Elena Goddard - "Energy"

"Hello again. The song we've already done a video to, has another part to it - the non-ballad version, that will be released back to back. If you're around in the next month or so, I'd love to shoot something for this with a very dark dramatic theme (opposite of our ballady beach shoot)." - Elena Goddard 8/20/2019

The fact that these things ever even see the light of day still amazes me. I know I'd read someone else mention something similar about putting out personal work, but good lord the time, effort, and resources going into this kind of nonsense is mind-blowing. This is the third music video I've done with [Elena Goddard][1] now and by far my favorite, but unquestionably the most difficult one to pull off. Literally to the VERY last minute before she had her YouTube channel premiere we were running into problems.

WRITTEN & PERFORMED BY: Elena Goddard
DIRECTOR/DP/EDIT: me
CAMERA ASSISTANT: Kyle Vines
MAKEOUT BUDDY: Elias Abraham
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: Lillian Maslen

Originally we'd talked about shooting something much more simple in a graffitied bathroom we'd found in a bar on our side of Brooklyn. It'd probably have been easier to go in that direction, but nooooo... I figured we should go for something more.

Her song is about loving someone but knowing the time wasn't right and that she'd need to let them go. I had her find a makeout buddy and figured we could film with the two of them a bit, get some singles of her in the places they used to frequent, and then land some takes of her performing the song. That was the plan at least. Here's the lookbook/treatment if you're up to check it out.

The first reference Elena sent over was the Break My Broken Heart video by Winona Oak and she liked the idea of colored lighting. I knew we'd be short on time, crew, and we'd not have access to power at our locations, so for sure we'd need battery-powered lights. This past year I've had a few chances to work with the Astera Titans and knew they'd work for the colors we'd want plus they're battery-powered.

Elena isn't signed to a label so she's footing the bill for these projects. We had my camera and lens package and a $400 budget. I rented a car that doubled as our picture car and a means to get gear around, two 4' Astera Titans and some misc. grip from Lightbulb Grip & Electric, plus a couple of Gold Mount batteries and a Smoque filter from a buddy of mine named Dave Adams. I was also able to snag Kyle Vines again to AC on the project at a crazy discounted rate. I swear one day I'll be able to have him pull focus so I don't embarrass myself with soft footage making the edit.

Originally we'd talked about shooting something much more simple in a graffitied bathroom we'd found in a bar on our side of Brooklyn. It'd probably have been easier to go in that direction, but nooooo... I figured we should go for something more.

Her song is about loving someone but knowing the time wasn't right and that she'd need to let them go. I had her find a makeout buddy and figured we could film with the two of them a bit, get some singles of her in the places they used to frequent, and then land some takes of her performing the song. That was the plan at least. Here's the lookbook/treatment if you're up to check it out.

The first reference Elena sent over was the Break My Broken Heart video by Winona Oak and she liked the idea of colored lighting. I knew we'd be short on time, crew, and we'd not have access to power at our locations, so for sure we'd need battery-powered lights. This past year I've had a few chances to work with the Astera Titans and knew they'd work for the colors we'd want plus they're battery-powered.

Elena isn't signed to a label so she's footing the bill for these projects. We had my camera and lens package and a $400 budget. I rented a car that'd double as our picture car and a means to get gear around, two 4' Astera Titan LED tubes and some misc. grip from Lightbulb Grip & Electric, plus a couple of Gold Mount batteries and a Smoque filter from a buddy of mine named Dave Adams. I was also able to snag Kyle Vines again to AC on the project at a crazy discounted rate. I swear one day I'll be able to have him pull focus so I don't embarrass myself with soft footage making the edit.

There were a few happy accidents too. By far my favorite shot is Elena singing in the backseat of the car. I'd picked the spot in advance knowing the existing lighting would get us pretty far. I'd just need to add the red accent on camera right and augment the levels coming in on camera left. We were shooting near the base of an above-ground section of the subway and during our first take we had a train come by. The interior lights of the train made some great-looking reflections on the car windows. We also lucked out with some cars driving by during one of the make-out shots and a couple of her performance takes near the wall. Honestly, we didn't have the resources to add much intentional motion to our footage so the happy accidents adding some subtle on-screen movement were by all means welcomed.

One Year Later

Last year around this time a goal of mine was to write a weekly blog post. It's not like I had something to say, but more the idea of setting up false deadlines each week forcing myself into making stuff. It's been a full year now and thankfully I've stuck to the plan – for the most part.

2018 had me shooting some of my favorite images and pushing myself with personal work, but good grief it was f**king tough personally and professionally. Uprooting and moving to New York City is unquestionably the hardest thing I've ever done. No amount of planning and prep would've been enough but we followed through and did the thing. We're all in New York now and floored at the possibilities ahead. Still, I'm not sleeping well considering all the unknowns.

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A sickly and slightly overweight version of me has followed me around the last year or so whispering "Hey dummy, how are you going to pay for all this?" He's stinking up and stretching out my clothes while also shooting footage with my name on it that's just bad enough for people to not hire me again. On top of that I've somehow started following this waste of time – and his friends – on Instagram and can't look away. I'm constantly reminded that he's on much better projects than I am and people are lining up to work with this turd fest only to have him flake out for another project in some other exotic location. I'm not too upset with his success though – he's still sick and overweight plus his footage is out of focus and not framed well. Oh, and all his stuff looks like everyone else's.

By no means am I the day to this dumbass's night: I'm not the hero my dog thinks I am, I for sure need to be running more, and good grief I'm ready to be spending more time on ideas rather than trying to "move to New York City." I've mentioned it before, but I met with a director not long ago who asked me something along the lines of "What are your goals? What do you want to do?" I just remember the ocean of sheer panic I fell into while trying to even mumble something intelligent. Even my desk stapler would've known I was failing at being a person at that moment.

"Screw you stapler. What have you done with your life?" - Me

I'm a fan of routines and the false deadline of a weekly blog post has been good for me; it'll not see the chopping block anytime soon. I'm also a fan of Chuck Close's idea about inspiration being for amateurs.

"Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere." - Chuck Close

See you next week...

So we made a thing

No clue. Absolutely no clue what was going on here. I'm just diggin' the fact that I've got friends who trust me and are basically up to make stuff no matter what.

In the latter part of June, I'd bought a one-way ticket to New York City with plans to connect with friends, make stuff, and meet new people. In prepping for the trip I reached out to Olivia Abiassi to see if she'd be up to make something while I was in town.

Olivia is an actress friend of mine who I stumbled upon while casting a short film a few years ago. I say stumbled because she was actually off-camera reading the female lead's part to help with the male talent's audition video. In hearing her read I immediately knew she was the lead I was looking for. She worked her tail off for that little passion project of mine and her performance was more than I could ask for. Fast forward a couple years she's now living and working in NYC.

Normally I'll put solid time and effort into prepping for a shoot. This project was more or less thrown together during my 45-minute subway commute from Washington Heights to her apartment on the Lower East Side. There was no scout ahead of time; not even a decent concept. Just me plowing through her Instagram account and listening to a TON of Logic's "The Incredible True Story" album.

A few months ago she had posted a short clip of herself prepping for something and accidentally – and absolutely – struck gold. She's got a great sense of humor and doesn't seem to take herself very seriously. She's also got great eyes and facial expressions which absolutely deliver on camera.

This simple Instagram post opened the idea of her getting completely lost in her own world and caring less about what people around her thought. In just about everything I try to make there's a bit of me braided in somewhere. For this utterly informal short I started her off buried in her phone trying to keep up with either the nonsense of social media or the non-stop stream of the world's bad news. In putting on her headphones, she's able to escape for a bit.

From a production standpoint, the headphones were key. I sent her a playlist I'd put together during my commute, but we ended up keeping Logic's "Fade Away" on repeat and that kept her movement timing consistent. I on the other hand couldn't hear the music, gave some basic direction, and just had to keep up.

Just about every movement piece I've done recently has been shot off-speed. There's a TON of grace and forgiveness in shooting in higher frame rates, but for this piece, I wanted to challenge myself with shooting in real time and intentionally using longer takes in the edit vs. the easy out with quick pacing to hide mistakes.

The edit took a bit longer than I expected in trying to sync her movements to the music as well as the un-rehearsed and un-controllable aspects of the footage we got. There were plenty of interesting-looking shots that I just couldn't use because they didn't fit the music – not to mention the unusably soft shots I blew focus on.

We're not curing cancer or anything, but we did have a very loose storyline with a beginning, middle, and end. We honestly just wandered around the Lower East Side not far from her apartment, looking for good and interesting light. The ice cream break was intentional, but accidentally hitting someone on the subway with her purse while she was dancing wasn't. Thank God that very large man was cool as hell.

UPDATE: As per usual, the footage from this film is available for licensing over at Filmsupply. Speaking of footage licensing, here's an example of how it was used to create an actual spot. Thank goodness too because the proceeds helped me pay rent in May 2020 during the Covid-19 nonsense.

Could've Been Bike Shorts...

"You could always make bike shorts if your idea doesn't work out."

To the nice lady at the craft store who sold me a couple yards of Spandex: Thanks for not tripping out when I showed you some weird reference images on Pinterest and then asked me to come back later to show what I ended up making.

So yeah, this one went super dark and ghostly. Like the way these things normally start off, I'd been sitting on a handful of reference images and used them as a starting point to make something; I'm suuuper interested in selective focus and in-camera effects.

Footage from this film is available for licensing over at Filmsupply.

The internet told me I'd need to shoot through some kind of transparent layer, so I started experimenting with different types of plastic diffusion and fabrics. I was looking for something translucent that would look interesting on camera when you touched it. A trip to an arts and crafts store had me finding a couple different types of Spandex that were on sale. Figured I'd need a frame to stretch the fabric to keep it taught, so it was off to Home Depot to spend like $3 on two 1" x .5" x 8' pieces of cheap lumber. I used screws to keep the pieces together and attached the Spandex using spring clips.

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Once I got the framed fabric and my camera set up, it took a bit of experimenting before I finally landed on a look. I'd bought both white and black versions of Spandex and tried out each one individually as well as layering them. The white looked more interesting with the lighting and how the shadows worked. Having the black layered behind the white kept the setup from being translucent.

Initially, I had the lighting setup on camera right with no diffusion and in front of the fabric. That made for some interesting-looking long shadows on camera as I touched the Spandex screen, but wasn't the look I wanted. With how I pictured the edit and knowing I'd never be able to reproduce the light-to-dark gradient across the screen, I moved the light above the frame but still front-lighting the fabric. Most of the reference images I had were backlit, but I wasn't able to reproduce that look with how small a space I was using. Moving the overhead light just behind the fabric worked for the space I had and gave me the look I wanted. I didn't use any of the footage with my hands in front of the backlit fabric, but it still made for some interesting-looking imagery as the light interacted with the fabric stretching the other direction.

A monitor tethered to the camera allowed me to see what I was doing as I was interacting with the fabric. The initial imagery I was getting looked super dark and ghostly and reminded me of a Nine Inch Nails track I'd heard from an interview with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the Song Exploder podcast – I'd highly recommend checking it out if you've not heard it already.

The initial test footage was shot at 48 frames/second but was still too fast for the look I wanted. 60 frames/second didn't work either, so I lowered my camera resolution from 8k to 6k widescreen so I could get to 99.9 frames/second on my RED Weapon Helium. The movement speed looked right, but I ran into flicker issues with the lighting and 180° shutter. The FLICKERfree iPhone app fixed that by letting me know I needed a 299.7° shutter angle. Thanks internet...

Another unexpected result from the testing was how flexible the look was once I got it into post – obviously though working with a high-end camera and raw .r3d files doesn't hurt. My reference images were black and white, but after experimenting with different color temperatures I again fell in love with shooting with tungsten lighting on a white background at 4500k. Neither the blacks nor whites were being clipped in the raw .r3d files so there was still all the color information to use in post. I kept the in-camera dark and ghostly look for this edit and didn't do any color correction or grading, but can easily imagine other possibilities with this footage.

After 8pm

St. Anne the Wife and I have two kids: one is 5 years old, and the other is 11 months. Turns out neither of them can be trusted to cook, bathe, and/or get themselves ready for bed on their own, so we pretty much close up shop after 6pm for family stuff. By the time we get those two tiny humans fed, cleaned up, and to sleep, Anne and I basically collapse from the day only to get up the next morning to start all over.

A couple weeks ago, St. Anne and The Boys were out of town for a few days and I made it a point to be out after 8pm. That's a freakin' double rainbow covered in unicorns around here, so I lined up a shoot with an absolute BEAST of a dancer I met through Instagram named Emmett Prince. He's a dance student at the University of Central Oklahoma and was up to shoot around downtown Oklahoma City after dark with a couple complete strangers.

Somehow I also wrangled another two filmmaker buddies of mine to help out on our shoot: John Dewberry is a saint and a kick-arse AC; Steve Mathis's last real jobs were gaffing Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok, so he basically just puts up with me. As per usual, the footage from this film is available for licensing over at Filmsupply.

In getting all this nonsense together, I had a couple key reference images and videos plus I was listening to a ton of Frank Ocean and Anderson .Paak. There wasn't a proper storyline, but I had the locations in mind and I wanted to work with a black male dancer in his early 20s. If you're up for it, here's the link to download the lookbook as well as the music playlist we used during the shoot.

All the nervousness kicked in right before our 8pm call time and I was ready to puke in the parking lot just to get it over with. The three guys on the project were donating their time and I made sure to keep the shoot under two-ish hours total with a round of drinks on me afterwards. I'd scouted earlier in the week and lucked out with all of the locations being pretty close to each other. The look at the first location didn't end up working and we only made it to three of the other five locations I had in mind. The footage we were getting felt right and I had no problem nixing the other two spots so we could keep within the promised time frame. Crazy thanks to John the AC for snapping some behind-the-scenes pics at our last location.

There's always the urge to just throw money at a project and this one was no different. That being said, I didn't have the money to throw at it. And two, I know through personal experience that throwing money at a thing isn't always the best solution. The goal was to shoot this project in a way where I was participating with the talent vs. simply observing them at a distance. This could've been a great situation to break out my Steadicam setup, but I knew I'd need to rent out a wireless follow-focus and monitor package for my AC. An EasyRig would've been IDEAL to balance out a handheld look and not straight-up kill my back, but again I'd need to rent one of those. "No self-respecting Director/DP would go into creative battle without the proper tools," right?

I'd packed my Steadicam but ended up not using it after only a few minutes – the camera angles just weren't right; Thank goodness I didn't drop the money on a wireless follow focus and monitor kit rental. I'm not going to say an EasyRig wouldn't have been helpful, but not shooting with one actually freed me up to try camera angles and movements that I wouldn't have otherwise.

One key piece of additional gear was a battery-powered Bluetooth speaker. I've done shoots with music sputtering out through my iPhone, but the sound quality and volume are passable at best. We used a JBL Flip 4 connected to my phone and it worked like a champ. The burrito-sized speaker was loud enough, sounded great, and the setup was dummy-proof. Either John the AC was holding it or I had it clipped to the small messenger bag I had on me throughout the shoot.

For the gear-heads, we shot with my RED Weapon Helium at 8k widescreen and either 60 or 48 frames/second depending on the light levels. In terms of lensing, my 25mm Zeiss CP.2 emphasized the on-screen talent and his performance but didn't separate him from the locations like a tighter lens would. I swear if I were forced to choose between a 25mm lens or food and water, I'd still pick food and water but I'd have to think about it for a minute.

We were shooting with existing light at each location, so we tested to make sure we weren't getting a flicker fight between shutter speeds and the light fixtures. The first two locations had no beef with a typical 180° shutter, but at one point we had to break out John's FLICKERfree Calculator app and adjust accordingly.

Knowing that we'd be dealing with lower light levels, I evicted the Standard OLPF that's set up camp in my RED for the Low Light version. It’s the first time I'd used it so I made sure to check out test footage online beforehand – which for the most part ended up being a waste of time. There are very few situations where I'd use the Skin Tone-Highlight OLPF, but I feel like the Low Light optimized version helped to give me just a bit more light, especially with my T2.1 lens and shooting around ISO 1600-2000 on the high-end. All of this footage is straight out of camera BTW using RED's RedGamma 4 / Dragon Color 2 look – which I absolutely dig. Given the opportunity, I'd love to see what a qualified colorist could do with the raw .r3d files.

DIRECTOR, CAMERA, & EDITOR - me
FEATURING - Emmett Prince
CAMERA ASSISTANT - John Dewberry
GAFFER - Steve Mathis
MUSIC - "White" by tiedy ky

Sources Sources Everywhere

I'm assuming part of being a creative is constantly feeding your reference bank so you'll have something to pull from when you're making stuff yourself. Without some kind of reference, inspiration, or source, I'm more than likely just going to keep doing whatever it is I'm already doing. I'm probably also not likely to grow or improve.

Years ago I had a notebook where I'd take an image from a newspaper or magazine, paste/tape it to a page, and then write a short story or even just a couple paragraphs about who/what was in the image and/or how it made me feel. There was ABSOLUTELY nothing profound about it or anything I wrote, but it was a fantastic practice for the kind of work and projects I'm passionate about today. Obviously, the internet has changed just about everything, so now I collect references in both digital formats and physical notebooks and draw from those sources and ideas for new projects.

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Pinterest and Instagram seem to be my major sources for interesting and inspiring imagery online. I subscribe to the print edition of The New Yorker and try to read a good deal of the articles each week, but I primarily keep my subscription for the photos. I'm also constantly pulling screenshots from videos as well as anything else I see on the internet, in print, and in person that looks interesting and set it aside to hopefully use down the road.

It's always great to see new work from people you admire and be able to link their imagery to other stuff you've seen. It's also hella boring to keep seeing visual trends after they've run their course – I'm looking at you 2009-11 and all your DSLR bokeh tests. I'm praying the "I only shoot film cameras" and "let's only shoot with super colorful Quasar Tubes and Sky Panels" trends wrap up soon. I'll fight you though if you start talking crap about my lens flares... They're freakin' beautiful.

I'm constantly curating my Instagram account and following the rabbit holes I come across. I'm pretty sure they led me to my regular rotation of sites like LensCulture, BOOOOOOOM!, Colossal, It's Nice That, and who knows how many others.

More and more though I'm intentionally looking for inspiration that's outside my normal online sources. Older photography and art books at the public library are a freakin' gold mine. It's incredibly refreshing to stumble across interesting work that's not suggested by some algorithm. I'll just take a picture with my phone and file it away with the others.

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Monsters and Night Scouts

Anne and The Boys are out of town for a few days this week. It's always weird having the house to myself overnight and having even a short respite from parental responsibilities. I joke about Anne being the family quarterback and me being the JV waterboy, but she NO DOUBT runs the parent show around these parts. That being said, not running the dinner service, being wrist-deep in the day's dirty bottles, and coercing two small children to go the f**k to sleep, I made the most of last night and was out before, during, and after dusk like some kind of monster.

The better three-quarters of my family are off visiting relatives with her mom. They're planners – and better than me – so they arranged their trip while I was working the deadCenter Film Festival this week. If you're up for it, go watch what on-camera talent Katie Parker and I put together for them last year.

I was also out last night scouting for another small personal project shooting this week. For scouts, I'm normally out with my Canon 5D Mark III & 24-70 lens kit plus the Artemis app on my iPhone. The DSLR is out there because the images are better and I can do more with the camera, but having an iPhone app that will show the aspect ratio with a specific camera, resolution, and lens is incredibly helpful in prep. Sidenote: I promise I shot these last night; The app dates are off.

If I'm out by myself, I'll shoot my clenched fist to get an idea of what the light will look like. The knuckles and creases are a quick stand-in for the shapes of the face and eye socket. Lower light levels don't always play nice with my camera's auto-focus, so I'll open my hand up to give it at least a fighting chance. I've also seen people online carrying around black marbles to check for eyelight – but I'm not dealing with that kind of nonsense. Probably should though...

A Lighting Test

So this was a different thing. By far the most moody and stylized projects I’ve done to date versus what normally fills up my hard drives. I’ve been sitting on a couple reference images for a long time that I absolutely wanted to use but for one reason or another hadn't gotten around to shooting. The whole idea was wrapped around lighting, body structure, and direction. Well, that and my thing of always wanting to do stuff and a goal to post to my blog at least once a week this year.

In putting a treatment together – or at least a lookbook – I dug through a ton of references I’d already had stored away. I’ve also been listening to a TON of Anderson .Paak so I knew his music would be playing a major part. By the way, I'm awful at coming up with titles, so ignore the "Graceful Strength" part if you download the lookbook. This whole thing was more about a lighting test than anything proper. The footage from this film is available for licensing over at Filmsupply.

There were also the self-imposed restrictions of a simple background, using my own equipment (short a couple c-stands and apple boxes), and keeping the talent either seated or lying down. I’d love to talk about my incredible studio space with all its incredible amenities, nice leather couches, and cases of LaCroix Sparkling Water, but instead, I’ll show you my bedroom where I pushed everything up against the walls before the shoot and then reset before St. Anne the Wife got home.

Initially, another model was lined up but I reached out to someone else due to scheduling conflicts. Madison Bready is an OU student I met years ago and worked with a few times recently. Turns out Madi was absolutely the right person for the shoot. Cynthia Dreier is a makeup artist I’ve worked with on quite a few projects and she killed it in making sure Madi looked her best and kept us on track during the shoot. Did I mention Madi is an OU student because we only had like 90 minutes to do makeup and shoot everything in between her classes that afternoon. Oh, and did I mention I was super happy with what we got? Because dang…

Gear-wise, we shot with my RED Weapon Helium at 8k, 60 fps, 2:1 aspect ratio, and 15:1 compression with my Zeiss CP.2 len set (25, 35, & 50). I'd also set my white balance to 4500k to warm up the tungsten light and white backdrop – along with her skin tones and hair color. That being said, all the footage in the edit is straight out of camera; I didn't do any additional color work to the footage (or still frames). I also tried a step printing technique shooting at 8 fps and a 360° shutter angle, but it was in the last couple minutes of the shoot and I wasn’t really happy with the footage; I should’ve shot closer to 4 fps. For lighting, I set up an Arri 650 head through a couple scrims and two layers of diffusion. A bunch of black fabric hung on camera right helped control the spill. I’d roughed in the lighting setup using a styrofoam head on a light stand before the talent got there.

Post-wise, I knew the 8k files were going to be a monster. We shot about 325 GB of footage which isn’t nuts with my camera package, but honestly a pain to edit such large files. Adobe Premiere on my Mac Pro setup will handle it like a champ, but having to lower the playback resolution to 1/8 or 1/16 just to just slog through the .R3D files is like tying that champ’s arm behind his back before going into a fight. I’d worked with offline edits WAY the hell back in the days of SD footage and tape decks, but this simple YouTube tutorial pretty much changed my workflow and is keeping me from looking so longingly at those fancy Alexa Minis and their blissful 4k sensor sizes.

Music is always the hardest part for me during an edit. I promise I’m all about supporting other creatives and paying to license music, but after a genuinely solid effort I couldn’t find or afford something that fit as well – in my opinion – as this Anderson .Paak track. 99% of my edits start with a music track – especially with personal projects; It's got to feel right or else it's not worth the effort.

After I'd gotten somewhat through a rough edit (and several glasses of whiskey) I reached out to a few other creatives for feedback. Crazy thanks to those guys for the insanely solid ideas, helping me step back from how close I was to the work, and look at what I was missing.

Good grief I hope to do more of this soon.

Steadicam Aero 30

For someone who's shot a ton of handheld in an EasyRig over the years and seriously considers it part of my shooting style, adding a Steadicam to the mix has been kinda mind-blowing. We shot this simple test with Madison Bready in just over an hour one afternoon in an impromptu shoot organized just before lunch.

In addition to the Steadicam Aero 30 rig I'd just bought earlier in the week, I'd rented a wireless follow focus and monitor setup from lensrentals.com for a shoot the next couple of days. After a handful of texts, emails, and phone calls John and Madi met me at a coffee shop near downtown Oklahoma City to hang out for an hour or so and make something.

For sure there's plenty of "Hey look at what you can do with a Steadicam!" nonsense in the edit, but being able to move and operate a camera in new ways is like kissing for the first time. Yeah, you're really bad at it, but it's awesome and sure makes your heart beat faster.

Ronins and Movis booted sliders from the trendy/relevant filmmaker pedestal a few years ago but I'd only shot with them a handful of times. Yeah, I've seen some awesome shots with those tools, but I never really bought into it. My back always hurt after using them and I never felt like I had the amount and type of control I wanted.

All the conversations I'd had around stabilized camera movement kept circling back to Steadicams being the way to go. There were a few camera department guys I trust and constantly pester here in town plus the LA steadicam op I connected with working on a recent feature. They all talked about how much practice it takes to even be remotely passable as a Steadicam op and I absolutely agree. I've got a ways to go. Oh, and I now realize I've traded the back pain from an EasyRig for hip pain delivered via a Steadicam vest.

Camera-wise, everything was shot with existing light on my RED Weapon Helium at 8k widescreen, recorded to 4k ProRes, and a Zeiss 25mm CP.2. None of this nonsense was color-corrected or graded. The music is another rad Louis Futon remix from Soundcloud.

Crazy thanks to [John Dewberry][1] and Madison Bready for putting up with and helping me shoot a test like this. I've been working with John over the years and he had come over a day or two before to help me initially set up the kit. I'd been doing some simple tests and practicing around the house, but nothing beats actual time working with talent in front of the camera and an AC pulling focus. Seriously hope to do more with both of them very soon.

deadCenter 2017

deadCenter is easily my favorite week of the summer in Oklahoma City. Over the years – give or take a couple – I've been able to work with the film festival in covering events and screenings with on-camera talent Katie Parker. Here's this year's recap video.

 

Oh, and another thing I got to be part of screened this year in Okie Shorts. Check out the link to Illustrators Anonymous for more info about our film.