Build a dolly for $25
You can pick up the CamOnWheels for $20 on Ebay. It looks like the most stable option would be on the PVC pipe. One major drawback I see in a lot of these DIY videos is the assumption that little urethane wheels are going to stay stable. On anything but the most optimized surface, wheels like that are going to generate vibration. However, for twenty bucks, plus something to screw them on to, and some pvc pipe… that’s a pretty cheap dolly. Have fun on this DIY Friday.
TeamJADED the month that was… with Toy Camera!
We wrapped a long term corporate project at the beginning of August, and then planned to spend the rest of the month chilling in the city.
You know, not doing much but sipping beers and maybe watching our friend Johnny’s DJ set on Tuesdays.
But of course, we couldn’t really take the month off, (luckily) jobs keep coming. So enjoy the recap with crappy Android phone pics processed to look ultra cool (debatable) with Toy Camera!
The first job to creep in was Wednesday Tech Talks at Pivotal Labs. Our friend Glenn usually does this job, which is a pretty straight forward, one camera shoot of a developer-type person saying things that are way over our head. Glenn had a similar idea about August regarding time off, except he did it right and left town. He asked us to fill in for him at Pivotal, and we thought sure that will be a simple gig. It was.
It also gave us a chance to use the A1, which has been getting rather neglected with the introduction of the 7D into our workflow last year. We also got to use the Ki Pro Mini, to speed up the post-production…
And in a bout of pure gear nerdery, we employed our Redrock Micro, and zoom for some innovative cross room audio for the Q&A sections.
Next up on the block was our buddies at Roughneck Hardware’s shoe release party. We decided to “document” for posterities sake, with no intention of turning around an edit… but we liked the footage so much we cut it the next day.
Then our friend JT hit us up about a job with Blurb. He’s been working with them, and they needed a couple of videos produced for their Photography Book Now competition. JT was heading to Burning Man, and going early to document an artist. So we stepped up for him and knocked that shoot out.
That’s all our gear on California St. outside of the Blurb offices.
The Wednesday pivotal shoots kept coming and then we landed a shoot with Pandora yesterday, filming Raphael Saadiq doing an in office performance and interview.
The Pandora shoots we’ve been doing are awesome and we were happy to do it. We had to plan some careful logistical maneuvers to get out of Pivotal in time to get to Pandora, but it all worked out. We got to use both A1′s for the Pivotal shoot, the 7D for Pandora, and bring in our friend Ben from Panhandle to run another angle.
(We lied that last pic came from Ben’s 5D.)
A pretty good day all in all. Now we’re editing that video and totally planning to take next week off. Yeah right.
Rolled: Fund this film on Kickstarter
Rolled is our good friend Whit Scott’s film in production about,
In 1979 a kid from LA got together with three of his friends because he wanted to artistically toilet paper a house. They planned it out knowing exactly what they would do, how long it would take, and how it would look in the end. One of the kids filmed it.
They continued this mischief throughout their high school years. When one graduated, they replaced him with a new member to carry on a specific job in the group. These jobs included the “historian” who photographed or filmed every house they hit.
In the late 90s, I joined this group as the historian. I recently convinced my three compatriots to recount their experiences. They said yes, we collected some great stories, and we were also able to meet the group’s founding member.
What remains is to go to Los Angeles to meet and film the kids currently in the group, and see how it’s doing since we left in 2000. The footage that was shot over the last 32 years also needs to be unarchived and digitized.
JADED is involved with the planning and production of Rolled. We headed down to LA with Whit and his wife Claire a couple of times this spring to film prelimanary interviews. You can see those in the Kickstarter trailer above. We’ve also helped some with the budgeting, and production recommendations, and we plan to be a lot more involved as the project moves forward.
We are really excited about this project! Whit is a great friend, and Rolled is all he has been talking about for the past year. Now he’s trying to raise $30k in the next thirty days…
To complete the film, donations are needed for camera, sound and lighting operators; city permits, insurance, motion graphics and post production.
Hook him up with some cash and he’ll roll any house in the U.S. for you (for $10k). The other donation incentives range from a DVD, to a name drop in the film, to Executive Producer credits. The Kickstarter has only been up for about twenty-four hours and he’s already raised more than $4,500. We’d say that’s a pretty good start.
Shooting bands for Pandora
Summer is picking up and we have a good mix of projects going on. Recently, Jeremey spent a couple of days hanging out in Oakland shooting for Pandora. On Saturday and Monday he booked two Canon DSLR shoots through our friend Dan Gahr who is managing video internally over there.
The first was an interview with the band Dawes…
…outside of the Fox Theater in Oakland.
This is our friend Jason Tongen, who was running the other camera.
The second shoot was a performance and interview with Mother Hips at Pandora HQ.
This is the view from Dan’s office. Great SF skyline from Oakland.
Two cool bands. Two great shoots with friends. What a fun couple of days. There’s some big things in the works for JADED, so stay tuned.
Last minute shoots with friends
Yesterday was one of those random San Francisco days when amazing opportunities just fall out of the sky. Our friend Ben Youngerman at Panhandle Productions shot us an email around eleven pm the night before asking to borrow some gear for a last minute shoot. It turned out that the shoot was with Bob Weir of of the Grateful Dead who is working on a project with Ben’s girlfriend Miranda Jones (videos below). Ben and Miranda are producing a documentary about the creative process of the project and had been waiting for the chance to shoot an interview with Mr. Weir.
JADED jumped at the opportunity to assist, and Jeremey headed to Mill Valley with Panhandle yesterday afternoon to help with the shoot. All in all it was a quick set-up, fast interview type of situation to be respectful of Mr Weir’s time. We shot at his home studio, which was on his beautiful property and he had thoughtful commentary about Miranda’s work. It was a great experience all around.
Some of Miranda (and Ben’s) previous work.
For the Future
On Wednesday we had a 7 to 7 shoot for a new client of ours called Institute for the Future. We are producing four videos for them (with a little help from our friends). Because of our recent travel schedule, and approaching deadlines, we needed to schedule all the video production for the last two videos on Wednesday.
We started the morning around SF City Hall to get some nice government building backdrops. This project called for actors, and for that we turned to our friend Allison Davis for casting and coordination.
Our second location was Cell Space, which we staged with our Kino Flo kit.
Ben Youngerman catching up on his texting after taking the rad picture above.
That’s Deniz Demerir sitting in for the talent.
Lance Burton from Planet Fillmore was our first actor of the day.
After we broke down at Cell Space we had an “sf is a tiny production community” moment. We ran into our friend Tom Green of Relevant Pictures who was on his way back to his new office after buying a battery at Calumet. We checked out his new digs and then headed to Jeremey’s old employer Seesmic, to make use of their studio space for the last shoot. (Thanks Whit!)
We used all of our lights, plus three of theirs to dress up the room.
Ariel view, with Ben on the 5D.
Marathon Shoot Round Up
Apologies for the delay in updates. We were on roll for awhile! This is the final marathon four city shoot round up. We started our first production day in New York by carting our gear from hotel to location with the help of the door guy and our New York helper for the day Pepe Urquijo.
Random photos of the set-up.
We had a break in the middle of the day to wander around mid-town Manhattan.
It wasn’t all work in NYC, we also made it over to B&H.
Where we geeked out on gear…
Canon section!
That oddly shaped new Panasonic.
Like a traveling band
Being on the road with a video crew can feel like being in a traveling band. We never stick around in any particular city for too long, and we’re constantly humping large boxes and bags of gear. Set-up and breakdown at the end of the day are remarkably similar to prepping and striking a stage for a big performance. …And oh my god, baggage claim is stressful. Let’s not even get into security.
In this post we want to talk about what we’re producing, how we’re producing it, and some of the hiccups and solutions.
At the moment, we’re traveling the country producing a corporate video that entails lots of all day recording in conference rooms where we have little control of the room except in the hour and half when we are setting up. For the rest of the day, we shoot hour long interviews every hour on the hour and need to fade into the background without interrupting the interviews we are documenting. We try to interrupt them as little as possible, because they would be happening with our without us there. It’s simply our job to document the process.
If you’ve ever worked on a set of any kind, you know that any and all aspects of production can be tweaked, and often are through the course of a production. Problems arise, and trouble shooting must happen. Sometimes the subjects need a little make-up, or in this case need to present to camera instead of turning there back to us. On this job, we take each arising challenge on a case by case basis. So far the only actions that have called for absolute interruption of the proceedings have been mic issues, or in the case previously mentioned, when a subject literally turned his back to camera.
We’re working in a mixed production environment using two Canon XH-A1′s, both shooting to tape. The A-Cam is also being fed to an AJA Ki Pro Mini recording in Apple ProRes LT. This is both for ease of post-production later, and so that the client has immediate access to dailies. We brought our Matrox Mini Max in an attempt to feed the B-Cam directly into Final Cut Pro in a live capture, but it kept dropping frames. We didn’t have time to trouble shoot, so we aborted that and will need to capture the B-Cam later.
The AJA Ki Pro Mini is a new device (not just new to us). Some people are having audio sync issues with it. We have not had those, but we have had some issues. We are recording all day long (usually 8 to 9 hours of recording). We have done two production days so far. Right around hour six on both days, the Ki Pro Mini crapped out on us. It spontaneously stopped recording and would not start again. We tried fresh cards in both slots, and neither would record. Our opinion is that it’s an overheating issue, because after about 15 minutes of cool down and a reboot, it came back.
The Ki Pro Mini gets HOT! And the cards coming out of it are hot as well. Because we have not yet purchased a desktop stand for it, or rods to mount it to camera, we’ve tried to increase air flow by perching it on top of two tape boxes. Having it crap out on us two days in row was a big dissappointment. Luckily we’ve got redundant systems going, we’re also shooting to tape. That means we didn’t loose anything, but it’s a bit of a hiccup in our workflow. It meant an extra couple of hours after production capturing A-Cam tapes for dailies. That goes completely contrary to why we purchased the device in the first place and really messes up our sleep patterns. In short, five hours of use and it works like a charm. Six hours and you’ve got problems.
Other interesting observations about the Ki Pro: It will not roll over recording from one slot to another because it needs to “close out” the recorded file on the first card. You need to wait for it to do that, then hit the “slot” button to deactivate the card so it can be ejected. Then hit “slot” again to initialize the second card for recording.
Related to audio, if you’re feeding audio in through the SDI (at least with our A1′s through a BlackMagic Design converter) then you can’t control the levels on the Ki Pro. If you feed audio in through the XLR inputs, you can.
Above is Brian Quint, who helped us out with set-up and media management on our LA Shoot.
That is Lauretta Molitor, our all star audio person.
We’ve got triple system audio going. Lauretta feeds audio into both A1′s, the Ki Pro, and records independently.
We’re using two KinoFlo Diva 400′s as key lights and two 200′s as back lights/ fills. They’re working great for quick set-up with even/ soft lighting.
We’re also using the 7D for close-ups, and b-roll. Abby rocked it to snap this props photo.
She was also having fun with it in our hotel room.
Because we brought the Matrox Mini with us, we’re employing it for a second task: compressing dailies to h.264 for the web. It rocks for that.
PluralEyes in action with FCP to sync the “Ki Pro crapped out” captured dailies with Lauretta’s iso audio. Here I should say that we forgot to bring a firewire to capture tapes. (We’re going to pick one up today.) On the first night when we needed to capture a couple of tapes from the A-Cam for dailies, we tried to run the capture through the Ki Pro Mini and on to a compact flash card. For some reason that we have not been able to repeat, the audio coming out of that capture was completely ruined with rhythmic popping sounds. Therefore we needed to sync with the clean audio Lauretta recorded independently. Ah, new tech. It’s a little frustrating, but by using redundant system’s we got everything we needed. That’s all that matters in the end.
All in a days work.
LA and Houston down, next stop NYC.
Broadcast Finishing for Bank of America
We pride ourselves on a being a nimble production outfit capable of shepherding a project from planning to premiere, whether that means web, tv, or theatrical. Recently, we worked on a series of mini documentaries for Bank of America with our friends over at ib5k. The documentaries were part of an overarching web campaign called the Opportunity Effect. The campaign showcases people involved with good causes made possible with the banks help.
This post is to spotlight three of those videos, specifically the three that aired as TV spots on Plum TV. We delivered dozens of finished videos for the project, but because these spots were destined for television broadcast, they required a slightly different finishing workflow with an eye towards broadcast standards. That gave us the opportunity to give them a little more love from a color grading stand point as well, and we were excited to do so.
We performed both the broadcast finishing and color grading of these spots on our new MacPro 12 Core using Final Cut Pro 7 and a 17 inch Flanders Scientific broadcast monitor.
