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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.

There’s nothing sexy about gastroenterology, until now.

Wanted to share a lil’ project I created under the guidance of agency hotness Grady Britton from Portland, Oregon. Grady is chocked full of good people and good ideas. Their copywriting is so sharp (crowd: How sharp is it?) I had to wear protective goggles while editing.

March is colon cancer awareness month and this video is part of the microsite screeningisbelieving.com. Check it out. Get screened. Be alive.

Here’s the FAQ for the technical stuff.
Camera: Red One MX for easier overcranking.
Lighting: 2 Kino 4banks and a few fresnels.
Crew: Myself, Lyn, Keaten Abbott, and Patrick Eggert (thanks, guys)
Post: 1080p masters from Redcine edited in FCP. Color correction done with MB Looks and Colorista II.
Graphics: After Effects. Flash pops done with Optical Flares from videocopilot.net.

I have a deep affection for the Redwood forests of Northern California. This is my best attempt to capture the reverence I feel when in the presence of these slumbering giants. My friend Kallie wrote this after our group’s annual camping trip to the coast. The words were too beautiful to ignore.

Presenting the continuing adventures of our wee beastie, Stella.

We shot this about 6 months ago for Sunset Magazine and have been keeping it on the down low while they used it internally. Excited to finally share.

Quick backstory: through the power of the Internets, Sunset Magazine (West Coast Lifestyle Magazine) found last year’s day-in-the-life flick of Stella and wanted something similar. The goal was to showcase a particular pet-friendly road trip in Northern California and Stella was just the dog for the job.

Since Stella responds best to her owners, I decided it would be most effective for Lyn and I to be out in front of the camera for this project. It was an interesting experience directing from the business end of the camera. Thankfully, I had the brotastic Tyler Faires lensing this one.

One of the unique challenges with this project was that all of the scenes needed to be in chronological and geographical order of the road trip (although I’ve deviated a little in the above “director’s cut”). It was a fun challenge to create something that is half narrative, half documentary, two-quarters music video, and seven-eigths social commentary on the proletariat exploitation of industrial unionism by the neo-Marxist class of socialist objectors. K, maybe not that last part. Just seeing if you were still reading.

I threw together a few behind the scenes clips since that’s what the kids do these days. Thanks for watching!

This was a relatively low budget project and I have many volunteers to thank for helping make this project happen.
Crew: Tyler Faires, Ryan Hutchinson, Foster Lovelace, and Daniel & Michelle Gallagher for helping shoot the last scene which was cut. Sorry guys, at least we got to hang out. Additional Thanks: Greg Dean from The Fly Shop, Sports LTD, Chester Chamber of Commerce, Treats Dog Company, Hat Creek RV and Resort,
Mt. Shasta Farmers Market, and Gawayne & Shelly, Chloe.

So, in the spirit of demystification, I’d like to deconstruct my latest commercial spot for you. If you think you might have the stuff to produce commercial work but aren’t sure where to start, maybe this’ll help. Maybe not. Dammit, Jim! I’m a filmmaker not a career counselor!

Have a look:

This particular spot can be broken down into 4 main elements.
1. The Copy – the words that are being said
2. Voice Over – the recording, or performance of the copy
3. Visuals – the stuff you see
4. Music and Sound – music bed and sound effects

If you’ve seen my portfolio you might correctly assume that I’ve worked with this client quite a bit. The message and branding have already been dialed in so I’m using those guidelines when developing the spot.

Now here are my secret weapons for each of these categories.

1. The Copy. I used to write all my own copy before I realized that there are much more talented people than I who actually LIKE writing scripts. After receiving the event details from the client, I wrote up some instructions and forwarded the details to my copy writer, Kallie. She’s worked with this client before and has the quirky Rolling Hills voice dialed in. By the way, Kallie is a pen-for-hire if you’re needing some deftly crafted prose or poetry for a project. You can find her on Twitter.

2. Voice Over. Once the script was approved by the client, I emailed it to Marketing Mania (mktmania.com). I’ve had the pleasure of working with this company for a few years now. They’ve done 95% of the VO work in my portfolio. Since we’d already cast a voice over artist for this client, the turn around was right quick. In less than 24 hours I had an MP3 of the final voice over. Use them. Tell Christina I sent you.

3. Visuals. No cameras were harmed, or even used, in the making of this commercial. This is all After Effects. Some artwork was provided by the client and the rest was created in software or sourced on iStockphoto. My goal was to create an interesting layout of content that illustrates the copy while leading the viewer’s eye through the spot in an engaging way. As you might imagine, this was the most laborious, time-consuming task of the process. The final visuals were assembled and timed in Final Cut Pro.

4. Music and Sound. Right now my favorite production music sites are Pump Audio, Non Stop Music, and Dewolfe Music. You buy only the song you need and pay based on use and distribution – pretty simple. Sound effects were all sourced through Sounddogs.com. Same search and purchase model.

That’s pretty much it.

Obviously, I’m simplifying the process a bit but these are the basic components used to create this particular commercial spot. Now you know (and knowing is half the battle). Feel free to use these resources on your own projects.

One last note: some of the sound effects I needed for this spot were a little specific so we had to roll our own. Thanks for the vocal help, friends.

Here’s a :15 spot I recently finished for local lifestyle magazine, Enjoy. This is the first of a series of seasonal spots that we’ll create throughout the year. The goal was to find a creative and simple way to showcase the Enjoy aesthetic while capturing the “emotional content” of the magazine.

My solution was to recreate a moving version of a typical Enjoy magazine cover. It’s a little different than moving covers I’ve done in the past. This is more like a “cover shot prequel” – a look into the life of the cover before it was a cover. Now the cover not only has a backstory, but a reason for existing. The visual message is that all of the sights, sounds, and (implied) smells of the season are magically locked up inside the magazine. You can experience the sensation of Northern California Living simply by thumbing through the pages of Enjoy. Simple, tidy, boosh.

This shoot was relatively simple. I think we did about 7 or 8 takes to get a couple keepers. For the camera nerds, this was shot on a Canon 5DMkII with a Glidecam in portrait mode. I found that mounting the camera in portrait would mean I’d have to crop less to get to the final cover composition.

A little side note: I live in California. We don’t always have what the rest of the world refers to as “seasons.” For example, two days ago (middle of October) it was over 90 degrees. Finding fall color around here is possible, but not always easy. For this football spot, we shot in a park that was a lovely, late-summer green. A few clicks from Colorista II’s secondaries transformed the park into an autumnal wonderland.

Two of mankind’s greatest inventions, together at last. Note: this is an exploration of what is possible, not necessarily what is practical. Tweet from the street at your own risk!
iPad Version Here

The footage for this demo came from a stock footage fashion shoot we did a couple weeks ago. Here’s a little bit of randomness from the day:

And just because the ladies did such a great job, here’s a few more clips of them posing.

I’ve been itching to try some stop motion lately and luckily found a project that seemed suited to the technique. Here is a TVC I created for a women’s health fair event (sidenote: TVC is industry-speak for “television commercial”). The challenge was to visually show a connection between “health, fitness, and fashion.” Shooting stop motion allowed for some creative transitions that helped tie the three themes together. Notice there are no cuts in this spot.

And now some technical details.
We shot this on a blue paper backdrop. It was lit with a couple of kino four-banks from the front. I went with hot lights instead of strobes to eliminate any potential flickering due to variation in strobe output. Don’t get me wrong, I love AlienBees, but they are not as consistent as, say, Profoto. Plus, shooting with constant light meant I could shoot at a higher fps without waiting for strobes to recycle.

The spot was shot on a Canon 5DMkII in stills mode (not video). I cheated the stop motion where ever I could. Cheating meant having the model move in slow motion and varying the shutter interval manually. It probably averaged somewhere around 4 fps. Other setups required the standard (and tedious) method of positioning the frame, snapping a picture…reposition…snap…repeat ad naseum. Text was done in After Effects using a combination of jitter settings in Path Text and Time Posterization.

I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll say it again. Filmmaking is one long string of creative problem solving. A great example of this is the “toiletry mobile” constructed from a mountain bike wheel and fishing line (see picture below). This little gem allowed the toiletries to easily orbit the model’s head. Big thanks to Casey our fearless model, Anna with make up and hair, Amy the apple eater, and Lyn production manager extraordinaire. Also thanks to InHouse Marketing for all their help with production logistics.

I’ll explain. Traditionally, books and magazines are in a portrait orientation and film and TV are landscape. You don’t read books on your TV and you don’t watch movies in a magazine, until now. With the advent of the iPad (and other handheld computing devices), the lines between print and motion media are being blurred. Books AND movies can now be consumed on the same device. A device you hold in your hand and flip any way you wish.

With the iPad, there’s really no longer a landscape limitation for video. Maybe you want your vid to appear full screen in portrait mode? Maybe you need a long, tall video banner-ad on the side of a digital magazine page? I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more vertically shot video soon. The simplest way to get a portrait orientation out of your video camera is to flip it. Flip it good. So get yourself an L-bracket and get shooting (if you shoot with a fixed monitor you might want to also get yourself a neck brace and a chiropractor).

Last weekend I shot some vertical beach scenes. These were shot on Red with a Canon 10-22mm.

Beach Verticals from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

All this vertical footy got me wondering what some of this might look like as an iPad magazine cover. So I did a little Sunset Magazine mock up. Sunset Mag, if you’re reading this, call me. We’ll talk.

I’m working on a personal project right now about the costal Redwoods. After spending two days deep in the jurassic mists I started to get a little stir crazy. You ever feel like raptors are watching your every move?

In addition to almost twisting my ankle falling off this tree, I think I really scared two old ladies that were walking up the trail behind the camera. There, now no one can say I take myself too seriously. Enjoy the buffoonary.

Spent most of the afternoon working on this diy cable cam. The “pulleys” are sealed-bearing scooter wheels I picked up from a local bike shop. Please chime in if you have any design suggestions. I’m just winging it right now. Once I get the kinks worked out, and some stronger cable, I hope to fly the Red on this thing. In the meantime, here’s a quick clip of the first spin with a sandbag.

A couple weeks ago, we decided to drive to Vancouver to take part in the Olympic festivities. The 5D mkII went with us and I ended up shooting enough video to throw together a quick edit. I do love the portability of this little camera. Almost as much as I love the Winter Olympics.

Last spot in the Better to Play series. I just watched all four back-to-back and I must say I’m pleased with their consistency. Yay for branding. This spot was shot on Red and posted in FCP with some help from Magic Bullet and After Effects (for the motion graphics). I’m pretty sure the idea for this spot came from an episode of Arrested Development. RIP Arrested Development. We’ll always have the banana stand.

We have a rad dog named Stella. She’s a unique little creature. Here’s a little flick Lyn and I created to show a typical day in Stella’s life. This was shot entirely on the Canon 5DMKII. It’s a good proof-of-concept to show that you don’t need a Red camera to create interesting visuals. You just need, well, interesting visuals. The small size and low weight of the MKII made it easy to get some of these hard to reach POV shots. Huge thanks to the talented Jef Gibbons for his musical contribution.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas to all.

Last month Lyn and I jumped down to Santa Rosa to film Levi Leipheimer’s Gran Fondo. I know what you’re thinking, “What the heck is a gran fondo?” Well, according to levisgranfondo.com, it is a “long distance, mass-participation cycling event – not a race.” There, now you know. I must say it was a grand gran fondo. The course wound its way through deep, dark forests and across golden hillsides.

The standard practice for covering cycling events is from the back of a motorcycle, or from a helicopter. Luckily, we had both. Carl Burchfiel, our fearless leader, wrestled a fully-kitted Red inside a tiny chopper while Lyn and I took the motos. I rode behind Bill and Lyn rode behind Val Kilmer Chad on his BMW 1200GS (For the record, I can neither confirm or deny the possibility of me being obsessed with this particular motorcycle).

As I was building out my camera the night before, I discovered I was missing the top handle – probably left it in the rental car in Cleavland. Operating a Red One without a top handle is like trying to cut a steak without thumbs. It’s awkward, and makes you look stupid. Hanging onto the back of a speeding motorcycle made it all the more challenging. I still managed to get some decent moving shots from the back of the bike. The rest of the time we’d try to leapfrog Levi, pull over, and film as he passed. Lyn carried the tripod on her back and our motos rode together. We were a motorcycle gang of two.

It was great meeting Levi. He’s a really nice guy and put together this ride as a fundraiser for the city of Santa Rosa and Forget Me Not Farm.

What I learned on this shoot:
* Size matters – can’t wait until Red comes out with some smaller cameras for this type of work. I hear the Scarlet should be out by 2015 [sarcasm].
* Story, story, story – I was reminded that gorgeous vistas and cycling celebrities do not an interesting video make. It always has, and always will be about the story. Even though we had rough audio and limited time with The Levi, I think I managed to eek out a subtle story line here. Enjoy.

Canon 100mm Macro + Red One. Yes, I hate these things too, but I love to hate them. Working with this guy for about an hour emptied my adrenal glands. Definitely will need a spider wrangler next time. The spider was either sitting completely motionless, or scampering away off the table. That made me think that a subject like this would work really well for a “living photograph.” Click the pic to see what I mean.

I shot this footage last December at the US Grand Prix of Cyclocross in Portland, Oregon. My buddy Chris was racing and I figured this would be a great way to try out the new Birger mount. After shooting for about a year with only the Red 18-50mm, it was pretty liberating to start shooting with some different focal lengths via Birger and EOS glass. This footage has been sitting on my hard drive for the last 8 months and I finally got around to editing some clips together. This is not meant to be anything more than a camera test so don’t look too closely for a theme or story.

I started this project with the Color workflow in mind, but ended up getting much better results out of the new color science in Red Alert. The final tint was done inside FCP with Magic Bullet Looks. Enjoy!

After a few failed attempts at building an underwater housing device for the Red (can you say large open tupperware with a viewing window at the bottom? Me neither), I settled on the simpler task of building one for the lowly Canon HV20. It was pretty easy to do, actually. A few pieces of ABS from Lowes, a little pipe dope, some teflon tape, and a used filter attached with silicon. The final setup setup looked kind of like a weapon with its nifty handle (which I filled with lead weights for stability)

Location of choice was Clear Creek right beneath the falls. Most of the healthy salmon split once I jumped in the ice cold water. But I found this little fella’ that was too blind and sick to scram. So what exactly is all that ick on his face? Well it’s Ich. Or more specifically, Ichthyophonus hoferi. Ich (pronounced “ick”). It’s a well-known disease, (caused by a parasite) and is harmless to humans. It starts as white spots on the fish’s heart and spreads outward to the skin. Ick, indeed.

And while we’re on the topic of fish, please enjoy the photo below of a monstor salmon found in our own Battle creek – Lyn’s old fisheries biologist stomping grounds. The fish was dead when found but was estimated to weigh around 90lbs when alive. You can see from the photo that this fish is about the size of a cow and probably would have fed a family of three for an entire winter.

Scenes from our annual, color-seeking trek into the woods.

For those of you who think we work with a big crew, here is evidence to the contrary. In fact, I think this was the biggest crew we’ve had to-date.  Choreographer, makeup artist (x2), PA, and Agency were all present.

Many, many months ago, I shot some test footage of Dad riding his motorcycle. Finally got around to pulling the footage together – just for fun. Enjoy.

Here’s a quick little video I did for an online photography contest. Hopefully we’ll win some schwag from PocketWizard and Strobist.com.

Matt Hoplin liked this idea and photoshopped me a few extra strobes for good measure.  Matt says:  “I see where you’re going and its just crazy enough that it just might work.  The only problem is you haven’t taken it far enough.  Hence I give you: the human ring flash.  This is the entry level model. The full version I’m building has 250 WS strobes in flash boxes powered by the gas powered electric generator mounted to the back pack. Weighs in at a couple hundred pounds and  9 of them at the lowest setting require a stack of neutral density filters but it’s totally worth it to get those circles in the model’s eyes.”