Check out the highlight reel from @SFIntlFilmFest and @SF_FilmSociety. It features our work as the Scoop team for San Francisco International Film Festival. It was edited by Ben Zweig. We had a ton of fun at the festival. Thanks to all who were involved with bringing us on, and everybody that we worked with. We’re looking forward to lots more.

Do I Need This examines our culture’s excessive, often questionable acquisition of possessions and asks the viewer to stop and examine what they buy and whether they actually need what they are purchasing – does your newborn really need that baby wipe warmer? Does your dog need another overpriced squeeky toy…do you need that hot dog cooker you found in the Sky Mall catalog…will that uncomfortable pair of new shoes be a good idea simply because they were on sale?

Using humor, quirky and engaging characters, and no preaching, Do I Need This pushes viewers to think beyond today, beyond the instant gratification of walking away with a shopping bag or carload of stuff and to look at the impacts of our endless world of purchases, on ourselves as well as on our planet. The film will engage viewers who may not view themselves as environmentalists but can still make a world of difference with changes to their buying habits.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A caricature of American idiocy, a metaphor about our consumer society and a visual interpretation of the Arab Spring. Pearl Square is burning, welcome to Essays On Reality, Chapter 1.

Essays on reality is an ongoing series of short caricatures, Influenced by the existentialist and surrealist movement, and inspired by social-political and economic events from around the world.

These metaphores engage improbable situations, unique characters and familiar objects. Witness them part with our notion of existence, to discover thier very own metaphysical aspiration.

This personal project is an ongoing experiment, each chapter containing three essays.

Greg Barth is a Swiss creative & director, currently based in Montréal, Canada. He has more than 10 years of experience in design, branding, typography, and 4 in Motion Design and Directing.

Here’s a pretty artsy video of a diy, motorized pocket dolly from Vimeo user Benjamin Sichert. His profile says he does photography for fun and carpentry by trade. We guess that’s how he built this rad slider. For more info and specs, click here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recently we were featured on the Crew Tide blog. It’s a company focused on exploring…

how independent filmmakers help brands tell their stories and reach new audiences for a fraction of the cost.

We met Crew Tide’s founder, Anna Callahan at SXSW. She asked us if she could do a short interview with us because our body of work falls so squarely within what she is doing. A couple of days later we did a phone interview. Now it’s up. Check it out.

Excerpt:

Jeremey Lavoi and Abby Berendt run Jaded Multimedia, a production company in San Francisco.  Most of their work is short-form non-fiction branded content.  They work with about a dozen freelancers so that when they have too much work, they know they can handle it — that’s a good problem to have…

There’s even a little Rough Life shout out. (Stay tuned, the second season premiere is approaching.)

In other JADED news, we have just come off of a ROLLER COASTER. After we got back from Austin/ Baton Rouge for the SXSW/ Pandora/ Rough Life extravaganza, we jumped right into the San Francisco International Film Festival. If you’ve been following the blog, then you’ve seen some of those pieces. We’re looking forward to a post-fest meeting with the great San Francisco Film Society staff next week. The fest was fun, but right after we set-up the production schedule with the Film Society, Jeremey was booked as a Producer/ Shooter on Discovery Health’s, Addicted. He was immediatly shipped out to parts unknown and embedded with a drug addict 24/7 for almost two weeks. Craziness ensued. We’d love to talk more about it, but unfortunatley we cannot. Suffice it to say, it was quite an experience. He got back just in time to for the final few days of SFIFF (and more importantly the Filmmakers Lounge on Fillmore). More to come.

The Waiting Room won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at San Francisco International Film Festival this year. We had the pleasure of interviewing the Producer/ Director, Peter Nicks before his screening at the Kabuki in SF.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Peter was intelligent and engaging, and we highly recommend watching that video, and then checking out the film.

A cool aspect of the project is that it’s more than a documentary, it’s a “storytelling project”…

The Waiting Room Storytelling Project is a location-based social media and community engagement initiative that aims to improve the patient experience through the collection and sharing of digital content. This cultural data – video, data visualizations, photographs and text – is collected in the waiting room by creating frameworks for sharing that range from anonymous expressions of feeling to deeper storytelling.

The primary aim of the platform is to uncover the needs of underserved patients at a moment when the role of the “Safety Net” is being debated both in America and abroad. We also aim to develop tools for patients that allow them to take a more active role in their health care experience. To this end, we aim to expand and foster the organizational capacity for storytelling at Highland Hospital by creating a robust, scalable platform that can amplify the voices and needs of the most underserved communities in our country.

As America’s health care system sits poised to undergo its greatest transformation in generations, we will capture history unfolding and make sure that the story is told from the bottom up, not just the top down, using a unique combination of social media platforms and traditional documentary film. We will directly engage the people stuck in the waiting room of a county hospital: an underserved community that is isolated and disconnected from technology and the vital conversation that can improve their lives. The Waiting Room is comprised of five main components:

1. A feature-length cinema verité documentary film that uses unprecedented access to go behind the doors of an American safety-net hospital fighting for survival while weathering the storm of a persistent economic downturn. Following both patients and caregivers, the film tells the story of a diverse patient population coping with a remarkable array of health problems, while caregivers struggle to treat problems that extend well beyond their patients’ health.
2. A social web architecture that encourages sharing and is designed for an interactive and social user experience. Project staff and volunteers will collect cultural data – photos, audio, videos, texts and emotions – using location based digital tools. Content will be tagged #whatruwaitingfor and uploaded to The Waiting Room’s multiple social media platforms.
3. A mobile application that will allow users inside and outside of the physical waiting room to browse, share and comment inline on content tagged #whatruwaitingfor.
4. A self-sustaining interactive platform placed in the waiting room at Highland Hospital that will allow for the capture of user-generated content. This initiative will serve not only as a cultural data collection platform, but will encourage the use of technology by a community that is most disenfranchised by this nation’s digital divide. The platform will have a pilot location at Highland Hospital – but will also spin off a mobile version that can be replicated and used at remote clinics, community events and hospitals around the country.
5. The Waiting Room website is a politically independent, hyper-local media portal that serves as a designed aggregator of our project data and a space built for user engagement. It will serve as a hub for our content: one stop on our web of inter- connectivity between points on the social web and the mobile space.

This content will be delivered across a variety of platforms including television, radio, public spaces and the internet, giving hospitals, policy makers, journalists and the general public a greater understanding of the evolving relationship between public policy and people’s lives.

Head to the website for lots more info about the issues. Facebook. Twitter.

A spotlight on San Francisco’s Photobooth, via the folks at Cool Hunting.

We took a trip to the Mission District in San Francisco, California to talk to Michael Shindler, co-founder of Photobooth. Photobooth serves as both a retail space for classic camera gear, a gallery and most interesting a tintype portrait studio. We talked to Michael about the ins and outs of the tintype process, and the old school methods used to create the stunning portraits.

Skateboarding, Timelapse and everything in between…

Video by RussellHoughten.com

Music
Composed by RichardHoughten.com
“Open Horizon”
Performed by Richard Houghten, Nicole Calhoun(cello) and Heidi Yoo(violin)
iTunes bit.ly/L25bJK

Featuring: Dylan Rieder, John Rattray thepredatorybird.com , Shuriken Shannon, Tom Karangelov, Jordan Taylor, Arto Saari, Oscar Meza, Dominik Dietrich, Jon Goemann, Jared Huss, Sam Winter, Jake Johnson, Stefan Janoski, Ben Nordberg

My section from the Transworld video bit.ly/Kfehkw

This one has been making the rounds (First sent to us by Mr. Ben Youngerman). It’s a perfect monday inspiration, enjoy.

How to do ideal DSLR:

• Exposure
• White Balancing
• Key Lighting
• ISO
• Shooting in Low Light

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can also read a great breakdown of the video if you don’t want to watch it.