense, there’s no such thing as “bad HDR.” High dynamic range isn’t good or bad, it simply is or isn’t. You CAN have high dynamic range and higher dynamic range, but you CAN’T have good high dynamic range, and bad high dynamic range. It doesn’t even make sense grammatically.

So how much DR before you can call it an HDR? Well, it’s relative. But in photographic terms, it’s safe to assume an HDR is any image that contains more dynamic range than what can be achieved in a single exposure. By taking multiple exposures, one can expose for the entire range of light in a scene and merge all that dynamic range into one, single, juicy, 32-bit, high dynamic range image. And you’ve got no way to view it.

No, seriously. There’s no way to view your 32-bit HDR cause there are no 32-bit display devices. Your computer monitor is only 8-bit (or 6, in some cases). Viewing a true HDR image on your computer monitor is like looking at a picture through a cardboard tube – you can only see 8 bits of it at a time. This is where tone mapping comes into play.

In order to display a 32-bit image on an 8-bit device, all those extra bits have to be squeezed, bent, tricked, and otherwise coerced into an 8-bit container. And just like how the alien bug from
Men in Black squeezes into his “Edgar suit,” the result is not always pretty. This Bendy McTrickybits process is called Tone Mapping. There’s good tone mapping and bad tone mapping (subjectively speaking, of course). Many people over do it by cranking the tone mapping to eleven. This what gives “HDR” photography a bad rap. But, remember, you’re not looking at an HDR image, you’re looking at a tone mapped image.

Now that we’ve got that all cleared up, lemme talk about this quick clip. I saw a video online recently of some “HDR Tonemapped” scenes. The gentleman who put it together referenced about 5 different pieces of software he used to get the effect. Seemed like a lot of exporting, importing, and reassembling. Being the workflow junkie that I am, it got me thinking, “there’s got to be a better way!”

The below clip was slapdashed together using only the shadow/highlight filter in Premiere (also found in After Effects). I’ve included a screen shot of my effect settings. Some people like this look. I don’t really, or at least not in the amounts that I’ve used it above.

Go, play. See if you can make something that actually looks good with tone mapping. You don’t necessarily need a crazy workflow full of still images and obscure software. Just use the shadow/highlights filter. But beware: scary, ugly, noisy monsters live in the shadows of your footage. Especially if you’re shooting HDSLRs with its less-than-ideal compression. It falls apart really quickly. Love it or hate it? Feel free to sound off in the comments.

Sometimes I think the creative process is akin to Frodo’s epic journey to return his bling to Mt. Doom. Frodo had the destination in mind, but no idea how to get there. The way was fraught with danger, despair, self-doubt, successes, failures, and giant hobbit-eating spiders (aka clients).

Just like Frodo, finding the path to your creative destination requires discovery and exploration. You’ll probably go down a lot of rabbit trails and dead ends before arriving. The more practice you have the better your sense of direction and intuition (don’t follow the lights), but there’s always an element of unknown when creating something new. The creative process is just that, a process.

This process of discovery is always evident when I’m in the editing stage of a project (NerdAlert: I use Final Cut Pro). For me, editing looks like this: I have a hunch, I try it then review. If it works, keep going. If it doesn’t work? Well, I back track and go a different direction. Slowly a path begins to emerge and by the end of the process my work space is littered with unsed chunks of ideas, directions, arcs, moments, colors, fonts, and empty cherry Diet Pepsi bottles.

OK, finally to my point. The video above is one of these leftover bits from the last project. I had a hunch, mocked it up in After Effects, then felt it was too flashy for the subject matter. So rather than let the clip sit unused and dejected on my hard drive, I’m going to set it free in hopes that you might be able to use it.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly drag and drop project file. You’ll need After Effects CS5 and plugins Optical Flares and Trapcode Particular. If you have all of those you’re good to go. Change out the text. Put a video clip on the stage. Maybe add a crowd with waving hands. Feel free to tweak and modify however you see fit.

Stay tuned to this space. I’m rather enjoying giving stuff away. Hope to have more goodies for you in the near future.