DIY Ring Light
That’s right, it’s DIY Friday.
Today we found this tutorial for how to make a glamourous ring light for your video machine. More from the creator.
In teamjaded land…
We are doing lots of scheming. It’s that time of year when planning is important, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been keeping busy as well. We were at Pandora last week shooting a talk for their Women in Business series.
The talk was with Lisa Kavanaugh, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Ask.com.
We aslo hit up the 11th Annual Final Cut Users Supermeet. We showed up early and screened our It’s a Rough Life promo in their open screen theater.
You’ll recognize Johnny saluting the crowd in the vendor area. We then checked out all the new gear, and got a close look at Canon’s new C300. Drool. Unfortunately we did not make it to the presentation stage, instead opting for dinner in Dogpatch. We totally planned to go back… just didn’t happen. Word on the ‘net is that the highlights included CS6 and a change in name for the User Group.
Final Cut X 10.03… are we good to go?
Confession… we haven’t delved into FCPX yet.
We were deep in a couple of editorial jobs when it came out, so it would have been unprofessional to jump in. Then all the negative buzz kept us away when those projects finally wrapped. At the very least we couldn’t/ still can’t use our Matrox I/O devices with it, so that was a non-starter. Instead, we upgraded our Adobe package and planned to get cranking on Premiere Pro sooner than later. Well, we still haven’t done that either. We’ve been getting happily by with our trusty FCP7, but now there is a new update to FCPX.
It includes:
Bigger and better multicam
Better XML
Support for layered PSD files
The ability to open FCP7 projects with a $10 plugin/app called 7toX (big one for us)
Support from a grand sampling of the the plugin scene, including Red Giant
And finally support for I/O, just not Matrox… yet.
Read more here. And here. Is it time for us to try it out? Have you tried it? Thoughts? Let us know. The FCP7 road is coming to it’s end, but our post-production journey continues. Where should we go from here?
Fabulous @shamptonian Photography
Our friend Scot Hampton has some amazing new photography up on his website shamptonian.org. For our Tuesdays with Friends, we give you some of his finest.
Scot Hampton is a creative director, DP, photographer, video editor, designer, writer, musician, analog artist, gardner, camp cook and a fan of all things analog, digital or a hybrid of both. Read more about Scot.
Below are a couple of his recent photos, check out his site for more!
You may have heard of Scot from his Award Winning video, The Falcon.
Check out some of his other videos here.
Signal To Noise
This is a rad video we found on vimeo this morning. It’s by Douglas Koke and is a time lapse of footage taken at the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in Socorro, New Mexico. Read more about it here. Happy Monday.
Sh*t San Franciscans Say… Yep
This is the obligatory, us jumping on the band wagon of posting the shit people say meme just about at the time when the thought of seeing another one makes us what to claw our eyes out. But this new one’s about SF! That’s our city! Check it out, via Annie Sloan:
There’s been lot’s of controversy on Youtube and Reddit about the legitmacy of this one. Lot’s of talk about “real” born and raised San Franciscans vs. Tranplanted Hipsters in the Mish. We’re a little closer to the latter, and thus we thought this one was pretty funny. The missing Burning Man section was hilarious. But just to even it out, this video was posted on Reddit by “hokeydokey” as an example of what real SF locals would say.
Pretty Classic.
Pandora Presents: Portugal. The Man
The last couple days we cut three videos for Pandora. It’s a pretty cool series called “Pandora Presents” where Pandora (along with Budweiser) put on a free concert for fans of the band. Basically, if you make a Pandora station for, let’s say “Portugal. The Man” and you live in the city where they’re hosting the show… then they’ll send you an email and you get to go see that band for free. Rad, right? This was their second concert in New York City with Portugal. The Man; the first was with the band Dawes in Portland, OR. Check out the spots by clicking the image below. Yes, since it’s brought to you by Budweiser, you’ll have to put in your birthday. So as long as you were born January 25th, 1991 you can watch these. And with that statement making me feel old, go watch some videos:
Part of the fun with this project was the Color Correction / Grading. Exciting times with Magic Bullet! We were going for a dreamy, saturated look. What do you think?
Before - & - After
On producing films… with Ira Glass
We found this gem on Reddit the other day. It’s a clip of Ira Glass, from of This American Life commenting on the unforgiving nature of producing films via his experience with Sleepwalk with Me. Enjoy.
DIY shoulder rig and mini slider
This is a DSLR shoulder mount made from PVC. What makes this one different than the last PVC shoulder rig we posted is that it has a glider built into to it. That’s pretty cool, and really sets this version apart. Thanks to Jon Barnes for posting it on vimeo. Click here for more info.
Rough Life gearing up
So, we’re a little more than halfway through January. For the JADED team that means that we’ve wrapped up our annual corporate gig early in the month. Now we’re planning the way we want our year to go. January is traditionally slow while our clients plan their own strategies for the year. Luckily this year is heating up and we’re already busier in January than we’ve been in previous years. However, we are still trying to carve out some time for our own projects. That brings us to It’s a Rough Life. If you remember, we closed out the year with end of the Phoenix Arc.
Johnny’s wife Paola got RNCK ink, and there was a banging teaser for the next season, which will be centered around the epic BART 2011.
Our plan for Rough Life is to kick it up a notch and go for the TV pilot. TV has always been the plan, so we need to carve out our pitch strategy. What the means for the web show is that it will be more developed and focused on the company. We plan to take all that footage we have from BART Tour and build out the episodes in such a way that gives the viewer a real taste of Johnny’s struggle to keep Roughneck afloat, and also to illustrate what that means to his family. Wish us luck, and stay tuned for more. In the meantime enjoy another look at two of our favorite episodes. The one posted above, and this episode from the SLC arc when Johnny learns that his sale’s rep doesn’t necessarily have his back.
Now we’ve got some planning to do.